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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.
After a week I'm about ten pages in to Män som Hatar Kvinnor, The original Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I borrowed it from the library thinking reading a book in Swedish would be a good way to practoce the language, but I think that I've bitten off more than I can chew in terms of reading level. I've read it in English and seen the Swedish movies so it's not tough to figure out what's going on, but I don't know how much that's actually doing for my reading comprehension.
I have been reading the Book of the New Sun series after playing a game called Caves of Qud. It is an interesting series taking place on Earth so far into the future the sun is dimming. It has a medieval setting, mixed with future technology, so things like swords exist but so do androids, flying machines, and laser guns. It is a very alien world, where sometimes you need to carefully read a description or look up a word (the author purposefully uses archaic old english words, along with greek and other languages), sometimes just to get a feeling about what something is exactly.
While I like the prose and feel of the world, I do have some things I don't like. These books do not particuarly follow the structure of most books - there isn't really a middle beginning and end. In fact the first book starts with him in the city and ends with him reaching the wall at the end of the city and just ends.
Second, while I understand that Severian (the main character) is not supposed to be a reliable narrator, I kind of just roll my eyes as every single woman he meets has sex with him two minutes after meeting him. And even if he 'loves' a woman he'll sleep with the next one that strolls by and not really care about how it affects the other. Dude is just knee-deep in pussy and after a while I just rolled my eyes when a woman appears in a page, because he will have sex with her within the next ten pages lol.
I had never heard of the author, Gene Wolf, before. I like his writing style and wish I had heard of him before reading these books.
Exactly why I stopped reading. He's the best, the most handsome, the best lover. It ends up reading like a self-insert power fantasy and just ends up being tedious.
You can't just do the thing you're supposedly parodying and then point to it later and say, "it's just a joke, bro."
I think I made it all the way through the first book and half the second before I realized it wasn't going to get any less stupid. And telling me that it totally flips the script ten books down the road doesn't endear me to it; I'm not going to spend dozens of hours with a thing in the hope that it gets better at the end.
Also, I keep meaning to try and penetrate Caves of Qud. Just reinstalled it, fired it up, but got to the character creator and noped out for the time being.
So uhh spoilers for the book
Also content warning
He's basically writing his own propaganda. Sorta like a book written by a North Korean Dictator. There's lots of hints that several of these encounters are basically rape.
I get it. None of that makes it any more engaging or less eye rolling to read leading up to that reveal.
The one and a half books I read completely soured me on the series and author.
I've been reading Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment and I've struggled to put it down when I pick it up. Not sure what else to say, other than the fact that I loved Blizzard games since I first tried a demo of Warcraft 2 back in 96 and kept playing them up until Diablo 3/Overwatch when I felt they started to lose their magic.
It's interesting to get some behind the scenes knowledge about why that is. It's always been suspected the Activision was behind a lot of that and the book really goes into how and why that happened. It's an interesting read, as a former fan.
Reading Satanic Verse by Salman Rushdie. So far I read the first two chapters since I reread the first chapter in order to flesh out the character in my head. Otherwise, I am enjoying the book, even though a lot of the Indian context is going over my head.
I'm using the Washington State guide to manage a lot of words or context I'm unfamiliar with.
I read through the Ministry For The Future recently. It's an interesting book, mostly about how eco-terrorism and the blockchain will save us from global warming. Each chapter has the book swapping between different areas of focus/subplots with some about the actions of the titular ministry, some short stories about things done by small groups, others about the aid worker who is the second protagonist, and the occasional bit of poetic prose about an abstract. It's a bit hard to follow along until you get into the pacing of things as a result but it's at least fairly quick to read relative to the length.
I also read through How To Talk to Your Cat about Gun Safety -- it's a super short collection of "pamphlets" satirizing how conservative evangelical christian groups would advocate talking to your kids about each topic. And it has a bunch of photoshopped cat pictures and puns. Not super funny or witty but amusing enough for a couple hours.
Next up is probably going to be They All Died Screaming given halloween is coming up. Was recommended it by someone who likes horror a lot more than me so I'm not totally sure what I'm getting into.