What are you reading right now?

[Hazel Motes]

The Holy Sinner by Thomas Mann. It's good. Really good. The narrator is an Irish monk and he's delightfully pretentious. The story is based around the story of Gregorius, a fellow born of incestual twins who eventually becomes pope. It's shorter than The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus and I would recommend it for someone who wants to read a work by Mann after Death In Venice.

 

[AnOminous]

Asimov had a crazy output as an author. I think he published around 700 books? While best known for his sci-fi, his commentaries and histories are great as well. His series chronicling the Romans was a inspiration for big sci-fi franchises like Star Wars and Warhammer 40k (along with his Foundation trilogy, which are the best books i've ever read)

More than 500. He isn't the most prolific of all time, but he's definitely way up there and with most of the quality better than the genuinely massive churners-out of material.

 

[deerPropaganda]

American Psycho. I started months ago and am only on pg 214/399 because I haven't read many books and am slow. I want to read more, though.

 

[teriyakiburns]

I just finished reading The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr. Still absorbing it, but it fits with a lot of the opinions I've held, about the internet and computers, for a long time now. Time to touch grass I reckon.

 

[Gilgamesh]

American Psycho. I started months ago and am only on pg 214/399 because I haven't read many books and am slow. I want to read more, though.

How are you going with that? I tried a few years ago, but the constant name-drops of luxury brands made me feel like I needed to read it with google by my side.

 

[DarkSydeHyde]

How are you going with that? I tried a few years ago, but the constant name-drops of luxury brands made me feel like I needed to read it with google by my side.

From one point I just started to skip those parts. It's just noise. It holds no value. I guess it is some allegory about the vapid yuppie lifestyle. All show, no style substance. Or like they don't do anything substantial in their life so they fill the void with products.

 

[Commander X]

KILLING TOWN by Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins, a novel based on an unpublished manuscript by Spillane and expanded on by author, friend and executor of the Spillane estate Collins, who in the intro explains that Spillane showed him the manuscript some years ago - an early, perhaps the earliest, Mike Hammer story Spillane started—the incomplete manuscript clocked in at 30 typed and single-spaced pages. The story takes place before Hammer's debut novel, 1947's I, THE JURY.

Spoiler

On my visits to his Murrells Inlet home, late at night, we would repair to his third-floor office—he had two others on the now rebuilt property—and we would talk writing. In particular, he would regale me with ideas he had for future Mike Hammer novels. The subdued lighting invoked the beachfront campfires where young lifeguard Frank Morrison Spillane would “scare hell out” of his friends with spooky stories; but that lighting also had an appropriately noir flavor.

After all, we were talking Mike Hammer.

It was in that office, during one bull session, that he shared with me the endings for King of the Weeds, The Big Bang, and Kiss Her Goodbye—novels in progress that I would have been astonished to learn would eventually be completed by me… including putting Mickey’s mesmerizing endings into prose.

On one such occasion, he withdrew from somewhere—like Bugs Bunny summoning a carrot or a machine gun—a browning, crumble-edged, fairly lengthy manuscript. It ran about thirty dense single-spaced pages, the equivalent of sixty-some double-spaced pages. I began reading.

“You wrote this a long time ago,” I said.

He had pulled up a chair, turned it backward and sat, studying me, wearing a devilish, little-kid smile that threatened to turn to laughter at any moment. He nodded.

I kept reading. “This is good.”

Soft chuckle. “I know.” That laugh-threatening smile.

“Is this what I think it is?”

A sly nod. The smile continued.

For half an hour, he sat enjoying me enjoy what was clearly an early appearance of Mike Hammer. But it was different from anything else about Hammer I’d read—he was even more of a lone wolf. Velda wasn’t his secretary yet. He was doing an undercover job in a small, corrupt town. Some of the flavor of the famous early non-Hammer, The Long Wait, permeated the ancient pages.

“This is terrific,” I said, when I’d breathlessly raced through the chapters. “Where does it go from here?”

He shrugged, collected the pages, stowed them somewhere, and we moved on to other subjects.

KILLING TOWN, starts off with a Hammer new to the PI game, an ex-Marine veteran of the WWII Pacific theater, riding the rails undercover as a bum, drifting into the town of Killington, R.I. in search of a specific person for a personal mission. As he disembarks, he catches sight of a naked woman through a carriage window performing a sort-of reverse striptease for some unseen party.

