Content tagged with “fiction”

“ Solid thriller about the apparent cover-up of an inflight incident on trans-pacific flight. Lots of a super geeky airline industry information. If you like jets, this is your book. Fast-paced, page turner. I legitimately couldn’t put it down. ”

“This is a fable. It was written by a Brazilian author in 1988, and has something of a cult following. A friend recommended it. It’s a story that’s also intended as self-improvement (I think…?). It’s about an ancient Spanish shepherd who travels into Africa to find his destiny. He has a dream about…”

“This was a competent spy novel. It’s the start of a series and an attempt to define the ‘female James Bond’: Emma Makepeace. It wasn’t bad, but I get a little tired of how every female spy is always very close to their origin story. In this particular case, this is Emma’s first mission, and there…”

“It’s tough to review this book. It was written 150 years ago, and I am clearly not the intended audience. It’s a children’s story, which came from a story that the author made up to tell to three young girls one afternoon. To be clear: there’s no real narrative here. The story is basically a fever…”

“This was recommended to me by a friend, and a Hacker News thread. It was recommended as a short work of fiction, and it is – it’s a novella, at best. ‘Murderbot’ (a name she gave herself) is a SecUnit – a cyborg security unit, hired to protected a surveying crew on a wilderness planet. Near as I…”

“Shockingly good novel that will make for an Oscar-winning movie one day. It follows three separate narrative threads during World War II – a young radio operator in Hitler’s army, a blind girl forced out of Paris by the Germans, and a Nazi officer with terminal cancer – as they slowly, inevitably…”

“A wonderful book – some cross between a road trip buddy movie and a psychedelic drug experience. I’ll try not to spoil anything, but the basic premise is that when immigrants came to America, they brought their gods and superstitions with them. Norse gods, and Pagan gods, and elves and leprechauns…”

“I found this novel hard to read. first, as a 43-year-old male, I’m absolutely not the target demographic (full disclosure: the author is my niece). Second, as the father of two daughters, there are events in the story I’d clearly rather pretend don’t happen. Some Very Bad Things happen in this…”

“Another book that I read for a women’s book club that I’m not actually in, but am following along with. Nothing I would ever choose to read myself, which made it that much better. It’s a wonderful, fast-paced mystery involving a family’s sordid past and a podcast (a thinly-veiled version of…”

“This is the second book of The Murderbot Diaries. Again, it’s a novella – only 149 pages. This picks up right after the first book. In this installment, she (1) helps a group of scientists get some research back, and (2) investigates a very bad episode from her past. In this sense, it’s like a…”

“Weird story behind how I read this: I ran into my friend Ben in O’Hare (we were waiting for the same flight home). He mentioned that he found a random book at his house and had no idea where it came from. So he read it, and he enjoyed it. Then it disappeared. He has no idea where the book came from…”

“I don’t know where to go with this one. I read it on a recommendation from a friend. It’s…religious science fiction? Is that a thing? The basic idea is that a pastor goes to another planet to try to convert an alien race to Christianity. The author has no history of Christian writing (I don’t…”

“Wonderful book about the advancement of science to the point where the human race is absorbed and amused by non-stop pleasure and triviality. Into this comes an outsider, and the examination of how he fits in (and doesn’t) is both beautiful and heartbreaking. The book is a rallying cry to those who…”

“Nice, short novel by Steinbeck. He creates a great sense of place, and a great cast of characters, through little side anecdotes that have nothing to do with the main action of the plot. It’s a good look at community during the Great Depression. I think I enjoyed it in part because it was so short….”

“Wonderful graphic adaption of Fleming’s first novel. It obviously abridges somewhat, but the artwork is unique, and there’s a neat element of ‘floating words’ that represent what Bond is thinking about in a given situation – you’re let inside his head, to all the analytic processes he’s considering…”

“I enjoy Suarez – I’ve been reading him since ‘Daemon,’ which was so good. He has a great ability to envision how technologies we deal with today would be manifested in extremes down the road. The visions of the future that he puts together are scarily realistic. You’re reading it and thinking,…”

“This is the story of a book – a fictional novel by a classic Greek author – and how it moves through the lives of five people over thousands of years. The book tracks through three time periods. 1400s in Europe. A boy is conscripted into The Ottoman Army to sack Constantinople, and a girl in that…”

