help me find books to read

giant bomb community!! i need recommendations on books to read. i just got a new laptop/tablet combo and was looking for good ebooks. Problem is, I don't read many books. Period. So naturally I would like some suggestions from you all. But first let me give you some background because I may not know what I want but I do know what I don't want. Get it? Me neither.

First and foremost I'm just looking for a good story set in reality. I use that term loosely but I'm just not big on fantasy. I loved Lord of the Rings movies but I could not imagine reading those books. But the more recent books I've read are near future apocalyptic worlds with zombies freshly taken over the U.S or the government crashed and sent the world into chaos. I do not mind love/romantic stories as long as it's not 50 shades of grey. I never read the book nor seen the movie but I head the plot and dialogue is terrible.

I was wondering if you think more military/tactical books would that I may like for a normal dude who isn't ex military or something. I dunno why but tom clancy always intimidated me but random stories that drew talks about always intrigue me.

Recent movies that made me want to get into books were the martian and gone girl. They both had excellent stories with great characters that it made me realize i've grown tired of 90% of what today's movies are offering. If you do have any suggestions please list the title and author and a quick summary of what the book is about so i can get an idea.

TL:DR

I'm looking for books but I don't read much so I'm overwhelmed by the genres and choices so help a duder out.

Hm. The Sharpe's Rifles series of novels are pretty great historical war fiction, and should be fairly accessible to new readers. I'd recommend giving them a look. Robert zludlum's novels are Clancy-esque without his tendency to go overboard on terminology and unnecessary details, though I think Ludlum's characters and writing in general are inferior to Clancy. And while the Jack Reacher novels are mostly case-of-the-day nonsense, there's a bit of fun to be had with its main character, a former MP who wanders America and solves crime.

If you liked Gone Girl, maybe try Gillian Flynn's other novels too, especially Dark Places.

Matthew Reilly's books are almost stupid frenetic in their pacing, really fun stuff. Check out Ice Station.
I'm going to reading a lot of cyberpunk hopefully in the next weeks, I'll see how that goes for me.

Get smarter with some non-fiction. Check out The Big Short.

Ok so. The best modern-day fantasy series going IMO is the dresden series. But it is very high-magic (like throw lightning, split the earth with magma) yet also equal parts detective series. Might not be on your style but its my favorite series ever so gotta mention it. The first two books do show signs of "new writer issues" but from book 3 on the series picks up drasticlly and just does not stop. Its on book 15(i think) as of right now so..that's a lot of reading.

As far as more modern non-fantasy stuff goes. I can second Mathew Reilly. Ice Station is a good like, pick up and see if you like it, if you do there are dozens of books in the 'Jason Borne' style genre.

For something more centered, there is always the Spenser series by Robert Parker, and now continued by a new author after his death. That series is uh..40 books deep. The books vary in quality a bit and if you go reading them 1-40 in order you do see the pattern in the books.., but if your after the "Private Detective solves crimes ala the old Noir style books, that's a neat series.

Ok, going back to modern fantasy, some romance but not the only focus. You'll find, again apart from Dresden, most of the books fall into the female protaganist/author category. Might not be an issue for you but if so, ignore this next suggest. Which is, anything by Patricia Briggs. The Mercy Thompson series is the main work, but Alpha and Omega are alway quite good. Though uh..werewolves. Not sparkly vampire twilight stuff, but yah.

Finally, there are a few major Fantasy Epics. If what you want is absolutely dense, you really need to read the whole series twice..about 20k pages (PAGES!) then there is Malazan, book of the fallen. A 10 part series which is..uh. well, I'd guess 95% of people bounce off of it. There is always the Drizzt series as well if you want length..its likely at that 20k page mark by now too given the 40 some books in that series.

Sci-fi wise, Vinny aproves of these too, there are some of the less brutal/battle focused 40k novels. Specifically the stuff by Dan Abenett Starting with the Eisenhorn trilogy, following into the Ravenor trillogy, with another trillogy being written right now in that same setting/story-line. its about the Inquisition, rooting out heritics, dealing with the pull and corrupting influence of the evil your trying to fight and so on. 40k is way more science-fantasy but eh, that's my gig so its what I can suggest.

See also the Witcher series of novels for Vinny approved books, though I've not read them so I couldn't comment.

And finally. There are certain authors that are very well known for a reason. You could just pull up a list of the 10 most popular authors and try one book a piece until you find one you like. Your then likely to find a dozen or more books by them that would suit your tastes. Guys like Michael Crichton are popular for a reason about all, even if book snobs might thumb their nose at them.

