What are you reading these days?

I just finished reading Dead Silence, a haunted house story in space, and thought it was alright. Akin to a relatively mindless space horror blockbuster movie.

Now I'm reading Reality Is Not What It Seems and... it is giving me a headache through no fault of the author, just the concepts getting explained are breaking my layman's brain. I just wanted to poke my head into wherever the fringes of new science are going and ye gods is it some complex stuff. I don't know that I'll have retained any of it by the time I'm done reading.

The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships by Neil Strauss. This book is having an enormous impact on me right now and I'm so grateful it was recommended to me just now considering where I am in life. I've read it with my wife simultaneously and we both agree that it really hits home with us on different levels. No matter if you believe in monogamy or other constellations of relationships this book is for you because the thoughts, dilemmas, traumas, doubts, shames, addictions are dealt with head on and authentically with no filter. He's a Rolling Stone writer so while the topics are sometimes heavy it's still a entertaining and easy read. I cannot recommend this book enough.

Currently going through two big rereads: my first of Moby-Dick, and my second of Mason & Dixon. They're both such fun, both Melville's and Pynchon's usage of language are so playful and poetic, and the intentional archaisms complement one another, even if the degrees of intentionality differ.

This time with Moby-Dick, I'm trying to focus on the character-scale, since my first reading was centered on the philosophical. (Poor Starbuck!) I'm right around the first lowering of the boats, and the tensions, between the thrills of the hunt and the unveiling of the fourth crew, are overwhelming. I'm finding Queequeg a lot tricksier this time, and feel like I'm understanding the "management style" of Ahab better than before.

Returning to Mason & Dixon, it's very cozy. This time around, the family dynamics of the LeSpark/Cherrycoke household are much more tangible, the dubiousness of the Rev Wicks' life story seems more plain, Mason's mental disorder more impactful. Dixon's capacity to play the straight man is pretty obviously necessary, something I'd entirely missed my first read. The Battle of the Seahorse was still more or less a mystery, though the interlinking machinations of the colonial corporations and the tides of "progress" They rise upon loom like somehow the answer. Similarly, Neville Maskelyne's clumsy insanity is clearly, though ambiguously, a comment about the ways that nobility never actually relinquished their powers of esteem to science, but...how and why? What about this deranged nepotee justifies his later (real) appointment to the highest position of astronomy in the world, as well as his placement in this book for so much longer than other fictionalized real people? Am I just being trapped in Mason's own paranoia?

Meanwhile, in the background, I continue to push through Finnegans Wake. The group I planned to keep pace with has long outstripped me, but after hours of study, the first chapter nearly reads coherently to me, at least at times. The message still seems ultimately unsteady, like no matter how much the reader grasps and considers, the story cannot be as singular as the majority of published scholars seem to insist. Interpretation doesn't promise any truth here, just opportunities for fun and games. The experience of understanding without concept or knowledge is unsettling, but maybe good for the soul?

Currently reading George Eliot's Middlemarch. It's a bit of a slog at 900-odd pages with quite a few characters to keep track of, but it's worth the effort. A great social commentary on 1830s rural England.

I also recently finished The Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina, an investigative journalist who has spent years covering a variety of illegal or unethical activities taking place on the world's oceans. It was completely gripping and quite an eye-opener as to the brutal reality of life at sea.

The book I have been enjoying most recently is The Very Hard Book by Idan Ben-Barak and Philip Bunting. It's hilarious but every page really makes you think as well as laugh, and I love the solutions my kid has been coming up with to some of the book's challenges. When asked to "read this book again for the first time" he suggested we read it back to front rather than the usual way around. Also he consistently nails the Stroop test which I really struggle with, because he can't read.

Since I last posted in one of these threads I read a John Grisham novel, The Pelican Brief. I mostly read it out of politeness on the suggestion of a family member. John Grisham is so obviously outside my interest I don't know why I did it. Hated it, unsurprisingly.

I thought those "she breasted boobily down the stairs" jokes were over the top, I had no idea they were targeting John Grisham specifically. The main character is a bright law student who is so sexy, she's competent and attractive and when you really explore the depth of her character you realize how great she would look in a string bikini. Of course she has daddy issues and dates older men: the more cynical and alcoholic they are, the better. Nothing about this book was good enough to make up for all the eye-rolling.

For non-fiction I read ADHD 2.0, having recently been diagnosed. It was interesting, I particularly found the connection between balance and focus intriguing. The metaphor of having a sports-car brain with bicycle brakes comes up a lot and feels a little self-aggrandizing but also works annoyingly well as an analogy: they emphasize throughout that the disorder can be both a blessing and a curse depending on the circumstances, so a good course of action is to try and cultivate the circumstances under which it becomes a blessing. Some of it did feel like bunk though, like they had one bit about a personality test that I found unconvincing, but I'd say I got something out of it overall.

Finally, in my quest to get though the occasional classic, I'm reading The Grapes of Wrath currently. I'm not far in but not surprised it's considered Steinbeck's best work. Some of it is still hitting pretty close to home.

I just finished the first Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. I'm going to give it a solid B. I was struck by how the setting reminded me quite a bit of the video game Sunless Skies, and I realized that I kind of want to read a Sunless Skies novel, because I love the weird dystopian setting of a broken world where victorian steam trains sky travel through space. I haven't looked through this article about influences for the game in much detail, but I might pick something from this for a summer read.

I started the next Mistborn series. It remains OK.

I just finished reading A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal and it was fantastic. I immediately picked up another book by Ben Macintyre called The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War. It has started out just the same, so I'm excited to spend time there. I'm also on the ninth book in the Liz Carlyle series, Breaking Cover. It's not a masterpiece, but Stella Remington's books are a fun, easy read. I'm also working my way through John Piper's Providence and I am reading a Strategic Management book for my MBA program.

I'm reading A Voyage to Arcturus in the Standard Ebooks edition. This seems to be a common thing to say about it, but it's unlike anything I've ever read.

It starts with a seance but then quickly moves to another planet. Sometimes the location shifts from chapter to chapter; the protagonist inexplicably starts growing other limbs and arms, including a telepathic tentacle and a third eye. The whole thing is suffused with a kind of gnostic philosophy or worldview that I can recognize is there, but which I can't begin to understand. It's out there, really out there. It was written in 1920.

I don't know anything about Harold Bloom beyond that he's a famous literary critic. Here's him on it:

"I have read it literally hundreds of times, indeed obsessively I have read several copies of it to shreds. [...] It affected me personally with more intensity and obsessiveness than all the works of greater stature and resonance of our time."

I recently read 'Debt: The First 5000 Years', which takes an anthropological approach to explaining the origins of debt, money, slavery, and a lot of other features of modern society (and by extension modern capitalism). I found it really interesting, although I'm still struggling to put it in context with the rest of my knowledge of history and the world because it simply presents such a different picture than I'm used to.

I was wondering if anyone else had read the book and what their opinions were on it, good or bad. I looked at some of the scholarly discussion around it and it seems to have been both defended by critics and some historians/leftist economists, but is pretty widely criticized by more traditional economists and libertarian scholars. Which is essentially an endorsement for me, but it still shows that there's some debate around it's accuracy I suppose. I don't think it provides a perfect explanation of the world as it is now but it does present some very interesting observations and asks some thoughtful questions of the reader.

I'm slowly working my way through the Wheel of Time series. Just finished up the first book and is absolutely in love with the writing and the characters. I thought it would have a slower start as a good friend of mine that has read the series always droned about how boring the first book is, but I was hooked from the Trolloc attack in the beginning until the end of the book and I'm really looking forward to how the series progress.