SF recommendations from Libby and YouTube

 I recently read via Libby a number of enjoyable SF novels. I started with one of my favorites, Iain M. Banks.

After I'd read a few of those I started getting recommendations from Libby, finally trying one that received my five-star award:

This is the story of an alternate history 2005-2010, where the big story wasn't the Iraq War, but a Wikileaks type character (the father of the protagonist of the story, Cora) who outs George W. Bush for lying about Aliens Among Us. ... that's enough without getting into spoiler territory. I found this one deeply satisfying!

Lindsay Ellis is also a YouTube personality

....where I found my next recommendation:

This is another alien story with a quite different vibration. A quick synopsis: A huge statue appears in the middle of the night in New York City, and aspiring YouTubers take video of it and are the first to be on this story ... identical statues have appeared in cities all over the world.

Complications ensue ... I still quite enjoyed this one ... four stars.

Hank Green turns out to be the younger brother of John Green,  Hank and John are together the Vlog Brothers, who have an enjoyable YouTube channel with posts of generally about 4 minutes:

Last but not least ... I got this recommendation from one or another of YouTube book recommenders, and it's the darkest of the three here:

The author is Rick Yancey .. I went into this one knowing nothing about it and I will do the same for you. Five stars! Already a motion picture, too ...

Back to reading ...

Book recommendations via YouTube and my newfound ability to read fiction without skimming

 For some years I have been partaking most fiction via Audible, since in the past I have been to much a skimmer to read fiction the normal way.

But recently I've tried some recommendations from my local library and from these YouTube book recommenders (see below) and found that I read without skimming and very much enjoyed some.

I'll have another post on my book recommendations for this period, but now for some of the YouTubers I've been watching lately:

 

 This guy's not exclusively a BookTuber, but this is the first one of his I watched.

I also got a couple of excellent recommendations from my local library on their Libby app.

Last but not least, there's Kindle Unlimited, I had this pegged as "just unsellable cruft" but that's no longer so if it it ever was! It's $10.85 per month.

Two vivid examples:

I just found Bloomberg Businessweek there, for which I have been paying $70 per year for a print-only subscription.

The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells' series of fabulous novellas, have the first two now on Kindle Unlimited for free. I recently read both of these and found them "virtual pageturners" even though I'd heard both the stories before on Audible.

Overall it's a feast of reading for any reader!