My Side of the Mountain (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/41667)
Mid 40s and I still read it at least once a year.
The foundation trilogy! And the “I, robot” novels in smaller part.
I loved how everything Asimov write about had rational explanations, how every action had a cause and a consequence. I also loved the idea that no single person can change the fate of a society, but only big societal movements can determine history. I now find fun how he gives his own counter example in the Mule plot, thus showing that something extraordinary can sometimes happen.
In this thread, I really show my age… Most of the books talked about here came out when I was “too old” for them and I didn’t enjoy them much.
I really need to read some Asimov.
And on your last thing, that is absolutely OK. Not all books are for everyone, that's the beauty of the diversity of books. I've noticed I've been growing out of enjoying YA as I age and I seem to enjoy romance and scifi more and more as I get older.
I highly recommend the robot short stories, mostly collected in “I, robot”. They play a lot with logic!
Animorphs rocked my world as a kid. It was a scifi series marketed to children but dealt with really dark topics. The lighter topics were what is family when stuff like divorce and aliens replacing your family members. Then some of the books delved into serious moral questions like, what does it mean to spare a life if that person is at risk of betraying you and your team, to should we drag an unrelated species into our war even if it’s against their values. The whole overall plot follows child soldiers who were unwittingly drafted into a intergalactic war that they cannot tell anyone else about and the trauma that brings about. The series surprisingly didn’t try and lighten the weight of the moral choices presented too much. While the protagonists were always “in the right”, they were constantly forced to cope with the consequences of their choices.
I was a huge fan of the Harry Potter series growing up. Order of the Phoenix was my absolute favourite.
Slightly off topic but, yay more niche focused instances! :D
I’m planning to keep this as a personal instance for experimentation. Running an instance for people takes a lot of time and responsibility and i don’t think i have much of either right now. 😜
Setting it up made me appreciate how complicated the Lemmy setup is and also how little original literature-related content there is in the lemmyverse. Whenever feasible I’ll try to contribute code/docs to Lemmy and content to literature.cafe. You’re doing a great job with this instance. There’s no reason for me to run a shitty alternative until you decide to return to Bikini Bottom.
100%, lemmy is so freaking frustrating in the way it is now. Whatever you're comfortable with is what's best! It was a pain in the ass to set up this instance. Thankfully it's gotten easier with the past few updates. I am very hopeful for lemmys growth and making more niche focused communities is extremely important to it's growth in my opinion.
Know that if things do grow more and you change your mind and decide to open things up, know that I'd support you 100%. Obviously, you don't need my blessing or support but spreading things out and embracing decentralization across the fediverse is something I will always be down with. I know there's probably going to be more pause in the future in regards to making alternatives to existing niche communities on lemmy but it's always good to have choice and just have things spread out. There is no competition here, we're all federated together.
Thanks for the support, gabe. That’s a very healthy approach to the Fediverse.
The discussion of fiction books! Please tag spoilers and follow instance rules.