What have you been reading? - Book Discussion Thread

I'm reading a bunch of stuff:

How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi -a really great book for people who want to learn what being an anti-racist mean and how it's more than simply going "lol, I don't see color."

A Little Hatred by Job Abercrombie - I've been on a low-fantasy kick and Abercrombie's books are the good. This one especially feels especially for the time since it basically deals with capitalism and a workers revolt. Also violent as fuck.

I'm thinking of ending things by Iain Reid - yeah I'm reading this cause of the movie. Apparently the movie is brilliant so I wanna check out the book before watching the movie.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy - might be the darkest western ever committed to print. My third time reading this. Not for the squeamish since it does not hold back on the atrociities that were committed during that time.

Currently reading Promise of Blood by Brian McClellan, its been interesting so far and i like the combination of magic and black powder guns. Reminds me of some of the weird magic systems Brandon Sanderson as come up with.

Going through World of Warcraft Chronicle volumes 1-3
It's a gorgeous set of books that do some I'll dare to say heavy retconning on some previous storylines.
A must read for any WoW fan.

@sanity: I listened to the audiobook of that one last year after a friend recommended it. I'm not usually one for guns in my fantasy, but this magic system was so unique and the writing was so good that I ended up really liking it! I haven't gotten around to the other books in the trilogy yet, but they are on my list.

Me and a couple of friends have been doing a book bingo kind-of-thing over the summer, just to motivate us all to read more. It's been great for a motivator, even if I haven't read as much as I would have wished... I most recently tried to check the "read a book written before the 18th century"-box, so I read Thomas More's Utopia.

Man, is it a drag.

I read it as a teenager, thinking I was the smartest kid in town, and told everyone it was a brilliant book. As a somewhat more reasonable adult, I can say that I can appreciate it's historical merits, but the book by itself just can't up to anything more recent. Of course, a thinly veiled critique of 16th century England is bound to be dull, but still.

I'm also making my way through a collection called ThePenguin Book of Japanese Short Stories. I once read somewhere that different cultures have different stereotypical narrative structures, where many Asian stories are best represented as a spiral turning inwards towards a central theme. Keeping that in mind, it's much easier to understand the otherwise fairly meandering and pointless stories. I've especially liked Peaches by Abe Akira.

I'm about halfway through Grapes of Wrath. I read it in high school and seemed to be one of the few who really liked it. It's been on my mind for the past few years and feels like the type of book for these times. Rereading it is cementing it as one of my all-time favorites. I had forgotten how strong 'Ma has to be for the entire family to function. I had forgotten about the interstitial chapters. I'd forgotten about how leftist(not sure if that's the best way to put it) it is. Talking about the labor of men plowing the earth they were raised on and being replaced by lifeless machines, of the unity and common struggle of migrants as they make their nightly camps heading west, of the low wages and exploitation from contractors and landowners.

Over quarantine I've reread Ghosts in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick and re-read all but one of the short stores from William Gibson's Burning Chrome. The Belonging Kind is probably still my favorite from that collection and I just can't finish Hinterlands.

I'm thinking of rereading something in Spanish next. I read Death of Artemio Cruz in my English literature class and loved it, I'll have to look for a Spanish version.

The Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson, would highly recommend them. I finished the first 2 books and loved them, taking a break before book 3 and reading Killers of the flower moon by David Grann. Very interesting non-fiction about murders occurring around the early twentieth century in the Osage native American tribe who were at the time the richest people per capita in the world due to oil reserves located on their reservations. Very compelling and dramatic for a fact based book.

I just got to the bit where the down on her luck family girl has been accepted by Yasner Kolin (I'm audiobook so I dunno how TF to spell that name)

I read at the moment solely to see what's going on with Kaladin

@sombre: Nice one, Way of Kings is such an amazing book, you'll love, it goes to some wild places especially for Kaladin. You might consider reading Warbreaker also before book 2 of Stormlight but it's not essential. I'm gong to read Edgedancer next as I heard it has some connections to Oathbringer (3rd in series). Good thing about Brandon Sanderson is that he releases books at a fairly fast rate unlike a lot of other authors so shouldn't be waiting long for the series to continue and eventually finish.

