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?

[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.

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

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

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.

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.

What??

[NamShubCMX]

What???

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