Sometimes it feels like I never get to read anything new

[conuly]

This is factually untrue - I just finished a new book yesterday - but it does feel that way.

Recommend something to me! Especially nonfiction - I really don't read much of that, so I can promise that I'll never have read whatever you recommend! (Whereas if you recommend anything kidlit or YA there's better than even odds that I've read it.)

Later I'll post up my own list of random recommendations for everybody, but right now I really must dash.

Comments

[conuly]

#1 recommendation of the year: October: The Story of the Russian Revolution by China Miéville. Absolutely the best book I've read on the Russian Revolution, which is saying a lot given how much I read about the Russian Revolution.

I didn't know he wrote nonfiction!

I sometimes find his fiction a little tough to get into - I have this problem a lot with British speculative fiction authors, actually, and it will take me several tries before I can get into the groove. (This usually pays off, which is why I bother, but I have got to be in the right mood to try again.) Is his nonfiction in a similar style?

Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner: A Story About Women and Economics by Katrine Marçal. Okay, so I read economic books for fun, but this is really good. Spoiler: Adam Smith's mother cooked his dinner and basically provided a bunch of invisible labour that was not factored into his economic theories at all.

Who could ever have seen that spoiler coming!?

[sabotabby]

His nonfiction is still pretty literary, but is a lot more straightforward than his fiction. I haven't read his first, which is about international law and rather difficult to get one's hands on.

[peristaltor]

I sometimes find his fiction a little tough to get into….

Understatement of the year, Holy Crap! edition. Seriously, The Iron Council?! Seriously. The Game, China, is not to prove how many words you can use in context.

[flexagon]

But if you can read slowly and look things up, you can learn some GREAT words.

(I also didn't know he wrote nonfiction, but I've read a lot of his fiction. My favorite is The Scar, despite overuse of the word "puissant").

[conuly]

Puissant might mean powerful, but it looks too much like pissant, which doesn't.

[peristaltor]

Scar is good, but my fave is still Perdido Street Station, with the classic and memorable line (after one of the cactus critters is hit with an ax or sword or something):

"There was a meaty thwack."

[conuly]

Taken out of context, that line sounds very wrong.