What are you reading these days?

Elder Race by Adrian Tschaikovsky for Tildes book club at the end of the month.

by the way the Tildes book club schedule is now on Storygraph

West With Giraffes Historical fiction set during the great depression, animal fiction, coming of age, old character reminiscing about his youth, travel narrative

Curse of the Mistwraith by Janny Wurts Grand fantasy focused on wizards. Dark themes but not so far grimdark.

The Women by Kristen Hannah US army nurse in Vietnam and then her reintegration to society. Dark book that is brilliant so far.

I recently finished Love Lucy by Lucille Ball and learned that she was a woman of character, grit and persisitence who honed her comedic skills on the radio and actually became a studio executive/ producer later in life. A true pioneer who arrived in Hollywood in 1933.

I have still been reading mostly fanfictions but I also have been beta reading for a friend of mine. They turned a fanfiction into an original book and it's been really cool to see the transition progress of that! I hope they can get it published physically so I can buy it 🤞

Yesterday, I started listening to the audiobook of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. One-sentence summary from Wikipedia:

The book examines the reasons behind the lack of progress on ambitious projects in the United States, including those related to affordable housing, infrastructure, and climate change.

I’ve been a fan of The Ezra Klein Show for many years, since it was a podcast at Vox, before Ezra and the show moved to The New York Times. I like Ezra’s curiosity and willingness to acknowledge uncertainty. I’m tired of political commentators whose bread and butter is perpetual sermons of anger and contempt.

What I like about the book so far is the fundamental idea of embracing technology as a potential force for good and embracing government’s role in developing and deploying technology, as well as criticizing government’s failures to do this in the recent past.

I read Foundation by Isaac Asimov this week. I totally understand the hype around it now, the premise is super cool even if the philosophical ideas underlying it are a bit shaky. I don't know enough about the roman empire to get all the references, but I get enough to find it interesting. I think the 9D chess structure in particular is really fun and keeping me hooked. Probably gonna continue through the rest soonish

Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show While Also in an Actual Cult!
by Bethany Joy Lenz

Bethany Joy Lenz was a lead on the show One Tree Hill. I never watched the show, but I have a thing for cult narratives, especially nominally Christian ones because I grew up in what I would consider a cult-lite strain of Christianity.

This book was wonderfully written and told. I listened to the audiobook, and not only is Lenz's voice eminently listenable, but her acting chops make the writing come across as natural and expressive. She changes her voice for each character, which makes telling apart the different individuals very easy.

Like any cult narrative, it's sad. Like any cult narrative, you want to reach into the story and shake the people by the shoulders and say "how do you not see this?" And, like any cult narrative, you know that's not possible, because what makes cults so fascinating is precisely because people can't see the obvious in the first place.

This one isn't as flashy as some of the other cult narratives out there. There aren't many horrific dark revelations on par with some other well-known ones, which might make it seem less interesting. For me, however, it was compelling because it was so down to earth. It captures better the "this could happen to anyone" feeling that so many cult survivors want people to understand. It genuinely reminded me a bit of my own upbringing -- I might have ended up like Lenz had I stuck with the type of Christianity that was in my circles. I could see parallels betweens Lenz's experiences in a high control religious group with my own.

A Short Stay in Hell
by Steven L. Peck

This is a novella based on a short story by Jorge Luis Borges called "The Library of Babel." It's explicitly acknowledged in the novella, in-universe by the characters. People are sent to purgatory in the library, and, in order to leave, they have to find the book that has the story of their life in it.

I liked this. Didn't love it. It gave me a bit to mentally chew on, and there are some open questions I have that I'm assuming are metaphors I haven't quite thought through.

I think it's decent cosmic horror, but it also felt a little underbaked to me. I think making it longer could have given it more legs.

Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering
by Malcolm Gladwell

Honestly, I was over Gladwell after I finished Talking to Strangers.

I like Gladwell. I genuinely do. He tells great stories. He tries to look at events and phenomena in interconnected ways, which I think can be very meaningful and valuable. His voice has great prosody -- he's genuinely pleasant to listen to.

But I also have qualms with Gladwell, and those came to a head in Taking to Strangers which felt downright sloppy and overconfident to me.