P.s. Jasnah Kholin is her name!

I like it a lot, but its so..dense. Like theres SO MUCH going on. I could just read about the shardblade/plate people and Kalladin and be happy!

@sombre: I just want to say that as a fellow audiobook listener, I've found that I have NO FUCKING IDEA how to spell half of the names I hear in the fantasy books I listen to.

I'll fourth or fifth or whatever we are up to that Stormlight Archive is great. You get an extra layer if you read the other Cosmere stuff but it is very much a standalone which is something I love about Sanderson.

As for the Edgedancer->Oathbringer connection: Edgedancer is a side story/background story of one of the POV characters. I think they are scheduled to have either one of the upcoming main novels as their POV book (in the sense that Kaladin was 1, Shallan was 2, and Dalinar was 3). More "required" than Mistborn but Sanderson does a really good job of making each book fairly self contained to the point that he even gives you gentle reminders of who previous characters were because he gets that a year or so between books means you might forget some nuances.

I don't think I'd ever give an audiobook my full attention. That's the thing the physical act of reading gets me. Listening to something can wander too much into passivity. It'd be way too easy for me to gloss over something and then have to rewind just to catch it again.

@shindig: As someone who loves books but struggles with reading them in a timely fashion, I've turned to audiobooks to make sure I don't stop reading altogether. That said, I have found that while I enjoy audiobooks very much, I actually retain the information in them much less than physical books. Perhaps I'm more of a visual learner, I don't know. I'm planning on reading Dune on Kindle with the Audible narration (which I listened to a couple years ago) at the same time to get ready for the movie.

When I used to run a whole lot I thought audiobooks would be a perfect fit but I couldn't do it for exactly this reason. I would be running and suddenly my mind would wander, and then I snap back to it and have no idea how much time has passed, how much I have to rewind etc. Also I just prefer the actual "ritual" of reading. Getting a nice stretch of quiet time, getting comfortable with some beverage and just diving into it. Kinda wish I could do audiobooks sometimes but just doesn't work for me. Even when I listen to the Bombcast and like try playing a very repetitive, mindless game, I still end up half remembering what is being said.

After seeing Dune trailer numerous times I've decided to read that masterpiece again.

So after finishing the second book in Ruocchio's Sun Eater series (it was okay...) I decided to go more pulpy and catch up on Kadrey's Sandman Slim. Started book 11, got confused, and realized I never read book 10 and switched to that

For those unaware (so most people), Sandman Slim is your bog standard urban fantasy book about James Stark who returned from hell after his buddies killed his girlfriend and threw him a hell pit. After 11 years of being a gladiator and an assassin and being tortured he is back in LA and hijinks ensue. Yeah, it is one of those.

It is closer to the Carey/Holm model of "noir detective but with magic and supernatural stuff that focuses on humanity as the worst monsters" rather than the Butcher/McHugh "Goku but in a city with a glock" model of urban fantasy and it is generally pretty fun. Very much an "everyone is tattooed and counter-culture and blah blah blah" style book and a friend of mine summed it up as "if Richard Kadrey didn't think he was above it he would have written millions of pages about his Sonic OC... and he probably did under a pseudonym" and she is not at all wrong.

Series has been around for a while (up to book 11) and been through a few major arcs. Latest one continues The War In Heaven while having a big focus on the rich and powerful abusing humanity and evil shadow orgs wanting to purify the world by killing anything that isn't human enough for them. This is the kind of book where a villain straight up got out of trying to murder a divine being because of police unions and a bunch of very openly bigoted and hateful assholes wearing blue lives matter pins while spewing slurs. If Carey's Felix Castor series were about the people who fall through the cracks then this is ever increasingly about the people who are attacked by a system designed to persecute them.

