What are you reading these days?

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is a graphic novel by Kate Beaton, who wrote the Hark! A Vagrant web comic.

It's rather depressing, but still good. Recommended. A major theme is sexual harassment due to the extreme imbalance in gender ratios and the terrible cultural norms that result from that.

("Graphic novel" is a bit of a misnomer here since it's autobiographical non-fiction, though with some names changed.)

Been reading The Three Body Problem for a while now. [WARNING: SPOILERS]
For those not familiar with the book, it is a hard scifi book written by a pretty successful Chinese author, focusing on how China (and the world) would handle first contact with an alien species. It is written very differently from other western scifi books, so certainly an interesting experience for me. I must admit I didn't much care for the beginning - it was much too slow and confusing. But the book evolved really well towards the middle, when the stories start coming together. It's also interesting to see the (not so hidden) criticism of the Chinese government and society coming through. The take the author has on the nature of science and particle physics in general is a bit amateurish to me. As a former particle physicist, I found it pretty hard to suspend my disbelief faced with some pretty blatant errors in the author's understanding. His sophons are just not how physics works - he could've used much simpler tools to accomplish his desired plot. Other than that, I found his alien race very mind-provoking and interesting. His "human computer" idea initially sounded silly, but was later well-explained and generated more interest. Their inability to lie and how their thoughts can be openly read felt to me like a take on the the Chinese government's desire to monitor and control their people. And the way their society evolved as a response to living on a planet in a chaotic solar system was well laid out and developed. Overall I think it's a pretty good book. Definitely recommended.

I started The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up yesterday, and I've been reading it between work tasks. It's a short book, and I imagine I'll finish reading it later today. I already dove in and sorted through all my clothes last night (two trash bags full of things to donate!), and I'll probably sort through books tonight, since that's a very small category for me.

Ulysses is really quite good, I'm a bit disappointed that I can't play the contrarian about it. It isn't suddenly my favourite novel or anything, but it's an incredible work. Just glancing at a random page evokes a crystalline rainbow, fragmentary spectra alluding to the infinite with more-than-oft-credited acceptance and humility to that infeasible quest.

In its wake, The Sun Also Rises. Almost its opposite in style, but surprisingly orthogonal to its predecessor, the balance between portrayal of human frailty and vicious and engrossing travelogue is the key here. "Hardboiled", "sparse", "lean", but still rich and comprehensive, like the central Spanish beef.

Suttree, Vineland, The Recognitions, these, I've read a lot of "ne'er-do-well drunkards ponder existence" lately, I see. What can harness these themes and this excessive craft with purpose? Of course, Blood Meridian.

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.

Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.

In truth, I can't name a more beautiful start to a book. The first quarter of the novel doesn't let expectations fall, either.

I picked up one of those fancy-cover Barnes & Noble books called Classic Ghost Stories, since it’s that time of year. The first three stories are by Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. This book does not include Washington Irving, and I have to read that each October, so I’ll find that somewhere else. Anyone want to recommend some good Halloween’y stories?

With Shantaram on Apple TV, I decided to finally read the book. I've had it kicking around for ages... and I have to say, its a remarkable work. I'd definitely recommend it for anyone.

After this I'm going to breeze through Shawshank and then GRRM's Fire & Blood

This is technically a self-help book - though that phrase has very bad connotations to me and I hate to use it to describe something so insightful and, in my case, genuinely life-changing.

Atomic Habits by James Clear. Lately I've been working on improving myself in broad ways - cultivating skills and habits that will hopefully act as force multipliers for everything that I want to accomplish in life. Atomic Habits has been a big part of that.

A few months ago, this video summary of the book opened my eyes to the fact that was I thinking about motivation and habit-forming completely wrong, and that had led me into a rut of false helplessness. In reality, improving at life isn't about cultivating and maintaining "motivation" or "discipline" - those can be useful second-line tactics, but they're exhausting and unsustainable in the long run. The key insight that I got from this video is that there are ways to engineer my life so that I'll automatically and effortlessly choose to do the things that matter to me - no discipline required.

After using the tactics in the video to regain more and more of the energy that my chronic illness stole from me, I finally have enough control of my life to start reading the book itself - which has been almost as life-changing as the initial insights from the video. I highly recommend it to anyone who struggles with controlling themselves, or doing the things that they know they need to do.