Book recommendations?

[rowyn]

I biked to my local library yesterday. For a few years, Lut and I used to go to the library regularly: we'd go online, request  books to be delivered to the nearest branch and placed on hold, then pick them up when we were emailed that they were in. The interlibrary loan system was sufficiently good that it was rather like ordering books on Amazon, except that you didn't have to pay and you had to go a few miles to get them instead.

 

I am not sure why we stopped going. Maybe we exhausted the backlist of books we knew we wanted to read. But as I was biking past the library a few weeks ago, I thought Hey, maybe I should check out some of the books I'm too cheap to pay  $9.99 for from Amazon.

 

So yesterday, I finally brought my ID with me on a bike ride and acquired a new library card.  I promptly went through and placed holds on the books I could remember being interested in, which was largely "Books by howardtayler's Friends". I am not sure why those are the books I could recall off the top of my head.

 

But I am looking for more book recommendations!  Recommendations for inexpensive e-books not likely to appear in the library are also welcome; I don't mind paying a few dollars for a book.  And classics that are in the public domain are also good: I finished rereading all the Austen novels, which is part of why I am jonesing for more books. For genres, I like sf, fantasy, and romance. I am happy with the various sub-genres of those (urban fantasy, supernatural, etc.)  I prefer books that are generally upbeat -- I am okay with the occasional pivotal character who gets killed or horribly traumatized, but I like stories that have protagonists with whom I sympathize and who get mostly-happy endings.

 

Any suggestions?

Comments

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

On a recommendation from a friend, I started reading the "Old Man's War" series by John Scalzi. Clearly, either he went forwards in time and stole all my ideas from Space Otters or I read the books before and didn't remember reading them or something, because, wow.

Except the otters. They are not furry books in any way. It's also a very different universe in general.

But they have an evil corporation running humanity's 'government' in space, 'clones' that aren't quite human to replace people, a plague used as a pretext to quarantine a population, cybernetics used for everything, and the second book has someone's clone that they tried to turn into a replacement for him by copying his old consciousness over it only it fails because they didn't know what they were doing. Oh, and his blood is made of nanites that he can spit at people and ignite.

Oh, and halfway through the second book they introduce space turtles which are basically space otters after all, only not cute.

Deja vu aside, they're very good books. n.n