So yeah, pretty timely. And Stark learning about what Non-Binary genders are and the use of first person narrative to show him regularly slipping but trying to do better is surprisingly realistic and, for lack of a more humorous term, adorable.

I just finished listening to The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Landby Thomas Asbridge, narrated by Derek Perkins. The narration and the book are both excellent. The author explicitly sets out to tell the story of the Crusades from both sides, with sections of the book alternating between focusing on the Christian and Muslim sides of the wars for the Holy Land. Although he doesn't mention Samuel Huntington by name, Asbridge calls out the notion that the Crusades represent an inevitable "clash of civilizations" as reductive. Rather than placing the Crusades in the context of 20th and 21st century conflict between Christian and Muslim societies, Asbridge takes care to place the Crusades in the context of the time that they occurred. As someone who's gone to war in the Middle East, I appreciated that. The book is written in a narrative style that is easy to follow. Descriptions of sieges and battles provide a look into medieval warfare, and primary sources are quoted often. Asbridge takes time to introduce and examine the motivations and legacies of some of the key historical figures of the Crusades.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in learning the general history of the Crusades.

Read a few books. Only gonna talk about the ones I think are worth spotlighting

Read Jim Butcher's latest Harry Dresden book, Battlegrounds, and... yeah. I love where the plot is going (even if they walked back from my previous prediction of a world changing event). Like, Butcher has always been known to be kind of a shithead when it comes to depicting women in his books and most of us assumed there was some more underneath (that may or may not be public now? Have intentionally not checked in and nobody informed me).

But it is just really interesting to look at the current "big three" Urban Fantasy Wizard Books (to me, at least). Kadrey's Sandman Slim is a guy who is trying to better understand his new nonbinary friend and whose current "big bad" is literally a guy who used police unions to get away with murder. McHugh's Hellequin/Avalon Chronicles series had an entire book about a newly powerless protagonist trying to fight back against white supremacists attacking a town and recurring themes of basically The Magic Alt-Right taking over. Some is more hamfisted than others but both feel like writers who are trying to "keep with the times" and, at the very least, remember that there are few things more enjoyable than watching a nazi suffer.

Butcher spends multiple chapters talking about how cops are the beacon of light during a time of chaos as humanity is under attack by the things that go bump in the night... yeah.... I mean, given the context and the specific characters mentioned it "sort of works" but... jesus fucking christ.

Combine that with cranking back up the skeeviness toward his female characters and... I'm not sure if I am done with Butcher and Dresdent but I am DAMNED close and very much in the category of "give me a reason to keep reading".

In a lot of ways it is no different than a lot of "old guard" authors. In a lot of ways, folk like Abercrombie and Abnett showed how "grim dark" can still be "fun". I have no idea who wrote it or what the title is but Radioactive Spider-cum reminded us that the good parts of The Dark Knight (Returns) was less the rampant racism and sexism and more the idea of our childhood heroes going out for one last ride in a world that dosn't care anymore.

And in that way, folk like McHugh and Holm and Kadrey very much show that you can still have the heavily noir inspired goku wizard without the skeeviness and while still tackling the kind of issues that one white dude with a gun also could never help with. I guess it just kind of blows my mind since Kadrey and McHugh both very much got their start (Kadrey may have been writing before Sandman Slim. Not sure) in the era where publishers and agents required every protagonist to bang at least one woman who will be put in a fridge before the book is over.

-------

And on an almost universally happy note: Sean Danker's latest novel in the The Admiral series. Sci-fi series that opens with three new recruits and a mysterious nameless admiral waking up on a dead ship in the middle of nowhere. Told from the perspective of The Admiral (who is going through withdrawal..) as they try to use their skills to survive while also trying to figure out who betrayed everyone, who can be trusted, and so forth. VERY fun book. Later ones in the series spend more time going into world building and what kind of a civilization would create such a scenario while also touching on topics like wealth inequality, body modification, and so forth. Very much recommend that series and very much worth reading from the start

Sounds like they haven't sold particularly well but if you like semi-military sci-fi with political intrigue they are really fun https://seandanker.com/

I've been taking my time in re-reading Dune again - one of my favorite sci-fi series of all time. When I thought the movie was coming out this year I actually read it daily but now that it's been delayed I sort of pop in every few days to read a chapter and it's been pretty nice revisiting it. Frank Herbert truly was a genius and boy it's a shame what his much less talented son is doing with the whole franchise but to me there have only ever been six Dune books and thats how it will always be.