It doesn't take long for him to figure out that the town's titular nickname is very appropriate.

Shortly after, he ends up captured and tuned up by the corrupt local police, who stink worse than the town's fish canning plant, of the rape and murder of a girl who happens to be the same one he spotted on the train. It becomes obvious that the police are hanging a frame-up job on him, probably courtesy of the powerful businessman who really runs the town, ex-Senator Charles Killington who owns the cannery and the glue factory that keep the town alive.

When all seems lost, witnesses providing phony testimony against him, an alluring blonde springs him with a false alibi and a marriage proposal which leaves him more confused than ever. She's Melba, Killington's daughter and he's trying to figure out her motives. It's a pretty good hard-boiled rip.

I stared too because the big cop wasn’t looking at the blackjack-playing pair but instead right at me, and the way he held that club meant he aimed to use it before asking any questions. He played it tough, the way nearly every stupid cop does, thinking that a uniform made him a superman and forgetting that other guys are just as big and maybe even tougher. With or without a billy.

He reached for me with one hand to hold on while he swung, and as soon as he had his fingers planted in my coat front, I pulled a nasty little trick that broke his arm above the elbow and he dropped to the floor screaming. The other cop was pulling his gun as he ran for me.

This one was stupid too. If I had gone the other way he would have had time to jerk the rod free, but I came in on him and split his face six ways to Sunday with a straight right and while he lay there, I put a foot on his belly and brought it down hard. Like I was stomping on a particularly ugly bug.

He turned blue for a while, then started breathing again.

The cop with the broken wing had fainted.

The bartender was wide-eyed over his open mouth.

Over in the corner, the slumming party looked sick to their stomachs, then got up and scrambled out.

The brunette hadn’t reacted at all.

 

[Hazel Motes]

More than 500. He isn't the most prolific of all time, but he's definitely way up there and with most of the quality better than the genuinely massive churners-out of material.

Serious question. How many Asimov books have you read? I wish I was a fan of science fiction fan but I've never been into it beyond the classics and JG Ballard, the least science fiction science fiction author of all time. I think it partly has to do with the amount of work these writers wrote.

 

[DaddyCowboy]

A Canticle for Leibowitz. Long story short, the Fallout and Wasteland series' were inspired by this novel, along with a lot of post-apocalyptic stories. I've only read through the first third, but my god does it ooze with atmosphere. I am not going to spoil any plot details at all, but long story short, if you like the OG fallout games + New Vegas, I would really recommend picking this up as it has the same vibe with them

 

[Professor G. Raff]

Just finished Inhibitor Phase (latest in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space books).

They all have their flaws, but this cold brutal space-opera world he's been building keeps drawing me in.

In terms of spaceships as characters, Nostalgia for Infinity is under-appreciated.

Earlier this year I finished reading the first 3 (4, if you count Chasm City) Revelation Space books, but Inhibitor Phase's release gap, the fact it's doesn't directly follow the story and characters of the other three and Absolution Gap's weird, somewhat insultingly unsatisfying ending caused me to move on to other series instead of reading it. Would you say it adds enough to pick up, or does the originally trilogy tell enough of the inhibitor story?

 

[Andrew Neiman]

Here are all the books I've read in the past 12 years:

