Out of the two standalone Reynolds books there are left for me to read, Century Rain sounds like the more appealing choice.

Shadow and Claw is books one and two collected. Sword and Citadel is books three and four. "The Book of the New Sun" has all four books in the main cycle, and I don't believe it has the coda novel.

Gormenghast is as classic as postwar books get.

Car crashes and cancer can strike at any moment!

Simon Winchester is a good next stop.

Indices, bibliographies, and endnotes tend to be left out

For my part, other than science fiction my big bridge between fiction and nonfiction was alternate history stories about events and periods that interested me.

Have you read any postcolonial critique of American and British lit, just as it exists for Russian lit?

And yet it's a part of how humans process art and war, just as people became critical of the art of enemy nations in the world wars. Why shouldn't it be written about?

I swear Reddit thinks everyone other than King and Rowling is unknown.

I'll need to read Bernard Cornwell's book on Waterloo to accompany the battle sequence. Likewise with Adam Zamoyski's book on the 1812 campaign for War and Peace.

This is on top of the fact that people in this thread upvoted the comment telling me "Its utter stupidity... That kind of extra-literal over interpretation is also absolutely moronic... I guess, in review, I'm not surprised you tried to make a red herring fallacy. Nothing else you've said makes sense. Why should you start making sense now. Just don't expect anyone to take your poorly thought out and easily disproven arguments seriously."

What are you talking about? This is a case of "applaud sides two and three because fuck the first one."

It appears to be the same people upvoting two comments putting forward theses that cannot both be true.

> If it's friendly and well-argued disagreement, that should be encouraged.

"Upvote anyone who disagrees with the one person I don't like" is a pretty poisonous attitude towards debate.

It's one of those curious phenomena of Reddit where people upvote comments containing mutually contradictory truth claims.

It's so full that the party travels hundreds of miles through uncultivated, uninhabited land, that seems like it would be fine for agriculture.

I don't feel as uplifted by the defeat of evil in a desolate, declining world.

Given how other people talk of how uplifting they find the ending, I doubt it.

The industrial revolution came from a large number of economic factors that England had in 1750 and Greece never did. The actual technologies themselves were actually a bit secondary.

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/why-was-industrial-revolution-british

I don’t know what’s supposed to be so great about it. All the magic and joy of The Hobbit was gone. Past Rivendell, I felt an oppressive sense of bleakness that couldn’t be lifted.

Those two portentous-seeming dreams that Bill has were what really unsettled me about the book.

What in god’s name are you talking about? Of course people’s hopes and dreams and fears are serious.

And were the optimists of the 1920s proven right?

I don’t actually comprehend why you feel bothered or resentful.

These days I don’t have much affinity for “no inherent meaning” talk. Yeah, I don’t believe things have Platonic essences either. But the framework I now have is that everything which has been observed and noticed is inherently meaningful. People have seen meaning in it, and therefore the meaning is a part of it.