Weird genre obsession

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Ricky D'Angelo

Thanks, in regard to my own reading preference I think I can subdivide a wide genre to smaller subcategories in the following order. . .
I. Science Fiction

A. Dystopian
___i. transrealism

(yes, I have been thinking about this). . Can anyone else subdivide their preferred reading genre?

Sure.
Everybody can.
If you look at the left sidebar of the Kindle ebookstore (using just one example) and drill down to Science fiction, you'll see:

Science Fiction
Adventure (42,602)
Alien Invasion (4,025)
Alternative History (9,274)
Anthologies & Short Stories (11,561)
Classics (431)
Colonization (3,778)
Cyberpunk (4,001)
Dystopian (17,685)
First Contact (8,750)
Galactic Empire (3,189)
Genetic Engineering (7,712)
Hard Science Fiction (8,291)
LGBT (1,837)
Metaphysical & Visionary (4,280)
Military (13,062)
Post-Apocalyptic (18,710)
Space Exploration (3,431)
Space Opera (20,300)
Steampunk (4,229)
TV, Movie, Video Game Adaptations (3,013)
Time Travel (8,813)

Do it for Mystery and you get:
ystery
African American (1,671)
Collections & Anthologies (6,504)
Cozy (15,164)
Hard-Boiled (10,377)
Historical (10,522)
International Mystery & Crime (8,691)
LGBT (1,572)
Police Procedurals (14,288)
Private Investigators (12,097)
Series (1,002)
Traditional Detectives (8,362)
Women Sleuths (25,289)

Romance?

omance
African American (11,857)
Clean & Wholesome (2,106)
Collections & Anthologies (16,680)
Contemporary (147,863)
Fantasy (31,239)
Gothic (1,709)
Historical Romance (47,366)
Holidays (11,656)
Inspirational (30,516)
LGBT (39,555)
Military (16,588)
Multicultural & Interracial (16,695)
Mystery & Suspense (48,921)
New Adult & College (20,167)
Paranormal (50,460)
Romantic Comedy (39,037)
Science Fiction (12,139)
Series (28,011)
Sports (9,948)
Time Travel (4,711)
Westerns (15,736)

If you know what you like you can easily reduce a flood of 5million titles to maybe a thousand that you are really interested in. When I go looking for SF titles in the Kindle store I don't care about the half million romance titles or the 300,000 mystery titles. Only the 150,000 SF titles. And of those I'm more interested in adventure and space opera than political or dystopian SF.

It's common practice to break down book listings by genre and subgenre/theme.
It helps people browse through listings holding millions of different books.

[Namekuseijin]

Originally Posted by Roos

Good to hear i am not the only one, @KevinBurke i read fiction to get away from things, life is crappy enough with good distractions, let alone without.
I think what attracts me in a lot of M-SF is the winning, wars, fights, battles.. As i hate the Dystopian crap that seems to rule the SF roost

there's no winning without losing

thus, one man's utopia is another's dystopia

that said, I'm pretty aspie myself and I only find solace in the reinventing of boredom reality through the arts. Give me fiction over non-fiction any day. Should I remind that plays and movies are fiction? Besides, there's beauty in "low level reading mechanics", almost like code-breaking some cypher to understand some authors' meaning.

I think I just bought my first non-fiction ebook ever: Fermat's Last Theorem, by Simon Singh. It narrates the centuries old search and failure by many notable mathematicians to prove the theorem, up until recently. Good stuff

[Namekuseijin]

> Can anyone else subdivide their preferred reading genre?

sure: there's good reads and bad ones :-D

[Ricky D'Angelo]

Originally Posted by Namekuseijin

> Can anyone else subdivide their preferred reading genre?

sure: there's good reads and bad ones :-D

You had to get all philosophical. . . I also enjoy reading philosophy books mostly by Mortimer J. Adler (who most notably wrote How to Read a Book). Adler defines the word "good" in the following manner.

The word "good" is used in a number of senses. The first is its use as an adjective, with a comparative and a superlative, as in good, better, best. This is its grading sense, in which things are judged for their exchange value. It is of little interest to the moral philosopher except in its use with regard to the summum bonum or the highest good, the best among all the real goods that are objects of desire (See Ends and Means.)

Another sense of the word is its use as a noun, when it refers to all the goods that are objects of desire, the real and apparent goods, the goods needed and wanted.

Finally, there is a sense that is unfamiliar to most individuals. This is the ontological good -- the intrinsic perfection that everything which exists possesses. Here, as Augustine tells us, a mouse has a perfection or goodness that is greater than that possessed by an inanimate stone like a pearl. Living organisms have more intrinsic perfection, than inanimate and inert things, even though the latter may have greater value in the marketplace.
http://www.thegreatideas.org/apd-good.html

Now I have to look up what the word "bad" means.

[Roos]

Originally Posted by ekbell

Rita Mae Brown's books are fun.
Another fun cat mystery series is The Cat Who.... series by Lilian Jackson Braun.

(I also have a fair collection of cat oriented science fiction and fantasy anthologies as well)

The cat who.. yes, i have read some, somehow it just did not click.
I love the tree cats in the Honor Harrington series, would love one of those!

[Roos]

Originally Posted by Namekuseijin

I think I just bought my first non-fiction ebook ever: Fermat's Last Theorem, by Simon Singh. It narrates the centuries old search and failure by many notable mathematicians to prove the theorem, up until recently. Good stuff

I get sometimes handed a history book handed by my wife (history teacher) one that impressed me the most was a (Dutch) book about the Pandemic of 1918 (Spanish Flu) the truth and the myths, and what the hunt for the virus and a vaccine has to do with the outbreak of the H5N1.
So i do sometimes roam on the dark side

I almost always choose fiction, and not the dystopian ones, i must say i loved the old Pulp SF, optimistic and fantastic stories

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Roos

...i must say i loved the old Pulp SF, optimistic and fantastic stories

I love some of the old sensawunda myself

[ReadingManiac]

Originally Posted by Roos

The cat who.. yes, i have read some, somehow it just did not click.
I love the tree cats in the Honor Harrington series, would love one of those!

