Rules

While browsing for deals on Amazon as I usually do, I saw that "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari was available in "New" condition from a Third Party seller for only $6.00 with free shipping! (Prime price is 20 bucks) What a deal! I thought, and soon after I ordered, I got that feeling of dread you get when you think that something may be too good to be true. I immediately canceled my order and looked at the seller profile. It was all caps with a name "JAMESHALEY" I believe, and their profile was just recently created. Their items for sale included pretty much the entirety of best sellers on Amazon.

I did a quick google for JAMESHALEY and found a blog post detailing the scam. Scammers will open up new selling accounts, listing almost every book imaginable at an unbeatable price, knowing that due to Amazon's 1-click purchase feature, they will get a lot of hits. Of course the shoppers will cancel their order, but more than likely they will already have your Name, Address, & Phone #, which is what the scam sets out to accomplish.

I immediately contacted Amazon about the incident and reported the seller. They sent me a swift response and even credited $5 for my trouble. So today I am browsing for books again and lo and behold, a different seller name has a great price, same situation. This is happening all over the site in different categories with more and more accounts being created everyday. So when shopping for a deal on a good book, please check the seller profile before you click "buy"!

I want to preface this by saying that my daughter will be 12 in a week and is fully capable of reading herself.

On Sunday evening I was looking through books available on my daughter's Kindle for her to download and read at her leisure when I say that "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" was available for free. I grabbed it quick and hoped that she would begin reading it soon. Then the thought occurred to me, why not read it to her? I haven't read a book to my daughter in years. I read the first chapter and she was enthralled. Having read the series myself years ago I knew what was going to happen and reading it aloud I am able to put the right inflections into the parts as they are needed. And to say she's enjoying it is not even close.

Since that night I have read a single chapter to her each evening, sometimes staying up past her bedtime to ensure she gets the prerequisite chapter finished. When we get to the end of the chapter she is begging for more.

As a parent I know that in the future when she is much older and has kids of her own she will think back to this time in her life fondly. It warms my heart to know that I am making a memory that will last her lifetime and it is even more special because I know it now.

Edit: Wow, Front Page and Gold! Thank you all for enjoying this post. And thank you kind stranger for the gold! I am just glad to get to share this moment in my family’s history with you.

Edit 2: there have been a lot of replies about Sorcerer’s Stone and Philosopher’s Stone. In the US it was released as The Sorcerer’s Stone. Prior to today I had heard of The Philosopher’s Stone and it appears both are correct depending on region where it was released.

The book is "Alaska" by James Michener. It's a history of Alaska (starting thousands of years ago) through the point-of-view of fictional characters (including a mammoth). The attention to detail is painstaking, almost to the point of tedium.

I can see why the guy handed me the book. It's informative, surprising and provides a lot of perspective about the indigenous people of Alaska.

Overall, very happy I finally read it. Did anybody else have the same reaction?

I really wanted to read Child of God by Cormac McCarthy. My eyesight hasn't been the best, lately. I figured that's okay, I'd just get the eBook so I can adjust the print size. I figured I'd also save a few bucks getting the eBook because it's just a file, right? But it's actually the exact same price as a physical copy! I'm not mad so much as I'm disappointed. What makes the eBook so special that it's worth as much as a physical copy of the book? I've made ePub files from scratch before with my own writings, it's not a difficult process. So what makes the eBook so special?

Has anyone else noticed that many Kindle books, especially new potential best sellers are now more expensive than their hardback counterparts? I complained to Amazon (UK) about this and was told that publishers are now setting their own prices, and that’s the reason for the increases.

It seems ridiculous to me that an e-book which has no distribution or printing costs can be more expensive.

https://watership-down.com/2016/12/27/requiescat-in-pace/

Richard’s much loved family announce with sadness that their dear father, grandfather, and great-grandfather passed away peacefully at 10pm on Christmas Eve.

I know this sub has no shortage of love for its local libraries, but we need a reminder from time to time.

I just picked up $68 worth of books for $00.90 (like new condition, they were being sold because no one was checking them out).

Over the past year, I've picked up over $100 worth of books for about $3 total. But beyond picking up discounted literature, your library probably does much more, such as:

-offering discounted entry to local museums/attractions

-holding educational/arts events for kids/teens/adults

-holding (free) small concerts for local musicians

-lending books between themselves to offer a greater catalogue to residents

-endless magazine and newspaper subscriptions

-free tutoring spaces (provide your own tutor)

-notary services

-access to the internet for those without, along with printing

-career services resources/ test guides

-citizenship test classes

-weird things your library wants to offer (mine offered kids fishing pole lending for a year... I can imagine why they stopped)

Support them. Use them.

Since I have to add mandatory "optional" text....

1984 is great at illustrating the warning behind government totalitarianism. The characters live in a world where the government monitors everything you do.

Brave New World is a similar warning from the stand point of a Technocratic Utopian control

F451 is explores a world about how ignorance is rampant and causes the decline of education to the point where the government begins to regulate reading.

What would be the 4th book to add to these other 3?

Edit: Top 5 list (subject to change)

1. "Animal Farm" by George Orwell

2. "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin

3. "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood

4. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" by Phillip K Dick

5. "The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. Le Guin

Edit 2: Cool, front page!

