EDIT (3/24/2024): Finished Player of Games, and it didn't win 2,000M, so I'm moving on to the Children of Time series. Schedule from there is We Are Legion (We Are Bob), A Wizard of Earthsea, and then Leviathan Wakes. All evaluated in the context of their series.
EDIT (2/28/2024): Finished Small Gods, and it didn't win 2,000M, so I'm moving on to Player of Games. My schedule from there will be:
1. The Children of Time series. I will be judging this as a series, so I will continue through these books before moving on in the schedule (there are three of them). That said, I may choose to stop early if I'm not enjoying them enough.
2. We Are Legion (We Are Bob). I will be judging this as a series along with the other Bobiverse books. As mentioned above, I reserve the right to stop early.
3. A Wizard of Earthsea. Again, judged as a series along with the other Earthsea Cycle books.
EDIT (2/17/2024): Finished Permutation City, and it didn't win 2,000M, so I'm moving on to Small Gods. Player of Games is next up after that!
EDIT (2/10/2024): I'm abandoning the Three Body Problem and moving on to Permutation City. Perhaps it will be the first to win!
EDIT (1/23/2024): To be clear, when I start any given book suggestion on the list, I'll be reading that series, rather than just that book before moving on to the next book. It's possible that I'll give up part way through if I don't like, though
EDIT (1/18/2024): I'm starting in on The Three Body Problem first, so it'll have the first chance to win. The next books will be read in this order:
Permutation City
Small Gods
Player of Games
I’m hoping Manifold can help me find a book (or book-length story) that I’ll love. As such, I'm offering large bounties (up to 15,000M) for book suggestions that I end up really liking. See the bounty market for full details.
EDIT: The bounty market is now closed for new suggestions. All final contestants are in this market for voting on! (To be clear, this means "Other" will resolve NO upon market resolution. Either a book will be chosen or "No book wins at least 2,000M bounty in 2024 :(" will be chosen).
I'm going to try reading books in this list until I find something that I "really like". Obviously, that's a subjective decision, but I'll want it to fit easily alongside other books I've ranked that highly in this writeup.
The ranking here will be input into which book I decide to try first, but I'll use my subjective judgement to decide which to read first. This is the order of events for the market:
Sunday morning: I’ll post my quick thoughts on all of the books (before I’ve read them - just doing research to see if I think I’ll like them). Feel free to try to change my mind about the books in the comments.
Monday morning: I’ll give my top 15 picks, along with what I’m thinking about them. Again, people can discuss in the comments to see if they can change my mind.
Tuesday morning: I’ll give my top 7 picks, which don’t have to be a subset of the 15 from Monday. Probably they will be, but maybe people will have convinced me to change my mind.
Wednesday morning: I’ll give my top 3 picks, which again could be any book from the list, but are more likely to be from the top 7.
Thursday morning: I’ll announce which book I’m trying out first. This doesn’t mean it’ll get the 2000M bounty and win outright, but I’ll be trying it out to see if I like it.
Potentially there will be updates from there; we’ll see how it goes!
Resolution note on books in series: I'm taking the recommendations for books in a series as a recommendation for the series as a whole, rather than just the first book. For instance, I "really like" The Vorkosigan Saga, but I don't "really like" the first book in that series. If someone had recommended I try out that series and I got through the first book enough to get to the second and then liked the whole series and "really liked" it, I would resolve that option as YES.
I’ll answer questions in the comments about my taste, so feel free to AMA about books. I’m slightly more likely to try out books that are part of a series, because I tend to like extended stories, though The Martian is one of my favorite books of all time, and it’s pretty short.
If you do leave a description of / pitch for the book in the comments, please do your best to avoid spoilers. I tend to like to go into things pretty blind.
I won't bet in this market. Rather obviously, the resolution criteria is very subjective to my taste!
Some Notes on My Taste:
Fantasy and Science Fiction are my most-read genres, with a side of popular non-fiction. I’ve done a write-up of some books I’ve read and what I thought about them in this doc.
I’ve got a bad pattern with a lot of books that I’d ostensibly like where if they don’t grab my attention in approximately the first 20 minutes of reading I tend to lose steam and not come back to the book. I’ve gotten lots of recommendations from friends for various books that I just don’t quite get started on (Lies of Locke Lamora, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, many others). So it's possible you'll want to lean towards things that start stronger, but then again maybe I'll push through slower starts because of the incentive in these markets!
