this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
66 points (95.8% liked)

Science Fiction

13658 readers
9 users here now

Welcome to /c/ScienceFiction

December book club canceled. Short stories instead!

We are a community for discussing all things Science Fiction. We want this to be a place for members to discuss and share everything they love about Science Fiction, whether that be books, movies, TV shows and more. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow.

  1. Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
  2. Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
  3. Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
  4. Put (Spoilers) in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers.
  5. Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread.

Lemmy World Rules

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

In the last few months I've read:

  • Project Hail Mary, Weir
  • Fall, Stephenson
  • The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Gaiman
  • The Ultimate Earth, Williamson
  • The first four Discworld books, Pratchett
  • Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge, Resnick
  • A Memory Called Empire, Martine
  • A Desolation Called Peace, Martine
  • The first five Murderbot Diaries books, Wells
  • The Imperial Radch trilogy, Leckie
  • Annihilation, Vandermeer
  • The Kingston Cycle trilogy, Polk

For comparison, I think I read two or three books last year. It's starting to be a non-trivial amount of money, even though they've all been the ebook versions, which are generally a little cheaper. Has anyone who reads a lot of SF found Kindle Unlimited to be worth the price?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] AFKBRBChocolate 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Thanks! It did occur to me that KU is like a library, do maybe I should check mine. I'm in Los Angeles county, so I looked at the LA county library page. They have a lot of good titles, but everything in interested in reading at the moment has a long wait list. I'm not sure if there are better library options available to me.

[–] ch00f 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I usually just look for what’s available now and start reading. Found a few good titles unexpectedly that way.

[–] AFKBRBChocolate 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I did that for a while decades ago, and ended up reading a lot of stuff I thought was pretty crappy. Then I became friends with a coworker who was also a reviewer for Locus Magazine, and he started helping me pick his to read. The difference in my reading enjoyment was exponential. So now I'm more particularly, and pay a lot of attention to things like Hugo and Nebula award nominees.

[–] ch00f 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh our library in Seattle has a service like that! You can list books you like, and the librarians will provide a human-picked list of suggestions.

[–] AFKBRBChocolate 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh, that's a nice service as long as the people know their stuff more than "Well this is the same genre..."

[–] ch00f 2 points 1 year ago

From what I’ve heard, they’re very good. They even write a short description of why they selected each book.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just wanting to echo the suggestion for linking the kindle to the library. It took a while but basically I just did a massive number of books I was partially interested in (>25) and got on the waitlist. If you then don't have time you can always defer and set the number of days to defer by (e.g. just a couple) but after only a month or so of reading new books I've had constant opportunities to read big name books over the year. There is also sometimes a special "skip the line" copy which can give you a bonus week reading early!

[–] AFKBRBChocolate 2 points 1 year ago