What are you reading these days?

I finally finished Player Piano. It was a good book, but reads a lot more stiff than Vonnegut's other work. Also, seeing the "love of the machine" themes in the book and applying it to the current state of the tech industry really hit home.

I think my next read is going to be Andromeda Nebula (Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale) by Ivan Yefremov. I saw the recommendation under a Soviet-wave playlist on YouTube and decided to give it a spin.

I finished Blood Meridian and decided to start over to pick up everything i likely missed the first few reads

I read a couple smaller non-fiction books.
The Elements of Style by Strunk & White is a marvelous thing, useful rules well-written. Most of the criticisms I could raise against it are more flaws either of myself (I took way too long to realize there was a glossary) or reality itself (it's over a century old and last updated half that long ago).
Incompetent: Coming up Short in a world of Achievement by James Flammang is a super relatable memoir focused not on the author's achievements or even their notable failures, but instead on the things they sucked at and never did again.

Then I read a couple political books:
The End of America by Naomi Wolf - written in the Dubya days, it talks about how the various major political scandals/controversies (war on terror, abu graib, flight watchlists, spying) "echo" Authoritarian/Fascist governments. I was a bit disappointed by this one. I've recently been thinking about how things got this way from how they were in the 60s and thought this could help me with the smudging of my mental painting. But, while it was a good reminder of the scandals of 15-20 years ago --which had gotten a bit dusty in my head-- I got distracted by the iffy rhetoric. That said, there were some things that rang true with connection to today, like the way the boogeymen changed from an external one to an internal one, the way things never got better but just "paused" (like a prisoner walking with a ball and chain on only one leg), and the warnings about the national guard.
Coming Up Short by Robert Reich. I just finished this one. It did a much better of answering that thing I was wondering, albeit from much more of an economic and meta-causal standpoint than I was originally considering. It was a really good read and very informative, I learned a lot. Even just the more anecdotal things he mentioned (like Nixon and the hardhat riot) I quite enjoyed learning. I found myself having to take breaks to stave off the helpless feelings; he does a great job of illustrating the "giant man-crushing grindstone" aspect of it all.

I had to take a break from the serious reads and started on Green Dumb Guide to Houseplants. It's a pretty and pithy book with illustrations, color coded pages, and useful info about various houseplants. I read most of it in one sitting and have a few candidates for what to make my third (surviving) plant.

I'm also still working on The Fellowship of the Ring in parallel. The commenters in the last thread were right: it does get better after chapter 7. I'm 2/3rds of the way through at the chapter where the newly introduced nigh-immortal drops a bunch of lore (No, the other other one). I don't think I have it in me to go right through the trilogy right away, so I will probably switch over to The End of the World next.

I just finished A City On Mars thanks to some long flights.

As far as pop sci books go, it was great! Around 400 pages of book followed by 30 pages of citations (excluding footer citations) - that is a heck of a ratio for pop sci.

I found that some bits dragged on a lot, especially the part about the laws around the moon, sky, and how they compared to the Antarctic and the deep sea. That isn't to say it was a bad section, maybe just not for me.

I did enjoy the parts about reproduction issues (both physical and ethical) especially.

Overall, I think the book does an excellent job of going over the various challenges that are usually glossed over, providing a little bit of information from any side of the argument that might exist, and trying to treat it all as well as possible. There are a lot of apologies in the book about not being able to see every issue from every lens.

I'm currently reading through the Liveship Trader series. I bought it on a whim in a bookshop and I'm glad I did: character development is really good and the storytelling is very rich.

I'm reading Ted Chiang Stories of your life and others for Tildes book club.

The Lonesome Dove. I have no real interest in the Western genre, but I’m enjoying it nonetheless. Fantastic character work. It’s a bit slow at first but it didn’t take me long to get hooked.

Since I already read Stories of your life and others before the book club, I am reading Diaspora by Greg Egan, and what a fascinating book, I love when an author goes far into the future and creates something "plausible" within progress, I don't want to spoil anything but his other books about what consciousness can be were always good, the only con of his writing is that is that it's sometimes hard to follow not sure how to explain what I mean by this, but as it its hard to imagine the current physical circumstances of the characters.

It you want to give it a try Learning to be me is an excellent short story from him.

I've just started Ian C. Esslemont's Night of knives. It takes place in the same world as Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen that I enjoyed a lot.

I’ve been reading the Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch. This is a non-fiction, pop-physics and philosophy of science book by a great physicist. And it’s a damn tough read!

I wanted to dig into to Deutsch’s work after hearing his thoughts on the limits of epistemology(theory of knowledge). He holds an outlier opinion in thinking that we human beings have no limits in how much we could understand about reality and the laws on nature. His reasoning for that is that we understand the laws of computation and that the physics of nature are analogous to computation. Therefore totally knowable. I’m still not totally sold on the epistemology. But the book is definitely fascinating. It also touches on other topics such as the relationships between quantum mechanics, theory of evolution, the problem of induction, virtual reality and the “reality of mathematical constructs.”

Reading the above paragraph I think I made it sound like a mess of crackpot conspiracies, but the arguments on his philosophy of science really are well reasoned. Just be prepared to think deeply about which arguments to take or reject! And you might need some light, relaxing reading after getting through this one. I know I will.

