I do not share the majority opinion on The Sparrow, but I'd rather be positive and suggest a few alternatives which I feel deal more inventively with the themes of first contact, the alien, and colonialism: Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus and Stanislaw Lem's Eden, Solaris, The Invincible, and Fiasco.

Wolfe does a fine job of modulating his prose style according to the dictates of his content, and unpacking the workings of the book over repeated readings is a pleasure -- both admirably Joycean qualities in a writer.

Lem I admire for his commitment to imagining the alien as something truly alien, resistant to simple analogies with our existing store of experience.

I'll definitely give this one a read soon. I'm currently reading The Mote in God's Eye, which is another book that explores first contact with an alien race. I have a long ways to go, but I'm really enjoying it so far. Give Mote a shot if this sort of subject matter interests you.

You might also want to checkout Accellerando by Charlie Stross. It has some really interesting notions of building businesses and future craziness in it as well.

I really like all of Charlie's books. The Laundry books are definitely different; closer to fantasy in fact, but still nicely in touch with hacker mentality.

Thanks for the recommendation.

I've been in the mood for just that type of can't put down read. But after googling for 'book reviews', 'top books' and 'books you can't put down', etc and other similar queries I just got a bunch bestseller lists and spammy adsense sites. Weird

Looking for a good read? Follow these directions:

1) Go to amazon http://www.amazon.com

2) Pick your genre

3) Sort by reviews

4) Pick the books with the most number of positive reviews

5) Read a few of the negative ones

6) Go out to Google and search for the books you selected

7) Pick up reviews from other non-book-review sites, like hn or reddit

8) Confirm selection by comparing notes from various sources

9) Get the book to read

Or you can just go to http://hn-books.com and let somebody else do all of that for you

EDIT: It occurs to me that perhaps you're making a snarky comment which I'm ignoring, but just be aware that the biggest problem in finding great books isn't piss-poor search strings and frustrating google search results: it's fans who love author X and are going to give him/her positive reviews no matter what they write. It makes it difficult to use review systems. I don't think that in a net of a billion people and a trillion web pages you're ever going to find a simple method for locating a good book to read that's going to stay the same over any length of time. There's simply not enough description in "good book to read" to have any meaning. There's a huge amount of implied context that is relevant but not supplied.

I really did not like this book. There were too many cusp points of stupidity, like "i am going to smash the next person who comes through that door" and kills an unintended victim. And the translation error that leads to the unfortunate hand modification, for someone who was such a genius at learning languages was not credible.

The whole precept of the book was done in a ham-handed way. The idea of a fallen sparrow being noticed, but not saved, and watched to suffer and die seemed to be an indication of a personal ax to grind on the part of the author.

I do read a lot of science fiction, but this book seems more like "everything you who are religious know is wrong" rather than Arthur C Clarke's invention of staggeringly different ideas about first contact. There is more imagination in the original short story "2001" than in both of the volumes in this set.

I thought this book was great, but I also found it quite disturbing. Some pretty bad stuff happens in it.

I read it several years ago and concur - it's well worth the read.

Have you read the sequel? I haven't read any reviews of it. I was wondering if it was as good as the first book.

I've read The Sparrow countless times, I really love it.

As for the sequel, no, it's not as good. Obviously that was to be expected. If you loved The Sparrow, you might still want to read on about Emilio (and one of the others...), but it'll be kind of rough and poignant. I wouldn't say that I enjoyed it, but I'm happy to have read it, and I've been thinking about reading it again (only read it once so far, a few years ago).

Worth reading, but not as good as the Sparrow.

Without giving away any of the plot, the thing I liked about The Sparrow was the huge factor of the unknown. The entire story had this feeling that you just didn't know where it was going -- a sense of uneasiness.

I don't see how you could do that the same way again, at least not in the same universe.

But I've got it on my kindle anyway. Sometimes first books are so good you have to read the second one just to see where the author wants to take the story.

I enjoyed this book and couldn't put it down, but was sad to find out the sequel was not about getting vengeance, which would have been awesome.

This was the best sci-fi book I've read in many years. Tightly plotted and full of deep ideas and stuff to make you think. Had a blast reading it. Can't recommend it enough.