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."

I don’t know why it hit me. I’ve seen that kind of motivational shit spread around all the time, but just the simple way such a harsh truth was worded so succinctly and the way it related to that point of the story really made me think. I struggle with a relatively mild bit of depression, and a lot of the time I struggle to even leave my bed because what’s the point? It feels like anything I try to do is just gonna fail anyway. I think reading that quote was just what I needed at this exact time. Life can be shitty, and a lot of the time you don’t get the things you want, but you still have to be courageous and at least try a little. I guess I’d kinda lost sight of that until now.

Here are some of the spoilers you missed out on by not reading Animorphs:

Five children are forced to engage in guerilla warfare, espionage and repeated murder to protect their loved ones from alien parasites as they wait for the other, heroic aliens to finally arrive.

When they do, the “good” aliens turn out to not give a shit about humans, caused the whole intergalactic war through their own shittiness and are willing to exterminate whole planets themselves to get at their hated enemies.

A child repeatedly experiences his intestines hanging out of his body while in various animal forms

A child is mentally tortured until broken and never gets better

A child in the form of a fly experiences getting splattered and smeared against a ceiling until his friends who are also flies at the time can peel his body off and take him somewhere he can transform back into a whole human before his insect mind fades completely

A child is shrunken and experiences having her eyeballs digested out of her head inside her friend’s stomach while she’s in the form of a tiny elephant

The heroes are forced to permanently imprison another child in the body of a rat because he knows too much and they abandon him on a tiny island with only other rats and garbage for company.

Rumors circulate that the island is haunted but it’s actually his psychic screams reaching distant boaters.

A race of devastatingly powerful, violent aliens turn out to be mental toddlers who don’t know what they’re doing and are just bred to think they’re playing one big game before they’re killed at age three so they don’t learn the truth

An alien spends a few centuries hanging from the parasitic tentacle of a much bigger alien, surrounded by millions of rotting corpses attached to its other moon-spanning tendrils. They engage in mental warfare until one finally absorbs the other completely.

It turns out another seemingly “evil” alien race is simply driven to kill and eat everything in sight because it was separated from its original world where food was continuous and the entire specie’s life is the torture of perpetual starvation

A peaceful robot willingly removes its inhibition against violence to help in the war, only to slaughter a huge number of alien-controlled humans so gruesomely that nobody dares think about or speak of it again and it is the only thing left undescribed in a book series that already describes entrails getting torn out and skulls getting smashed

A child stays too long in the form of a flea and instead of turning back into a human, accidentally turns momentarily into one big, giant flea that can only writhe and moan because it shouldn’t exist and can’t live at that scale.

The kids discover Atlantis, then discover that Atlanteans are inbred mutants who paralyze any humans they find, dissect them alive to figure out how their organs work, then stuff the corpses as kitschy museum displays for their children.

An ordinary ant gets transformed into a human child. It has no idea what’s happening and is so overwhelmed by its huge new brain and sensory input that it can only scream until it dies

And thanks for tumblur http://bogleech.tumblr.com/post/149533101763/the-emileighain-mountains-railroadsoftware for putting these in a easy to follow method.

Edit: She did a ama in 2011

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/gzhau/iam_ka_applegate_author_of_animorphs_and_many

edit: whew this has been a wild ride. i have tired to keep up with everything but over a 1000 comments and 7 hours later this has been one hell of a fun trip down memory lane. Thank you kindly to the stranger in the comment section that gave me a gold, am gonna take a break for a bit from reddit. Need to finish some work up and make a youtube vid on some stuff .

Edit Three? : Applegates husband is in the comment section!

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/6mf2a8/the_animorphs_were_a_lot_darker_than_what_you/dk1pcag

Edit 4: For those ever curious about statistics of what happens when something hits the front page. This is the stats of this post 7 hours in .

7,440 points (93% upvoted) 169.3kviews

10 hour mark

11,167 points (92% upvoted) 255.9kviews

Final Edit :

20,223 points (89% upvoted) 445.2kviews

Was a blast talking with you all , and am glad a bunch of you appreciated my humor.

If you ever want to flag me down for some talk about animorphs or need some help with job interviews flag me down with the /u/ summon /u/silverwolfer

EDIT Please sort by new, such amazing submissions still pouring in! EDIT

Or, would have given 5 stars, if you rated books?

The idea here is to:

1. generate perhaps more diverse answers than "your favourite book" question and

2. give lots of recommendations all-around

EDIT, This book is not available in English yet. Silly me My last 5 star book that I can't stop raving about is The Rabbit Yard by Johannes Anyuru. It's very topical as it starts with an act of terrorism. The book is part dystopian, but even if you're not into dystopia, it's also so much more. The story is clever and the book is also moving in parts. The ending is totally unforgettable.

EDIT I love you guys! You are keeping me busy, because I'm reading every single answer. I hope everyone gets lots of recommendations from here.

I'm sorry to say the book I'm mentioning here seems not to exist in English translation yet. I'm an idiot, should have checked first.

EDIT My upvote finger is cramping but I'm not quitting because you guys are not quitting. PLEASE SORT BY NEW

EDIT The passion for books here is fantastic!