What are you reading these days?

I'm reading the Lion Women of Tehran

I'm reading the Eye of the Bedlam Bride from the Dungeon Crawler Carl series.

I'm about to start the Truth by Terry Pratchett for Tildes book club.

I'm about to start Every Tongue Got to Confess, a collection of folk tales collected by Zorah Hurston in the Gulf States. (These include some of the same stories that inspired Uncle Remus and Song Of The South. I'm looking forward to reading a version collected by an African American. Hurston is also a gifted author)

I just started reading the Cradle series by Will Wight and I have a problem with how much they are taking over my life…

Luckily I was traveling so I read most of the first two books on the plane there, and then read books 3 and 4 on the way back. I’m struggling to put the books down now that I’m back home.

My excuse is I’m on the one month trial of Kindle Unlimited from reading the latest “Beware of Chicken” book…but also if I manage to finish the series before my month of Kindle Unlimited ends I think that is a dangerous neglect of the rest of my life in favor of just reading. I have a problem with putting books down.

I read the Witches of Thistle Grove series, and those started so strong and just became unhinged by the end. Then for my book club we read The Place Where They Buried Your Heart by Christina Henry, and it was good; the ending was a tiny bit rushed, but it was a good book overall. The next book for my book club is This Is How You Lose the Time War, and I'm excited about it, and then I have The Reformatory to read for myself. Lots of books going on. I actually have several books checked out right now, but I generally only read one at a time.

I've somehow fallen into a weird genre of sci-fi that I'm really liking that I'd call... bureaucratic horror? administrative eldritch? Some of it is SCP adjacent, some eldritchy. The three that come to mind are:

A month ago was There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm. It's about a governmental organization tasked with understanding and maintaining antimemetic species, creatures whose defense mechanism is that people can't remember them, that they don't stick in memory.

Then came the Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, in which the UK gets its hand on time travel and does boring stuff with it. This one was recommended on Obama's 2024 summer reading list.

This week it's Lexicon by Max Barry. It's about Poets, really persuasive people that control people with words, and how they control the world.

I recommend all three books, but I'm super easy to impress.

I'm coming up on the end of Lexicon, so if anyone's got a recommendation in the same subsubgenre, lemme know. Bonus points if it's a series, and the longer the better. I feel like getting immersed.

Listening, rather than reading, but I just finished book 8, of 9, of Lucky's Marines by Joshua James. It came across some feed of mine described as:

A high octane space action in the vein of Starship Troopers and Firefly

The author describes it as:

Gritty. Fast-Paced. Addictive. You'll love this high-octane military sci-fi because it's the love child of "Starship Troopers" and "Jason Bourne."

I like all those things, so I decided to give it a try.

In the beginning (Book 1), it had a few moments that left me confused about what was happening, and/or feeling like the book was more "Young adult" than "Adult science fiction". But I enjoyed it, and would rate that first book at 7/10.

Books 2-4 bit into me more, I understood more and enjoyed them more, 8/10.

Books 5-8 really "took off" for me plot wise, leaving me excited to start the next book, 8.5/10.

Looking forward to starting book 9 later this week, and wrapping the series up.

The books are shorter than most of my others, the audiobooks come in at an average of 6 hours per book, so fairly easy reads. And it's almost entirely action-packed. There is enough dialogue for character and plot development, but the majority of the books are "things happening" more than "people talking".

If We Were Villains I thought was semi-interesting for the first third of it and then it loses its steam. The characters are one dimensional and it does this weird thing where it’ll just quote a lot of Shakespeare. It was very YA, and there was a moment where I realized that lots of people I text with text in a similar way because they read a lot of this stuff.

American Dirt was super controversial six years ago because a white woman wrote it. I think there’s a good story here even if the bits and pieces of Spanish language makes me cringe. Should a white woman handle these types of stories? Sure. I think people get too uppity about depictions of the Mexicans cartel because it apparently makes us look bad.

Violin is the first book from Anne Rice that I’ve read. And because in the lead up to this I read two page turners back to back, it reminded me what good prose looks like. I love the poetic way in which she writes. And I find her a fascinating author since she popularized those types of monster love stories that is basically still propping up the book industry.

I read Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, which is a sort of postmodern conspiracy novel about a group of editors who, for a lark, invent a world-spanning conspiracy that seems to leak into reality in frightening and dangerous ways.

In theory, this should have been my favorite novel ever written -- just the premise alone instantly captivated me, to say nothing of the fantastic prose, compelling characters, a prescient and nuanced thematic framework that somehow managed to speak directly to our current historical moment -- of LLMs and ascendant, disorderly authoritarianism -- despite being published in the eighties; not to mention a rich and instructive conversation with its own historical context; not to mention its delightfully convoluted central conspiracy.

So everything about the novel was great, except one element that made me actually, genuinely dislike it: the pacing. This novel is the size of a birthday cake, my copy was six hundred and fifty pages long; I genuinely believe it would have benefited from cutting like half of that. Almost the entire first half of the novel is dedicated to introducing characters and themes with LITERALLY no plot whatsoever; even when we finally do get some motion, the story mostly feels directionless and unmotivated because our perspective character is almost entirely reactive. And huge amounts of page space are dedicated to historical or esoteric figures and events that could have been done justice with only a passing mention. Foucault's Pendulum might, for you, be like your favorite book of all time -- all the pieces are there for something absolutely extraordinary, but they're just placed too far apart from each other, and so finishing it was, for me, an absolute slog. I am now looking forward to reading absolutely anything else.