FWIW the first chunk of Eye of the World was intentionally written to be very Tolkien-y to ease readers into the series - it goes very different places eventually. They aren’t always good places, in my view - I loved the series when I was an early teenager but drifted away by the time I was 16 or 17 - but that issue does at least go away (and there’s definitely worse Tolkien-aping happening in early 90s fantasy fiction, Dennis McKiernan would like a word).
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In my late 40s I tried The Eye of the World and couldn’t get past the first chapter. It all felt so terribly self-important, just like Brandon Sanderson’s intolerable bombast. 
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While I prepare to get torn down for this:
After the Expanse series, Blindsight, Echopraxia, and Infomocracy, it is really difficult for me to get into other sci-fi recommendations for this same reason. It feels like I’m supposed to have a fine wine and monocle at the ready when the first main character is introduced. That, or I’m supposed to be smoking a pack every four minutes and on my tenth bottle of whiskey by time I reach chapter two.
I much prefer characters who are largely nobodies just trying to get by. The only reason why the Roci crew from the Expanse has typical “main character hero” syndrome is because Jim is hell-bent on making everything his problem and jumping into literally anything he can find, and the rest of the crew is like “Ah, here we go again…”
If Jim wasn’t there, the other characters would be entirely unknown and/or dead, because the story largely focuses on the wider dynamics, and Jim is just there to allow a character-driven story to exist at all.
I guess this is also fueled further by the fact that I don’t really understand characters in fiction 99% of the time, so I tend to half-ignore them in favor of chewing on the setting and background dynamics. As a result, when characters are way too big or self-important, they feel like they’re getting in the way of the story and there’s nothing left for me to care about, so I drop the book. 
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The near future. Everyone lives in the polluted City. A mother grabs a chance to bring her sick daughter into the fresh air by enrolling in an experiment where a small group of people go live in the Wilderness State as hunter-gatherers.
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook is a sledgehammer of a book. Despite being set in the pristine wild, expect no exhilarated nature descriptions or noble savage vibes. Short measured sentences bring the reader into the harsh reality of tribe life and the skewed group dynamics between a bunch of modern people living off the land.
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I recently finished The Word for World is Forest by Le Guin. It was a nice short read, and the inspiration for the novella is really obvious. I wish it had been longer though 
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Apart from writing my WIP backstory, I plan to finish off the second half of American Gods!
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I’m just over halfway done with Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia.
I’m enjoying the inclusion of many mistaken theories of Polynesian origins that were pursued in past times. I like when science gets presented that way, with the false starts and failed ideas that are part of real research, rather than just giving a clean, neatly wrapped body of knowledge.
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Honestly, most of my reading consists of fanfiction, but outside of that, I’m working on catching up with Claw, the latest web serial by WildBo, whose past serials include Worm, Pact, Twig, Ward, and Pale. I think I’m on the last chapter of the third arc and I think the latest posted chapter either finishes the 4th arc or starts the fifth… Could get caught up in a day or two, but I find I struggle to read fiction for hours on end like I use to.
I also have quite a number of Audiobooks queued up on my portable media player… I think I’m on like Chapter 32 or 33 of the first Volume of the Years of Lyndon Johnson, which while an enjoyable listen can be exhausting as some chapters have a runtime of over two hours, and many of the other audiobooks are in DAISY format and crippled with the National Library Service’s DRM, so it’s impossible to break the books into individual chapters and my portable media player takes forever to load a whole book, and my NLS player has a bad battery so it really only works when plugged in(plus I’ve misplaced my cable for connecting my digital cartridge to my computer(the cartridge is a generic USB flash drive, but the housing blocks access to the USB-A plug, so you need an USB-A male to USB-A female extension cord with little or no guard on the female end) and it takes a while for the NLS player to scan a full 16GB cartridge… Plus, my media player also has a bunch of audio from television shows, movies, and youtube videos queued up as well, and I’ve been prioritizing my YouTube backlog recently and I try to save stuff on the media player for when I walk, and it’s been harder to commit to more than an hour a day of walking as the weather has gotten warmer as my route goes through the parts of the trailer the various window and portable ACs have the hardest time reaching.
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I want to mention the science fiction author Philip K. Dick! I’m not reading his books right now, but he got mentioned in a different thread, and I want to recommend him strongly.
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C. J. Sansom’s Shardlake books are a series of historical detective mysteries set in 16th century London, during the time-period of Cromwell, the Reformation, Henry VIII. The protagonist is a barrister who does his own investigating. A Tudor-era Matlock, if you will…
In the fourth book of the series, Revelation, Matthew Shardlake must deal with a string of religiously inspired murders, the mind of the killer brought to a state of obsessive radicalism by the rising tensions between Catholics and Reformers.
Deep historical research, a great protagonist surrounded by a cast of believable characters, a compelling sense of timing and tempo in the writing.
-Revelation (Sansom novel) - Wikipedia
-Matlock (TV series) - Wikipedia
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Oh, they are so good, especially the third volume - Master of the Senate. I really hope Caro gets to finish them (he is almost 90) because the fourth volume ended in quite a cliffhanger, in the middle of a raging war in southeast Asia…
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All the Shardlake books are great. The author, CJ Sansom, unfortunately died earlier this year.
