What are you reading these days?

I finished my second read through of the Nevermoor series in preparation for the 4th book. It has my childhood Harry Potter loving heart captured for sure. The world is beautiful and the characters are fun and interesting, I highly recommend the audio book, as the voices the reader uses really add a lot of life and character.

I'm on book 7 of the Expanse series, just past where I was in the show. I think the books are excellent and I'm enjoying some of the ways it's different from the show. I don't think Naomi in the show holds a candle to the character in the book, nor does Amos. I spent all of book 6 girding myself for heartbreak (If you saw the show you know what I mean), but was surprised to learn it was a TV show death, not a book death. I still wonder if I'm approaching it in the book and just don't know, but I'm happy not to lose a character I love.

I'm currently waiting on the second book in the Mistborn series after having absolutely fell in love with the first book. Brandon Sanderson is a writing force of nature, I don't understand it. The world and magic are so fleshed out and I'm so curious where book two takes the story after the last words from the Lord Ruler in book one.

I got about 90% of the way through Cassidy Hutchinson's ENOUGH and found myself both befuddled how she went so long without seeing the signs while working in the Trump WH, but also consoled to follow her through the crisis of conscience. I'm thankful for her actions at the end, especially knowing what she aspired to achieve and what it cost her. I think it's a book I'll try and recommend to a few Trumper friends who may find her story compelling.

I'm about to finish All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, after having read Blood Meridian last summer. Horses is less intense than Meridian, but still an engrossing read.

Both books make me want to eat beans on tortillas all day.

I had started Upgrade by Blake Crouch. The main premise of the novel is that gene manipulation had became illegal because it had caused a massive famine that the world is still trying to recover from. And the story follows the son of the scientist that had accidentally caused it, that is part of the law enforcement agency that enforces the U.S. version of the law. And he was involved in an explosion that some of the shards were carrying some edited bacteria.

I am also reading Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel. This one is interesting because the way that the novel is set up is interviews, like that of World War Z, by people that have first hand experience with, what is essentially, alien tech.

The last book is Breakfast with Seneca:A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living by David Fideler. The book is how to live like a Stoic. It is interesting because Fideler had pointed out that stoicism and Stoicism are different things. The difference is that Stoics do in fact show emotion, they just try to regulate the negative ones like anger. While stoicism shows no emotion, which funny enough Stoics believe that this is not healthy.

I started Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Mostly selected it because I saw it on a Hugo awards list from a couple years ago and "necromancers in space" captured me.

Several chapters in and I'm finding it fairly engaging. Reviews on it seem to be mixed and I wonder if it's a book that looped in a lot of different genre readers. I wanted something kinda fantasy and it does that and sci-fi is my genre of choice so it ticks that box. The main character is quite irreverent. Interested to see how magic, which is so critical to this world, and interacts with the usual sci-fi tropes.

I finished up The Mountain In The Sea last week. I deeply enjoyed the second half of this book. The first half was a bit slow in getting set up for my tastes but the second half, as things start coming together and the more philosophical (even if not truly that deep) aspects start becoming more evident, really caught me. While not a particularly heavy book, some of the questions of inter-species communication and culture are longer lasting.

I have started, finally, into the Silo series. The first story in Wool caught me hard. The immediate understanding of the setting and place are masterful for what was (to my understanding) a stand-alone short story before becoming the larger series. I'm not terribly far into the series yet and I am finding it very enjoyable.

I also started reading Africa Risen a short story collection by black authors. I'm a few stories deep and there have been some strong winners and less strong showings. A few of the stories are spectacular examples of Afrofuturism and, having just read Mountain in the Sea, it is enjoyable to read and reflect on how different culture and communication styles play into the myths and storytelling of different cultures.

Recently, I finished I Know Why the Caged Birds Sing by Maya Angelou and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. The books were interesting reads and I enjoyed the storytelling of both authors. (I'm actually thinking of starting a blog for fun where I review/discuss/analyze the books that I've read, but I'm still trying to work out the details of that.)

As for my following reads, I was considering Gather Together in My Name, also by Maya Angelou, as it's the second book in her autobiography series. Then there's the Tildes Book Club book, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. It's the first book to be discussed (in early March) so I think I'll be reading that as well.