My Dune Deluxe Edition finally came after more then a month so I'm eager and ready to jump in and read it.

@gundato: That's a great write-up of Kadrey, who I particularly enjoy in his genre. Tough protagonist, entertaining, with a real eye towards modern society. He's a sharp writer.

My copy of The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen just arrived today!!

I finally hooked my iPad up to Overdrive and have been getting books from the library. I've read two books so far.

The first is Tegan and Sara's book High School which I absolutely adored even though it kinda messed me up at times since bits of it hit a little too close to home. The book's about their experience of going through high school in Calgary and how they started their careers as musicians while in high school, but it also gets into a lot of other much more complex and heavier topics (also, lots of talk of doing LSD). I've listened to Tegan and Sara's music for a long time (I think I first heard them in 2002 or 2003? They've been popular on the prairies since the early 2000s) and they're one of my favourite bands so the book was an easy choice, but I didn't expect it to impact me as much as it did and make me introspect so much.

The book was part nostalgia for me since I also grew up on the prairies and recognized everything they talked about and have been to some of the places they've described. A huge chunk of the book though is about them being queer people on the prairies in the 90s and how rough it could be at times along with how they didn't really fit in with the culture of the prairies, two things I can strongly relate to. I won't get into details because of spoilers but I found myself relating to Tegan a lot. In high school I was basically in the same frame of mind as her, just with, you know, fewer drugs, and a lot of her feelings, particularly her worrying about being stuck in Calgary for life and about work, I still feel to this day (COVID put my plans to get out of the prairies on hold for now).

I could honestly write a giant essay about this book and the topics discussed, but I won't today. I think the book's well worth reading not just for the content but for their amazing writing styles. Like with their songwriting where they write songs independently and only collaborate for arranging and recording, they alternated writing chapters of the book and both have completely different voices as authors. Often one twin would write about something from their perspective, then the other would write about their perspective on the same situation/issue and fill in additional context. By the end of the book I could tell which chapter was a Tegan chapter and which was a Sara chapter. It's super cool.

The second book I'm currently in the process of getting through is Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants, which is a book about the origins of modern advertising and marketing, and the predatory nature of it. It's certainly a much drier read than High School was and I'm finding myself struggling to get through bits of it, but overall it's pretty interesting. It basically explains how modern advertising and advertising-funded media started in the 1800s and how it's led to this pattern where a new form of media comes out, it initially is quite successful, then someone decides to do an advertising-funded variant and it leads to a giant race to the bottom because all competition dies other than other ad-supported variants. This pattern started with print media and has continued to happen on every major technological innovation in terms of media since then.

The marketing aspect of the book is particularly disgusting, especially a lot of the products discussed from the early 1900s. As it turns out, a lot of modern "norms" regarding hygiene and personal care are how they are because a bunch of marketers 100+ years ago wanted to sell soap so they preyed on people's insecurities. The chapters on tobacco advertising and marketing also are quite disturbing.

I'm not sure if I'll end up finishing The Attention Merchants because of how the middle chunk of it has been so far. I may end up skipping to the last chunk on the internet and modern web advertising.

I read Positively Unstoppable The Art of Owning by Diamond Dallas Page. The book pretty much is an advertisement for his DDPY program though it has alot of great stories of people who used his program like Arthur Boreman and were success in doing it, plus recipes and even about the trials and tribulations that DDP went through in life and how he overcame them in wrestling. I used his program in the past and had success. Such a great book though I highly recommend it if you need motivation in your life and lack the desire and passion to reach ypur goals whatever they are.

