Books

Mostly audiobooks, mostly sci-fi and LitRPG. Favorites first, honest failures at the bottom.

Favorites

Stories of Your Life and Others — Ted Chiang

Dragon's Egg — Robert L. Forward

Advent — Xander Boyce ★ 5/5

Rated it 5/5 on Audible under the review title "Best." The bar every other LitRPG gets measured against.

Children of Time — Adrian Tchaikovsky

Also read the sequel, Children of Ruin.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) — Dennis E. Taylor

Start of the Bobiverse; stuck with the series through Heaven's River and Not Till We Are Lost.

Contact — Carl Sagan

Wyrms — Orson Scott Card

Sci-fi

The Enderverse — Orson Scott Card

Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadows in Flight — plus the First Formic War books with Aaron Johnston (Earth Unaware, Earth Afire, Earth Awakens, The Swarm, The Hive).

The Worthing Saga — Orson Scott Card
The Martian · Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir
Dune — Frank Herbert
Ready Player One · Ready Player Two — Ernest Cline
Foundation — Isaac Asimov
The Forever War · Forever Peace — Joe Haldeman
Rendezvous with Rama — Arthur C. Clarke
The Interdependency trilogy — John Scalzi

The Collapsing Empire, The Consuming Fire, The Last Emperox.

Consider Phlebas — Iain M. Banks
Hell Divers — Nicholas Sansbury Smith
Outland · Earthside — Dennis E. Taylor
Freedom's Landing series — Anne McCaffrey
The Genesis Fleet — Jack Campbell

Vanguard, Ascendant, Triumphant.

1632 series — Eric Flint (with David Weber)

1632, 1633, 1634: The Baltic War.

Starship Troopers — Robert A. Heinlein
A Princess of Mars — Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Machine Stops — E.M. Forster
Junk — Les Bohem
Sovereign — Jeff Hirsch
Infinite — Jeremy Robinson
Breakthrough — Michael C. Grumley
The Adventures of Tom Stranger, Interdimensional Insurance Agent — Larry Correia

LitRPG & progression fantasy

Advent · Temper — Xander Boyce

See favorites. Temper is the follow-up series.

Ether Collapse series — Ryan DeBruyn 5/5

Equalize, Equatorial, Excise, Emulation, Earthdom — read the whole run; rated Equatorial 5/5 on Audible.

Towers of Heaven · Collect the World — Cameron Milan
Oh, Great! I Was Reincarnated as a Farmer — Benjamin Kerei

Plus the sequel, Oh, Great! I Discovered How to Cultivate a Farmer in 52 Easy Steps.

All the Skills — Honour Rae
The Ten Realms — Michael Chatfield

Made it through The Third Realm before it lost me.

Divergence → Dispute run — Sean Oswald

Divergence, Collapse, Countdown, Resistance, Contention, Control, Dispute.

Dungeon World — Jonathan Brooks 4/5

From my Audible review: found it after Advent, which was incredible — this is decent by comparison, but worth a listen.

Reborn: Apocalypse — L.M. Kerr

Mystery, thriller & classics

Agatha Christie

And Then There Were None, The Moving Finger, The Murder at the Vicarage, Crooked House, plus a good chunk of Poirot's Finest Cases.

Pendergast books — Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

Relic, Reliquary, The Cabinet of Curiosities.

Harry Potter (complete series) — J.K. Rowling
The Chronicles of Narnia (complete) — C.S. Lewis
The Tales of Alvin Maker — Orson Scott Card

Seventh Son through The Crystal City — all six.

Animal Farm — George Orwell

Nonfiction

Freakonomics · Think Like a Freak — Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
The Inner Game of Tennis — W. Timothy Gallwey

Best of the nonfiction shelf. Not really about tennis.

The Art of Learning — Josh Waitzkin
The Singularity Is Nearer — Ray Kurzweil
Elon Musk — Walter Isaacson
The Innovator's Dilemma — Clayton M. Christensen
Zero to One — Peter Thiel
Thinking in Systems — Donella H. Meadows

Good — got what I needed without finishing it, which is fine for this kind of book.

Options Trading — T.R. Lawrence
Sampled, took the good parts

Why We Sleep, Mindset, Staring at the Sun, The Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness, The 3-Day Effect.

Couldn't finish

Life's too short. No hard feelings.

The Count of Monte Cristo — Alexandre Dumas

Ran out of time before I ran out of book.

The Overstory — Richard Powers
The Way of Kings — Brandon Sanderson
Stranger in a Strange Land — Robert A. Heinlein
The Lost Gate — Orson Scott Card
Artemis — Andy Weir
The Keeper Chronicles — JA Andrews