Seveneves is what got me started with the CC book club!
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Project Hail Mary
Scalzi has some good stand alones.
Redshirts is one of my favorites. Hilarious.
His most recent The Kaiju Preservation Society is very good, more well rounded characters than he usually has.
If you want to try a new author I absolutely loved Arkady Martineās two books. They are long and the second is a sequel, but you donāt feel like you are left hanging at the end of the first, though you should read the first one first. 
Itās called A Memory Called Empire.
An older standalone, by an author who died too young is Janet Kaganās Hellspark.
Another really good stand alone, by an author better known for her series is Elizabeth Moonās The Speed of Dark. No spaceships in this one - itās kind of twist on Flowers for Algeron with autism instead of mental disability.
I second the suggestion of any of Andy Weirās books. They are all lots of fun.
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Not science fiction, but Iām reading Tana Frenchās new novel, āThe Hunter.ā Sheās a wonderful writer, but this is a slower go than her other novels. Made me realize, too, how much I appreciated another novel I read a little while back by another Irish writer, āKalaā by Colin Walsh. That one had reminded me of Frenchās fabulous early novels.
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I just finished The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith/ J. K. Rowling. What a wonderful book. I am hooked on the series. I have the next book, but I think that I will wait a bit before I tackle it. My next book is Remarkedly Bright Creatures which I am reading for the Book Club. I love it already!!!
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I just finished The Ink Black Heart too, last night to be exact. I put off starting it due to its 1012 pages. However, once started, I flew through those pages. Good stuff.
@silverlady: Thanks for the heads up that number 7 in the series (The Running Grave) is already out. Like you Iāll wait a bit before tackling it, but nice to know its waiting in the wings.
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I just finished Of Time and Turtles by Sy Montgomerty. Itās not a book I would have ever picked up on my own, but I went to a fundraiser for a local conservation organization and the author was the guest speaker. I loved the book and the author. Iām out to the bookstore this weekend to buy two of her earlier books (The Soul of an Octopus and The Hawkās Way.) Iām one of those folks who is afraid of most animals. My H couldnāt believe I was reading the book about turtles.
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Evidently, she is working on Book 8. I really like to pace myself with the books. What a gifted writer she is.
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Just finished Data Baby by Susannah Breslin about the long-term effects of her participation in a longitudinal study at Cal that followed 100 preschoolers through age 32 from 1969-1999. She describes how being a ālab ratā most of her life affected her psyche.
Finished Tom Lake prior to that and did not like it anywhere near as much as other posters. I found the motherās storytelling artificially interrupted by picking cherries with her daughters in the present an annoying contrivance and the story itself predictable.
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I finished The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store this afternoon. I did not love it.
Can you say why, @2VU0609? Itās on my Holds list.
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Just finished The Fraud by Zadie Smith on the recommendation of a friend whose taste usually aligns with mine. It has a fair bit to recommend it, , but I just didnāt love it. It just never completely captured me. Guessing I was in the minority on this oneā¦
I have tried it twice now but just didnāt get into it enough to want to keep going after the first chapter or two. Glad to know Iām not the only one, because I keep reading rapturous reviews!
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I liked The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store last month. There are other books Iāve liked better this year (I read a lot of books), but it was an interesting story,
I didnāt care for the fraud either and I typically love her books.
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I got too bogged down in The Fraud and finally gave up. Like others, I normally like her books.
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I think the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is a bit of an acquired taste. I read it for a book group where everybody liked it. However, another group I know basically all gave up after starting it. His style is very rambling and the characters get sort of dropped in here and there.
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I felt like the first half of the book was really slow and the story bounces around. The second half picked up and I felt like there was so much character development in the first half that didnāt resolve in the second half. Some of the detailed explanations of things, like how a water system was constructed, just bored me. I will say that the overall theme of the book is meaningful and Iām not sad I read it. It was kind of like going to a long movie and leaving wishing they had cut about 20% of it.
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@2VU0609 I had very similar thoughts about Heaven and Earth.
I felt like there were too many characters (hard to keep track of them all) without enough character development. Lots of meandering side/back stories that seemed irrelevant much of the time. Once I finished, I thought āwhat a weird storyā but I did enjoy the offbeat characters and the relationships between some of them. McBrideās Acknowledgments at the end of the book gave me a better understanding as to why he wrote it.
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Glad to know its not me. Iāve started Heaven and Earth twice and it is not grabbing me. Time to move on to something else.
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