Fiction: Ship of Magic, Robin Hobb

Really enjoyed The Farseer Trilogy and this is completely different, but still great. Hobb is great at developing character and that ability really shines when she jumps between several characters, GOT style.

Non-Fiction: The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson

Weaves together the story of serial killer H.H. Holmes and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. What a different place America used to be. Fascinating to read about the incredible undertaking of the fair and also what Holmes was able to get away with in a time where you could just lie about who you were and be believed if you were...you know...a white man.

Neuromancer and Count Zero by William Gibson

This is my 4th time reading Neuromancer and it is still one of my favorite Sci-Fi books. This isn't some crazy deep story telling or the most compelling characters. The imagery that Gibson creates through his prose drips with style and is some of the most engrossing story telling. This is a trilogy series that is roughly connected to each other. Neuromancer sits well as a standalone story that I highly recommend to those waiting anxiously for Cyberpunk 2077.

The first quarter of Neuromancer is what every piece of Cyberpunk media after it was written has been trying to re-create, even up to of course Cyberpunk 2077. It's hard to live up to that and the sequel, Count Zero, struggles to do so as well. I just finished Count Zero for the first time and now I'm moving onto Mona Lisa Overdrive later.

ANTIFA: The Anti-Fascist Handbook by Mark Bray

This book is a deconstruction of the global ANTIFA movement and what it represents throughout the whole world. It is inspiring and frightening to read. I think the idea that talking about fascism and being anti-fascist has become a political conversation indicates where we are at in this county. I'm still not sure if I should be inspired or dejected that this has been a 200+ year fight. The author does a great job though by reminding us about the history of fascism and what it has led to serves as a great opening chapter.

So far the book has been told through the stories of people that have been in activist groups all over the world. They discuss their methods or stories of how demonstrations happened. As a "handbook", I wasn't really expecting it to be told this way, but I think it is really effective to hear real world examples rather than being an "Anarchist Cookbook".

Great read so far though and I think I've said enough without being modded.

@whitestripes09: The great thing about Gibsons Sprawl trilogy is that even at their worst they are still leagues beyond anything offered by their contemporaries. I have looked far and wide and have never found anything that compares to that particular flavor of “cyberpunk” that Gibson created. Truly one of the all time greats.

3 books

Just Finished A Storm of Swords

Imagined Communities by Bennedict Arnold. Critical Theory on the origins of nationalism.

Always Running by Luis Rodriguez. An autobiography of a survivor of Los Angeles gang life.

Thinking and Being by Irad Kimhi. Exciting but frustratingly terse at key points.

Having loved the first two books of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, I decided to read some of his more recent work. I'm about 10% into Aurora, his 2015 book about a generation ship on its way to colonize a nearby star system. I have long been fascinated by the concept of generation ships, and so far Aurora seems to have exactly what I've come to want and expect of KSR: a combination of realistic science with plenty of interpersonal and cultural conflict. I'm definitely going to be getting through this one quickly.

I just read The Dream of Reason, by Anthony Gottlieb. It covered a history of western philosophy from the first Greeks philosophers, to Descartes. Or essentially, Ancient thought to when European thinkers were finally able to push beyond both the Ancient approaches, and the religious stranglehold on thinking to say, by scientific approach.

My new book is going to be Bigfoot...It's complicated, by Denver Riggleman. From what I have pre-read, it's a study of the Bigfoot cult, and by extension, understanding how cults/conspiracy organizations think, and how their group psychology functions. Also, it seems like it will be a fun read. When I was young, I lived off the library reading about Bigfoot, and UFO's for that matter. I never really believed any of it, but again it was fun. Now that I am an adult(of sorts, but for a while) I will re-visit some of this, but with a more developed perspective. :)

Tribe by Sebastian Junger. So amazing. The guy is a national treasure.

Dawnshard. The new novella by Brandon Sanderson. And soon Book 4 of The Stormlight Archive (the main series Dawnshard is a part of) will be released.

I recently wrapped up the second book of the Stormlight Archive series and I’m taking a little intermission reading The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. Very good! And wildly relatable.

