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What are you reading these days?
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
Currently rereading the Tao Te Ching. It's my favorite book, and I don't think I've read any of it in the past five years... which probably accounts for much of my frustration during that time. It's a challenging book in many ways, full of paradox, pithy maxims, and seemingly opaque allusions. I've heard many people say that they just couldn't get into it, but finding the right translation can make all the difference. I've tried a few, and my preferred version, the Victor H. Mair translation, came out a generation ago. I haven't found another yet which makes the text understandable, yet preserves nuance and avoids being too prescriptive. It's a fantastic, potentially life-changing read.
Just finished "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Completely re-examined everything you thought you knew about the beginning of civilization. We were not just hunter-gatherers for 10,000 years and then suddenly yoked by civilization.
I have been meaning to read this for about a year now. I remember when it came out it seemed like everyone on my socials was reading it and raving about it. This is reminding me I should actually read it.
I read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Twice actually--I liked it so much after reading the ebook that I got the audiobook too and listened all over again. I don't think it's one I would recommend to many people I know, since it's intentionally pretty slow and repetitive, but I found it fascinating in the same way I find YouTube videos based on the lore of The Backrooms fascinating.
Just finished The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton with my bookclub. It's a historical murder mystery set in the 1630's on a Dutch Indiaman setting sail for Amsterdam from Batavia with a large cast of characters. I was really enjoying the story and some of the characters, and was really curious to see the final whodunit and how it'd all wrap up together.
Unfortunately the last 20 to 40 pages was fucking batshit crazy. Character assassinations left and right, outright stupidity, shit that barely made sense, no justice for the evil actions, and worst of all was the forming of the Murder Mystery Incorporated. I was sooooo flabbergasted that both the writer AND the editor were like uh yeah this ending is fine. It was like a completely different book! A much shittier, insane book.
The whole bookclub was pretty up in arms about it because it just didn't make sense. It felt so incredibly rushed and was immeasurably disappointing. Turton can build up a good mystery but bruv can't finish it for shit. This was something the reviews mentioned about his other mysteryish book The 7 and a half deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. That too, apparently, had a bad/rushed/nonsense ending.
I gave it a 3/5. Like I said, I really liked the rest of the book and was hooked, homie just doesn't know how to end it.
Last year I decided to read the full Animorph series. I had read some of them as a kid but didn't think I ever finished and even if I had, I didn't have any memory of it. They ended up being pretty fun reads so I've decided to revisit another childhood series. Redwall!
Right now I'm making my way through The Bellmaker, which is book 7 out of 22. They're definitely slower than the Animorph books but I'm enjoying reliving some of my childhood none the less.
Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett. I've been gradually reading through all his Discworld books; Wintersmith is no. 35. It's described on Wikipedia as "written for younger readers", but TP's writing is wonderful and there's little that makes it less than adult. He's so very human and humane and kind, it's a lovely world to inhabit and drowse off to (I read in bed and fall asleep). From Tiffany Aching, who's fourteen:
And many other gems
I'm finishing up This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth. Pretty good book if you're interested in a journalistic view of this stuff.
Currently doing a lot of reading of BJ Novak's The Book With No Pictures which the kid LOVES and it is an absolute blast to read.
Elsewhere I am reading Michael Cobley's Seeds of Earth which I picked up because it had a pull quote from Iain M Banks on the cover and have been mostly pretty disappointed by it. Not quite enough to put it down but it's fairly weak. Characters are not massively inspired, the plot is thin and meandering. The world seems like it could be interesting but there just isn't really enough going on in it. Maybe later books in the series get more exciting but I probably won't try. Especially because I just discovered Fantastic Fiction and have a whole raft of new authors to try next..
The Book With No Pictures was a big hit in our house - my middle and youngest children both loved it, and people still reference "Boo Boo Butt" in our house with some frequency. It was a genuine delight.
In terms of literal reading, I'm still working through the same three big books, with very little in terms of discussion to offer on each.
However, I'm on a road trip, listening to the audiobook for Tess Gunty's The Rabbit Hutch. Holy cow, this book is fascinating. Blurbs say it's about an odd young woman and her roommates, all of whom have aged out of the foster care system. It actually seems to be about all the people living in their building. It's the first book I've encountered that handles internet media without missing a step, featuring embedded articles and comments sections that feel exactly like the kind of schlock that fills up news sites and social networks. I'm only about a quarter of the way through it, but it's already got a huge cast of viewpoint characters, plenty of whom take up an entire chapter's perspective for no perceivable reason except that one of the more primary lives intersected with theirs in some way.
Gunty's use of irony is delectable and masterful. Characters will go on page-long rants, slip into dreamlike states, their stressors made clear, naming political actors and movements and pet peeves, and the narrator will follow right along with them. The new mother is, yes, depressed, yes, a little dissociated and too emotionally drained to be who she wants to be for her child, but all we hear as the audience is why the baby's eyes terrify her, why the death of all things dear is inevitable, why she is the problem despite all she can do. It's not afraid to name villains, but also not afraid to make them human, nor is it afraid to cast aspersions on characters that nearly anyone would uncritically accept as "the good guys".
The language is clear, but it is dense and allusory, with plenty of attention paid to the prose itself. When a book is met with such a positive reception as this was last year, I'm always very afraid of the disappointment. This one, unless it really goes off the rails, is shaping up to be entirely the opposite.