Quote · Modern Wisdom
Black Holes, Denny’s Fist Fights & Japanese Handjob Culture - Rabbit Hole #4 - #1118
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What Makes a Great Book?
At 2:26:10 · chapter starts 2:18:27
Tim Ferriss, who collected comic books as his first childhood business and paid his college bills as an illustrator, has returned to graphic novels as a way to occupy the visual movie that runs constantly in his hypervisual mind. He showcases Something Is Killing the Children (monsters are real, only children can see them, Netflix series incoming), Lazarus (cartel-like families in a post-apocalyptic US), Day Tripper (a Brazilian meditation on mortality and a father's shadow, no sci-fi), and Ama (deeply philosophical and psychedelic, from France). He recommends the Kindle/Comixology panel-by-panel zoom function for digital reading. Chris Williamson evangelises for Dungeon Crawler Carl — a LitRPG series with 82,000 Amazon reviews at 4.7 stars since 2020 — and for Red Rising. Tim Urban pleads the case for the Three Body Problem trilogy: the first book is a B+, the second book's first third is slow, but once you're 200 pages in, the remaining 900 pages is 'the greatest thing I've ever read.' He wishes readers could be told this in advance so they don't bail at the slow part. The actual series title — Remembrance of Earth's Past — was effectively vetoed by readers in favour of the first book's title, a parallel to Game of Thrones overriding A Song of Ice and Fire.
Three Body Problem's real title is Remembrance of Earth's Past — readers ignored it. The first 500 pages of 1,400 are slow. None of that matters: Tim Urban says the remaining 900 pages is the greatest thing he has ever read, a game-theory epic with concepts as mind-bending as Interstellar but deployed in service of an unstoppable plot.
Tim Urban argues that despite the Three Body Problem trilogy's slow opening 500 pages — one-third of the total — the remaining 900 pages is the greatest fiction he has ever read.
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman has accumulated 82,000 Amazon reviews at 4.7 stars since its 2020 release, making it one of the most reviewed self-published fiction series in recent memory.