Weird, someone just mentioned these in another forum I read. I'm going to have to try them!

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by ReadingManiac

Weird, someone just mentioned these in another forum I read. I'm going to have to try them!

If it's the Treecats alone you're curious about, the story you want is CHANGER OF WORLDS in the Anthology of the same name. You can get the book cheap at Baen's ebookstore or in the MISSION OF HONOR promo CD found in several places online.

The Treecats also play big roles in the prequel books of the STAR KINGDOM Series; A BEAUTIFUL FRIENDSHIP, FIRE SEASON, TREECAT WARS.

Just bear in mind they're not really cats. Just very catlike aliens. With very low senses of humor. They do like playing Frisbee, though.

There's a lot more than treecats in the various Honorverse series, if you're interested in modern space opera and adventure SF. They're all linked but each series can be read separately.

The primary entry point is ON BASILISK STATION, free at the BAEN FREE LIBRARY.
But another good entry point to the latter books is THE SHADOW OF SAGANAMI.

In keeping with the tone of this thread, if you like either, you'll end up bingeing twenty-some volumes covering five series and a half dozen anthologies.

[Roos]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

If it's the Treecats alone you're curious about, the story you want is CHANGER OF WORLDS in the Anthology of the same name. You can get the book cheap at Baen's ebookstore or in the MISSION OF HONOR promo CD found in several places online.

The Treecats also play big roles in the prequel books of the STAR KINGDOM Series; A BEAUTIFUL FRIENDSHIP, FIRE SEASON, TREECAT WARS.

Just bear in mind they're not really cats. Just very catlike aliens. With very low senses of humor. They do like playing Frisbee, though.

There's a lot more than treecats in the various Honorverse series, if you're interested in modern space opera and adventure SF. They're all linked but each series can be read separately.

The primary entry point is ON BASILISK STATION, free at the BAEN FREE LIBRARY.
But another good entry point to the latter books is THE SHADOW OF SAGANAMI.

In keeping with the tone of this thread, if you like either, you'll end up bingeing twenty-some volumes covering five series and a half dozen anthologies.

I do agree with the treecat series, loved them, devoured the Honor Harrington series up until part 10, that one just would not go down the hatch, it was some time ago, but if i recollect it was a lot about politics, and boy do i hate the slimy backstabbing attitude that seems to go with that.
I folded about 1/4th in the book, took me 4 years to pick up the next part, still not fully back on track for me.
Since then i read the treecat series, and now i added part 12-13 to my Kindle Account for a holiday read

I liked (as a M-SF series) the Kris Longknife series better even sans Cats :P

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Roos

I do agree with the treecat series, loved them, devoured the Honor Harrington series up until part 10, that one just would not go down the hatch, it was some time ago, but if i recollect it was a lot about politics, and boy do i hate the slimy backstabbing attitude that seems to go with that.
I folded about 1/4th in the book, took me 4 years to pick up the next part, still not fully back on track for me.
Since then i read the treecat series, and now i added part 12-13 to my Kindle Account for a holiday read

I liked (as a M-SF series) the Kris Longknife series better even sans Cats :P

The core Honor Harrington series is to an extent *two* series.

The early novels were mostly standalones chronicling different stages of her career, whereas the latter books are to all intents and purposes a single mega novel dealing with the collapse of an empire and the rise of new ones.
It complicates matters that the more recent novels were originally meant to feature Honor's kids after her death in battle...which he rethought and repurposed. Which is particularly amusing because a good deal of the ongoing narrative relates to the hidden enemy having to move *their* plans forward a generation.

Of course, once you're twenty-some volumes deep into a series (of series) the urge to hang around for the (expected) payoff is pretty big.

[ReadingManiac]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

If it's the Treecats alone you're curious about, the story you want is CHANGER OF WORLDS in the Anthology of the same name. You can get the book cheap at Baen's ebookstore or in the MISSION OF HONOR promo CD found in several places online.

The Treecats also play big roles in the prequel books of the STAR KINGDOM Series; A BEAUTIFUL FRIENDSHIP, FIRE SEASON, TREECAT WARS.

Just bear in mind they're not really cats. Just very catlike aliens. With very low senses of humor. They do like playing Frisbee, though.

There's a lot more than treecats in the various Honorverse series, if you're interested in modern space opera and adventure SF. They're all linked but each series can be read separately.

The primary entry point is ON BASILISK STATION, free at the BAEN FREE LIBRARY.
But another good entry point to the latter books is THE SHADOW OF SAGANAMI.

In keeping with the tone of this thread, if you like either, you'll end up bingeing twenty-some volumes covering five series and a half dozen anthologies.

Thank you! Titles noted.

[JustinThought]

Originally Posted by ekbell

Rita Mae Brown's books are fun.
Another fun cat mystery series is The Cat Who.... series by Lilian Jackson Braun.

(I also have a fair collection of cat oriented science fiction and fantasy anthologies as well)

I went through about half of Braun's series a few years ago, then recently I finalized my collection--I now have all --31?-- of her books, and I'm working my way through them. It gets kind of confusing--one of the books I was missing was the first in the series, so now I'm kinda surfing my way through Qwil's early, hungry days through his more prosperous times.

Good series, though.

On the subject of cats, though, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls from Heinlein was a good addition to his LL group--if you like SciFi. (Waving my hand wildly: Me! Me!)