“This is an anthology of every work of narrative fiction H.P. Lovecraft wrote, in order. (I say ‘narrative fiction’ because he apparently wrote a bunch of poetry that isn’t in this book.) I had always wondered about Lovecraft. I was familiar with ‘Call of Cthulhu,’ the role-playing game. Then a few…”

“This is the third Gabriel Allon novel I’ve read (there are presently 23 of them). It was probably the weakest of the three. There’s always an organizational villain. In the other novels , he demonized Israel and the Swiss banking industry. This time it’s the Catholic church – or a faction within…”

“This is Christian/Conservative spy fiction, if that’s even a thing? It’s perhaps telling that the cover has a praise quote from Rush Limbaugh, and there’s another from Sean Hannity on the inside flap. (The author was on Limbaugh’s payroll earlier in his career, apparently.) This is #4 in a…”

“I know this is a classic, but I didn’t really enjoy it. It’s the story of an idiot who commits a murder. And when I say ‘idiot,’ that’s not flippant – he’s written that way. The character is a failed student living in Saint Petersburg in the 19th century (I think it was called ‘Petrograd’ back…”

“Absolutely stunning novel. I had heard of the book for years. My mother was born in Ethiopia in the 1940s (my grandparents were missionaries from New Zealand), and several people had told me that the story in the novel resembled my mother’s experience there as a child. The book was purchased for me…”

“ Clearly a great play, but hard to read. You know what’s coming all along, and you sort of dread it the entire time. I got a feeling of impending doom throughout the entire thing. It was hard to pick back up – I just didn’t want to confront it. I’m frankly glad it’s over. ”

“Daniel Saurez writes about the future…but not too far into the future. His books are all about the world in 10-15 years, which is ‘the future,’ technically, but not so far that they’re unrelatable. Saurez writes about a future state that feels very real, and he designs it in such a way that you…”

“I read this on a friend’s recommendation. I’m trying to read more fiction. I enjoyed it. It’s a young adult novel, so you get the familiar tropes: adolescent facing a major choice, problems with authority, dark forces swirling in the background, a hopeless romance, etc. But it’s put together well,…”

“(This is the book that was the inspiration for the 1982 movie Blade Runner . The association is very loose, through. The movie and the book have little in common.) This is ‘philosophical science fiction.’ It describes a modified reality which raises all sorts of interesting questions. The setting…”

“Great novel. Does not read like it was written 121 years ago. Genuinely terrifying in parts. Suffers a bit in the middle as the characters run around London, and I got a little confused as to what they were doing. It turns into a bit of a detective story. I got the main gist of what was going on,…”

“This is a classic of science fiction, clearly. By some accounts, it’s the greatest sci-fi novel ever written. I had been meaning to tackle it for years, but this took on increased urgency with the new film coming out (it was supposed to be this year, but the COVID pandemic has pushed back the…”

“Wonderful novel about a woman who has pushed the world away due to trauma in her past, and who has to rejoin mainstream society in order to confront her demons. This is normally way outside my area of interest, but I read it for a book club and I’m quite glad a did. It’s always interesting, and…”

“This is book two of the Gabriel Allon series, by Daniel Silva. This is another great spy novel – just as good as the first. This one concerns looted Jewish artwork, held in Switzerland. And just as I mentioned that Silva went hard on Israel in The Kill Artist , he goes twice as hard on the Swiss in…”

“This book is a tough one to read, for a few reasons. First, the dialog and descriptions are…lyrical? Pretentious? Long-winded? I don’t know how to describe it, but the author would never say something in one word if he could use 37 words instead. It’s like he knew he was writing a Very Important…”

“I bought this because it was recommended in a list of ‘steampunk novels,’ and I’ve always been a little interested in that genre. It’s… okay. First of all, an unbeknownst to me, it’s a young adult novel. Additionally, it seems to be targeted to teenage girls. Sophronia is a girl from a wealthy…”

“i belong to a facebook group called spybrary , which is for people who like spy novels and movies and such. Another member of the group is a guy named Payne Harrison , who I came to understand is a spy novelist. He had mentioned that he was annoyed at a movie called SAS: Red Notice because the…”

