You literally can not have a median of 0. You can have a mode of 0 though.

Have you tried more journalistic/prose nonfiction? In Cold Blood by Truman Capote Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the Emperor of All Maladies, Killers of the Flower Moon. They read much more like novels.

A lot of people have exclusively read romance, scifi, fantasy or crime thrillers. They e been told that “literature” is stuffy and boring and pretentious. Imagine their surprise when they find out these books won prizes and critical acclaim because they’re very well written.

That explains how you missed bestselling author Dan Brown.

It’s my dad’s entire book shelf. Lee Child, Dean Koontz, John Grisham, David Baldacci. Well it’s half his book shelf, the other half being WW2 And Civil War nonfiction.

Mr Rogers?

The setting for this book is barely existent. There is a time war, sure. There are two sides at war, yeah I got that. What’s it about? How does it work? Are there different universes, or just different times? And how do all the times affect each other? No clue, not a thought, not for us to consider.

I thought this was really well fleshed out, to the wibbly wobbly timey wimey extent that these things can be managed. They each hale from a very different potential far future where humanity has reached an end state of technology, either mechanical or biological. Each side is trying to alter history to make their potential future become the actual future. The bio-organic Blue sabotages advancements in computer technology for example, or Red goes back and plants the seeds of the discovery of the transistor. The two timelines merge at a ‘wall’ in the recent past, and it’s almost impossible for them to exist in the others’ timeline after that point.

!Also the characters realize in the end they are in a causal time loop where each of them brought the other into existence in a way.!<

I really hated In the Woods by Tana French, but >!Rob winding up being a total fuckup who almost sandbags the case!< was one of the few parts I really loved haha. Really inverted that trope.