@BrynSterling My mom read us the Lord of the Rings too! Kudos to your mom (and mine) for that accomplishment. I can’t imagine reading such a thick book out loud! Unfortunately, except for the Fellowship of the Ring, I haven’t read the Lord of the Rings since my mom read it to me, which was when I was pretty small. Ironically, though, I just read Hobbit right now and planning to reread the Lord of the Rings trilogy very soon.
Honestly, I love all of Suzanne Collins works; she is a really talented author and The Hunger Games was a really exciting page-turner. Kind of hoping she’ll come out with another book soon.
I generally prefer sci-fantasy (like Star Wars) to sci-fi, and I actually only recently started to get into sci-fi, so I haven’t read all that many yet. I like the first book of Ender’s Game and the first book of Dune, but the following books I read in both those series kind of didn’t interest me as much and weren’t as good. They kind of tend to tackle philosophy with points that I didn’t like or didn’t agree with, and Dune particularly seems more of musings on philosophy almost more than an actual story. I enjoyed C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy (which I need to reread), but it IS C.S. Lewis, one of my all-time favorite authors and someone who’s philosophy I strongly agree with (and one of the smartest, wisest people to ever live, in my opinion). Actually, Lewis’ Mere Christianity is one of the most influential books on my life, tbh (and also one of my favorite books).
Apart from that, I don’t know that I’ve read much sci-fi. Do you have any sci-fi recommendations?