Spoiler

"Das Kapital," Karl Marx
"Parecon," Michael Albert
"Ten Day That Shook the World," John Reed
"The Gods Will Have Blood," Anatole France
"My Disillusionment in Russia," Emma Goldman
"God and the State," Mikhail Bakunin
"Anarchism and Other Essays," Emma Goldman
"The Stranger," Albert Camus
"Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War," Ernesto "Che" Guevara
"Hegemony or Survival," Noam Chomsky
"The Communist Manifesto," Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
"Homage to Catalonia," George Orwell
"What Uncle Sam Really Wants," Noam Chomsky
"The Bolivian Diary," Ernesto "Che" Guevara
"The ABC of Communist Anarchism," Alexander Berkman
"Living My Life," Emma Goldman
"Baader-Meinhof," Stefan Aust
"The Trial," Franz Kafka
"The Conquest of Bread," Peter Kropotkin
"Kronstadt, 1921," Paul Avrich
"Darkness at Noon," Arthur Koestler
"Stalin: A Biography," Robert Service
"The Last Tsar," Edvard Radzinsky
"The Picture of Dorian Gray," Oscar Wilde
"We," Yevgeny Zamyatin
"Lenin: A Biography," Robert Service
"Bakunin and Nechaev," Paul Avrich
"The Neverending Story," Michael Ende
"Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov
"The Stranger," Albert Camus
"Rocannon's World," Ursula K. Le Guin
"Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov
"Water For Elephants," Sara Gruen
"The Neverending Story," Michael Ende
"Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov
"Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov
"Going to Meet the Man," James Baldwin
"The Plague," Albert Camus
"Homage to Catalonia," George Orwell
"Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary," Bertrand Patenaude
"Casino Royale," Ian Fleming
"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"The Days of the French Revolution," Christopher Hibbert
"A Place of Greater Safety," Hilary Mantel
"Les Misérables," Victor Hugo
"The Ball and the Cross," G. K. Chesterton
"Go Tell It On the Mountain," James Baldwin
"Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass," Frederick Douglass
"The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4," Sue Townsend
"The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole," Sue Townsend
"Stalingrad," Antony Beevor
"The Fall," Albert Camus
"Notre Dame de Paris," Victor Hugo
"Insurgent Mexico," John Reed
"Raven," Tim Reiterman
"The Man Who Was Thursday," G. K. Chesterton
"Perfume," Patrick Süskind
"Napoleon: The Path to Power," Philip Dwyer
"The Count of Monte Cristo," Alexandre Dumas
"The Hunger Games," Suzanne Collins
"Citizen Emperor: Napoleon in Power," Philip Dwyer
"Candide," Voltaire
"Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life," Peter McPhee
"Catching Fire," Suzanne Collins
"Mockingjay," Suzanne Collins
"Don Quixote," Miguel de Cervantes
Selected Tales, Edgar Allan Poe
"The Shadow Out of Time," H. P. Lovecraft
"The Metamorphosis," Franz Kafka
"The Fall," Albert Camus
"Conversations with Stalin," Milovan Đilas
"Faust, Part One," Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
"Engineers of the Soul," Frank Westerman
"The Real Life of Sebastian Knight," Vladimir Nabokov
"Résistance," Agnès Humbert
"Bend Sinister," Vladimir Nabokov
"The Sorrows of Young Werther," Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
"The Exile and the Kingdom," Albert Camus
"Chess Story," Stefan Zweig
"The Castle," Franz Kafka
"Tales of the German Imagination"
"Despair," Vladimir Nabokov
"A Game of Thrones," George R. R. Martin
"Beware of Pity," Stefan Zweig
"The Jew of Malta," Christopher Marlowe
"Doctor Faustus," Christopher Marlowe
"The Confusions of Young Master Törless," Robert Musil
"The Happy Prince and Other Stories," Oscar Wilde
"Faust, Part One," Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
"The Beautiful and Damned," F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Stoner," John Williams
"Faust, Part Two," Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The Iliad, Homer
"Living Poor," Moritz Thomsen
"An Introduction to Islam," David Waines
"Into the House of the Ancestors," Karl Maier
"The Man-Eaters of Tsavo," John Henry Patterson
"Where Soldiers Fear to Tread," John S. Burnett
"Behind the Candelabra," Scott Thorson
"King Leopold's Ghost," Adam Hochschild
"Shake Hands With the Devil," Roméo Dallaire
"Venus in Furs," Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