I finally finished a book this year! This is a fun one, if you're into universal destruction:

This is the way the universe ends, not with a crunch, but a heat death (most likely).

The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Dr. Katie Mack (narrated by Gabra Zackman, with parts narrated by the author as well) is an engrossing and entertaining voyage into the unfathomably distant future. Mack lays out the various possible ways that the universe might end and explains each of them in detail. There is a lot of math involved, but Mack does an outstanding job of making the science understandable and easy to grasp. Each chapter details a different potential means for the universe to end, starting with a bit of history and science that brought us the theory being discussed, followed by what that would "look" like (in some cases, it wouldn't look like anything, because it would be undetectable and--from our perspective--nearly instantaneous). Each chapter also details what the current science suggests about the likelihood of each scenario, including what experiments are being done or may be done in the near future that could help expand our knowledge of such possibilities.

For the majority of the book, Dr. Mack does not make any value judgments about the end of the universe. It will end. This is simply true. The epilogue contains excerpts from conversations with various astrophysicists and cosmologists about what it all means. The opinions they express are varied and nuanced. It is here that the reader is invited to think about this and place it within the context of their own value system.

There is a particular skill involved in communicating complex scientific topics to a general audience, and it is a skill that Dr. Mack clearly possesses. The writing style is conversational and often humorous, which is something that I appreciated for a book with a topic as heavy as the end of the universe. I can only hope that Dr. Mack continues to write books on similar topics for the general public.

5/5, highly recommended

Just started Axiom's End (which I almost always type out as "Axiom Verge") by the incomparable video essayist Lindsay Ellis.

It's a little clunky, but I find that incredibly charming, and it gives it a very real feeling. It's very much in the same lane as "Arrival" or "Contact" so far, in terms of alien contact has happened, but it's less "invading force" and more "a single craft that hasn't been reachable."

It's about a woman and her family being upended by their narcissistic, online-beloved father who has a sort of Edward Snowden-but-for-alien-contact reputation and a role as being beloved as a cultish figure by the internet at large. I'm still very early into it, but I think the two words I'd most describe it as so far are "relatable" and "charming."

After owning it for years but never reading it, I finally read 1984. I thought the messages in it regarding totalitarianism, etc. were great but as a book to read it was rough. The over-the-top cynical nature of book got grating, especially given how long-winded some parts of that book seemed. After how things have been in the world the last 5 years, I just found it impossible to enjoy a book that is this relentlessly negative.

Now I'm reading Malcolm Gladwell's "Talking To Strangers" and am enjoying that a lot more. I just started it so I don't have much to say yet.

I read most of; Bigfoot...It's complicated, by Denver Riggleman. Somehow it disappointed me. I thought it might be more science based (Sociology or Psychology plus statistics and such, the author had involvement in an Intelligence service. And there was a little bit of that. But mostly it was character studies of the people were get involved in organizations to the point of cults, rather then a real overview of some sort. And of course how he and his buddy shined the whole thing on. To be fair, I did not as yet read the finally 20 pages of it.

I'm also reading the Immortality Key, by Brian C. Muraresku. It is fairly interesting, concerning the possibilities of mind altering substances were used in Greek and perhaps early Christian religion. Mostly ingested in beer, and later wine. I'm about two thirds through, and it is still mostly dealing with probabilities than absolute proof. Still, I can see the effort is most likely sincere, and seemingly well based.

Finally, I am reading my new car manual, and that is fairly thick! My last car (a truck) is a year 2000, and all the improvements that has happened in auto-land since! I'm not going to say what my nice new car is, but it is not another truck...I still have that buddy with 43000 miles on it. Love that truck!

I am currently reading The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

I am currently reading "The Night Boat to Tangier" by Kevin Barry and it's great.

Also reading Easy way to Stop Smoking by Allen Carr, using nicotine patches and the Irish health services Quit smoking support services.... It's 3 weeks since my last puff of a cigarette and I'm feeling pretty good about quitting for good this time.