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Notes -
I was always one of those guys who loved his non-fiction much more than his Sci-Fi. Asimov always stayed true to the reputation people often pinned to him as “the greatest explainer of the age,” and he was truly remarkable when it came to that. When I read the Foundation trilogy though, it just kept coming through to me, over and over and over and over and over again just how sterile his writing seemed to feel; and it wasn’t at all to my liking.
IMHO the Foundation trilogy gets much more humanized halfway through, and even for the first half "sterile" is an overstatement, but you're at least directionally correct, I must admit.
I'd agree his non-fiction was better than his fiction, it's just harder to recommend because there's so much to choose from! Hundreds of books instead of dozens, in so many fields that it's hard to say that a fan of one subject would equally appreciate the others. "Asimov's Guide to the Bible" was perhaps the most in-depth example I can think of to recommend, but by far my favorites were (the anthologies of) his pop-science essays.
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