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[LARD]

I am a big fan of the human nature and philosophy in the second and third ones.

[Remuthra]

I agree, as the entire series is great for its philosophical depth. However, Ender's Game is set apart by its construction. On its surface it is a quite good children's book, with more fast-paced writing and a focus on children, and you can just read it as that. However, the deeper you look, the more underlying messages and comparisons you can see. Ender's Game is truly remarkable because it can be as deep as you want, and it seems to have endless depth and complexity. It is my personal favorite book, and I've read it some 18 times at this point. The rest of the series is more slow-paced, traditional science fiction. While I read it all, and it was quite good, it didn't capture the profound ability of the first to give readers as much or as little complexity and philosophy as they cared to go looking for.

[Ghazkull]

Joe Abercrombie was mentioned before but adding to the First Law Trilogy:

Best Served Cold (Set in Styria a few years after the Trilogy) it's Pretty much Kill Bill in a Fantasy Universe
The Heroes: One Battle, 3 Men, No Heroes (Set in the North after Best Served Cold) All Quiet on the Western Front in Fantasy

both are excellent and add to Abercrombies Universe.

Steve Eriksons Malazan Book of the Fallen Series is pretty awesome too. If you like Black Company, Song of Ice and Fire or teh First Law Trilogy this is something for you. The Series is utter Epicness especially since every Book trumps the next one in Cataclysmic World Destroying Wars and ridiculously complex intrigues. Only the Last Book runs out of power at the end  but the rest is grimdark epicness at it's best.

Then i could suggest Jack J. Lee's Sustainable Earth Series. Ever asked yourself how Humanity would continue years after a Zombie-Apocalypse? This is pretty much it. Although it has some typical Clichees of the Zombie-Theme its otherwise fun to read if a bit shallow.

The Rest has already been mentioned often enough so i won't reiterate them

[Sergius]

This book is weird and good, not sure if it's easy to find, but give it a try:

The True Game by Sheri S. Tepper.

That's a good thousand pages of some not-so-standard fantasy (and... something else. But I don't want to spoil). Well, in theory it's three books (King's Blood Four, Necromancer Nine, Wizard's Eleven) but I got the one-volume-edition.
It was the first book that I read in English.

[Scoops Novel]

I am a big fan of the human nature and philosophy in the second and third ones.

Can you better define this? I question it given his funding of "family first"  or whatever they're using as code now groups.

[Gervassen]

Does it matter? If you blacklist literature because the author might have a different philosophical view, that's a bit... close-minded and defensive.

[Sergius]

It's called boycotting and it's perfectly legitimate.

Like saying, I don't want anything by Ray Bradbury or wossname who hates computers and thinks geeks are subhuman.

[Starver]

It's called boycotting and it's perfectly legitimate.

Like saying, I don't want anything by Ray Bradbury or wossname who hates computers and thinks geeks are subhuman.

As a kind of reverse situation, I quite liked Battlefield Earth and the Mission Earth Decalogy[1], by L. Ron Hubbard.

This was back in the early '80s, before I'd even heard of his church.  (As far as I was concerned, and I suppose I still am, they were "rollocking good reads", in a Sci-Fi-schlock kind of way.  Some rather perverse imagery[2], and some rather silly premises[3][4], but the books worked, in their own fashion.

Less than a decade later (once I knew about L. Ron's more 'pastoral' output), I probably wouldn't have touched his works with a bargepole, such were the bad opinions of his organisation on Usenet/etc...  OTOH, by having read the books I also know that had I not read them my life would have been not much poorer, either.  And I'd have probably just read something else instead[5], possibly to my benefit.

Still, while there are all kinds of reasons to avoid books, I think "book-burning Mein Campf, even for the irony" isn't something you should be tempted to do...  And authors' opinions can be easily ignored (the Christian imagery in the Narnia series, for one, or the quite modern anti-sexist ironic style employed by Edwin Abbott Abbott in his Flatterland book as something that's actually (when you realise what he's doing) a palatable subversion of the contemporary societal condition), and I never put books down (unfinished) for that reason...


As for not picking them up...  You makes your choices.  Obviously if you're buying the books you're going to have a standard compatible with "do I really need to waste my money on this?" if it's of an iffy heritage, whilst borrowing from a library lets one extend one's range a little more beyond the paid-for limit of how far you'd go beyond your comfort zone...  And regret it less if what you pick up is distasteful/boring/badly-written/whatever and you realise your mistake.


[1] Or however he spelt that word...

[2] e.g. Mission Earth's "plastic surgeon" alien who had some rather strange proclivities as to the plastic surgery he'd perform, and the Earth-girl hooker who got kidnapped and ended up teaching the alien catamites how to be... interesting...  But as I doubt you've read the whole ten books in the set (makes LOTR almost look like a pamphlet...), I suppose "you really have to have been there" to understand...

[3] More so for the Decalagy/Decology/whatever, where immediately prior to the forward by the Alien Minister Of Literature saying as how Earth is a fictional place is the forward by the Alien-to-English translation robot who starts to question not just why he's being asked to translate the book into the fictional language of English, but if the Earth and the English language are fictional then why/how does he (the robot) even exist?

[4] Battlefield Earth was much less silly than the movie.  I could 'believe' the book, but the film stunk.

[5] I think, at the time, I was reading through the library shelves in alphabetical order of author.  Thus someone with a post-H initial would have benefited from my attention I suspect.   Zelazny, mayhap...