“I wasn’t a huge fan of Bradbury’s writing, but the story is quite good. The message of the book is similar to ‘Brave New World’ – in the future, humans are so artificially satisfied that thinking deeply about anything is discouraged, even considered sinister. Thus, books are outlawed, lest they…”

“This is a ‘historical novel.’ It’s sort of fiction, but sort of not. It’s a narrative of history, but apparently quite accurate. The book mainly follows two men: Gaius Marius (a real person ) and Lucius Cornelius Sulla (also a real person ), during the period of 110 - 100BC in Ancient Rome and its…”

“I read this book because I loved Red Storm Rising (which Bond co-wrote) when I was in high school, and was looking for a way to recapture that. The result was mixed. This book was less ‘nation states at war’ and more ‘special forces beats the terrorists.’ The plot was very human-oriented, which…”

“A shockingly good novel. I normally wouldn’t have read this, because fantasy is a genre I don’t think I’ve read a single page of, but a friend (who is a huge fan – he has tattoos…) recommended it. By page 100, I was contemplating taking the day off work to stay home and read it. What was amazing to…”

“An absolutely lovely novel, which is – at its core – about the relationships we make, and specifically friendships that develop over extended periods of time. Alexander Rostov is an aristocrat who is convicted of subversion in the years following the Russian Revolution. Since he resides in the…”

“A fairly nondescript techno-thriller about World War 3. In my attempt to replicate my love of Red Storm Rising , I took a chance on it. It was okay. The plot centers around the Zumwalt, one of a series of new stealth destroyers (a real thing, apparently), and its massive railgun (not a real thing,…”

“This is my sixth Potter novel – I’ve read them all in order. Like the last one (‘The Order of the Phoenix’), this was long: somewhere close to 700 pages. And like that one, the book seemed to meander a lot. I said of the last one that Rowling could have cut 200 pages from the middle and no one…”

“A good installment in the series, but overly long. At 900 pages, it was the longest so far. She could have cut a third of the book out and told the same story. There were hundreds of pages in the middle where not much of anything was happening. I enjoyed the characterization of Umbridge. Also, I…”

“This was another book that someone bought me for my birthday as a joke. So, of course, I read it. I’m glad I did. It wasn’t as terrible as I feared (that’s a wildly elitist statement, I know). It’s the story of Bane Morgan, a fighter from the Scottish Highlands in the 1400s, who finds himself drunk…”

“While it was interesting to see the source of a lot of pop culture references that I’ve grown up with, the book itself is awful. Sorry. It’s an attempt at absurd parody that feels like it was made up as Adams went along and was never edited. It hardly makes sense, isn’t funny, and it took every…”

“Honestly, I didn’t love it, which I know is heretical, but it was very episodic – just random episodes kind of strung together with very little unifying plot. This is likely due to the fact that it’s a kid’s book, but, still, I just couldn’t get into it. Also, I wasn’t in love with his writing…”

“so, here’s the thing: I shouldn’t have read this book. More importantly, I should have stopped reading this book when it became clear that it would never make sense. But I didn’t. Back in the 80s, I was a fan of a card game called ‘Illuminati’ by Steve Jackson Games. I was reading about it one day,…”

“An entertaining novel about a corrupted political campaign in the then-future year of 1996. A political candidate gets a microchip implanted in his head, which is used to control his actions while at the same time interpreting real-time feedback from the public. Easy reading with a solid amount of…”

“This is a fun, lightweight science fiction novel about an alternate Earth with ‘kaiju’ exist – essentially large monsters, like Godzilla. It’s a lot like Jurassic Park. (‘Kaiju’ is a Japanese word for ‘strange beast.’ It’s become a genre for Japanese monster movies.) The author provides some great…”

“This is an excellent spy novel. Years ago, I listened to quite a few of Daniel Silva’s novels on CD in the car. I remember really enjoying them, and always wanting to get back to them. I looked up the Gabriel Allon series (his most successful series), and found the first title in it (this one)….”

“I literally picked up this book because I’ve always been intrigued by The Knowledge, which is the test of city geography that London’s black cab drivers have to pass before they get licensed. It’s considered one of the hardest tests in the world. This book has very little to do with The Knowledge….”

