What are you reading these days?

The Nazis: A Warning from History by Laurence Rees.

It's a 1997 book after Rees and a BBC documentary team had spent 16 years interviewing nazis and those who'd experienced nazis. There's a tv series too, that I haven't seen.

This work explains the brutality, the dysfunction, the racism, discrimination and horrors we often forget and often don't tell in the history of the German nazi party and Second world war.

It's harrowing and extremely worth a read. Especially today where right wing extremism is on the rise many places, and authoritarianism is threatening the liberal democracy as the type of government many states aspire to.

It's only around 250 pages, so it's not one of these impenetrable war histories either. Highly recommend. I've got maybe the last quarter left.

I've been reading the Mistborn series. A while ago I started reading the Way of Kings, but Sanderson never really grabbed me, and I didn't finish it, which is not typical for me. I really liked how he finished off Jordan's Wheel of Time, so I wanted to give him another go.

I'm not actually loving it, but I'll definitely finish the first book.

I don’t have as much time for reading as I’d like. But I’m reading The Dark Forest, book two of the trilogy that starts with The Three Body Problem. I’m really enjoying it. It’s very fresh to me, smart and imaginative. Also respectful of its elders without being derivative at all.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh.
I've been meaning to read this one for a while, just because the central premise seemed intriguing. The main character, with the assistance of a wildly incompetent psychiatrist, attempts to sleep an entire year using psychotropic drugs to escape her feelings and increasingly alienating relationships.
I initially felt rather unable to sympathize with her as a character, but at as the story has been progressing, I'm kinda beginning to see why she is as she is. Emotionally neglected most of her life, with no real goals or ambitions.
A bit of a surreal read, but weirdly enthralling.

I've got three books on the go at the moment.

My high-end serious reading is The Words That Made Australia: How a Nation Came to Know Itself. It's a series of essays from the past 100 years, about the Australian way of life over the decades. I read one essay every week or so. I've read a lot of references to these various essays, but now I'm reading the sources. For example, I've learned that the phrase "the lucky country" was not the compliment everyone thinks it is.

My mid-range casual reading is Exiles: The Uplift Storm Trilogy. I was recently prompted to re-read the Uplift Trilogy, which I've always enjoyed. I've previously tried to finish all six books, but I got bogged down in the fourth book (Brightness Reef), and never got further than that. I read somewhere recently that some big mysteries pay off in the later books, so I'm currently slogging through Brightness Reef again, hoping to make it to the end this time. And it is a slog. I remember why I didn't finish it last time, but I'm determined this time.

My low-end comfort reading is The Narnia series - yet again. Just something light to wind down with before bed.

It is wonderful having an e-reader. I can carry all three of these books/series around with me wherever I go!

I made it through The Name of The Rose... I found challenging, but it did eventually grow on me and I hope to read it again eventually with a more careful eye. Making it through the beginning was hardest, with denser Latin and theology, but the book later unfurls into a mystery which drew me in much more and became a smoother experience. In the afterword the author states this was kind of intentional, or at least something he was aware of and didn't care to fix; the stated reason was to ensure readers who were presented the mystery were truly invested in the world of the book because in Eco's opinion the world of the story shapes it shapes in the way a bucket shapes water. It was a weeding that I nearly didn't get through, and I'm not sure I buy into the reasoning... which only makes it slightly annoying that I found it was, in fact, rewarding by the end.

I really ended up liking the main character in a way that felt like authentically getting to know somebody. The book has two levels of diagetic framing, with the author claiming to have found the text of the novel, and the text itself is the recounting of the events by the protagonist many years after they had occurred. So the writing style itself is as recounted by a monk who by the time he committed the story down was an old man, and this means he sometimes makes commentary on his own actions with the benefit of his current hindsight. I was a bit charmed by him!

I would characterize the main underlying theme of the book as symbols and communication - semiotics - and it really did make me think about it in a new way.

After that book, I wanted some lighter YA fare and ended up reading A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. It was great, I loved the world of Earthsea and the way its magic was both constrained by known rules but still very mysterious and fuzzy around the edges. The plot was nice, a coming of age story that perhaps I'm a bit old to relate to, but it was a good mechanism by which to explore the setting that for me was the main draw. Lovely quick and fun read.