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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.
I started the new Percy Jackson book that came out. Yes, I'm in my 30s, but I fell in love with the series two years ago, and have always loved world mythology and modern retellings. I've also been so impressed with Rick Riordan and how he manages to make his world so inclusive.
If anyone else wants to chime in with other world mythology stories I should read, I love to hear them!
The King Must Die and Bull from the Sea by Mary Renault retell the minotaur story and the labyrinth.
Til We Have Faces by C S Lewis retells the myth of Psyche.
Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin retells the Aeneid in the voice of Lavinia, Aeneas wife.
ooohhhhh I'll have to add all of those to my TBR (as if it's not already super super long đđ)
I listened to Circe by Madeline Miller relatively recently. The audiobook narrator had the most beautiful voice, and the prose was so melodic, it was really lovely. However, Circe had like 1000 years of story to impart (including Odysseus's visit), so quite a lot of it is written in a passive voice. I'd highly recommend the audiobook, but I can't say how compelling the text would be on its own.
Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan is excellent. I've listened to the audiobook and liked it enough that I read the text, as well. It tells the story of Xingyin, the daughter of Chang'e (the moon goddess in Chinese mythology) and her mortal husband, Houyi, as Xingyin tries to free Chang'e from basically being chained to the moon. [I found the second book, Heart of the Sun Warrior, to be relatively unnecessary; Daughter of the Moon Goddess doesn't leave any loose ends so the second book is kind of like an unrelated adventure in the same world with some new and some known characters. Still a good time but it's not exactly a sequel.]
I do have Circe in my TBR as well, and I actually have the audiobook! I'm glad to hear the book is beautifully read. I read Song of Achilles and fell in love with it. It's such a beautiful story written from a perspective that we don't often get to hear. So if you liked Circe, I bet you would like Song of Achilles if you haven't read it yet.
Daughter of the Moon Goddess is going on my TBR!
I also recommend Children of Blood and Bone if you're interested in African mythology. It's YA, but it's a very well-written and compelling story. The sequel also recently came out, but I haven't gotten to it yet.
I liked both Circe and Song of Achilles in both book and audio format so I'll cosign those too!
Song of Achilles is on my TBR list! Just haven't reached it yet. Galatea is a short story by the same author that my library has so that's on my list too!
I'll add Children of Blood and Bone to my TBR! I've seen it around but haven't looked into it yet - thank you for the rec!
I've started Daughter of the Moon Goddess but had to return it to the library so thanks for the reminder and the good review!
I missed the last one, so I have a longish list.
I finished Station Eleven, which is probably one of the most hopeful "End of the world as we know it" books I have read. A central theme is "survival is insufficient", both before and after the end of the world, with the stories interwoven. Highly recommended.
Then I listened to Some Desperate Glory, the Hugo winner for best novel. The themes of indoctrination and how much you can be a product of your bubble were explored in interesting ways. I found the characters a bit shallow, but the story was good.
Then I took a break from the Hugos to read Max Barry's Providence. I usually enjoy his books, and this one was no exception. Providence has a very similar central theme to Some Desperate Glory, namely
mild thematic spoilers
the risks of relying on AI to make all your decisions
The similarity is a coincidence, no planning on my part at all. What's weird is that a million years ago, when I first read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, the very next book I happened to read was Lexicon by Max Barry. And those two books have a very similar central theme,
mild thematic spoilers
Neurolinguistic hacking of the human brain
So IDK what it is about Max Barry's books. It's not a recently released book. Maybe Emily Tesh is a Max Barry fan. Anyway...
@zipf_slaw and @Eji1700 since you both mentioned finishing Snowcrash, I hope you will give Lexicon a try. It's a completely different vibe but a very good book.
After Providence, I started The Terraformers a Nebula finalist. I am nearly finished with it, but this is already quite long so maybe I'll write about that one in the next thread.
The HBO adaption is excellent.
Thanks, I will have to check it out.
How'd you like the writing style of Station Eleven? I've read a few of Emily st. John Mandel's novels (station 11, last night in mtl, sea of tranquility), and as much as the stories have been enjoyable and I might well pick up another of her books in the future, there's something about her writing style that makes me feel like.. something's missing? A bit detached maybe? I've never been able to put my finger on it, though.