“I had to stop reading this one. It was recommended to me by a friend, but I was pretty uncomfortable with it. It’s a modern, snarky novel that purports to be an alternate version of the Gospels, written by Jesus Christ’s best friend, Biff. …yeah. There was the obvious sacrilegious angle that I…”

“I’ve read two other books in this series, and they’ve been amazing. This one was…less so. It reminded me of The Phantom Menace , which was a Star Wars movie that was more about political maneuvering than anything else. Someone said ‘it was like watching C-SPAN in space.’ Same thing here. It starts…”

“This is a first-rate political/military thriller. Some backstory: Joel Rosenberg wrote five books in the ‘Last Jihad’ series. Someone gave me book #4 – ‘The Copper Scroll’ – and I loved it . So, now I’m going back and reading the entire series from the start. The series has some controversy. It got…”

“Not my jam, really, but my son and his girlfriend were reading it, so I decided to give it a shot. There are a lot of characters, and time travel is involved, so the book is all over the place. At any given moment, I had the barest understanding of what was happening. Characterization was poor, and…”

“Strange little book. I wanted to read some Michener without commitment, and this is the shortest Michener book. It’s a family history, told in flashback by a modern-day solider preparing to testify in front of Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal of the 80s. The main character comes from a long…”

“Fifty pages into this, I was thinking ‘Man, I should never buy John Le Carre…’ His novels are so…so hard to follow, so… administrative . The book recovers a bit, though. It turns into a tragic love story, told in flashback. The book zips back and forth between the 60s and present day, telling a…”

“Absolutely loved this book of James Bond short stories. Since it’s not canon, it takes so much…license, with the character and the series. There’s a Bond/Cthulu mashup, Bond as a teenager at Eton, a couple with Bond as a retired 90-year-old, etc. It was such a fresh look at aspects of Bond that…”

“I read this as the second novel in the series. It’s better than the first one (‘The Magician’s Nephew’), but still pretty thin. There are no layers to the story of the plot – it’s very linear, very superficial. There are no twists. It seems like a heavy allegory of the Christ story, but apparently…”

“I bailed out of this just after the halfway point. I was looking for a spy thriller series to get into, but this just left me flat. There’s some poor writing here. Don’t bother forming your own opinions about anything, because the author will simply spoonfeed you what you’re supposed to think. It’s…”

“This was a fun novel I picked up at Costco. These days, I’m kind of a sucker for the ‘magic book’ genre (see Cloud Cuckoo Land or The Midnight Library ). It’s set in Ireland, and jumps around in time between two periods and three characters. Opaline is a woman on the run from her maniacal brother…”

“‘The Last Tycoon’ was the unfinished novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald – he died while writing it. This text is the unfinished manuscript – it ends, quite abruptly, with a note that says ‘The manuscript ends here.’ Following that is a synopsis of how the story was supposed to end, based on notes,…”

“This was a later book in the series, but was written as a prequel. I read it first, before any of the other books. It’s…okay, I guess? Clearly, it’s exposition. Lewis is trying to clean up a bunch of details and set the stage for what comes next. I sort of knew that going in, so I read it in that…”

“ One of the best novels I’ve ever read. Incredibly suspenseful with a fantastic payoff in the end. There’s a sentence 84% of the way through (according to my Kindle) that had me literally slack-jawed for about 60 seconds as my mind reeled with the implications. ”

“The first three chapters which lay out the scenario of mass worker displacement by robots are quite interesting. After that, the book descends into bad science fiction and presents many fundamentally objectionable and downright creepy ideas as obviously wonderful and desirable. The book was written…”

“For the record, I didn’t read the raw play, but rather the book ‘The Merchant of Venice’ by Modern Library. This book has the script, a scene-by-scene analysis, and about as much commentary from directors and actors who have staged the play. I supplemented this by watching the 1974 TV special with…”

“I was headed home from Frankfurt, and I needed a book for the nine-hour flight. This was one of the few titles in the shop that was in English. Turns out, it’s a wonderful novel. A mid-30s woman in England has had a life full of regret where things just didn’t work out for her. She looks back on so…”

“I bought this book because I went to Montauk. I had previously only known it as the setting of a couple episodes of Friends , but then I took Annie on a work trip to The Hamptons , and we spent a day with some friends in Montauk, visiting the lighthouse and doing the tourist stuff there. Off in the…”