1,000
3.00The unlinked version of this market is up!
https://manifold.markets/ChrisPrichard/which-books-in-this-list-will-i-rea
Children of Time was great! Luckily, this wasn’t a hard decision as to which category it landed in for me - I started it on Monday morning and was 70% through it by bedtime. I haven’t read through something that fast since The Martian.
As I’ve been doing recently, here’s my head-to-head comparison count in my list of books I’ve read:
“Really liked” - Liked it better than 6 / 15 books.
“Good” - Liked it better than 7 / 7 books.
“Okay” - Liked it better than 8 / 8 books.
I had a really fun time with this market, though it was somewhat stressful at times. In particular trying to figure out what to read and in what order felt like more of a fraught decision than usual given that there was often quite a bit of mana riding on relatively arbitrary decisions on my part. As I mentioned in previous comments, I wouldn’t structure a market this way again.
I’m not done going through the book recommendations, either! More candidates can win bounties. I’ll be setting up a new market soon where people can bet unlinked on which books will successfully win 2000M or more.
I hope this was fun for participants, too!
Some spoilered thoughts on Children of Time:
In some sense, I’m surprised I liked this book as much as I did. I’ve emphasized a few times how character-driven books appear to be the sorts of things I like, and I wasn’t really that into any of the characters in the book. Part of it was, I think, that I was rooting for the characters, perhaps. Holsten and Lain weren’t, like, the most interesting characters ever, and the romance didn’t grab me that much, but I felt very invested in how things were going to turn out for them.
This does make me wonder, though: why didn’t I feel that for the characters in Permutation City, or Small Gods? It honestly makes me wonder how useful introspection is as a tool for understanding which books I will find compelling, and why they are compelling to me.
There was something of Assimov’s Foundation in this book - the way it was spread so much over time gave it the structure of a set of short stories. Normally, I think I wouldn’t like this sort of set up, but somehow the book kept me curious and engaged each step of the way. I’m impressed the author got me so invested in each set of new spider characters. My enjoyment of this book makes me think I should check out short stories more.
The only “flaw”, perhaps, and I’m coming hot off the presses as I’m writing this, is that the ending felt maybe too tidy to me. It wasn’t entirely unforeshadowed that the spiders tend to “co-opt” other species rather than kill them, but as the noose closed in on the humans and tension was building, it felt like a little bit of a let-down to me that the resolution was that the spiders had come up with a nigh-on-magical virus to make the humans like them.
I worry that I won’t enjoy the sequels as much. I think part of what drew me in was the sort of sense of “progression” and catching up on the latest cultural and technological developments in the spider society. Literally no one who was alive during the events of the first book will be alive in the second book (or at least that seems to be implied), so it can’t even be carried on the strength of me wanting to see particular endings for particular characters. Even so, I’m definitely going to continue reading from here!
@ChrisPrichard (Note: Children of Time didn't win 5,000M for being one of my favorite books of all time, but if the series lifts it there, I'll increase the award in the bounty market)
@ChrisPrichard glad you found something you really liked, and thanks for sharing along the way - I farmed a bunch of your recs for my own too-long to-read list.
@ChrisPrichard Thanks for this market. It's been good fun, and I've taken lots of recommendations. But of course most of all I'm glad my faith in Tchaikovsky paid off. One of my favourite authors, and CoT is one of my favourite books. :)
Finally - I’ve finished Player of Games! I would say that I liked it about as much as I liked Permutation City and less than I enjoyed Small Gods, which lands solidly in the “Okay” category for me. Again, to try to make it clearer how I’m making this judgment, I pulled up my list of books I’ve read and compared it head-to-head with the books in each category:
"Really liked" - Liked it better than 0 / 15 books.
"Good" - Liked it better than 1 / 7 books.
"Okay" - Liked it better than 4 / 8 books.
I think part of what I’m looking for to say that I “really liked” a book is the feeling that I can’t put it down - the feeling that I’m kinda sad when it ends because I wanted more. Books in my “really liked” category are things that I’m highly likely to come back and re-read (which I do often with many things).
Next up will be the Children of Time series. I will be judging this as a series, so I will continue through these books before moving on in the schedule (there are three of them). Though as mentioned previously, I reserve the right to stop early if I’m not enjoying them!
