davidh219

This was in his most recent collection Trigger Warning. Wasn't much of a fan of this one. In fact, Trigger Warning was a bit of a disappointment for me in general. Not terrible, but not as good as his previous two collections. I think I gave it a 3/5 on goodreads.

I'm a fairly new Shakespeare fanboy. I somehow avoided him in school. Earlier this year my girlfriend took me to see a production of Richard III by our neighborhood theater company and it was incredible. I immediately bought The Norton Shakespeare. So far I've read Romeo & Juliet (terrible), A Midsummer Night's Dream (incredible), The Merchant of Venice (incredible), and The Tempest (incredible). I also went back and read the actual text for Richard III and it was ,of course, incredible. So far so good!

Saki's one of my newest favorite authors. Genuinely hilarious. I have the The Complete Saki, but I haven't quite finished all of it yet. My general opinion so far is that Reginald is his worst collection, Reginald in Russia is an improvement but still not amazing, and everything else is incredible. I've tried getting the guys at my neighborhood theater to do a production of one of his plays but they're not having it, lol.

I used to be really weird about audiobooks. I would only use them as a way to experience a book I already read and loved for a second time. Then I started listening to short-story podcasts while taking a shower, or doing the dishes. Recently I said to heck with it and started listening to free audiobooks on youtube of classics in the public domain that I've been interested in but haven't gotten around to yet, and I started a free trial of audible just to get the three free audiobooks and I'm currently going through A Darker Shade of Magic, which is fantastic. Honestly, there's basically no difference between reading and listening unless you're an extreme auditory learner or an extreme read/write learner. I do fine with all four methods of learning and always have. Like literally we had a test in high school to figure out which learning method suited us and I barely had any kind of preference. And there are many scientists out there that will now argue that the four learning methods are bunk anyway. Anybody who says they don't count as reading (not how you personally feel, but in an objective sense) doesn't know what they're talking about and is basically arguing semantics ("it's not technically reading"). Writing is modeled after spoken language. The first stories were recited orally. If anything, the written word loses something by not being spoken aloud, namely prosody. What research there is agrees with me, as will the vast majority of professional authors that will tell you to read your prose aloud and see how it sounds. I still prefer reading by a landslide, and I certainly wouldn't listen to an audiobook of something difficult enough that I'd expect to have to stop and re-read often (Gravity's Rainbow comes to mind), but for most fiction I never re-read passages anyway (this is a harmful habit most people could do with breaking, imo), so it basically doesn't matter, and I absolutely count them as books I've read. I still had to pay attention to the story, and audiobooks take almost twice as long to get through and I can't speed through uninteresting sections, so they're hardly "cheating." It's just nice to be able to "read" while doing chores, taking a shower, or when my eyes are too fatigued to keep reading print. Otherwise I'd have to resign myself to not reading during those times and I love books and want to consume as many as possible.

The following are all generally classified as novellas (a short novel), and all old enough that you should be able to find them for free online due to public domain laws. I'm fairly certain not ALL of these are technically public domain yet, but they're still all old enough that the author is dead and nobody cares enough to enforce the copyright if it still exists. I listened to most of these as audibooks on youtube. The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway The Man Who Would be King by Kipling The Metamorphosis by Kafka Death in Venice by Thomas Mann Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad The Pearl by Steinbeck The Time Machine by H.G. Wells Of Mice and Men Flowers for Algernon The Call of the Wild You can check out project gutenburg for public domain e-books and librivox for public domain audiobooks. There are certainly more old, famous novellas I haven't listed, but that's because I haven't read them.

Sounds like you want something post-modern to me. Try these. Gravity's Rainbow The Master and Margarita Slaughterhouse-Five House of Leaves The New York Trilogy Infinite Jest

Unfortunately I mostly read genre fiction, and that extends to short stories. Don't know if most of this is what you'd be looking for, genre-wise, but I enjoyed these a lot. Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman Smoke & Mirrors by Neil Gaiman Unnatural Creatures (edited by Gaiman, stories by various authors) 60 Stories by Donald Barthlme (very post-modern, be warned) The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka

My girlfriend likes to color, and she has the Harry Potter and Game of Thrones coloring books. I don't see the appeal myself, but to each their own!

