RE: Firefly
What an absolute fantastic series we stumbled on one night, binged the entire thing!!
It’s a shame Fox cancelled it after one season (not the only Fox show to die prematurely), but at least there was the Serenity movie to tie up some loose ends…
And I’m looking for a decent Babylon 5 STL to print at a small scale…
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Gosh we are a bunch of nerds here aren’t we! 80’s video games…Firefly!
What’s next? “Read through the Hobbit in 5th grade so fast my teacher didn’t believe me at first?” (Yes… that’s me)
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If you liked Firefly, then “The Expanse” is right upon your ally as well if you haven’t already watched it.
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My dad turned on to J.R. Tolkien and the Hobbit and the Lord Of the Rings trilogy. I was so happy to see the movies come out nut so depressed it would be released over three years!!
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I will never watch it (long story) but I have read the whole Leviathan book series. It was a very good epic story.
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When I was in fifth grade, there was a class segment where the teacher read to us and we were supposed to keep our eyes closed so we could visualize the story. Yes, the Hobbit that year… 
Audiobook before audiobooks were a thing…
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Warren Chappell, a noted illustrator and typographer would often have his wife Lydia read the books which he was illustrating to him as he worked.
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Is this the book series you speak of? If so, do the books have the illustrations, because daaaannnngggg! The ones I saw while looking it up are incredible!!!
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Sorry, I spoke carelessly. Leviathan Wakes is the first novel in the Expanse Series, an epic, vaguely Cold War science fiction series.
But good call, @sirgariff! I also read that Leviathan Series several years ago and, although I disbelieve evolution and its possible theoretical applications, I suspended that for the story and it was very entertaining. Very Steampunk. [edit] And yes, the online illustrations are from the books. [/edit]
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Having spent so many hours reading so many great sci-fi/fantasy books, it’s awesome to now have 2 more series on the back burner ready to read that I was unaware of. I look forward to delving into those universes. Thanks @Randy !
(Un)Fortunately I just made it through the first book of thousands of upcoming pages in the Sanderson, Way of Kings series, another fantastic read.
Aaah, Sanderson. I read his Reckoners and Skyward series (I think that’s also a plural word) when I had reading time a while back…
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Moved this to a new topic, since it seems to be gaining a life of its own.
Really enjoyed Firefly and Serenity (though I bounced off the opening of the first more times than I can count).
Books/authors which I inevitably recommend to folks:
H. Beam Piper — his novella “Omnilingual” really should be a part of the middle school canon, and a lightly-edited and updated version is available at:
http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/omnilingual.html
and his Little Fuzzy is rightly considered a classic and has a wonderful audiobook version at:
Hal Clement is considered to be the grandmaster of hard sci-fi, and his Space Lash (originally published as Small Changes) is a book which I read and re-read many times in my youth, and which is still relevant today — the stories in it are probably more accessible in:
I have pretty much everything Tolkien wrote and will need to take a new picture of my shelves once The Bovadium Fragments is published:
(there’re similar shelves for other authors, notably Steven Brust, Jack Vance and Ursula K. LeGuin, whose writings I find an endless delight)
Looking forward to everyone else’s thoughts and recommendations!
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Wait–he wrote Beowulf?!?
But seriously, so much goodness in a thread so viral it couldn’t be contained in the other one.
Yes, Hal Clement. Mission of Gravity was my introduction to carbide-hard science fiction.
Larry Niven. His Known Space future history series, of which Ringworld is the foundation.
Robert Heinlein. He got weird near the end, but The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of my top 5 SF books, and one I’d dearly love to see a properly-done movie of.
Gene Roddenberry. The Star Trek TOS series, remastered.
Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s Guide books, and the two Dirk Gently books.
Ooh, ooh, ooh, Isaac Asimov. Everything, but I have a soft spot for The Caves of Steel.
Arthur Clarke. Everything. Rendezvous with Rama stands out for me.
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Apparently its not clear who the original author is. Most are translations per the internet (a few of whom include Seamus Heaney, Francis B. Gummere, and J.R.R. Tolkien)
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It is of course a scholarly translation — there is a bit more which he wrote on that text, and at least one of those books is one which I don’t have — something for future me to worry about, maybe after retirement.