"Carry On, Jeeves," P. G. Wodehouse
"The Man Who Would Be King," Rudyard Kipling
"Dubliners," James Joyce
"Things Fall Apart," Chinua Achebe
"The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies," Clark Ashton Smith
1,001 Nights
"Sense and Sensibility," Jane Austen
"The Road," Cormac McCarthy
"For Whom the Bell Tolls," Ernest Hemingway
"Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself," David Lipsky
"Phaedrus," Plato
"The Secret Agent," Joseph Conrad
"The Code of the Woosters," P. G. Wodehouse
"Thank You, Jeeves," P. G. Wodehouse
"Gravity's Rainbow," Thomas Pynchon
"The Case of Comrade Tulayev," Victor Serge
"Heart of Darkness," Joseph Conrad
The Penguin Collection of Early Greek Philosophy
"Amerika," Franz Kafka
"Confusion," Stefan Zweig
"Watt," Samuel Beckett
"The Myth of Sisyphus," Albert Camus
"De Profundis," Oscar Wilde
"Moby-Dick," Herman Melville
"The Ode Less Traveled," Stephen Fry
"The Luzhin Defense," Vladimir Nabokov
"The Paris Commune," Donny Gluckstein
"Eating the Dinosaur," Chuck Klosterman
"Journey to the End of the Night," Louis-Ferdinand Céline
"Devil in the White City," Erik Larson
"In the Heart of the Sea," Nathaniel Philbrick
"Animal Farm," George Orwell
"The Master and Margarita," Mikhail Bulgakov
"Pale Fire," Vladimir Nabokov
"Phaedo," Plato
"Infinite Jest," David Foster Wallace
"Paris After the Liberation," Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper
"If on a winter's night a traveler," Italo Calvino
"The Big Sleep," Raymond Chandler
"War and Peace," Leo Tolstoy
"Diary of a Madman and Other Stories," Nikolai Gogol
"The Ivankiad," Vladimir Voinovich
"A Moveable Feast," Ernest Hemingway
"The Case of Comrade Tulayev," Victor Serge
"We," Yevgeny Zamyatin
"Dead Souls," Nikolai Gogol
"Norwegian Wood," Haruki Murakami
"The Luzhin Defense," Vladimir Nabokov
"Conquered City," Victor Serge
"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"Waiting for Godot," Samuel Beckett
"Tales of the German Imagination"
"Pnin," Vladimir Nabokov
"The Magic Mountain," Thomas Mann
Stories, Vladimir Nabokov
"How Much Land Does a Man Need?" Leo Tolstoy
"Imperial Ambitions," Noam Chomsky
"In the Garden of Beasts," Erik Larson
"Journey to the End of the Night," Louis-Ferdinand Céline
"Pale Fire," Vladimir Nabokov
"Eichmann in Jerusalem," Hannah Arendt
"The Fatal Shore," Robert Hughes
"Songs of a Dead Dreamer," Thomas Ligotti
"In a Sunburned Country," Bill Bryson
"Lord of the Flies," William Golding
"Everything is Illuminated," Jonathan Safran Foer
"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," Jonathan Safran Foer
"Diary of a Madman and Other Stories," Nikolai Gogol
"Bobby Fischer Goes to War," David Edmonds
"The Queen of Katwe," Tim Crothers
"Eugene Onegin," Alexander Pushkin
"Lord Arthur Savile's Crime," Oscar Wilde
"The Immortal Game," David Shenk
"Under the Skin," Michel Faber
"The Rookie," Stephen Moss
"Great Again," Donald Trump
"Never Enough," Michael D'Antonio
"Envy," Yuri Olesha
"The Man Without a Face," Masha Gessen
"Brief Interviews With Hideous Men," David Foster Wallace
"Who Killed Kirov?" Amy Knight
"China: A New History," Robert S. Fairbank
"The Talented Mr. Ripley," Patricia Highsmith
"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," Raymond Chandler
"Madness," Roald Dahl
"Death on Credit," Louis-Ferdinand Céline
"A Dog's Heart," Mikhail Bulgakov
"Cathedral," Raymond Carver
"The Disaster Artist," Greg Sestero
"The Eye," Vladimir Nabokov
"The Man Who Was Thursday," G. K. Chesterton
"Endgame," Frank Brady
"The World's Best Jazz Club," David James
"The Emigrants," Vilhelm Moberg
"Timon of Athens," William Shakespeare
"An Advertisement for Toothpaste," Ryszard Kapuściński
"Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady," Clarice Lispector
"12 Rules For Life," Jordan B. Peterson
"Macbeth," William Shakespeare
"The Photographer's Eye," Michael Freeman
"The Strange Death of Europe," Douglas Murray
"The Photographer's Mind," Michael Freeman
"Wuthering Heights," Emily Brontë
"A Confederacy of Dunces," John Kennedy Toole
"Despair," Vladimir Nabokov
"Something Fresh," P.G. Wodehouse
"Unto a Good Land," Vilhelm Moberg
"The Better Angels of Our Nature," Steven Pinker
"Silence," Shusaku Endo
"Meditations," Marcus Aurelius
"The Remains of the Day," Kazuo Ishiguro
"Lying," Sam Harris