Yeah, I'm not going to think too much about this one because it's not something I can really answer; it's just too hard to choose. This is just off the top of my head in no particular order like you said, and I'll probably forget something major. The 13 Clocks by James Thurber The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway The Time Machine by H.G. Wells The King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner The Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia A. McKillip A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny The Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson I'm already questioning myself so much, but whatever, let's go with it. I wish I could fit 12 Angry Men on there, but it's a play so let's just say it doesn't count. Although I put a graphic novel series on there so clearly I have no consistency, lol.

I'm currently reading: Winter by Marissa Meyer (65% done) Perdido Street Station by China Mieville (15% done) A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab (15% done)(Audiobook for doing chores to) Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow (60% done) The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson (40% done) The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury (10% done) Writers of the Future, Volume 30 (75% done) I have a graphic novel adaptation of Auster's brilliant post-modern novel City of Glass that I haven't started yet but will likely read in one sitting and finish before any of the above just because it's fairly short and I'm really excited. Is it weird that I read lots of books at once? Anyone else do that?

Harry Potter was successful because it was derivative of other fantasy, tapped into Campbell's monomyth, and was simple and shallow enough to be palatable to the wider reading public, especially people who'd never read fantasy before and couldn't tell how derivative it was. The prose is full of adjectives and adverbs, but a lot of other kid's books are, and otherwise it's fine. It also gets better as the series goes on (I think). Mediocre books? Absolutely. Marketing conspiracy? Absolutely not. Any publisher, editor, agent, or professional author will tell you that it's impossible to tell what books will blow up big and which won't. You can't market a novel to success. Marketing books just doesn't work like marketing a product or even marketing a Hollywood movie. It is, for whatever mysterious reason, orders of magnitude less predictable. That's why publishers buy up books and authors they believe have promise and lose money on almost all of them but make it up with the small percent that capture lightning in a bottle. Brandon Sanderson, Kevin J. Anderson, and Orson Scott Card account for like 80% of Tor's revenue and are what allow them to publish all their other authors. Sanderson has said as much himself.

Not a big fan of Hunger Games personally. I tend to read quite a bit of YA, for whatever reason. These are some of the standouts off the top of my head. The Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner (books 2-4 are orders of magnitude more complex and deep than book 1, so don't judge it by the first book.) Jumper by Steven Gould (way better than the movie, but it's a teen problem novel with a speculative element. Know what you're in for. Daddy issues, sexual abuse, etc.) The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer The Recokoners series by Brandon Sanderson The John Cleaver series by Dan Wells The Graveyard Book Lost Stars by Claudia Grey A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness The Invention of Hugo Cabret Abhorsen Trilogy by Garth Nix

The Chronicles of Narnia Where the Red Fern Grows Sherlock Holmes R.A. Montgomery's Choose Your Own Adventure books The Time Machine

Well, I like post-modern more than I like horror, so it makes perfect sense that my favorite horror novel by a country mile is House of Leaves.

I just started listening to the A Darker Shade of Magic audiobook. Picked it more or less randomly (I was vaguely familiar with her) to try out the audible free trial. Only 9 chapters in so far since I only listen to it while doing chores but I already love it a whole lot. I think I'd have to not only finish this but read another book or two, but early predictions are I have a new favorite author.

Well, Pat is an endless tinkerer and reviser, so I wouldn't expect it any time soon. I predict 2018, but nobody knows for sure. Also consider that The Wise Man's Fear is nearly as long as the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy put together at 400k words (LoTR is 470k), which took Tolkien 17 years to write. Kingkiller Chronicles is so ridiculously popular that his publisher will do whatever they need to in order to print the next book even if it's expensive and difficult because of the length, so expect Doors of Stone to be even longer and quite an anomaly on your shelf as far as number of words in a single volume go. 500+k words wouldn't surprise me in the least.