Schedule after Children of Time:
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (series)
Wizard of Earthsea (series)
Leviathan Wakes (series)
Some spoilered thoughts on the book:
The most compelling aspect of the book to me was actually the Culture. Books so rarely explore a utopian society that is actually utopian, rather than being a dystopia in important ways. Though the Culture wasn’t the main focus of the book, I found myself hungry for more details every time it was mentioned. I’m so curious how it developed, what their society is like, how people fill their time, etc. This was a surprise to me, because “world building” is usually my least favorite part of any work - something I have to slog through in order to be able to comprehend their story. But in Player of Games it was the part I wanted more of!
Probably the weakest part of the book for me was that I didn’t like or identify with Gurgeh (or honestly any of the side characters). As will be familiar from my previous reviews, apparently the characters in a story are critical aspects of how much I enjoy the story. Gurgeh was often just in culture shock about Azadian society, or was in some sort of haze-of-focus on the game. His relationships with other characters in the story was also often one of annoyance or indifference.
Another thing that was a miss for me was the way that the games themselves were described. This book shares some similarities with Ender’s Game in having a protagonist who is very skilled at a particular game (or games in general), but in Ender’s Game the game itself was described in enough detail that I could appreciate the cleverness of the solutions. But in Player of Games every game was kept very abstract. We were told that Gurgeh was coming up with brilliant, incredible plans, but it’s just very hard to appreciate them when the cleverness itself is just not described.
The book spent a lot of time on Azadian society. I was mostly ambivalent about these parts of the book? They weren’t bad, per se, but maybe it was unfortunate that they mostly seemed to portray Azad as just a terrible dystopia. It might have been a more interesting book for me if Azad had had cultural aspects that I could (and was meant to) appreciate, but instead it was more like “yeah the Culture should come in and burn it all down”. Also maybe it was a bit disappointing that they made the aliens so “human”. They even appeared to share humor and sex-appeal cross-species! Though maybe the sex appeal part just shows how different people are in the Culture than we are today. Maybe if you’ve got the right glands in your head you can look at a literal alien and be ready to get it on.
The conclusion was mostly satisfying - I didn’t see it coming that Flere-Imsaho was Marwin-Skel, though once it was revealed it was one of those “ah, I’m an idiot for not seeing this” moments. I suspect other readers did figure this out. Once more, it made me want to see more about the Culture. If these “Minds” were willing to use Gurgeh in this way, what does that say about “freedom” in their society? Because it seems like he was played like a fiddle.
I’ll definitely come back to the Culture series. I suspect they’ll grow on me as I read more of them, perhaps even making me retrospectively like Player of Games more.
@ChrisPrichard ARGHHHHH I knew this would happen 😁 There is a lot of fandom for PoG but I find it exactly the same. If you want more awesome Culture stuff, please, please, please pick up Excession. If you want some crazy can't put it down characters, try Use of Weapons.
@ChrisPrichard When you judge books as a series, does that go both ways? What I mean is, if you "really like" Children of Time as a book, does it resolve YES, or is there a chance that a later book could ruin it for you?
@Fion Yeah - good question on the mechanics here! My plan is that I'll check in and potentially resolve the market after each book in a series. That does mean that there's a chance of a path like:
Book 1 -> Good, but not really like
Book 2 -> Really like! Market resolves!
Book 3 -> Everything is terrible now; hate the series
In this case, the market would remain resolved, though I would maybe no longer "really like" book 2. This is rare for me; I'm willing to take the risk!
I’m so curious how it developed, what their society is like, how people fill their time, etc.
Read Use of Weapons, Excession, Look to Windward, and Hydrogen Sonata? 😬
Update: I'm being really slow! Final Fantasy VII Rebirth came out and I've been spending a lot of time there, rather than reading.
I'm 31% into Player of Games, and likely to continue to finish it. It's hard to get a read on where it will land in the end, because it feels like the first third was more of an introduction to the character / setting and setting up what the main action / plot will be. I'm not yet "sucked into the story", which I guess isn't a good sign, but I don't think that means it couldn't grow on me a lot going forward!
Anyways, I'll see what I can do to make a lot more progress in the next week. I really don't want "No book wins at least 2,000M bounty in 2024 :(" to be the option that wins in this market.
@AlQuinn Haha - maybe not?? The top sci-fi stuff from my list is The Martian, Vorkosigan Saga, Ender's Game Series, Crystal Society (if that counts as sci-fi??), and Spin.