RH’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a favourite of mine as well — check out The Cybernetic Samurai for a spiritual sequel.
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I grew up with 3 channels of Canadian stations on rabbit ears with a black and white tv in the boondocks of Northern NY. My brother and I turned to reading, board games, and running around our 275 acre farm as forms of entertainment with reading being our primary pastime especially during the long cold winters.
Our dad was an avid…nay…addicted reader and we learned our addiction from him. Our normal year would include keeping a list of the books we read, with all three of us breaking the 100 books in a year mark regularly. Mostly sci-fi
Mind you, these weren’t the comic book sized books nor were they light. Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Anderson, Card. Zelazny, Tolkien in the fantasy realm.
The top of my list… those that I continue to go back to over and over
- Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogy (can’t do the movies! To me, there’s a “feel” of the books that was lost in the movies. And I just don’t enjoy watching Zombie looking characters, like the Orcs)
- Chronicles of Narnia series (that one started from my Fourth grade reader. There was one chapter from the first book)
- Enders Game. Gosh I love this book!
- Ready Player One. Feeds right into my 80’s upbringing
- Rendezvous with Rama. The discovery of the unknown in this one hit all the right marks.
- Chronicles of Amber series. Great fantasy epic. Another book of “discovery” and magic in a modern time. Love it!
- Project Hail Mary. So totally in awe of this book and how he wove the story. Looking forward to this movie next year! IMAX, here I come!
And so many more…and that was a lot of writing. Guess I love reading!
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Interesting, this was a favorite in high school but I went back to read it about 10 years ago and found it a little too quirky for my taste…though I do still subscribe to the answer to life the universe and everything is 42; a towel is always an essential travel item; and do not go ANYWHERE without a package of pub peanuts…you know…just in case. I got to looking that up on the internet and discovered potentially a deeper meaning behind the peanuts:
AI Overview
At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a longstanding tradition involves the entry, descent, and landing (EDL) team eating “lucky peanuts” before major mission events
. The practice is meant to help calm nerves before high-stakes moments like launches and landings.
The origin of lucky peanuts
The tradition began in 1964 during a period of high anxiety for JPL after six consecutive failures in the Ranger program, which was the first U.S. effort to send probes to the Moon.
- On July 28, 1964, a trajectory engineer named Dick Wallace passed out peanuts to his colleagues before the launch of Ranger 7.
- The mission was a resounding success, and a superstition was born. What started as an effort to relieve anxiety became a symbolic good-luck ritual for critical mission events.
- The tradition has continued for decades and has even influenced pop culture. For example, in 2019, a short documentary titled Peanuts in Space: Secrets of Apollo 10 was released, featuring Ron Howard and Jeff Goldblum.
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I also grew up in a small town in NY state. Pre-internet, when my two most valuable possessions were a hand-me-down 10 speed bicycle and a library card.
I’ve been reading pretty much non-stop since I was 6 years old. When I was younger it was about 100 books a year, now closer to 50 a year. Nearly all fiction, with a few rare exceptions, and of course not counting all the reading I had to do for college, graduate school, medical school, and residency.
No way I can make a list of favorites, although Tolkien would be at the top. Definitely heavy fantasy and sci-fi when I was younger, now more into historical fiction, crime fiction, and thrillers. Very occasionally literary fiction.
I did read the “Expanse Series” mentioned earlier in this thread and really liked it.
For what it’s worth, in the last 25 years the work I enjoyed the most was Neal Stephenson’s “Baroque Cycle”. Absolutely incredible. Not sure how he pulled it off, but a massively entertaining read.
Another recent stand out favorite series was the “Slow Horses” books by Mick Herron. The TV series is also great, and Gary Oldman is brilliant as Jackson Lamb.
Don’t watch a ton of “new” television, although there was an amazing BBC series that I recently watched (twice!) called “Detectorists”.
Interested in other’s recommendations, always looking for good books to read 
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The Chet and Bernie Mysteries by Spencer Quinn. Bernie is a private eye, and the stories are 1st-person, with the person being Bernie’s dog Chet. Wonderful, wonderful books.
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