"The White Masai," Corinne Hoffman
"Lighting the Way," 14th Dalai Lama
"Waking Up," Sam Harris
"Goodbye, Things," Fumio Sasaki
"Mrs. Rosie and the Priest," Giovanni Boccaccio
"SIddhartha," Hermann Hesse
"The Butcher Boy," Patrick McCabe
"The Rape of Nanking," Iris Chang
"Three Men in a Boat," Jerome K. Jerome
"Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories," Ryunosuke Akutagawa
"The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea," Yukio Mishima
"Submission," Michel Houellebecq
"On the Shortness of Life," Seneca
"The Samurai," Shusaku Endo
"Naomi," Junichiro Tanizaki
"Stoicism," Brad Inwood
"The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," Oliver Sacks
"Buddhism," Damien Keown
"Anecdotes of the Cynics"
"Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind," Shunryu Suzuki
"Of Human Freedom," Epictetus
"No Longer Human," Osamu Dazai
"The Temple of the Golden Pavilion," Yukio Mishima
"The Setting Sun," Osamu Dazai
"Whatever," Michel Houellebecq
"Psycho," Robert Bloch
"The Enchanter," Vladimir Nabokov
"Mythos," Stephen Fry
"Heroes," Stephen Fry
"The Sense of Style," Steven Pinker
"Midnight in Chernobyl," Adam Higginbotham
"Mindhunter," John Douglas
"So You've Been Publicly Shamed," Jon Ronson
"Confession of a Serial Killer," Katherine Ramsland
"The Madness of Crowds," Douglas Murray
"Beowulf"
"Serotonin," Michel Houellebecq
"The Samurai," Shusaku Endo
"The Big Yaroo," Patrick McCabe
"Silence," Shusaku Endo
"Inspector Imanishi Investigates," Seicho Matsumoto
"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
"Man's Search for Meaning," Viktor Frankl
"Devils in Daylight," Junichiro Tanizaki
"The Death of Ivan Ilyich," Leo Tolstoy
"The Penguin Book of Norse Myths," Kevin Crossley-Holland
"The Invasion," K.A. Applegate
"A Confederacy of Dunces," John Kennedy Toole
The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio
"The Turn of the Screw," Henry James
The Iliad, Homer
"The Patriots," Sana Krasikov
"Call Me By Your Name," André Aciman
"My Dearest Father," Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
"On the Shortness of Life," Seneca
"Of Human Freedom," Epictetus
"Enchiridion," Epictetus
"The Bad Beginning," Lemony Snicket
"Most Beloved Sister," Astrid Lindgren
"The Reptile Room," Lemony Snicket
The Odyssey, Homer
"Frictions," August Strindberg
"Dubliners," James Joyce
"The Wide Window," Lemony Snicket
"The Silver Mine," Selma Lagerlöf
"The Miserable Mill," Lemony Snicket
"Sleet," Stig Dagerman
"That One Should Disdain Hardships," Musonius Rufus
"The Wendigo," Algernon Blackwood
"The Austere Academy," Lemony Snicket
"The Contender," Robert Lipsyte
"Silence," Shusaku Endo
"Macbeth," William Shakespeare
"A Poetry Handbook," Mary Oliver
"Kiss Kiss," Roald Dahl,
"Switch Bitch," Roald Dahl
"Richard II," William Shakespeare
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," Douglas Adams
"A Morbid Taste for Bones," Ellis Peters
"Someone Like You," Roald Dahl
"My Uncle Oswald," Roald Dahl
"Of Human Freedom," Epictetus
"Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" Raymond Carver
"Troy," Stephen Fry
"South of No North," Charles Bukowski
"The Ersatz Elevator," Lemony Snicket
"Factotum," Charles Bukowski
"Carmen," Prosper Mérimée
"Nine Stories," J.D. Salinger
"Flapperes and Philosophers," F. Scott Fitzgerald
"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," Raymond Carver
"Richard II," William Shakespeare
"The Stranger," Albert Camus
"The Making of a Story," Alice LaPlante
"Tales of the Jazz Age," F. Scott Fitzgerald
"J.D. Salinger: A Life," Kenneth Slawenski
"Nine Stories," J.D. Salinger
"The Elementary Particles," Michel Houellebecq
"Falconer," John Cheever
"The Piazza Tales," Herman Melville
"The Catcher in the Rye," J.D. Salinger
"My Salinger Year," Joanna Rakoff
"J.D. Salinger: The Last Interview," David Streitfeld
"Wiseguy," Nicholas Pileggi
"Three Japanese Buddhist Monks," Saigyō, Kamo no Chōmei, and Yoshida Kenkō
"Franny and Zooey," J.D. Salinger
"The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching," Thich Nhat Hanh
"Three Early Stories," J.D. Salinger
"The Plains," Gerald Murnane
"Moby-Dick," Herman Melville
"Vedanta," Pravrajika Vrajaprana
"The Beautiful and Damned," F. Scott Fitzgerald
"The Discomfort of Evening," Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

