Animorphs is a fun kid's series about changing into animals and fighting aliens! Also the brutalities and hard decisions of war, the terrible consequences of pacifism, and all the kids get PTSD from the awful battles they fight and the atrocities they're forced to commit. Also Area 51 has an alien toilet!
::: spoiler Spoilers for a nearly 30 year old book series Also, everyone dies at the end! :::
Isn't it heavily implied that Earth is going to fall to the yeerks for sure? Gonna be honest, it's been almost 20 years since I read them.
The Hobbit was specifically written from the stories Tolkein told his children and I read that one on the regular
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“Watership Down”, too. It was based on Adams’s experience in the military and particular people he knew, so there was plenty of material and real shit to draw from (like real shit; IYKYK), as then translated into stories he told to his daughter when she was small about a little tribe of plucky hero rabbits in the face of danger. If you can come up with a better formula for creating a fuckin epic story, I will be surprised.
I read it for the first time when I was 9, such a great book.
I think I read Tolkien himself ended up regretting marketing the book for children, not sure how true it is.
Adult books are about sad people having affairs
You're not really allowed to comment on books if you exclusively read shit books FFS
Ask for recommendations online and you get pretentious wanky answers too
No, 1984 is outdated and boring, and a coffee table book. You want -
The One Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out Of A Window And Disappeared
A Man Called Ove (Anxious People too)
A Man With One Of Those Faces
The Echo Chamber
The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry
The Girl With All The Gifts
Hard Landing
The Idiot's Club
All modern and absolutely beautiful
To be fair: I am currently reading "how high we go in the dark" by Sequoia Namamatsu. It's so sad. It's speculative fiction, but everything is too real and too sad.
Being an adult means also confrontation with sad topics
True, but I promise you'll get enough of that from real life after half a dozen decades
Read something lighthearted, life has enough drama
Well I have 4 decades already and I've read a lot of books. Light and heavy. Because that's what life and art is about. I don't believe in comfort food all the time. Sometimes you just need the poetry of hardship.
Thanks, this is good. I've just started with the 100 year old guy and it's interesting (early days, though!).
The thing I've always hated is stories always revolve around conflict and (usually) people making terrible choices. Watching lessons in chemistry was mostly delightful because of this (must read that!)
I'd quite happily read lots of stuff that's just 'nice' and people being good. I'm sure I'd get tired of it eventually, but I'm sick of manufactured BS.
I'm quite aware I've grown up on lots of sci fi, so love me some world building and crazy ideas, but I'm starved for characters, broadly speaking...
Oo I'm not too into sci-fi but one of my favourites is The Breach by Patrick Lee
And yes, you should've read Lessons in Chemistry instead of watching the mediocre cash-grab, unfortunately
C'est la vie
Thanks!
I'm sure the story will be more than satisfying when I get to it. Swallowing the misogyny was bad enough the first time, though - yuck!
“Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told to me in my childhood than in the truth that is taught by life.”
—Friedrich von Schiller
have anyone read "The missing piece"? Fuck that book. Made me cry in the midle of the store. I bought it and instead of listening to sad songs I read this book when I'm down. I just cry like a baby for 3 hours than I'm happy again. Fuck this book full of feelings
“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
—G.K. Chesterton
should we really be bringing our kids up to be nice little conformant drones?
“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.” [emphasis added]
—Ursula K. Le Guin
teach them rebellion and revolution and defiance, teach them to dream about a better world, teach them right to repair and reverse engineering and open source, teach them science and technology and engineering and art and design are all interlinked and that economists have no idea what they’re doing, teach them who the dragons are, teach them resilience and sustainability and regeneration, teach them other people have feelings too
don’t teach them conformity and obedience and compliance
I think the only book I've read that included sad people having affairs was from Game of Thrones. I'm more into just general suffering
It's like watching Gravity Fall vs watching Dark.
Who am i kidding i'll watch both again.
I read Dune as a kid and still find the story of the man who becomes worm to be quite a delight.
I reread a book that I probably read in middle school (12-13 years of age) and enjoyed it. I think I got more out of it now, as an adult. All that matters is that you read.
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Wish we could all be more childlike reading Harry Potter. Why couldn’t we have just left it as a well written fantasy series, instead of questioning the preferences of some of the characters and the -isms of the author?
It's hard. I love Harry Potter. I love Ender's Game. But their authors hate the people I love. Not personally. They don't know them and hate them anyway. It makes me sad. I want to share those books.
But I guess it's better to share books by people who don't hate my friends. I'll always have Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. I've been sharing The Golden Compass with my kids lately.
Harry Potter was good. But I can live without it in my life. I think I will keep sharing Ender's Game though.
I understand why Harry Potter found a place in everyone's hearts. But with the behavior of the author, the books are in hindsight a lot more mean spirited than I remembered. That hatred for me and my loved ones bled into the books quite a lot now that I can recognize it.
I still enjoy it and plan to read it to my kids one day. It's a fun world, and always will be, independently of the beliefs that the author developed decades after it was written.
Lovecraft, Tolkien, and certainly the majority of classic authors held beliefs that most would find objectionable. That doesn't make their work any less great.