A Year at the Circus: Inside Trump's White House - by Jon Sopel

The Dark Side of the Mind: True Stories from My Life as a Forensic Psychologist - by Kerry Daynes

Berlin: The Downfall 1945 - by Antony Beevor

Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe - by Mike Massimino

Pigs Might Fly:  The Inside Story of Pink Floyd - by Mark Blake

No. 10:  The Geography of Power at Downing Street - by Jack Brown

Once Upon a Time in Iraq: History of a Modern Tragedy - by James Bluemel and Dr. Renad Mansour

I've been catching up with Terry Pratchett recently and although to me his stories don't seem to amount to much, that doesn't really matter because it's more about his writing style. As with Douglas Adams it seems that Pratchett is more about playing with standard fantasy/ sci-fi tropes and clichés in what I find to be a very breezy and engaging way. At times I am not really certain what is going on but at the same time it doesn't really matter to me because I find myself being swept along by the flow of it. I find his stories challenging in a non threatening way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Darker_Shade_of_Magic

I mentioned this before but The Culture series by Ian Banks is one of the best hard sci-fi series  I have read and I have been reading sci-fi for over 50 years.

There are really two aspects to the novel, a straight out action adventure type story and a section that is referred to by most who review the novel as an infodump concerning the origins of language.

People are very much divided on which aspect of the story they prefer but I definitely preferred the infodump sections as I found them very thought provoking.

Asimov eventually folded all his novels into the Foundation concept including his Robot stories but you only really need to read the novels that make up the original Foundation trilogy; Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation.

I read them before any of the Star Wars films were released and I always thought the original trilogy was a big influence on the Star Wars franchise.

I have not read any of this author, either, but my reading is very far-flung.  Presently reading a book about the Oxford English Dictionary's creation and the contributions by a very unlikely personage, indeed, an American doctor/ex-military man who was put into an asylum for the criminally insane in Victorian England.  Truth is stranger than fiction, quite often.

Yes, it's a pretty bleak world/universe. But the Dandelion Dynasty series is not?

Awesome suggestions! Since I suddenly have "all the time in the world" I've started a sci-fi kick. 

Did you guys like any of N.K. Jamisin's series--especially the acclaimed "Broken Earth" series?