“Wonderful play. I continue to be amazed at Shakespeare’s ability to write about the human condition, and have those observations be perfectly relevant 400 years later. As with The Merchant of Venice I approached this holistically. I read the play first, which was difficult, then read a…”

“I had just seen the movie, so I knew what the big plot twist was. In that sense, I was reading it less for the story, and more to get a feel for how Christie wrote. Turns out, she writes well – very clear, with a minimum of fluff. And perhaps unsurprising given the context of her hero, there’s…”

“I tried to read this years ago, but didn’t get too far. It’s a weirdly tough read. I picked it up in an airport on the way home from a conference and tried again. Gibson has an odd writing style. He’s done a lot of world-building, and he uses all sorts of nomenclature and jargon without much…”

“ Didn’t love it. Was confused for most of it. Lots of characters and some of the summation at the end didn’t make sense. Additionally, a lot of political moralizing. ”

“I don’t really know what to do with this one. It’s a pretty unique book, but I really liked it. It’s fiction, but not regular fiction. It’s like a series of blog posts written in the first person by a man who went to work at an old book shop in London. Each post is some aspect of what it’s like to…”

“One of my daughter’s friends left this in my car after she borrowed it to drive to a Pitbull concert in Omaha. So I read it. Five students get mysteriously pranked into serving detention together. One of them dies from an allergic reaction. Who did it? The format of the book is interesting. Each…”

“The definition of an epic sci-fi novel. This a long read, and prepare yourself for the second one, because the first one leaves a lot of questions unanswered. There are a ton of different story threads going on independently, and they don’t come together neatly in the end. It’s almost a…”

“A friend recommended this. It’s technically young adult fiction – the same author wrote The Fault in Our Stars . But I didn’t realize that until I was quite a bit into it. Quentin grew up next door to Margo. They were friends when they were younger. They once discovered a dead body in a park…”

“My daughter bought me this for my birthday. She had read the back of it at the bookstore, and ‘thought I would find it interesting.’ It was riveting. It’s actually a fairly nondescript story of abuse, but it’s intense. The author is currently an attorney in San Francisco. The book begins with her…”

“This is an epic historical novel. It covers about 50 years in the life of a 12th century English town called Kingsbridge. It’s not fantasy – there’s no magic, no dragons, etc. The book represents actual life in the Middle Ages. The central conflict is the building of a cathedral in Kingsbridge….”

“A ‘novel of manners,’ much ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ It’s a long story of the coming of age of an American girl in Europe. Large scope, and gets tedious in the middle – I felt like there were about 100 pages in there when the plot just wasn’t moving at all. There’s a Big Secret towards the end that…”

“ Another page-turner. More horror than science, unlike Airframe . Truly scary in places, with a nihilistic bent. Got me wondering if this is something that could actually happen. ”

“I read this for a nascent classics book club I have become a part of. Sadly, I didn’t like it. It was a long haul, and I wouldn’t have finished it if not for the obligation. The book is fundamentally about a whole slew of terrible things we should probably leave in the past. There are terrible…”

“If you were a geek in the 80s, your book has arrived. The author is one year younger than me, and I half-suspect he was simply trying to cram as many 80s geek references into a single book as he could. The result is insanely fun. Everything is there: Wargames, Dragon Magazine, text adventures on…”

“An absolutely fantastic novel. Very, very long, but it never slows down. It’s more Tom Clancy than cyberpunk. A MMOPRG does play a part in the plot, but it’s more about globe-hopping and gunfights than computers. You know how when you read about ransomware attacks from Asia, you think, ‘Man, I wish…”

“I keep buying these Murderbot books for some reason. I tend to get them on Kindle when I travel. They’re short. You can read one in 90 minutes. They remind me all the world of a primetime action show. Every episode has some self-contained story that will never come up again, and every episode moves…”

“My neighbor bought me this for my 50th birthday as a joke. Just to spite him, I read it. It’s about what you would expect. It was written in 1962 and it shows. Lots of ‘fellows’ and ‘chums’ and ‘nifty.’ Also, lots of exclamation points and adverbs. No one just ‘runs,’ they always ‘run quickly!’…”