I listened to it on audiobook, so that may color my response somewhat. I found the narrator extremely calm/mellow, which fits the writing style, which I find pretty flat. Even in the most intense action moments, the characters thoughts and the narration are very introspective. I'm not sure it's my favorite style, but for this story, I think it helped me get through the feelings around the world ending.
Prior to 2016, I don't think it would have bothered me. But with everything happening since then, I sometimes DNF those kinds of books because it feels a little too possible. I appreciated Station Eleven for seeing beyond the loss to the rebuilding, and that just because things have changed doesn't make them inherently bad, even if they are very different.
Still working on Gravity's Rainbow, getting close to the end of Part 3. I'm sure I'll have more thoughts to share when I finish.
Also started reading Fevre Dream, GRRM's vampire book, for the Halloween season. It's an unusual setting for a vampire story, about steamboats on the Mississippi river in the antebellum south. It so far seems to be as much about steamboat racing as it is about vampires, and I'm here for it!
If you like this sort of thing, Anne Rice's vampire works have a similar setting.
I'm currently taking a break from hard science-fiction like Greg Egan's 'Diaspora' and Vernor Vinge's 'A Fire Upon the Deep' to read a little of Ursula K. Le Guin's work- namely 'The Left Hand of Darkness' (which I loved immensely), and 'The Dispossessed'. It's still science fiction in many ways, but the focus is more on society than technology.
If you didn't see it, there is a Tildes book club discussion thread for the Dispossessed.
Book Club discussion - Spoilers the Dispossessed
If you like some older more social science fiction you might like The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri Tepper - definitely shows its age but the premise is a post apocalyptic civilization, women live in and run the cities with the barracks outside the cities run by the men with festivals for sex/reproduction. Boys are sent to their fathers at a certain age and are given a chance to return. Men that live in the city serve the women, and the boys choose which life they want.
More stuff happens but that's the setup.
I'm reading Kindred for Tildes Book Club.
I'm halfway through Island of the Missing Trees, a family story of immigrants to the UK from Cypress, representing a mixed marriage of a Turkish and a Greek Cypriot and their daughter and a sister/aunt. It is a beautiful sad thoughtful story.
I'm halfway through James by Percival Everett, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn in the voice of Jim. It is subtle and thoughtful and satiric and a very enjoyable book to read, especially since the original was assigned for me to read in school.
I'm reading a biography, Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA and the Battle Against Thalidomide.
Currently about 1/2 way through Jeff VanderMeer's Authority.
Very different from Annihilation with some of the horror coming from the drudgery and toxicity of office bureaucracy lol. Really though, it's definitely building and building towards something, and the horror is very subtle and unknown.
Once I'm finished with Authority, I'll move on to Acceptance and finish the trilogy in time to get the 4th book for Christmas.
I also grabbed a few new books recently, including This Is How You Lose the Time War, and it seems really fun so I'll try squeeze that in somewhere too.
I still don't know how I feel about that one. Finished it a week or two ago and found it to be intruiging, but it was a bit of a shock to read a story where none of the background or setting or hardly any of the activities in the book meant anything useful or was worth remembering. Kind of off-putting after coming from a story like Hyperion where understanding the details of the world was so critical.
I read (well, audiobooked) the area x trilogy, and remember quite enjoying all 3, even though each felt rather distinctive from the other. A little too long ago for me to remember much detail or add a more in-depth comment, though I'd like to revisit them one day when my memory of the original reading has degraded a bit more and I'm low on new reads. I hope your enjoying them!
Edit - I completely forgot there's a fourth coming out, so thank you for the reminder :)
I read them earlier in the year and loved how deep you sit inside these characters head.
The last book that I finished for personal reading was The Memory Police. This has to be one of the strangest works of dystopian fiction I have read, but in many ways one of the more fulfilling ones because of this. I think the integration and parallels created by the manuscript the protagonist works on throughout the text is one of the most interesting things Iâve seen in this genre. Itâs hardly a new idea to have a story within a story / frame narrative, but I just have yet to see it done within the dystopian genre let alone this effectively. I sadly canât say much more without spoiling the text, but if you love a funky dystopian narrative that is more metaphorical than it is realistic I can wholeheartedly recommend it.
