The City & the City

The City and the City by China Mieville. The cities are very close but very far away.

I caught up with some science fiction this year. The Murderbot diaries books by Martha Wells - 6/10. Mixed on these. They're fun to read. The setting is cool and the worldbuilding is shallow but effective (i.e., don't read it if you want game of thrones in space). Each novella takes an afternoon to read. I think "snarky violent droid" is overcooked these days and lost interest after book 5. Light by M. John Harrison - 7/10 excellent prose; great multiple-storyline plot; the journey was better than the destination, but it kept me thinking Far from the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson - 7/10 Fun. If "near future Nigerian/British post-colonial frontier action with guns, robots, and psychic aliens" sounds cool to you, check it out. I liked his Rosewater Trilogy just as much. Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts - tough to rate these. brilliant ideas, VERY challenging plots. I wish I didn't get so confused by the end of each book.…

I loved this book, such a great concept and wide open to interpretation. They made a TV adaptation of it, I think they managed quite well given how difficult it is to visualise some of the concepts.

I read The City & the City by China Miéville. If I were to recommend it, it would be because the author's English vocabulary is so much fuller than my own. I had to keep a dictionary handy to get through most of it and I appreciated the challenge.

Easily these (so far): This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (actually now one of my all-time favorites, without regard to genre. Just amazing) Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikovsky The Book of Strange New Things - Michael Faber Ted Chiang's short story collections (Exhalations and Stories of your life and others) Daemon - Daniel Suarez The City and the City - China Miéville Roadside Picnic - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (this one still haunts my dreams at times) We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1) - Dennis Taylor (just finished this series for book club) Galatea 2.2, The Overstory, Bewilderment, The Gold Bug Variations - 4 different books, all by Richard Powers - what can I say, the man is a genius and a treasure Eifelheim - Michael Flynn - ok, this book can be a slog at times, but it is very rewarding for those who persevere, and has stuck in my brain for many years Chocky - John Wyndham - A quiet, delightful surprise Providence - Max Barry - This book flows like a movie. It will make a great movie. I found myself LITERALLY out of breath a couple of times Hench: A Novel - Natalie Zina Walschots - Quirky, memorable…

I liked The City & the City by China Miéville. It's basically a crime story based in two different cities, and I won't say more about that. :) edit: Apart from that, if you like visual storytelling, it's great to read graphic novels, comics or webtoons in a language you're still learning. I could recommend some if you're interested.

This is more a question, in terms of Sci-Fi are people familiar with China Miéville? Perdido Street Station, Embassytown, and The City and the City are classics, Perdido Street Station might be the best fiction I have ever read. Dark stuff

Great question, and one that I asked just before going to Mozambique for 10 weeks a few years back. I'd just bought a kindle, which were not available outside the USA back then, and asked a few interesting folks I was chatting to at Foo. Here are my resulting first few kindle purchases: The Match King Heros Die (I bought the rest of them) The city and the city Every patient tells a story Blindsight Born to Run Hot, Flat & Crowded The Autobiography of Ben Franklin The Hunger Games (!) And on it went - asking for recommendations was a fantastic thing to do. I'd asked for fiction as I was going there to work and would be too exhausted at first to do much else. So I do encourage everyone to give some names of books. And yes - do take a good camera, do take binoculars - Leica if you can afford them, and embrace the experience. A few years later I went to Antarctica on a boat for 30 days offline. By then I had hundreds of books on kindle, and several devices to read them. This is basically a solved problem now. I did take Wikipedia in offline state, which was useful.…

Reposted from my site: (http://ben.kudria.net/post/2548785108/my-favorite-books-of-2... (http://ben.kudria.net/post/2548785108/my-favorite-books-of-2010)). Affiliate links there, for those inclined. === In 2010, every single book I read, I read on my Kindle. Buying a Kindle has been the best thing I have ever done for my reading addiction. I recently upgraded to a Kindle 3, and I wholeheartedly recommended you get one as well, even if you currently have a Kindle 2. Here are the top books I enjoyed in 2010, and you will enjoy also. - The His Dark Materials Trilogy. Start with The Golden Compass. - The City & The City by China Miéville. Quite the post-modern detective story. (Read also his novel Perdido Street Station) - Surface Detail, the new novel by Iain M. Banks, who has quickly catapulted to the very top of my “Favorite Sci-Fi Authors” list. Surface Detail may not be the best novel for a Banks-unfamiliar reader, however — you may wish to start with something like Consider Phlebas or Look To Windward.…