What do you know about the "Destroyermen" series?

Nothing...

So after enjoying Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon as much as I did, I tried listening to a couple of his other books. Reamde was pretty good, if a bit more far fetched in areas than others, and Anathem was awful. Couldn't get into that book on a dare. Might be one of those that is better to actually read than listen to.

I love all of Stephenson, but some of his stuff is more Thomas Pynchon than regular scifi. Reamde was really good and pretty accessible. Anathem is very challenging but the back half payoff of it is well worth the slog of the front part. The Baroque Cycle is amazing and more like Cryptonomicon, except historical.

I'm sure you've read Snow Crash, but you'll likely love it if you haven't.

Love Hearne's Iron Druid series.

Cryptonomicon is his best IMO, but I liked Anathem a lot.

Diamond Age is really good too. It's cyberpunk and I think I liked it even more than Snow Crash.

I need to get my gf a bday present. She likes politics and scifi. I am going to get her The Foundation Trilogy, what else can I get her? Nothimg too hard scifi. She also likes psychology. Is there any psychological scifi out there?

I've been having trouble lately finding books that hold my interest for long (I currently have six or so books I'm in the middle of and just can't seem to get back into).

A while back, Amazon was running a special on Kindle books and I bought several on impulse but hadn't gotten around to reading them. I finally started one the other day and it turned out to be the first "can't put down" book I've come across in quite a while.

The book is "The Scourge". It is a story of a knight making his way across a plague ridden England during the 1300's. Only, in this story, the plague isn't the Black Death; it's a plague that turns its' victims into zombies.

Like "The Walking Dead", the tale isn't really about zombies (or the afflicted, as the book calls them); it's about how men deals with it and the resulting power void.

There is a second book called "Nostrum (The Scourge, Book 2). The final book of the trilogy is schedules for release this March. The second book is as good as the first.

The books were originally released as a serial and there are Author's Notes after every four chapters or so explaining the history of the time, whether the people in the story were real people or not and notes about the places in the story. I didn't find them distracting at all and actually looked forward to them.

Highly recommended.

Based on another thread I have started reading Leviathan Wakes. I'm not a huge fan of the alternating POV chapters, but it just got to a point (about 40% in) that the POVs are starting to intertwine so that's sorta cool.

Like the direction it has started in, I hope I like the ending.

I also read Ubik a few months back. Didn't care for it too much. Found it way too predictable.

I'm pretty comfortable in predicting you'll like the ending.

So this Expanse series, are the follow ups sequels or concurrent? Or prequels?

Direct sequels. As in each one continues the story from the previous book. No giant leaps forward in time or anything like that that (related to your previous mention of Foundation in the other thread). There are recurring characters and points of view, etc. Part of the reason I think it's going to translate so well to TV...

Three books currently: Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War and Abbadon's Gate, with a fourth, Cibola Burn coming in June.

I finally started Starship Troopers. I'm about half way through it and absolutely love it.

I'm about 90 percent of the way through the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Finally working through the last book, The Crippled God.

The series has been excellent and brilliant, but is some of the more difficult fantasy reading I've done. I'd probably rank it HIGHER in difficulty than George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire.

But it's worth it, if you stick the whole thing out. Huge, rich canvas of characters. Ever-shifting landscape of layered antagonists with complex motivations.

I'm about halfway through Toll the Hounds. I think you are absolutely right about the difficulty. And initially the constantly changing landscape of characters was off-putting, but I've grown used to it.