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Double Checking my Unread folder, it turns out I’m actually missing Volume 3… Can’t remember if it was in Choice Magazine Listening or one of the other random things the NC Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped sent me on digital cartridge, but listening to a review and/or author interview about the series sold me so hard I tried buying the four already available volumes as audioCD audiobooks, but could only find three of them. Really aught to make at least finishing volume 1 a priority… Damn my struggles to keep up with content that comes in chunks that take longer than about 20-25 minutes to consume… and damn my slow ears and slow fingers… Un hte upside, I’m pretty sure VOlumes 2 and 4 are shorter than the first, so with any luck, those won’t take as long to finish, and hopefully Volume 3 will be easy to find on CD when finishing its absence becomes a necessity.
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Oh, I love detective stories in non-contemporary settings. I’ll have to check this out.
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Bunny is a short novel by Mona Awad about a young woman, Samantha, at an experimental Arts College. The only other students in her literary Workshop are a clique of over-the-top glee-girls. When Samantha gets to know them better, and eventually falls into the clique, scary things happen.
Reminiscent of both The Secret History and The Craft, but with an energy all its own. Depth of character, hilarious satire, scary horror. Great book.
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Rebecca Struthers is one of the few watchmakers still practicing in the UK. She also has a PhD in horology, the science of measuring and keeping time.
Her book Hands of Time views the past 500 years of human history through the lens of a watchmaker. Fascinating.
-Rebecca Struthers - Wikipedia
-Horology - Wikipedia
Recommended IF: The Shadow in the Cathedral - Details (ifdb.org)
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currently I’m reading this:
as one should expect from a Naval Historian… 
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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A few others you may or may not have already read:
- The Roma Sub Rosa series by Steven Saylor follows the investigations of Gordianus the Finder in ancient Rome during the tumultuous 1st century BC. ( Roma Sub Rosa - Wikipedia)
- Sister Fidelma, the protagonist in Peter Tremayne’s eponymous series, is a christian nun as well as a Celtic dalaigh, an advocate/investigator in the 7th century Irish legal system. ( Sister Fidelma mysteries - Wikipedia)
- Ellis Peeters’ The Cadfael Cronicles follow Brother Cadfael, a 12th century English monk/sleuth in a series of short and engaging novels. (The Cadfael Chronicles - Wikipedia)
- Judge Dee was a historical Chinese judge during the 7th century T’Ang dynasty. Dutch orientalist and writer Robert van Gulik found and translated an 18th century detective novel featuring a romanticised version of this judge and went on to use this character in the Judge Dee Mysteries, a series of original novels and short stories. (Other authors have written about Judge Dee as well, among them Eleanor Cooney & Daniel Alteri in their T’Ang Trilogy, book one of which I read not too long ago: What are you reading these days? (intfiction.org)). ( Judge Dee - Wikipedia)
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Adding all of these to my list!
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My first thought, on catching up on this thread, is: Where on earth do you all get the time to be conversant with such a wide variety of reading material?! And then I remember: not everyone is in the season of life of raising multiple small children 
When I recently threw my back out, I read (based on references from another thread here on this forum) Through the Language Glass, and found some interesting material in there. The tidbits that stuck with me were the Guugu Yimithirr people, who have no words for left/right, front/back etc., but internally maintain their compass bearings at all times, such that holding a given book they would refer to them as the “west page” and the "east page, and if they turned themselves a moment later the same pages would become the “south page” and the “north page”.
Otherwise, the entire phenomenon about how certain cultures have no words to express what we (the English-speaking world) would consider fundamental colors. The lack of a name for blue is especially interesting and widespread. It makes a little more sense when you consider that we don’t bat an eye about referring to both sky blue and midnight blue with the same single word, volunteering qualifications about the shade when necessary. Other cultures may find us obtuse for treating those as “one color”.
I actually encountered this phenomenon years ago, without realizing that it was a widespread thing, when teaching myself some Scottish Gaelic. They have a word gorm which can refer to anything from a sort of teal-ish color to orange-red!
My wife and I also read out loud together, but much more sporadically than we used to. For instance, we just finished the novel Malcolm probably more than a year after starting it (I lost track). A Victorian-era story about a noble-hearted fisher youth of northern Scotland who chances to fall in with the marquis of the region and his daughter, and whose own origins are shrouded in mystery.
Slowly been perusing through Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Some well-put thoughts and statements in there.
At the prompting of @rovarsson, I recently introduced myself to Terry Pratchett with The Colour of Magic and The Truth. A very witty writer! Mostly light fare. Also from discussion with rovarsson, I read the children’s-story-that-adults-can-appreciate Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter. (He may want you to know that his username is derived from the Swedish title of this book.) A good tale with both hardness and heart-warming.
Due to the resolution of certain phases/factors in my personal life, I may find myself with a little more available reading time in the upcoming future than I’ve known for the past few years. The great trial is going to be deciding what to fill that limited time with from amongst the massively piled-up to-read list that has been accruing over the years!
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