A Good Summer Read?

binaryhead asks: "Well, the semester has just ended, and I have graduated from school! :-) I start my full-time job in a month and want to read a good book in the mean time. Having read Snowcrash, Neuromancer, and most of the hacker biographies, I am trying to find a scifi-geek-hacker book that people like. I might try the new Kevin Mitnick book, but I wanted to see what Slashdot preferred. Thanks."

Comments

Fantasy?

[DreadSpoon]

If you like fantasy at all, I'd recommned Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series, Terry Goodkind's "Sword of Truth" series (which is all but a blatant ripoff of Jordan's work, mind), or any of the Forgotten Realms mini-series (RA Salvatore is the best writer of FR books, imo).

If you like humour (yes, the British version of it ;-), and can at least tolerate fantasy, you _must_ read Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" books. Absolutely must.

I'd also recommend Asian folklore; those stories are surprisingly good, considering the plots seem like they were thought up by someone using the peace pipe... ;-)

Re:Fantasy?

[Vann_v2]

I read Robert Jordan when I was in middle school and loved it. "I'm a big boy!" I thought. Then, years later, I realized that he couldn't really write well , or at least didn't write well, and only the first book was worth reading.

Who wants to spend the time reading 7, or however many there are now, 1000+ page books whose plot is plainly drawn out as long as possible for seemingly no other reason that to extend the series? I don't, but I suppose this is a good way to kill time during the summer.

Re:Fantasy?

[critter_hunter]

As far as Forgotten Realms is concerned, I think RA Salvatore is the only really good writer. I haven't read all of FR, so maybe I was just unlucky, but everything else I read was crap

Death Gate cycle, by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, is damn good fantasy (especially the 4 first books). The Dragonlance trilogies are good, too, and so is Rose Of The Prophet apparently, although I haven't read that.

Ì saw someone recommend Connelly - I must concur, although that's no summer read. If you buy all the Connellies this week, you'll have finished reading them before summer starts. They're page turners - heck, I read Blood Work in one sitting. I started reading before going to bed - didn't sleep all night :)

Re:Fantasy?

[WowTIP]

Jordan's first five or six books are good reading, but then the series start to stall. Not much happens. I have a like-dislike relationship with Goodkind's books. On one hand they are very captivating, on the other they are pretty naive.

Now, my suggestions.

Fantasy:
George RR Martin - A song of fire and ice (series)
Stephen Donaldson - The chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever (two series, one listed)
Tad Wiliams - Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (series)
Stephen Erikson - A tale of the Malazan book of the fallen (series)

Science fiction:
Stephen Donaldson - The Gap series
Peter F Hamilton - Night's Dawn Trilogy
Greg Egan - Diaspora

And all the classic; Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, etc.

A word of warning. Both series by Stephen Donaldson contain main characters whose actions at times might seem offensive/disturbing to many.

How about...

[ath0mic]

...something not "scifi-geek-hacker" for a change? It's a big world out there.

Re:How about...

[Cire]

Damn right. Read Down and out in Paris and London by George Orwell. One of the best books I've read in a long time.

Cire

Robert Anton Wilson

[barkingcorndog]

Good stuff to read before starting your first job. Check out the Illuminatus! trilogy.

Dune

[DarkSkiesAhead]

I have to recommend the old sci-fi classic, Dune. It did a marvelous job of creating a strange yet self-consistent world. Gread read. The other books in the series are sometimes dry and uninteresting, but still worth it.

Read something that will FUCK with your head

[Anonymous Coward]

and leave you feeling dirty.
Like Naked Lunch

Some must-read modern classics for geeks

[privacyt]

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams -- a hilarious take on Sci-Fi, the Hitchhiker's Guide has been read by many of the most influential hackers. (I'm using that term in its good sense.)

Then there's that little sci fi novel by George Orwell called 1984 -- which is important for geeks who want to be informed citizens

Vinge of course

[fuzzeli]

I think that Vernor Vinge is an essential geek read, most especially the loosely-related and absolutely fantastic pair, "A Fire Upon the Deep" and "A Deepness in the Sky". And the Motie Books, "The Mote in God's Eye" and "The Gripping Hand" by Niven and Pournelle, are a great first contact story. Also, anything by Robert Forward (especially Dragon's Egg and Starquake) is guaranteed to by intellectually fascinating and horribly written.

Re:Ender's Game

[stubblehead]

Definitely Ender's Game. I would recommend the first sequel, Speaker for the Dead (added a lot of interesting new items), but not so much the last one, Xenocide (boring, too much irrelevant side story). But even if you don't read those sequels, I again recommend Ender's Shadow, then Shadow of the Hegemon, and finally, Shadow Puppets (this last one is kinda quick and not as good but worth the 'closure' of a trilogy... or is it?...)

For some reason, Card is amazing in his firsts - EG and ES. But I feel he squeezes the story out too tightly in sequels, and then just stomps the crap out of the rinds for complete trilogies. However, like these previous posters, as highly as I would recommend the Hobbit in fantasy, Ender's Game is a book that will stick with you for ages. I read it at around 15 years old by recommendation of a teacher (who wasn't a fan of SciFi until EG) and I devoured it in a few days. Great plot, terrific characters (that warrant extensions), and fluid writing. I don't know how Card fares in fantasy but he's more than worthy of his Nebula and Hugo awards.

Re:Just one?

[Midnight Warrior]

Cryptonomicron is historical fiction focusing around the age of Alan Turing (WorldWarII) and really centers around encryption. This is a read-several-times-and-still-see-something-neat book. Also, shortly after this book came out, SeaLand, the country, started making news again. No accident I think as this book kind of gave a "business plan" to the island.