I started Cloud Atlas for the Tildes book club. (Discussion will begin in early March).

I just finished Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin. It is a beautiful novel that is a respectful retelling of parts of the Aeneid, and some events after the end of the poem, in Lavinia's voice. Unlike Dido, Lavinia doesn't speak or do much in the original poem. Le Guin tells her story and the rest of the story in relation to hers. Unlike the main character in Atwood's Penelopeiada, Lavinia in this book doesn't resent most aspects of her own culture, but there is natural tension as she lives out her culturally assigned roles and strives for personal fulfillment. There is some clever writing in which Lavinia interacts with the poet Virgil within the book.

I read Endurance by Lansing which is a grim Antarctic survival tale that is very well written.

I read Miss Benson's Beetle by Rachel Joyce about an amatuer naturalist who goes beetle collecting on a south pacific island, and her assistant who is a strange character. This book is funny and sad and interesting.

I recently finished Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis, a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. That got me thinking about re-reading other stuff by Lewis which now has me doing a parallel reading of Out of the Silent Planet and Andy Weir's The Martian. It's interesting to contrast a mostly religious story about one guy stuck on Mars from the 1930s with a mostly scientific story about one guy stuck on Mars from the 2010s. I'm thinking about doing Burrough's A Princess of Mars next just for another perspective.

To Green Angel Tower is taking me a very long time to get through, mostly because I'm dealing with some IRL stuff this+last week (and also because the audiobook is over 20 hours long at 3x speed). I wanted to read ebooks rather than listen to audiobooks so I am going through my TBR of books without audiobooks. Read Blood Over Bright Haven by M.L. Wang and, wow, that was, uh, yeah, a book, I guess. It had words. I hated it so much I kind of want to write a full review about it but I also want to spend 0 time ever again thinking about this book. TLDR: Literally the most predictable plot I have ever read, and I'm pretty sure I only got 1 detail of my prediction wrong because she changed her mind about the ending and left in accidental foreshadowing that was no longer needed. If not then the book is even worse than I currently think of it. And jesus what a thin veneer over a thesis statement of "global capitalism and resource extraction is bad." Couldn't even create entities with ambiguous morals, it just had to be everyone who is part of the system is evil. I don't remember the last time I've been this angry I wasted my time with a book before.

On the very opposite side of the coin, I'm reading Dragonfired, book 3 in the Orconomics trilogy. It's WONDERFUL!!!!! J. Zachary Pike is one of the funniest authors I've ever read, and his social commentary is so well done, plus I'm laughing out loud every 5 minutes. Also honorable mention for his section/chapter transitions, which never fail to hit their mark. There isn't enough comedic fantasy in the world but this trilogy more than pulls its weight.

To Green Angel Tower has been on the back burner for me mostly since finishing the first half, been reading more on the literary side of things.

Getting close to finished with Ulysses, although it's my understanding that some of the last few chapters are the longest. I finished up the Oxen of the Sun section, and that was probably the most difficult so far, but like everything else in the book hugely rewarding.

Also am about halfway through The Crying of Lot 49. Have wanted to read more Pynchon since I read Inherent Vice. While the made up songs are kind of hit or miss, I think every fake film or tv show Pynchon describes in his books are hilarious. His description of the man, boy, and dog submarine team horribly dying made me laugh out loud.

As is annual tradition, I’ve been rereading Hegel. Phenomenology of Spirit is such a poorly understood book; I really wish that people grasped

I’m 300-something pages deep into The Power Broker. It’s very solid literature and I haven’t been bored per se… but I’ve definitely hit a slump.

Any Caro fans wanna nudge me along, please? <3

E: And for the unfamiliar, The Power Broker is the (nonfiction) tale of an early/mid-1900s reformer bureaucrat from NY, who broke-bad and pulled some duplicitous legislative shenanigans to make himself despot of the NY state parks system for several decades. Infamously over a thousand pages long, and extremely well-researched - but delivered in rather accessible and entertaining prose.

My wife and I picked six different books to read this year together as part of our anniversary gift together. We are currently on Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile.

She is incredible for getting snappy interesting dialogue. It’s been a fun go so far!