At least three of those have competence-porn style lead characters, so perhaps that's what I'm actually drawn to? I like Spin because of the well-executed mystery and characters that I found really compelling. I'm not sure what drew me to Crystal Society, but I've read it twice through now, so clearly there's something!
@ChrisPrichard hmmm, wonder if you'd like the Ted Chiang short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others. The film Arrival is based on one of the stories, but that specifc story is not my favorite in the collection ("Tower of Babylon" and "Understand" are better I think, and the latter story is the ultimate in competence-porn). Of course, your reading queue is long already, but thought this could be of interest down the road.
@AlQuinn Interestingly, that one is actually in the list above! Looks like it was suggested in the bounty market by @TylerJohnston. It's not in the immediate queue, but perhaps could be prioritized soon after? (though I think Leviathan Wakes is the current leading contender to go after Wizard of Earthsea, but that's like one book and three series of books later!)
@ChrisPrichard oops I'm retarded and didn't see it up there! I would have bid it up and advocated for it to make the cut had I noticed before.
I've finished Small Gods! I enjoyed it more than Permutation City or The Three Body Problem, but it wasn't close to the "really liked" category. To be clearer on how I judged this, I pulled up my list of books I've read and compared it to all the books in each category:
"Really liked" - Liked it better than 0 / 15 books.
"Good" - Liked it better than 1 / 7 books.
"Okay" - Liked it better than 3 / 7 books.
So it falls pretty easily into books that I ranked "okay". This is making me slightly worried that nothing is going to pass that bar, but I've still got 10 more months to go!
Next up will be Player of Games. I will be treating it as a standalone recommendation, rather than as the whole Culture series, so if it doesn't win I'll be moving on. My schedule from there will be:
1. The Children of Time series. I will be judging this as a series, so I will continue through these books before moving on in the schedule (there are three of them). That said, I may choose to stop early if I'm not enjoying them enough.
2. We Are Legion (We Are Bob). I will be judging this as a series along with the other Bobiverse books. As mentioned above, I reserve the right to stop early.
3. A Wizard of Earthsea. Again, judged as a series along with the other Earthsea Cycle books.
Some spoilered thoughts on Small Gods:
I was surprised I didn't like it more! Pratchett is, as always, very funny and it was definitely an easy read. I enjoyed the philosophy jokes and the surprisingly lighthearted way he could write about a society as terrible as Omnia.
I think the impression that I got from the book was that it was sort of meandering? Like, Brutha as a main character didn't have much agency for most of the book - just sort of blown about by events. I was briefly really interested when he copied the library into his head and Ephebe was overthrown. I didn't expect this change of pace and thought things were about to pick up, but it went back into meander-mode with him working his way across the desert and then getting knocked out by Vorbis. Maybe I like books better where the main character drives the plot? I'm not sure, honestly.
I also think maybe the end felt a bit too deus ex machina for me (though maybe that's appropriate for a book about gods!). Like, the way Om powered up so much and then bullied other gods into helping out was just a bit too tidy for me? I mean, I dunno, I wasn't expecting a dark ending or anything. Maybe this is also just a symptom of the lack of agency that Brutha had? Though I guess standing up to Om at the end shows quite a bit of agency, so maybe I'm just wrong.
Honestly, this review is a much harder one to write than for the other two books. There isn't a lot that I didn't like, there just wasn't a lot that grabbed me?
@ChrisPrichard I know Leviathan Wakes got dropped early in the process, but I seriously believe it is the most relevant book to your taste in this list. You should try it at some point.
Also a reminder about my recommendation of The Fifth Season, which didn't make it into this market. Based on what I've seen so far, I think you will really like it.
@Shump Yeah - good reminder!
After this market resolves, I'm planning to make one where multiple options can resolve yes and list more books in it. The Fifth Season will definitely be there!
@ChrisPrichard +1 on Leviathan Wakes.
Learning what I have about your tastes from the past three books, agree completely.
Also bums me out you will not be reading other Culture works because imo Cherenadine Zakalwe is such a memorable character.
@MattCWilson I'll definitely consider coming back to the series, for sure! Especially if I really like Player of Games, I understand the other books are really good, too!
As for Leviathan Wakes, I'll consider it a favorite to go after The Earthsea Cycle!