Diamond Age is another read-several-times book that focuses around where nano-tech can go. It remembers that not all technologies are controlled. Stephenson also amplifies where electronic paper/organic LEDs can go - finally we have an author telling us something beneficial from technology instead of always calling new technology evil.

Re:Gullivers Travels

[privacyt]

Free on PG and it's about time we, as a collective, got a little more broad in our selections.

I couldn't agree more. Gulliver's Travels raises many fascinating philosophical questions, in the form of a historical satire. (Jonathan Swift intended the book as a complex satire on 18th century morals and thought.) Ah, if only Swift were alive today, imagine what he would write on things like:
- the university system in the US
- the crazy US government and its Total Information Awareness, War on Drugs/Terror/Whatever, Iraqi Freedom(TM), etc. - all the outsourcing of tech jobs.
- Kind-hearted Micro$oft and the RIAA. Amazon's nice, well-deserved patents.

The possibilities for Gullver Travels Version 2003 are endless!

I hope this is fair use:

[cje]

It's (Lord of the Rings) not that it's a hard read, it's that it moves way too slowly. IIRC, there's a good page about Treebeard when we first meet him. A simple, "he looks like an aging cypress tree with a face" would work pretty well.

In the preface to the unabridged version of "The Stand", Stephen King (truly an American icon) writes:

As it happens, I think that in really good stories, the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts. If that were not so, the following would be a perfectly acceptable version of "Handsel and Gretel":

Hansel and Gretel were two children with a nice father and a nice mother. The nice mother died, and the father married a bitch. The bitch wanted the kids out of the way so she'd have more money to spend on herself. She bullied her spineless, soft-headed hubby into taking Handsel and Gretel into the woods and killing them. The kids' father relented at the last moment, allowing them to live so they could starve to death in the woods instead of dying quickly and mercifully at the blade of his knife. While they were wandering around, they found a house made out of candy. It was owned by a witch who was into cannibalism. She locked them up and told them when they were good and fat, she was going to eat them. But the kids got the best of her. Hansel shoved her into her own oven. They found the witch's treasure, and they must have found a map, too, because they eventually arrived home again. When they got there, Dad gave the bitch the boot and they lived happily ever after. The End.

I don't know what you think, but for me, that version's a loser. The story is there, but it's not elegant. It's like a Cadillac with the chrome stripped off and the paint sanded down to dull metal. It goes somewhere, but it ain't, you know, boss.

LOTR is certainly not short on words, but taking all of the pages that describe the world of Middle-Earth and boiling them down to single Cliffs Notes-style sentences would kill the narrative. There are portions where Tolkien goes overboard (i.e., some of the details of Middle-Earth's history and the lineages of his characters) but on the whole, I thought that LOTR was pretty well-paced.

I mean, the trilogy isn't a Michael Crichton airport reader or a Thomas Harris psycho thriller. It's an epic journey through a world of splendor and grandeur. The guy invented his own languages for Middle-Earth, dude. :-) Rushing through Tolkien's world would not have done it justice.

Re:I hope this is fair use:

[James Lewis]

That is true, but I enjoyed The Hobbit much more than I did The Lord of The Rings. Part of it was my dislike for the never changing character of Frodo, but the other part was that it bordered on tedious. While I still enjoyed it, I believe there is a happy medium that you have to reach concerning detail. Part of the elequence of good writing is describing enough of the world so that a person can visualize it well, but not so much that it becomes restrictive and boring to read. The Hobbit most certainly achieved a high level of elequence in that respect, while The Lord of The Rings did not.

No, he is not dead

[teslatug]

Not really SciFi per se, but how about some Stephen King for a change. I love the way he describes settings. It creates a very vivid picture in your mind and you can lose yourself in the story for quite a few hours. Some of his books that I would really recommend are the Dark Tower books:

Soon to be re-released:
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger
The Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three
The Dark Tower: The Waste Lands
The Dark Tower: Wizard & Glass

Not yet released:
The Dark Tower: Wolves of the Calla (November 2003)
The Dark Tower: Song of Susannah (Summer 2004)
The Dark Tower: The Dark Tower (November 2004)

Re:Dune (what about Miles Teg?)

[bmac]

I don't agree with "dry and uninteresting", but Miles Teg getting his in book 5 (Heretics of Dune, I believe) is one of my all-time favorite sections in any book. As well, the book is as much about the fact that the development of the humans centers upon *awareness* is in itself worth the wordage, IMO.

Peace & Blessings,
bmac

What??

[NamShubCMX]

What???

No one suggested Hitchikers guide to the galaxy (a trilogy iun 5 parts) yet!!??

Re:Gullivers Travels

[joeykiller]

Your points are good, except I wasn't talking about Bowling for Columbine but his book "Stupid White Men".

You don't answer an important question, though: Why didn't Swift choose the bulldozer tactics of Michael Moore in his days, if Moores bulldozer style is easier to write?

Swift chose what you call the intrinsically more difficult genre of metaphorical fiction, just not because he wanted to do so, but because he had to: In Swifts England there were no first amendment or equivalent, and the idea of free speech weren't very evolved.

Therefore, as a critic of a regime or a system, you had to choose more subtle ways of expressing them than the bulldozer tacticts of a Michael Moore. This wasn't a English problem per se, this was a problem troughout Europe.

The bonus, of course, were the great books of Swift and others. But if the people of those days could choose, I think they'd appreciate it if the system allowed the more bullish styles of a Michael Moore.

Still, "Gulliver's travels" is a joy to read!