Would you like to share your current reading list?
I just finished Never Flinch- one of Stephen King’s Holly books. Was good.
Currently reading Knife- Salman Rushdie’s book about his attack.
I think Catch-22 is next. I’ve never read it.
I tried Dungeon Crawler Carl but gave up on about page 16.
My son gave me a book called How to Live with Objects. I tend to pick it up when I want something non-scrolling. It’s pretty good.
The Myth of normal by Gabor Mate, so far really good.
Reading Serj Tankian’s memoirs: Down with the System.
It’s an interesting insight to how music was more a means of activism and bringing visibility to the Armenian genocide. It’s a very interesting story with almost as much history about his people as it has about him so far.
Hacker book club is reading The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin and I’m enjoying it so far. First novel I’m reading in a long time 😅
For the last 10-15 years i have probably only read about one book per year- usually one i got as a gift and forced myself through. Even with glasses or contacts reading for more than 10-15 minutes was uncomfortable. I recently got an e-reader and and love it! Being able to change the font, size, brightness is a game-changer!
Not a book but I’ve just about collected all the pieces of historical evidence you can obtain in Caves of Qud and have just been reading all that recently (it’s pretty dense). The lore and writing of this game is awesome as hell and I certainly would get books of it if they ever wrote any.
I just finished Cormac McCarthy’s top 3 again (blood meridian, the road and no country for old men). I started reading them again right after he died but kinda rushed through. This reading I really took my time. Finished a few other books in that time as well. But currently I’m reading “Krieg” which is from the Warhammer 40k universe.
We were recently talking about the movie No Country… I’ve never seen it. Maybe I’ll add it to my read/watch list. Thanks.
There is a weekly thread on the books com about what everyone is reading you may want to check out.
Yep, I was just about to plug the [email protected] community too.
It’s nice to see how much engagement they get on the weekly threads! They’ve got a yearly bingo thing going on too, which is fun if you’re trying to read more. And just all around it seems like a nice place to share your reviews/thoughts or ask for recommendations.
When I click your link I can see the post, but when I click on the community it says im already subscribed but that there are no posts?
I would say it’s a federation issue but your account and the community are both on the same instance, so I dunno. Typically I’ve only seen that when subscribing to a community on a new instance since your instance won’t populate posts from another instance until you or someone else first subscribes to it.
Does it show you as being logged in when you click the community link?
Thanks!
Just finished Prophet of Dune for the second time. It’s about how it’s not a gift to know the future, because if you do, then you have no free will. It also comments on the difference between morality and law and which is better suited to governing humanity.
It’s a weird book, but it follows Dune nicely and provides a fitting end to the story of Paul Atreides. It’s also quite short, about half the length of the first book. I’m looking forward to the movie coming out later this year.
oh yeah, the Halting Problem: a machine that can make active decisions (such as a computer or a human brain) cannot predict its own future reliably. Meanwhile, an entity that can predict its own future reliably, has no power to change that future.
Man i love the Mistborn universe by Brandon Sanderson. It’s such cool fantasy that’s not just a carbon copy of Tolkien (a trap a lot of it falls into, I feel?)
After years of not touching books, I recently went and renewed mine and my daughters library cards to get her (and me) reading more over the summer. Currently I’m reading Dan Brown’s newest book Secret of Secrets, which has been a pretty interesting mystery/thriller but also delves into the nature of consciousness and explores alternative ideas about what it is, at least in a fictional setting.
I haven’t read Dan Brown in years. I’ll check that out.
Ryan North - How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler
More interesting and funny than I had expected, not too heavy, ideal for now.
That sounds good! We just finished Ourlander and the whole time i was screaming, “you know the future! Fucking build something!!”
Hah, don’t know that one but it sounds like the perfect one to read next! :D
I am more litrpg and cosmic horror
I quite like He Who Fights With Monsters. An Australian get isekai’d to an almost earth and gains vast cosmic powers while getting the crap beaten out of him and dealing with the consequences of running his mouth off to authority.
Another is Speedrunning the Multiverse. The god king of time is bored and reincarnates to see how fast he can grow his powers back to god king level and not for the first time. Interesting read if you like amoral main characters.
Beyond the aquillo rift is a bunch of cosmic horror short stores and a couple made it into the Death, Love, and Robots Netflix series.
I just started He Who Fights with Monsters recently and I’m already well into the second book. Good shit.
Just don’t go sleeping with Clive’s wife.
You know, there is going to be a surge in popularity of Amphoras any time soon. I have a pamphlet here somewhere…
I like horror. Never heard of cosmic horror. I’ll look into that.
I’ve been reading a fair bit of old, out of copyright fiction over the last couple years. I recently finished Carry On, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse which was amusing. You can find a copy here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/65974
Thanks! I’ve been finding a lot of great stuff on Libby.
I just finished Ender’s Game and loved it. I was completely enthralled with it.
That’s a great story!
Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”
Wikipedia’s description is pretty good:
In the book, Klein argues that neoliberal economic policies promoted by Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics have risen to global prominence because of a deliberate strategy she calls “disaster capitalism”. In this strategy, political actors exploit the chaos of natural disasters, wars, and other crises to push through unpopular policies such as deregulation and privatization. This economic “shock therapy” favors corporate interests while disadvantaging and disenfranchising citizens when they are too distracted and overwhelmed to respond or resist effectively. The book challenges the narrative that free market capitalist policies have been welcomed by the inhabitants of regions where they have been implemented, and it argues that several man-made events, including the Iraq War, were intentionally undertaken with the goal of pushing through these unpopular policies in their wake.
Semiosis and Interference by Sue Burke were my last two, but while interesting they didn’t go in the way I thought, and it feels like there’s a big hunk of… I hesitate to say wasted, but certainly unrealized potential. At the same time I feel like my expectations or preconceptions about what could or ought to happen are causing me to miss the point that Burke is trying to make.
I have so far bounced off the third and final entry in the series, Usurpation, but I have faith in both it and me and will take another crack at it soon.