I just finished Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone. I've been a big fan of his since he first came on the scene with his Craft series (Two Serpents Rise is pretty stand alone and legitimately one of my favroite "just for fun" reads that I've come back to repeatedly, but this one I bounced off of a couple of times and while it definitely does pick up once they get through the Getting the Band Together phase and was a fairly fun an enjoyable read overall I didn't LOVE it and I honestly don't think it'll cross my mind again. I know other people liked it, and there's nothing WRONG with it but it didn't feel fun enough to be thing I read for the sheer pleasure of it and it didn't have enough depth to feel like it was saying something or making me think.

Currently working through But What if We're Wrong by Chuck Klosterman and it's actually fairly enjoyable and engaging. The premise is that we all know people in the past were wrong about any number of objective and subjective things, and everyone agrees that it's insane to think our current understanding of the world and tastes is the end state of reality, so what does that actually look like in practice. Klosterman is a music and pop cutlure writer and it's occasionally annoying HOW involved he gets on minutiae level details of musical history and taste breakdowns, but there's a lot of honestly fairly interesting insight to be had about what matters to us now, and our taste and understanding, being almost arbitrary and how differently things could have gone and what that means about what people will think about the world we're living in now.

After a recommendation from a friend, I'm listening to the audio book for Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter's The Long Earth. I'm less than an hour into it, so I don't have much to say about it yet. But I haven't listened to or read a book in months now (shame on me), so I figured I'd jump at the chance to post in this thread while I can :)

I'm in the 3rd chapter of Michael Cisco's Animal Money and it's kinda slow going because I keep feeling the need to go back and check previous pages to confirm that the person I think is narrating is actually the current speaker. Each of the 5 main characters is described by other characters so some of the time you can tell when the narration has switched perspectives between one paragraph and the next, but I'm pretty sure I've found at least one spot where a character, identifiable by his speech pattern as described by another character, refers to himself having an injury that was earlier attributed to a different character, so now I don't even know. Maybe I need to make one of those grids like what you use to solve a logic puzzle. Maybe it won't help because the author intentionally described the characters incorrectly in one spot or another. At least one character is knowingly experiencing hallucinations, and others are either knowingly (suspectingly?) or unknowingly, plus something attributed to a hallucination maybe isn't really, so who even knows. It's entertaining, when I can make any progress.

I just finished reading Gloomspite by Andy Clark

It's a...Warhammer book. Would I recommend it even to a fan? Probably not.

I ended-up reading it because I've been trying to get myself hyped and excited about building and painting my new Warhammer army, which is related to the book. I have been successful, but while the book starts off pretty strong, I do feel like it falls off in the very last 20% or so. Some stuff in it just makes me roll my eyes, such as the description of the antagonists, which feels extremely forced, as it goes into semi-elaborate detail basically describing the models from the tabletop game.

I mean, I guess this is what I expected, but it still just takes me right out of the book when a character, who realistically ought to be seeing things that are completely indescribable to them, describe something perfectly. It ends-up just feeling like marketing rather than a story that really needed to be told; which again, I guess it is, but I always hope for something better.

How To Own The World, because inflation is out of control and pensions are unlikely, and it looks like I might have to invest a lot and/or for a long time in order to attain a comfortable quality of life in my old-ish age.

Happiness: A Very Short Introduction. It's part of the Very Short Introductions series of Oxford University Press. It's quite good, and I wish I had read it before. I've been reading philosophical takes about how to live a good life for years, but there is nothing that quite replaces scientific psychology when it comes to happiness and well-being. Philosophers do have something to offer when it comes to the question of happiness, but naturally their opinions are old and much less in-tune with reality of human psychology.

Very Short Introduction series is such a good series. The quality differs between authors, which is to be expected, but among the books I read I never got the feeling that the author doesn't know what they're talking about. There are hundreds of books, from arts and culture to philosoph, and both natural and social sciences. I'd definitely recommend this series to anybody. The books are quite short too, with generally between 100-200 pages.

I'm currently around 6 hours (chapter 7) inn Neal Stephenson's Seveneves and although I like it it's kinda boring and I don't know if I'm willing to put another 26 hours into this if it doesn't pick up soon. I like the scientific approach and find it interesting but it gets a bit excessive at times and makes me think about Patrick Batemans obsessive ramblings about music. Anyone here read it and can tell me if these first chapters are representing the rest accurately?