I saw you listed the books towards the bottom as "least favorite". Does that mean you didn't really enjoy them or you just enjoyed them less? A lot of those are dense classic sci fi books, so just trying to gauge your reading moods to be able to make good suggestions. (For example, based on your list, I would *not* recommend Sam Delaney's Dahlgren, which gets really dense. It's not light-hearted fantasy/sci fi in the slightest).

Since you are more meh on old style sci fi, maybe more "New Wave" is your style.

Well, I'm a huge fan of Phillip K Dick who has had a bunch of his stories adapted to TV/Movies (Bladerunner, Minority Report, Total Recall, Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly). His stories often involve questioning of reality. If that sounds up your alley, I have some recommendations.

I also read Harlan Ellison a bit. He's a fiery bastard and lives in LA (in his documentary "Dreams With Sharp Teeth" there is a part where he points out the OC Valley as seen from his home and says "The LA smog doesn't bother me- look at it down there killing Republicans.").

I thought the Harambe thing was pretty funny. My wife did her's and got white swan. My kids haven't had a chance yet.

We did go down to the Wizarding World at Universal on vacation. The prefect shirts I made for the kids got them able to skip the line in Gringotts.

Reading "Again Dangerous Visions", then moving on to either rereading Martian Chronicles or this Lovecraft-inspired collection.

Philip K Dick is one of my faves, but then you get used to trying to find how he is going to make reality questionable in each story.

Maddie S. @ 3/1/2017 1:03

Ole' Vern @ 2/1/2017 21:08 I've been reading the unabridged Stephen King novel "The Stand" for many months. What a looooooong but awesome book I only read my first Stephen King book in 2015. It was 11/22/63. I couldn't put it down and I think I finished it in less than a week. SO good. I definitely want to read more if you have some recommendations.

It's hard to match it up, since much of King's subject matter is quite different from that particular book, especially since most of his stuff is either horror or fantasy, with a few "other" things in there (like "the Body", "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption", or "The Green Mile").

spindoctor02 @ 4/1/2017 16:51

vladykins @ 4/1/2017 15:48 Philip K Dick is one of my faves, but then you get used to trying to find how he is going to make reality questionable in each story. I'm about 6 chapters in so far, and tbh, I'm not a huge fan of his writing style so far. I feel like I'm talking to a teenage girl, who's got the attention span of a squirrel and is writing the book on a mobile device. Seriously, a sentence can have more than 3 words in it.

He's jumping all over that reality, so it takes some time to settle in.

Well, philosophy is a HUGE area to work in, so you'll need to narrow it down some. Do you have a particular philosophical bent you want to focus on? Or a particular issue?

Plato's Republic is the obvious choice for starting, though it wanders all over the place ( a common philosophical problem, of course). But Republic has classics that are referred to over and over in popular culture, like the Allegory of the Cave. It puts out the Socratic discussion of the philosopher-king as the solution to government, since Socrates was not a huge fan of democracy. Granted, they also made him kill himself by drinking hemlock, so there is that.

Here's a quick link to get you started: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html

It's written for the most part as a discussion between Socrates and his students, with arguments passing back and forth.

I can swap you to other stuff after that until we end up with Heidegger. I will also, at some point and time, have to refer you to Monty Python's "Philosophers' Drinking Song".

But I also recommend Existential Comics. It portrays comedic philosophical situations,but then has links for "Why this is funny" or "Didn't get the joke" that explains the philosophy of the philosophers being punned on in the comic:

http://existentialcomics.com/

I may or may not have posted this alternative Council of Elrond, featuring various philosophers:

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/175

Ole' Vern @ 23/3/2017 16:09

Christian @ 3/1/2017 16:45 Ole' Vern @ 2/1/2017 23:08 I've been reading the unabridged Stephen King novel "The Stand" for many months. What a looooooong but awesome book I've started that book 3 different times. lol Never finished. Finished it a while ago but update, this is one of my favorite books I've ever read. Absolutely awesome. Since then I've read Stephen King's The Shining which was fine. Interesting ending. And now I'm in the middle of Stephen King's It, which is really good

IT is fantastic right up to the end when you get mad. Really mad.

But still worth reading.

Pet Semetary is probably one of my favorites from him.

Ole' Vern @ 23/3/2017 19:10

Christian @ 23/3/2017 16:24 Ole' Vern @ 23/3/2017 16:09 Christian @ 3/1/2017 16:45 Ole' Vern @ 2/1/2017 23:08 I've been reading the unabridged Stephen King novel "The Stand" for many months. What a looooooong but awesome book I've started that book 3 different times. lol Never finished. Finished it a while ago but update, this is one of my favorite books I've ever read. Absolutely awesome. Since then I've read Stephen King's The Shining which was fine. Interesting ending. And now I'm in the middle of Stephen King's It, which is really good Well, this gives me hope that maybe the next time I start to read it, I'll get through it! lol Seriously man it does take some time to get into it. So much character development to get through. But give it a chance and then you'll be hooked

Are you reading the original or the complete uncut? I think uncut adds another 400 or so pages.

M O O N that spells uncut.

Christian- The Stand really is fantastic. If you don't want to fully invest in slogging through again, there was a decent miniseries put out in the 90s or so with Molly Ringwold and Gary Sinise and a few other folks that was relatively decent. That way you only lose like eight hours or so that it ran if you hate it and if you like it, then you can go back and read the detail in the book.