Sell me on a book.

[Mark CMG]

I'd say literary fiction is fair game.

Cool. I'll give it some more thought and try and come up with a few. I'm a Richard Yates fan so Eleven Kinds of Loneliness is often going to top my list (here's a review but it has spoilers). However, many of my recommendations will be included in the monthly "What are you reading?" threads that have been part of the OT/Media forum here for years. You might find them worth looking over, too.

what are you reading this summer site:enworld.org - Google Search

 

[Croesus]

Hard Sci-Fi:

Dragon's Egg by Robert Forward. Life on a neutron star. As near as I can tell, the science he used is valid.

Cascade Point by Timothy Zahn. A wide ranging collection of short stories, including some where physics is key to the story, e.g., The Energy Crisis of 2215. Zahn's early stuff tended to be harder sci-fi than his later stuff, and being a physicist, the science he uses tends to be real.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Fantasy sagas (WoT, SoIaF)
Zombie fiction
Short story anthologies (nearly any genre)
Modern mythology
Alternate history
"Hard" Sci-fi - recently gotten into Alastair Reynolds
Favorite Authors - Robert Jordan, GRRM, Neil Gaiman

Fantasy Saga stories:

Harry Turtledove's Darkness (also slightly an AltHist series: it's essentially WW2 in a fantasy world)

The shared-world of C.J. Cherryh, Mercedes Lackey, Nancy Asire and Leslie Fish- Sword of Knowledge (also slightly an AltHist series: it's essentially an exploration a low-fantasy analog to Rome as gunpowder was just about to be discovered...)

Hard Sci-Fi stories:

Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain

Ben Bova's Grand Tour

Isaac Asimov's Nightfall (short story is better than the novelized version)

Greg Bear's Forge of God and Anvil of Stars

 

[Croesus]

Isaac Asimov's Nightfall (short story is better than the novelized version)

Another vote for the original short story - read it years ago and still remember it.

 

[Stumblewyk]

Another vote for the original short story - read it years ago and still remember it.

Yup. Read it in high school, and again a couple years ago. It's very good.

Also, I settled on Rendezvous with Rama, mostly because the library had it in stock, but also because it's only ~200 pages, I figured I could read it quickly, and I'm expecting to be getting a couple books I specifically requested for my birthday this weekend. =/

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Also check out their periodicals to see if they have any Sci-Fi mags. Personally, I'm a big fan of Fantasy & Sci-Fi Magazine.

You may not be able to check it out of the library, but you could still check it out IN the library.