14
votes
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.
Part way through I Capture the Castle which is charming, coming of age and seems to be working toward a love story.
Started Stephen King 11/22/63 which is an interesting time travel story with detailed americana.
Slowly making progress through Enemies and Neighbors by Ian Black about Israel and Palestine,
same for Invisible Women Data Bias in a World Designed for Men which is highlighting some serious gaps in medical knowledge between what is known about men vs known about women.
I enjoyed 11/22/63 very much. I would agree with @tomf and say that the miniseries with the same name is worth a watch (once you finish the book). It stars James Franco with Chris Cooper playing the diner owner. I originally watched it on Hulu when it first came out and it appears that it's still there.
11.22.63 had a really good miniseries that is worth watching if you haven't already. They included details from the book almost as easter eggs for the readers, but without letting it take away from their telling.
Since this is a book thread and it's kind of relevant, I'm going to share one of my favorite pieces of trivia: C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley both died on 11/22/63, the same day as JFK.
I just finished the Three Body Problem. The overall premise was interesting, but the writing is absolutely terrible. My understanding is that it has something to do with the translation from Chinese. It doesn't make me want to read the rest of the series.
So I'm actually going to start the Bobiverse series next.
I thought I was the only one who didn’t enjoy TBP after how much it’s been recommended to me; totally agree about the writing. Bobiverse is awesome, you’ll enjoy it.
I thought Three Body Problem was good enough to keep going and read The Dark Forest. I'm glad I did, as Dark Forest was, by far, my favorite of the three.
For what it's worth, Bobiverse read to me like techie wish fulfillment fantasy. I enjoyed it, but it was conspicuously free of challenging or novel ideas. (Which is something I like, sometimes.)
I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels that way about Bobiverse. It's certainly not bad. I think it's great in audiobook format, where you can listen kind of passively1. It's fun and entertaining, but as you said, it's not at all challenging or new, which I tend to prefer.
So I'm not saying going from Bobiverse is bad, but for anyone reading, I wouldn't go into it expecting anything similar to TBP.
1
I'm not saying audiobooks are inherently to be listened to passively, just that they can be. There was actually a fairly recent study that showed neglible difference in comprehension and retention among college-educated native english speakers presented with non-fiction text via either audiobooks or e-books. E.g. An audiobook can be pretty much the same as actually reading.Started First Law, it's March and I finished 2023 /r/fantasy Bingo so it's a perfect time to read a long series, though I'm reading a bit slowly right now (for me) and I don't think I'll finish it before April, but oh well.
Read the final trilogy of Realm of the Elderlings by Robin Hobb. Cried a lot. Beautiful ending to the saga. Also read Naamah's Trilogy by Jacqueline Carey, it's a time for cleaning up my TBR (and Bingo had that awful "Druids" square so a trilogy featuring a druid was perfect). It was.....okay I guess. Terrible compared to Phedre's and Imriel's trilogies but at face value it was okay.
Naamah's trilogy
Someone described Bao as a "budget Joscelin" to me a while ago and that's so true lol. I found their love so uncompelling, and because he's such a secondary character to her, I found him unbelievably boring. Also her entire motivation is like "ah what is the goddess controlling my fate telling me to do" which...doesn't really make a character compelling. Still, it's nice to spend time in that world, I love Terre d'Ange so much.I've also been reading some of Tildes's nonfiction recommendations. Finished The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World last night after reading Kingbird Highway, and I think I'm going to read The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 next.
I'm about 150 pages into A Confederacy of Dunces. I'm absolutely loving it. Cannot believe it was written so many years back, it reads so fresh and the humour makes me laugh out loud just about every other page.
Just a few chapters into LeGuin's Earthsea series. Too early to say much, though while looking at the book seems like it'd be a quick read, actually reading the text is slower than expected. She doesn't use commas and clause separation in ways that I expect so I have to re-read many sentences to get the flow and emphasis right.
Her writing in the first book almost feels like early modern English or KJV style, but I remember it feeling more natural in the rest of the series. I also like to point out whenever this series comes up that she returned to it years later and added more books, so anyone who only read the original trilogy should read the rest; all of it is good.
Le Guin uses some pretty significant Philosophical influences on Earth Sea. I don't want to spoil anything but she is working hard to write precisely and wants you to think about the world and characters she builds.
Personally I'm working my way through the books about Mars from the last recommendations thread.
With my 10 and 12 year old we're reading The Wild Robot which is cute and has us excited for the upcoming movie. With my 7 year old we just finished Finn and the Intergalactic Lunchbox and it was a lot of fun, it goes 0-60 in the first chapter and grabbed my son's attention.
About 2/3's of the way through The City and The City and I'm really enjoying it so far. It's my first Mieville novel but he's got a fun way of writing that really clicks with me. I'll definitely be adding Kraken to my to read list.
Setting Spoilers
Took me a little bit to understand the shared geography but different cultures of Beszel and Ul Qoma, I originally thought they were in different dimensions but it just turning out to be human conditioning was really cool.
Very interested in learning more about Breach as well, the world building is just really intriguing.
Super nerdy, but I’ve been reading “Hypermedia Systems” from the creators of HTMX. Fairly informative read, and as a front end dev that spends his day on React, the concepts in the book are a breath of fresh air.
I have been reading Strike a Match 4 over by Christmas. I only started seriously reading the previous month but it's been a series I really enjoy so far! The whole concept of a post apocalypse rebuilding and I really enjoy the situations the author came up with.
Lately Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard which has one of the best pretenses of a novel ever. It's a bit like Robinson Crusoe but the protagonist is completely isolated inside London's highway network. I like it better than Crash.
Before that I was reading the non-fiction Spatial Models of Parliamentary Voting which interests me because: (1) I work on a web site for public opinion data, and (2) I've long been interested in dimensional reduction. I'd tried the dimensional reduction methods I've used for continuous variables on polling data before (which is either yes/no or a Likert scale) but these didn't work well. The book describes the DW-NOMINATE model which uses a very different approach to make a spatial map of legislators based on their polling history. I found it a little novel to read something math heavy by social scientists. More about the model here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOMINATE_(scaling_method)
Dipping back into Anne of Green Gables yet again.
The first time I ever read it was well before my 12 year old came along. But she has an extremely Anne-like personality, while her best friend is very Diana-like. It was rather shocking to me on a re-read of Anne after my daughter got her ADHD diagnosis (and I had started learning about ADHD) when I noticed just how well L. M. Montgomery captures that personality type. I'd swear that Anne would be diagnosed if she were a real person living today.
Chapter 13 is by far my favorite capsule portrait of it. I sometimes jokingly quote Marilla from that chapter:
The American Plate but Libby H O'Connell.
It's ok. It's a food history book about 100 foods that are quintessentially American. I love learning about where different foods come from, and the whys of how they are, but I'm not super into this one. I think it might be because I already know a lot about what she's talking about, thanks to the internet, Tasting History, and Unwrapped.
"Plague of the Swords", 4th tome of the Traitor Son cycle by Miles Cameron.