"On Basilisk Station" - does get better. Most of the Honor Harrington series spend a lot of time revealing Honor's internal maunderings, dithering about her love life (or lack thereof), worrying about what her crew thinks about her and so on, but they pay off with a grand finale of a battle (or three) fought against overwhelming odds that always made me clap politely and say "well done, Harrington. Nicely played". She would have beaten the
Kobayashi Maru scenario without cheating.
Picked up The Illustrated Brief History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell [two books in one] at Borders super cheap. Now I've read the Brief History of Time twice and don't understand it , even with pictures. Starting The Universe in a Nutshell now.
You might like "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" by Gary Zukav, which takes physics concepts and illustrates them in a fairly simple manner, and then takes them to seemingly outlandish conclusions. It's non-fiction, but sometimes it reads like, well, fantasy and/or science fiction, since the further you delve into, say, the atom, the more mystical it gets. Things that make you go "Hmmmmm".
The wikipedia article on says it is "a popular new age book from 1979 about mysticist interpretations of quantum physics". I'm not at all a fan of most New Age notions, but I found it at least intriguing. Sort of a "speculative non-fiction" book, if there is such a thing.
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I've started re-reading "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon, having first read it sometime around 1974, I think. Pynchon, Vonnegut, and Richard Brautigan were all the rage back then. In my household though, we also went through all the Barsoom and Conan stories, just to lighten things up a bit.