That was a while ago though, and I've thawed since then. Plus, when I saw the name of this book, I didn't look much into it and assumed it was Gladwell returning to his earlier work and sort of grappling with some of his earlier errors. I liked the idea of him evaluating his own work in hindsight with the same thoughtful, critical eye he gives to everything else. It felt like a fresh, new angle that made me want to give him another chance.

Turns out that's not what this book is at all -- it's just another book by him in the same rhetorical form that makes him so compelling to listen to but that also raises my hackles for being potentially false and even deliberately misleading.

This book is a wonderful collection of stories. They're interesting. They're compelling. Gladwell tells them well. It was an effortless listen.

Gladwell doesn't just tell stories though -- he uses them as the foundations upon which to build broad revelations about humanity, society, life, etc. His stories are the raw materials with which he constructs what he believes to be axioms about how people work.

And I don't think he does that well in this book. I think if he were less certain and hedged his assertions more, I'd find them easier to swallow. Instead, however, he delivers them both with a sort of laser clarity that's so precise it feels scientific (even though it isn't) and also in a roundabout, metaphorical way where he'll draw you into a comparison or implication but not state it outright. He'll pull two wires very close to each other, but rely on you to let the circuit complete only in your own mind. This has the effect of making you feel smart as a reader, but it can also feel like an accountability dodge -- like he knows what he's saying won't stand up to scrutiny so he has to maintain plausible deniability.

Like, in the book, he doesn't outright say that the TV show Will and Grace was solely responsible for the surge in positive attitudes towards gay people in the 2000s, but he strongly implies it because it makes for a great story. Genuinely, I loved hearing him tell the story of Will and Grace as he wove in the cultural landscape of the time and his historical and scientific commentary. It's satisfying. Gladwell is a master of synthesis.

But he's also, well, wrong. There was a lot more going on in those times than just Will and Grace, and it's pretty patronizing to everybody to say that modern gay liberation happened because of it. But of course, he doesn't outright say that even though he really wants you to think it.

Anyway, I think I'm done with Gladwell for a bit again. I really do like the stories he tells. They're fascinating. I just don't love the broader story he uses them for -- what he would call his own "overstory."

I just read the first two books in High Howey's Silo trilogy, Wool and Shift, in fairly quick succession. The TV adaptation has been getting a lot of praise from colleagues in work and the premise sounded quite interesting so I decided to give the books a whirl first and wound up getting pretty hooked - they were absolutely perfect for some recent long haul flights. Good balance of mystery, tension and characterisation.

No guesses needed for what I'll be tucking into next but I'm feeling the itch for some non-fiction after that. I was recently recommended The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow and am leaning towards that at the moment. I had read Harari's Sapiens which was fine enough but I didn't find myself completely convinced by his theories and arguments. Graeber and Wengrow's work sounds like a much stronger effort on this very fascinating topic, has anyone here read it?

In the last two weeks, I've read and finished:

The Village Library Demon Hunting Society by CM Waggoner
Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth by Natalie Haynes
Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
Graveyard Shift by ML Rio
The Games Gods Play by Abigail Owen
The Sundown Motel by Simone St. James

Of all of these books, the only one that was meh on my list was the first, The Village Library Demon Hunting Society.

Divine Might and The Games Gods Play were part of the Goodreads challenges for January-April, and I've gotten all 6 challenges now. I wasn't expecting to like the latter as much as I did, but it was a dumb story with a slow burn. I'm not big on spicy books, but this one was not too spicy, as far as my reading preferences go. I now feel invested in reading the other two books when they come out. Obviously they have a theme, though I wish there were more books on the list based on mythology from other cultures, not just Greek.

Starling House has a very "Beauty and the Beast meets Anastasia meets the song "Home" from Frozen 2" vibe to it, but for adults, and that's really not the storyline at all, just has similar vibes and themes. It might be one of my newest favorite books, and I don't do rereads often unless it's a book I absolutely love, but I'm pretty sure this one will get a reread.

Graveyard Shift was a novella, and it was fine for what it was, but pretty forgettable.

Finally, The Sundown Motel. If you're into creepy stories, Simone St. James is a master at writing supernatural crime books, and I absolutely love her writing style. I read Murder Road for book club last month, and it was so good that when I saw this one, I immediately borrowed it from the library and got through it in less than 2 days.

I haven't really picked my next read. I started something, but didn't actually read beyond the initial intro to the book because of work, so I'm not sure that's actually my next read yet.