“Oh, goodness, I didn’t like this book. And I feel terrible about that fact, because it’s a classic, but I just didn’t. This is a long, long book. I’ve read comparably long books like The Covenant and The Pillars of the Earth , but this is both long and very, very boring. It’s set in 1600. John…”

“This is the first novel in the Young Bond series. It covers James Bond in 1933 when he’s a 13-year-old boy at Eton. The date setting of the novel is actually never mentioned. I was trying to reverse-engineer it based on comments by the characters. Mentions of ‘the war’ had me thinking they were…”

“This is a British spy novel with a twist. The characters are all from MI5, but they’ve screwed up in one way or another and have been exiled to Slough House (pronounced ‘slaw’), which is a dingy remote office, away from the main MI5 office. They have to spend their days here, as a ‘slow horse,’…”

“I’m an old-school James Bond fan. I’ve read every original novel (the Fleming novels), and most the later novels (Gardener, Benson, and some others). I’ll come out and say it: this is the best non-Fleming Bond novel I’ve ever read. It’s divided into two parts. The first is Bond’s mission in a small…”

“I originally read this novel in high school. I think I got 10 installments into the series before I graduated, and it turns out the series has grown to 40+ novels. It was essentially Harry Potter before that was even a thing – grand adventures in a magical world, sheltered from the real world…”

“So, here’s the thing – if you know the secret, there’s not much point reading the book. And everyone knows the secret by now – ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ has become a common idiom. But back when this was published in Victorian England, no one knew the twist, and it was probably a hell of a surprise in the…”

“One of those books which you know is Very Significant, but that which you wouldn’t read for any other reason. The dialect (emancipated slaves in Florida at the turn of the century) is hard to read, and the story moves slowly. It gets a little more compelling toward the end, when there’s a crisis…”

“First, this is not a standalone novel. It’s part one of three, and it ends completely unfinished. Second, I bought this because of Barack Obama. Seriously – I saw it on the shelf of a book and gaming store in Stockholm, and it had a praise quote from Obama on the cover. I thought, ‘Has a president…”

“This is a weird novel. It doesn’t fit the normal pattern of fiction where there’s a central conflict. It’s just a story that spans maybe a decade-and-a-half. There’s no major plot point to center around. It’s the story of two friends who start a video game company. They make their first game, and…”

“Like the first book in the series, this is a fun spy novel. Emma Makepeace is a James Bond-ish woman working for a secret agency inside MI6. This one takes place largely on a yacht on the Cote D’Azur . There are scary Russians, commandos, spies, and intrigue. It’s not a dark or a deep novel….”

“Entertaining, but not the best Bond I’ve read. It involves Bond racing at Le Mans, which is new, and there’s a very interesting post-script about how this was Ian Fleming’s idea, and Horowitz used Fleming’s notes for the basis of the first part of the story. The main plot is pretty fantastical. It…”

“This is a novel from 1851 designed to reveal the horrors of slavery. And it worked – it caused outrage across the United States and pushed the country toward the Civil War. The author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, was prompted to write the novel by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which…”

“A lovely little book of short stories by Tom Hanks. The hook is that every story ‘features’ a typewriter in some way (in quotes, because some appearances are brief – Hanks apparently collects old typewriters). Short stories are interesting because there’s no room for plot. They’re very…serial. They…”

“So, what can you say about this book that has been said a million times? it’s many things in one: a novel, a history, a philosophy, etc. I enjoyed reading it. It took me 50 days of fairly consistent reading – 30-60 minutes per day. The chapters are quite short, taking maybe five minutes, so I…”

“Simply a great read. A very fast-moving account of what a Martian invasion might look like at the turn of the 20th century (it was written in 1898). The author captures the subtle movement from confusion to outright terror and panic extremely well. When the first Martian cylinder lands, no one…”

“Robertson Davies is apparently a very famous Canadian novelist. The fact that I didn’t know this is not surprising, I guess. I was visiting a friend in Ottawa, and we went to a local bookstore. He handed me this and told me to buy it. He said it was required reading for most Canadian high school…”

“This is a contemporary novel, which I normally would have no reason to read, but I believe it was recommended to me because of its format. The story is mainly told through ‘found media’ items, interspersed with traditional narrative sections. By ‘found media,’ I mean emails, letters, faxes, texts,…”