For current personal reading, I am part way through Goodnight Punpun by Inio Asano, and The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon. Sadly these two have taken the back burner during my university studies this term but I have been thoroughly enjoying them. I am not insanely into graphic novels / manga / comics, but Goodnight Punpun has been one of the most fun and fulfilling texts Iâve read for personal joy in a long time. The Priory of the Orange Tree is quite a fun entry into more recent fantasy (a lot of fantasy I have read is contemporary, but not insanely new). I do not think I have read enough of The Priory to give a fair opinion, but I can at least recommend the first half of the book :p
For university I have had the great pleasure of reading books making up the formation of contemporary Canadian literature. My favourite text so far is Sheila Watsonâs the Double Hook. It is definitely not for everyone, it is very modernist in its writing style and even the worldview it represents. But I find the almost play-like quality of the narration to be fascinating, the integration of indigenous and christian symbolism is adeptly interwoven, and its anti-regionalist worldview is rather interesting (more contemporary Canadian texts often accept their Canadian identity, vs this text shuns regionalizing the narrative at all). I have also had the pleasure of re-discovering the wonders of 18th century satire, I never actually had the chance to read Gulliverâs Travels before but it was rather intriguing. The qualities of it feel a lot different than the other Johnathan Swift texts I have read, I guess in part due to its usage of the âtravel narrativeâ form that was popular at the time.
I have a lot on my reading list as well, so Iâll list some of the books waiting for me on my shelf for your interest:
Edit: I should also add some of the stuff I read this summer! ( I perhaps read too much ). I spent a lot of time this summer reading Old French texts (dual texts as my Old French is a lot worse than my contemporary French). Most notably, I canât begin to emphasize how enjoyable Les Lais de Marie de France are (I used Claire M. Water dual text). To be quite fair I am a bit of a medievalist, particularly late anglo-saxon works (Old English) and the transition period after the Battle of Hastings interest me a lot, producing some of the most magnificent texts. the Lais are all conceived or presented as being oral Breton history, being transferred into the language of French for Marieâs contemporary audience. Throughout the Lais itâs apparent that Marie is quite concerned with cultural transfer, and even other forms of transformation (even Werewolves if youâre into that kinda thing). It is interesting seeing how the works of the time deal with the notions of conquest, cultural transference, and really thinking of what their own identity is as âAnglo-Normanâ people. (Similar parallels exist with later Old English works, oral stories of pagan heroism being transcribed by Christian monks, with an almost melancholic tone harkening to a bygone time).
Finished Snow Crash today. Was alright. Next up, The Mote in God's Eye, probably.
Still can't get the Hyperion Cantos out of my head though, wish I could read it for the first time again.
I was the same with Snow Crash, found it was alright, there were some great setpieces, the finale was a ton of fun, and it was very prescient in predicting the metaverse and high quality VR but I felt it was very overhyped.
I enjoyed reading some novels by Katherine Addison:
The Goblin Emperor is a fantasy novel about someone growing up in exile who unexpectedly becomes the ruler of an elvish empire after a suspicious airship crash kills off the emperor and most of the heirs. He has to get up to speed very quickly in a very complicated and sometimes deadly situation, starting with no allies. His power is in theory absolute, but in fact itâs rather limited by traditions he doesnât understand very well and other powerful nobles. As you might guess from the title, heâs half-goblin on his motherâs side and thatâs sometimes an issue, though itâs not dwelled on; much of the time itâs easy to forget that theyâre elves. Iâm not normally into political intrigue but this one is pretty good.
The world-building is largely focused on whatâs going on with the nobility and their servants. The new emperor has to rely heavily on his staff. He doesnât get out of the palace all that much and itâs a while before you learn all that much about the empire.
Although itâs not a direct sequel, she also wrote two more novels set in the same world, with a third on the way. The first one is Witness for the Dead. These take place in a faraway city where one of the characters is assigned as a sort of detective / psychic / exorcist. His magic gives him a limited ability to answer questions about someone who recently died after touching the body. The police come to him about murders (not that helpful if the victim doesnât know who did it) and other people come to him for problems involving dead people like inheritance disputes.
Another novel she wrote that I liked is Angel of Crows, which is a fantasy version of Sherlock Holmes from Watsonâs point of view. Along with regular humans, this world is populated by âangels,â vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures, with various powers and limitations. And they solve mysteries sort of like classic Sherlock Holmes stories, but with surprising twists as many of the characters are not who they appear at first.