I can think of no harder thing to recommend than books that someone might like. Music comes close, but you can generally check out an album in under and hour and decide if its for you... though I find most people don't even put that much effort in, then come back 4 years later and ask if you've listened to this awesome album that they forgot you recommended to them 4 years earlier. Anyway...

World War Z sound like the book you want to read. Sort of post-apocalyptic, light military tactics, great story, no 10 page long descriptions of flowers and stuff. Ignore the movie, it has almost nothing to do with the book except the name and zombies.

I'd also recommend Dan Abnett, though that's a slightly bigger commitment.

You should check out The Reckoners series by Brandon Sanderson. The first book is called Steelheart. It is technically classified as "young adult", but in the opening of the book a baby is disintegrated in the arms of its mother, so...
The quick synopsis is that a red star (Calamity) suddenly appeared above the earth. Then people started getting superpowers. Anything from basic flight, heat manipulation, invincibility. They called these people Epics. It quickly turned out that becoming an Epic did not make you a superhero, as the power corrupted the one who got it. And so, ten years after Calamity, the world is broken into warring city-states led by powerful Epics. The book takes place in Newcago (formerly Chicago) where one of the most powerful Epics took power. His name is Steelheart, and he is immortal. Nothing can touch him. The protagonist, David, wants to kill him. Steelheart killed his father. And David once saw Steelheart bleed.
Sanderson usually writes really good fantasy, and this does bare marks of that, but I think it is something you would enjoy. I have listened to all his books on audio, currently on the third Reckoners book now. Great stuff.

Have you checked out Roadside Picnic by Strugatsky brothers? One of the biggest sci fi books in Russia of all time - the game Stalker is based on it.

@slaps2: Came to recommend this. Good to see it's already been recommended.

Have you considered reading some non-fiction? I don't want to be overt in throwing it in your face but there's some really great popular history books for example which have amazing story telling in them, often covering the sorts of things that if it was in fiction it'd be too much to believe! One of the first books that comes to mind is Rubicon by Tom Holland, which is about one of the most exciting & rich periods in history, the end of the Roman Republic & the rise of Julius Caesar, alongside vivid characters like Cato the Younger, Cicero, Crassus, Pompey the Great, Mark Anthony, all names you are likely familiar with, but he tells the story so vividly. It's an extremely easy read.

If you do read it & enjoy it then Holland's follow up is Persian Fire, which about the rise of the Persian Empire & it's clash with the Greek world, city states like Athens & Sparta.

Both recommendations are easy reads, not too long (no more than 350 pages a piece) & absolutely not drier academic history books. There's also a World War 2 spy book, Operation Mincemeat. It is about an operation to send false orders for the Nazis to find & read. It's a really enthralling read, my dad gave me it, a real page turner.

As for fiction. Man. Philip K. Dick has always been my favourite sci-fi writer. His stuff is just about wonderful ideas. Highly recommend Ubik to start off with.

Since it'll be posted eventually, I'll just say Masters of Doom (being a game website, and all). It's about Doom, but the human story behind all that is super awesome, too.

And the Spelunky book is coming out soon (they email copies early if you preordered). And that stuff is super fascinating.

The Last Wish is a great collection of Witcher stories. The novel series is cool and all, but that book has a bunch of standalone stories that are great fun to breeze through.

i love Armour by John Steakley. I own three copies, two paperback version (that each took me about 10 years to find each) and the e-book version.

Read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and then read The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. Then read the hitch-hikers guide to the universe.

You can never go wrong with Douglas Adams, basically.

There are a lot of modern day thriller books, but I happen to like W.E.B. Griffin's "The Presidential Agent Series". The books are modern day, well early 2K era. The character is snappy and funny, but some of the bad guys actually become semi-shady good guys. Its military/espionage fiction but they are mostly fighting terrorists. The books go all over the world, but in a realistic way. (All military/espionage fiction is fantasy however; if Armies worked as well as they do in books, the US would win wars even against terrorists.) The other nice thing is that teh main character isn't just another boring W.A.S.P. white-guy.

I say this all the time, but rather than ebooks get into audio-books. Audiobooks blow text rendered books out of the water, and if you find it hard to get into books or read books...for whatever reason... audiobooks are great. Audiobooks are great way to on-ramp you onto reading physical or ebook too because you get hooked an acclimated to how teh author writes and his characters so that reading teh physical books becomes more gripping.