 

[glass_houses]

A whopping 27 books a year. How could the rest of us plebs ever hope to keep up.

 

[DarkSydeHyde]

"Das Kapital"... Cringe bro

 

[Andrew Neiman]

A whopping 27 books a year. How could the rest of us plebs ever hope to keep up.

I mean, plenty of them are short/easy reads. I just think long-term book journals are interesting to look at.

 

[glass_houses]

I mean, plenty of them are short/easy reads. I just think long-term book journals are interesting to look at.

Fair enough. I misunderstood your intention, apologies. What was "Living Poor" like?

 

[Andrew Neiman]

Fair enough. I misunderstood your intention, apologies.

No worries, I understand.

What was "Living Poor" like?

It was pretty good. It’s a Peace Corps memoir, and I read it in preparation for joining the Peace Corps. It was written during the Wild West days when they just dumped you off at an airport and you had to figure out for yourself how to get to your village in the middle of nowhere, but a lot of what Thomsen writes I think is still generally true. It does a good job of capturing the basic weirdness of the Peace Corps experience, and has lots of funny moments -- Thomsen shows up at his village, where some NGO had installed an electric generator which had since broken down. The villagers want him to fix the generator, but he's like, "Sorry, I'm just here to teach you how to raise chickens and banana trees better. I don't know anything about generators." Half the book is about Thomsen trying to convince the villagers to feed their chickens more so they'll lay more eggs and to make other investments that don't pay off immediately.

 

[deerPropaganda]

How are you going with that? I tried a few years ago, but the constant name-drops of luxury brands made me feel like I needed to read it with google by my side.

yeah, pretty much what the other guy said. it picks up after page 30 or so.

 

[Gilgamesh]

Serious question. How many Asimov books have you read? I wish I was a fan of science fiction fan but I've never been into it beyond the classics and JG Ballard, the least science fiction science fiction author of all time. I think it partly has to do with the amount of work these writers wrote.

Most of those are non-fiction books such as his Understanding Physics collection and history of the Roman Empire.
For his sci-fi though, his seminal pieces are The Foundation Trilogy, The Gods Themselves (Asimov cites this as his favorite), and I, Robot. Some may include two of I, Robot's semi-sequels, The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, but after that most of his sci-fi is trying to string the I, Robot universe with Foundation's, to varying degrees of success. However, if you do decide to read the expanded Foundation novels, read the original trilogy first.

 

[Jewthulhu]

@Andrew Neiman (Can't reply for some reason)

"Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov
"The Stranger," Albert Camus
"Rocannon's World," Ursula K. Le Guin
"Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov
"Water For Elephants," Sara Gruen
"The Neverending Story," Michael Ende
"Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov
"Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov
"Going to Meet the Man," James Baldwin

Damn you really liked Lolita lmao

Lolita happens to be next on my list of stuff to read, followed by a few works by Descartes and Berkeley.

 

[Andrew Neiman]

@Andrew Neiman (Can't reply for some reason)

Damn you really liked Lolita lmao

Lolita happens to be next on my list of stuff to read, followed by a few works by Descartes and Berkeley.

I really do; it's one of the few "great" books I believe I've really explored to its limits. Also, I was in a non-English-speaking country for a few months, most of that with "Lolita" my only English-language book on hand, so I read it several times running.