I've been trying to read more books that are generally read in high school but my teachers' curriculum never included

This time it's The Diary of Anne Frank. The first couple entries got me choked up because she is such a typical 13 year old girl (but also smart and funny and relatable) and I keep reminding myself what happens to her 🥺

I do audiobooks as I don't have make the time to sit down and read. But I've been burning through, and really enjoying, The Gray Man series. I'm about to finish book four, over about 6 weeks. It's hard for me to "put down" (stop listening?), it's pretty good at keeping me captivated. The movie a few years ago (off book #1) was okay, but cut a lot of content from the first book.

Just started The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo. Yep, another Japanese mystery. The Vocaloid song that spoiled me on The Tokyo Zodiac Murders had a sequel which I didn't watch, but I did check the description for the book because I figured hey, the songwriter clearly likes unique and interesting murder methods. It was about the second book in a series, so figured I'd read the first one.

A pleasant surprise I didn't realize until I checked it out: this is the Kosuke Kindaichi series! I've heard of him through the Young Kindaichi Case Files, a manga and anime series about a teenage detective who's the grandson of "a great detective" who remains officially unnamed for copyright/trademark reasons (though I recall reading that originally they DID outright name him before the original author or his estate protested). This character is supposed to be one of the best detectives in Japanese fiction, so I'm looking forward to seeing him in action!

Bekim Sejranovic's Nigdje, Niotkuda. This one was recommended to me as we partially share the same writing style. It is a deeply flawed novel with a few bright spots in an otherwise drab semi autobiographical chronological jumble. Next on is his Your Son Huckleberry Finn.

Currently reading: The Rebel and the Rose by Catherine Doyle (YA fantasy romance, similar vibes to The Crimson Moth/Heartless Hunter). Clockwork Boys by T. Kingfisher (I've been really enjoying her work so I'm trying an older piece). Wool by Hugh Howey (now that we're just waiting for season 3 of Silo). The Boy on the Bridge by MR Carey (zombie dystopia - I'm a zombie hater but read The Girl with All the Gifts for book club and deeply enjoyed it, so now reading the prequel... sequel?).

Just finished: Iron Gold by Pierce Brown (favorite of the saga so far, love that it's multi-POV now). The Prophet of Yonwood by Jeanne DuPrau (big meh). The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio (tough). The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea by Axie Oh (you really just need to accept that stuff is just treated like it makes sense when it doesn't. Maybe it's the retelling part of this and me just not knowing the source material). Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (flashed back to a bunch of big bad parts of my childhood. Exhausting.).

Up next: The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton (book club), Carry by Toni Jensen (book club), The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (book club), Ruin and Rising by Leigh Bardugo, China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan. And I'm first in line on like 6 books at the library now so I'm dreading that particular flood...

I’m reading “ the Saint of Bright Doors” by Vajra Chandrasekera

Set on a different world, one which has lots of religions and prophets, and some magic? ( not entirely sure to what extent, only a little into it). He is in a support group of children rejected by their religious order.

So far it explores extremism, indoctrination, de-radicalization, traumatic upbringing.

I've continued bouncing between books lately.

I'm still slowly reading Dust of Dreams, book 9 in Malazan Book of the Fallen. The book is fantastic and I'm wanting to see the end of it, but I find myself reading a chapter occasionally. In someways I've enjoyed the series enough that I don't really want it to end just yet so I've been dragging it out since book 9 & 10 are two parts of the finale. I think eventually I'll hit a point where I just start focusing on reading this only.

I picked up Owner's Share by Nathan Lowell. This book serves as the end point of the first main arc in the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper series. This arc follows the career of an interstellar sailor from their start at the lowest of ranks on a ship. The books are all solid, with the first book being a very "cozy" sci-fi book full of positivity. Other books in the series have certain parts that I didn't particularly enjoy, but all of them were overall good reads that I enjoyed. They all stay very small scale in their focus on the life and career of this one individual and their time spent sailing the stars and trading as well as solving problems and generally improving things on the ships he finds himself on.

I picked back up Warlock of the Magus World, which is a Chinese web novel. My friend got into them years ago and has recommended me a ton of them over the years. This is the second one that I'm reading, and its not bad, but I find myself usually comparing this to a novel that is like pop corn reading distilled into pure carbs. Fun in bursts, but after a bit of time I find myself wanting something with more substance and will put it back down until I get in the mood again. I'm ~350 chapters in so far and started reading this in mid 2023. I'm not sure how much further I'll get in this go, but I'm enjoying it right now.

I had a burst of reading through The Fellowship of the Ring, but have put that back down for now. I'll keep a bookmark perpetually in The Lord of the Rings and whenever I feel like reading it I'll drop in for a bit and then put it back down whenever something else catches my eye. They're great to revisit and notice new things or just to take part in a story that I've enjoyed for most of my life. I do plan on revisiting the Silmarillion sometime soon, but we'll see when I get to it.

I have other books I'll read a chapter or a few pages in here and there, but none that I'm making big amounts of progress in. I've been starting a lot more books lately, but I try to keep them fairly distinct and not have multiple of the same genre going. I'll generally not start a second epic fantasy series or a sweeping space opera while I have one started, but slotting in shorter golden age scifi books, a standalone fantasy novel, or a Conan the Barbarian short story in to my other reading keeps things fresh without feeling like I'm committing to something big when I want a different book to read.