I really love The Goblin Emperor. I liked the two spinoffs ok but I found them very hard to listen to on audio. The complex names and titles were not difficult for me by themselves (though easier reading than listening) but the writing style was repetitive because the MC's internal thoughts referred to people by title, and then the MC would refer to them by that title out loud and then the narration would add Name Title said. And it was hard to focus on.
I really miss Maia and his story more.
I loved the Goblin Emperor. The sequels were not so much my preferred type of book, but they held my interest.
The unlikely/unexpected hero who succeeds with the help of grit, character, hard work and luck is generally going to help me enjoy a well written story and the Goblin Emperor is exactly that. It's not a physical fighting adventure but it is a compelling narrative. Just be prepared for a confusing naming convention and a lot of characters.
I've just finished The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon. I'm normally more of a fiction type of person but I've been slowly leaning into philosophy and psychology texts.
Does anyone have any suggestions or recommendations for me? I was especially interested in the last essay in Wretched where Fanon discusses mental disorders in Algerians caused by French occupation from 1954-1959.
On the fiction side of things, I finished Cixin Liu's Death's End. It was a little difficult for me to stay engaged for the first half of the book and the large time jumps were a little jarring. Though, I can understand the decision to include them, especially considering how the book ends. There were definitely interesting and entertaining concepts but the immensity and scale of the content felt unrealistic (obviously). It was still a fun read.
Hannah Arendt can be interesting.
Rene Girard the scapegoat
Are you interested in history about colonization, or just philosophy and psychology?
A psychological fiction you might appreciate is white Tears by Hari Kunzru
I'm interested in the philosophy and psychology aspect. Reading about the ways behaviors developed in people because of traumatic events felt like a concrete way to drive home Fanon's points about colonization. I'll look into both Arendt and Girard.
I just checked out White Tears from my library. It is definitely scratching that psychological fiction itch for me! Thank you
Started perdido street station last week. Its really hooked me but I'm not sure why. The world and story are interesting so I'm always looking forward to jumping back into the book to see what's going on. China's writing is also very easy to get into and seems to flow quite nicely so the chapters don't feel like a slog especially since the city is such an odd place.
Overall I'm happy I started the book as iv been putting it off for a while due to it being weird fiction. I wasn't sure I'd enjoy that but it seems like it's right up my alley.
Blitzed through Snow Crash on a plane.
Itâs a really unique and interesting story. A sort of less cool but more possible neuromancer mixed with some fun quasi history/religious conspiracy theorish stuff.
It unfortunately doesnât stick the landing well in my eyes but it mostly remains unique.
YT never got that new skateboard that Uncle Enzo got for her. =(
Listened to volume one of Beware of Chicken a cultivation novel that I'd read but not listened to yet. Was still enjoyable and I plan to keep reading/listening. It's a fun bit of a pole at the genre - the cultivators call themselves Daddy, because worlds and translation are weird so they're inherently silly. But also clearly harming the world.
The Practice, The Horizon and the Chain
A novella about a boy brought out of the Hold to be taught as if he's a real person... I liked this ok but didn't love it. It is a bit magical but also about connecting people but also ... Yeah. It's a bit more symbolic.
We Speak Through the Mountain
The second novela in this story about a girl living in a collapsed world invited to a secret school in the mountains. But why doesnt anyone come back and why don't the scientists help the rest of the world? I don't know how many of these are planned but I really like them.
In the middle of
Dressed to Kill, a Monster Seamstress LitRPG
Because why not. It's a LitRPG where the MC has the seamstress class and wants to fight monsters. Nothing surprising and probably nothing truly unique, I haven't read anything with a "dungeons sustain the towns" setting but I'm not sure if that's a new concept or just my lack of familiarity.
And I am reading Super Supportive and Beers and Beards on Royal Road. I'm enjoying the trickle of updates. It probably scratches a similar itch to comic book releases.Looking for similar suggestions if anyone has any. (More about writing quality than specific genre recs, though a lack of sexism and homophobia is great) Wandering Inn and I have fallen off so I need to get back to it sometime.
Trying to still read my book in French but I'm struggling so I request The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to try in French instead.
I got Le Lion, la Sorcière blanche, et l'armoire magique...
And I'm sorry, French has a whole tense that is only used in literature and no one thought I should learn this?!?
Anyway otherwise I can read this, after I look up all these new conjugations.
Finished reading Ubik, by Phillip K dick and wondering which of their books I should pick next.