I've taken a break from my read through of Malazan Book of the Fallen for the last couple of months now. I'm on book 8 and love the series, but work had been crazy, and those books make me want to think about what is going on with all the different characters. We got the new guy on our team trained up and things have mellowed out a bit, so I'll probably book them up soon.

I had a friend reach out for me to do a beta read through of a new book he is working on. That's become my priority so I can get him some detailed feedback regarding the plot and pacing in this new work.

Besides that, I've been jumping around between different books:

Atomic Habits by James Clear is something my wife and I are reading and talking about. It's a very popular "self-help" book, and I can see why. After the first couple of chapters, it seems like stuff that I mentally knew, but having him clearly lay it out and give practical examples has been a great reminder for me to work on addressing some of my bad habits.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey is my current "bathroom book". I've been slowly reading it for a long while now, and it's been a good refresher, as I first read this book 10+ years ago at this point. I'm finding myself wanting to read more books that help with introspective, as I'm wanting to continue working on improving myself to help be a better role model for my sons.

Portal to Nova Roma: Venice is the second book in the Portal to Nova Roma series. It's a litrpg novel, which I've not read a lot of, but the series had been on my list for a while and thought I'd give it a spin. It's enjoyable and fast-paced. I do have some minor complaints about the main character as there are a lot more broken things he could be doing as he is supposed to have access to the accumulated knowledge of a somewhat near future earth available to him and the biggest things he's introduced are magic guns. I'd recommend them to anyone interested in the genre.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
was gifted to me by a friend, and I've been enjoying reading this. One thing I had never put together was the introduction of humans into an environment inevitably led to the mass extinction of that region's megafauna.

The Forge of Gods by Greg Bear is scratching my sci-fi itch currently. It seems to be more interested in the idea that the author wants to explore than the characters taking part in the story. I'm enjoying it so far, and it's a shorter novel, so I don't think it will over stay its welcome. I'd been meaning to try out some of his works after I heard he had passed away, and was one of those long time sci-fi authors that people had good things to say about his works.

The Legend of Corinair (The Frontiers Saga #3) by Ryk Brown is a pulpy sci-fi series that are published online, with each "book" being relatively short and part of a larger over arching story. I read this mainly in short bursts and was recommended it by Steve Gibson on the Security Now podcast, so I thought I would take a look. The books aren't thinkers, but they are good fun so far.

I've also slowly been reading some Conan the Barbarian short stories from the ones that Robert E. Howard published. Reading his work makes me wonder how he would have developed as an author if he had lived longer, since I've enjoyed each story I've read so far and plan to go and read the collections of his other short stories.

I also recently read the first chapter of the Fellow Ship of the Ring as part of my "eternal" rereads of the Lord of the Rings to my sons, who wanted to hear a story while they were falling asleep. I plan to read The Hobbit to them when they're a few tears old, but since A Long Expected Party is a very cozy and tame chapter, they enjoyed it without really understanding it.

There are other books that I have bookmarks in, but they've been on hiatus for a while until I get around to picking them up again. There's just too many good books to read!

Still a bit slowed down because of life stuff (house purchase) but this is what I'm up to:

Trying to get through library loans. I just finished Slaying the Vampire Conqueror by Carissa Broadbent, which I enjoyed. I'm currently listening to Children of Fallen Gods, the second book in her War of Lost Hearts trilogy. So far, I'm enjoying the moodiness and grunge of the vampire books more than the War of Lost Hearts. I also listened to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by VE Schwab, The Goddess Of by Randi Garner, and The Language of Dragons by SF Williamson. Partner and I listened to All Systems Red by Martha Wells and have the next one queued up too.

I just picked up Piranesi from my stack of library books. Also in the stack to be read are: The Kamogawa Food Detectives, Elder Race for Tildes book club, and Ever King. I also got the first Malazan book on CD to put on my computer when I eventually get to it.

I have an irresponsible number of audiobooks checked out in Libby. Hopefully I'll get to them before they return themselves.

Iv decided to change up my usual genre of sci fi and fantasy and go with a collection of travel, food and autobiographical books.

I'm currently reading junky by Burroughs and medium raw by Anthony bourdain. So far junky is much easier to read than naked lunch which I will drop in and out off over the next few months. Medium raw is a sort of continuation if kitchen confidential which was a fantastic book. I'm a fan of anything bourdain so even though I'm only two chapters in its already phenomenal.