For me, the narrator is just too important. There are several books I'd love to listen to I just won't buy the audio version of because either the mix is bad, it's recorded at a ridiculous sample rate so it sounds like someone recorded a phone call in the 50s, or the narrator's voice is just annoying. I would say I most of the narrators I've ever listened to to get in the way of the words they're trying to deliver in some way, and it's just annoying. Part of the reason I have 13 credits sitting in my audible account at the moment.

HOT.

SCI-FICTION.

JAY PEGS.

In terms of realistic-ish books where the world is crumbling apart, may I recommend Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. (I keep recommending that book to help, but it is one of my absolute favorite)

For military stuff, nothing really comes to mind for what you are looking for. I mainly read books that involve people who were in a war or the conflict is a component, instead of tactics and strategy.

You could also try reading the original novels of The Martian and Gone Girl. Not sure how you feel about that, but those are two well regarded books before the movie. (Gone Girl in particular was a quick runaway hit as a novel, well before the film was made. And by the way, what an awesome movie!!)

@reverendk: Yeah, I've read both those books...Pretty fun!

I've read most of the commonly recommended stuff as far as historical fiction goes and The Aubrey / Maturin series (on which the movie Master and Commander movie is based) is quite comfortably better than any of the rest of it.

There are plenty of other perfectly enjoyable series in the genre (Sharpe, Hornblower, Conn Iggulden's stuff, Mary Renault's Alexander trilogy etc. etc.) but O'Brian is in a league of his own. The rest are great at what they do, but O'Brian is the only one of those I would recommend to any reader, regardless of whether they have an interest in the subject or genre. His writing, characterisation and -I would say especially- his dialogue are all utterly charming, and should be able to be enjoyed by anybody.

Anything Margaret Atwood writes is golden. I'd say she's easily one of the greatest novelists of this century. Makes the profane profound and vice versa.

Oh and also, I just started reading the Expance series of books, and I've got to say, they're fantastic. Near-ish future, good drama and GREAT characters albeit it's kinda on the junkfood side of literature so don't go expecting a deconstruction of the space opera genre.

Honestly if you liked the movie Gone Girl, I highly recommend that you read Gone Girl. I promise you that you will be surprised by it, even if you've seen the movie. It is an excellent example of how written narrative can be manipulated in ways that other mediums can't even come close to emulating, and the writing itself is extremely sharp. Specifically, Nick is an unreliable narrator. You can't trust him to tell you everything, and you can't even trust him to tell you the truth. You can't really do this in a visual medium with the same effect, and I think that being shown some of reading's unique strengths might be a good place to start.

The primary reason I make this suggestion is that for me, when I fall out of reading for awhile, I find that once I finally start and rip through a really good book, my appetite for reading is completely renewed. Gone Girl is an excellent and forceful book that will almost certainly compel you to move immediately into a new book, which will seem a lot less daunting to you once you've got one under your belt.

If you think you might be into historical fiction, I'm reading Julian by Gore Vidal right now. So far I'm really enjoying it. It's about the life and times of the last pagan emperor of the Roman empire, Julian.

@clagnaught: i dont need tactical or strategy novels. Ive read some historical fiction back in high school with a young soldier who was in the civil war and he mentioned he pissed his pants before his first battle fresh out of camp. I also read a ww2 story about a boy who escaped being wrongfully imprisoned by the nazis when trying to go across france/germany to find his family. If you have any suggestions please do not refrain!

thank you everyone for your suggestions. I will try to pick from the ones you listed on here and i will give them a go. Because i dont know what my particular tastes are beyond what my post stated i dont think there are any wrong answers.

I know people say recommending books is the hardest thing to do but i feel like i dont know what i dont know sometimes. Its kind of asking for a good album to listen to and someone asks me " well what do you like?" and my answer is "i dont know what i like but i heard (insert genre here) and i didnt like that"

@lead_dispencer: Hmmm, in that case I suppose my favorite war novels/novels that involve a war would be Slaughterhouse Five and Atonement.

Another novel I love is a nonfiction novel called Nothing to Envy, which focuses on six or so perspectives of what it's like to live in North Korea. There's been more and more books about the subject from defectors, but I believe this is still one of the best regarded novels on the subject. Just thought of that when you have an example of the boy who escaped from a concentration camp.

I'm hot on Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go right now. Really chilling, subtle dystopian science fiction in the vein of authors like Margaret Atwood.

I'll always, always suggest The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. A short, goofy sci-fi story about a common man named Arthur Dent and his Betelguisian friend Ford Prefect traipsing across the galaxy doing... basically nothing at all (except carrying towels). That book is still genuinely funny. Douglas Adams is a master of non-sequitur humor.