What authors do you read?

I am the opposite, and not a heavy reader. I am sure that most of the TFPERS are. So when I find an Author that I connect with I will read all of the materials I can find. It's as if they are in my head and the book is the door to their mind and I am wanting full privilege in. I even visit their website.

 

This is the best kind of thread revival.
I have a 45 - 90m commute each way three days a week, which is going to increase to six this week. I do mostly audiobooks now, just due to time constraints. But, I have a lot I listen to. I'll do whole series when I can find them. It's like a Netflix binge. OverDrive is the best app ever... I borrow them from libraries.

Lee Child
Sue Grafton
Lisa Scottoline
Karin Slaughter
Lisa Lippman
James Patterson
Johnathan Kellerman
David Baldacci
Julie Garwood sometimes
Patricia Cornwell
Lisa Gardner
Michael Palmer
Michael Crichton
Recently tried some Joe Hill... That dude is crazy
Matthew Costello
Michael Connelly
Gillian Flynn
Robin Cook
Jeffrey Deaver
Grisham, King, Koontz, etc
Jesse Kellerman
Tess Gerritsen

and when I can find one I haven't read, I do like a good JD Robb "Eve Dallas" novel... Best guilty pleasure.

 

I'm reading my first book by Jonathan Franzen and really enjoying it.

 

Good Lord, far too many to list in full. I won't bother with authors of whom I only really like one or two books. And I will not bother to list those of my professional interest, or specifically Jewish interest. But some of the faves of general entertainment are:

JRR Tolkien
Frank Herbert
Isaac Asimov
Robert Jordan
Raymond Chandler
Dashiell Hammett
Robert B. Parker
Robert A. Heinlein
Robert Silverberg
Larry Niven
Jim Butcher
Arthur Conan Doyle
Owen Parry
Lindsey Davis
Neil Gaiman
H.P. Lovecraft
Kevin Hearne
Seanan MacGuire
Tony Hillerman
Victor Hugo
Alexander Dumas
Edgar Allen Poe
George RR Martin
Anne McCaffrey
Kat Richardson
Patrick Rothfuss
Brian Sanderson
Will Thomas
Harry Turtledove
Sharan Newman
James Clavell

There are definitely more, but those are just off the top of my head.

 

If I can't find them on Overdrive, or am waiting for a copy to become available, sometimes I can get them off of the Ebook Bike site, like this particular series by Cixin Liu ( a Chinese Sci Fi writer):

The Three Body Problem
The Dark Forest

 

Cool, thanks for the info!

 

So is most of the books read by the TFP all actual paper or a book pad of some kind?
A super at work uses Amazon I still prefer to touch fold a corner and turn the pages. Also with the books on my shelf I can look at them and be glad like little trophies.

 

I'm torn about this. I have several bookshelves of actual books and more that I'd put out on the shelf if I didn't run out of wall space in my current place. But the convenience of only carrying a kindle is hard to argue with.

 

Paper. My wife has an iPad with a reader, but that does me no good since it's with ehr pretty much 24/7. One of these days someone I know will be chucking an old EReader of some sort & take pity on me. Given the number of books I have stacked up & boxed up around the house, with few of them being Must Keepers, a pad or tablet would make a lot of sense.

 

A mix. I think we have about 4 ereaders in the house (a couple of Kobo, a Kindle and an Aluratek) two iPads and of course, I use my iPhone to read a fair number of books. I even found a Kobo eReader in one of those Little Free Libraries in our neighbourhood, which I took home recharged, loaded up some titles and returned.

There's still a bunch of paperbacks at home that I haven't read, and will get to but I sure prefer the ereaders. The last time I took a book home from the library, it stank of cigarette smoke. I couldn't keep it in the house.

 

In an attempt to reduce the staggering volume (if you'll forgive the expression) of books I own, I have shifted to Kindle books for basically all my casual entertainment reading. The only books I am keeping in paper/bound form are either religious texts, reference/professional works, or graphic novels.

I like the aesthetic of bound books, but they take up a lot of room, and are too easy to lose/damage.

 

My only beef with Kindle is the type of file it reads (.mobi I think) which makes it a real hassle everytime I want to load up a .epub book. I need to convert it somehow. Or (shudder) buy books from Amazon. Thatès the main reason I use my Kobo or my iPad.

I too like the aesthetic of bound books, and am finding hard to dispense with all my pulp fiction collected over the years. Desperately hanging onto the hardcovers from back when I was in the SciFi book club (Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, AC Clarke, Asimov, Tolkein ... so many) and so many other classics.

Once I Feng Shui my collection, I will definitely stream my reading: pulp fiction ==> ereader, classics ==> bound editions (eg, I just purchased Gulliever's Travels by a Jonathan Swift with 24 prints and 160 drawings by Luis Quintanilla as well as a 1937 hardcover of the Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan by James Morier.

 

I have a free converter that makes it super easy. Or use .pdfs

 

yes, I do use Calibre, - or did, until I found that most books I want are in epub and my iPhone/iPad sucks them into iBooks automatically, without any issues. If I ever use my Kobo again, its pretty generic for epub.