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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 finished Middlemarch! What a delightful book. Every character was so fully realized, and I enjoyed how all the storylines tied together towards the end. I was slightly disappointed in how little we got of Fred Vincy and Mary Garth towards the end, but I suppose that's just because their story was essentially finished and just needed to be tied up by the ending of the Bulstrode story. Overall, a terrific book, and I will certainly read more Eliot in the future. I've already picked up The Mill on the Floss so that may be the next one I go for!
I also read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. I was surprised, based on what I heard and how it seemed towards the beginning, how plot driven this one ended up being! It was almost structured like a thriller. A very good time, loved Piranesi as a character and the unraveling of the mystery was very satisfying.
Now I'm back to Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, which I previously started but got a little bored and decided to jump into Gravity's Rainbow instead. Now I've read much more of Pynchon's work, as well as having seen the film adaptation last year. Very much enjoying it, but we'll see if my interest holds the whole time this go-around.
Happy to hear you liked 'Middlemarch', it is one of my favourites! The 'Mill on the Floss' is the only other Eliot I've read and I also really enjoyed it but it doesn't have the depth of 'Middlemarch'. The rich character development is really what grabbed me too, only topped by Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' which probably has the richest character development of any novel ever written.
There was a two year old discussion about Piranesi here, for what it's worth: https://tildes.net/~books/1fm7/tildes_book_club_discussion_april_2024_piranesi_by_susanna_clarke
Finished all the Bobiverse books and all his other work, and moved on to the 10 book Spiral Wars series by Joel Shepherd.
Just starting Book 2, with Book 1 (Renegade) being a really good first instalment.
just finished anarchist pedagogies, and was pretty bored by it. i am trying to read some books on anarchist parenting, or at least how the two subjects can relate to each other; but this was more of an academic endeavour and likewise the book itself was a series of essays. there were some fascinating tidbits to be sure, but i forced myself to cram the last ~200 pages last weekend just to be done with it
now working on the solutions are already here, which i discovered via andrewism on youtube. so far it's pretty bleak but seems to be leading towards a pitch on degrowth and looking towards indigenous peoples for how to address our climate collapse
im on bookwyrm at https://books.solarpunk.moe/user/xyhhx is anybody uses that :3
Have you read at the cafe by Errico Malatesta? He is my favourite anarchist writer as well as being a generally badass dude
Currently reading The Heart of the Nhaga by Lee Young-do, translated into English by Anton Hur. It's been good so far, lots of inventive worldbuilding and memorable characters. The plot hasn't yet congealed into something cohesive since I've still early in the book but there's some promising hints and mysteries so far. I'm not sure how much I like the translation, but this is also one of the first translated books I've read. The sentence structure and word choice is off in ways which cause me to occasionally have to reread a sentence before it clicks. It's just not as fluid as I'd like or perhaps I'm not used to it yet.
The book I read before this one was The Language of Liars which... I found a little maddening. I wrote up a review on my website which I'll link to instead of typing it out here since the issues are all with the ending and involve spoilers.
Finished listening to Arthur Golden's 'Memoirs Of A Geisha' Published 1997. Meh, lame. Already said a little about it with my last post, no need to add anymore. Didn't work for me, not even on a plot level which was all I was hoping for.
Well into Patrick White's 'The Solid Mandala' Published 1966. Just finished the first brother's perspective and now moving onto the other brother's which is a much slimmer chunk of the book. Enjoying it a lot, I can see some of myself in the more logical, cold brother (also a lover of literature) and to watch him constantly self-sabotage himself by being a snobby elitist and unable to make human connections due to a superiority complex reminds me (only slightly) of my younger self, but much like Dostoevsky's 'Underground Man' you can see self-parallels but it is ramped up to the Nth degree. The narrative jumps all over the place in time but since there isn't really a traditional plot to follow it doesn't matter and I'm pretty sure you are just meant to soak up these little glimpses of their lives and interactions with people to build a bigger picture of who these 2 brother's are. The end of the first brother's section was shocking and I'm still not sure what to make of it.
Started listening to William Golding's 'Pincher Martin' Published 1956. William Golding?!? The guy who wrote 'Lord of the Flies' that I was forced to read in Grade 8 and hated? Yes, that William Golding. They awarded him the Nobel Prize in literature in 1983 so there must be some works of his that are great you would hope. 'Pincher Martin' is included in Harold Bloom's Western Cannon so I figured I would give it a shot. The idea is that a lone military sailor falls overboard or somehow ends up in the water lost from his ship, he makes it to a tiny little 'island' or really just some rocks above water. Here he is totally alone in a abyss of open ocean, he has to survive on sea urchins and what fresh water collects in a hole in the rock, we now get to watch his slow decent into madness and insanity. Sounds like my kind of book! Halfway through and the madness is now beginning, wild listening ahead I'm sure.