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What are you reading these days? #13
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk a bit about it.
Notes: I could not start the thread yesterday on Friday like I used to, I'm sorry for the delay.
Past weeks: Week #1 · Week #2 · Week #3 · Week #4 · Week #5 · Week #6 · Week #7 · Week #8 · Week #9 · Week #10 · Week #11 · Week #12
I dropped the Ishiguro book I was talking about last week. I just couldn't get into it, and it started dragging on for a few days. The story was not bad, from a few dozen pages I did read, nor the style, but I just could not appreciate it so I moved on from it.
I picked up two books this week, and finished a long read. I was studying from An Introduction to Language by Fromkin, Hyams, Rodman for the last two-three months, and last week I finished that. It took too long to finish, and that's part me procrastinating and part some life issues.
So now this week I've started Language in Society by Suzanne Romaine, which is an introduction to sociolinguistics. I'm reading these linguistics book as a preparation for my upcoming attempt to get a master's in the field. This one is more specialised into the area I want to focus on initially, namely language contact and variation. It is a greatly praised book. I'm just at the beginning, reading the preface. I want to finish this rather switfly and move on to a text even more related, Language Contact by Sarah Thompson.
The other book I took up is Il Fu Mattia Pascal by Luigi Pirandello. This will be the first narrative by Pirandello I'll read. It's been quite some while that it was getting dusty on my to-be-read shelf, so I'll use Wikipedia's help to talk about its plot:
One lovely thing with Italian books is that they have a big front matter, the one for this consisting of over thirty pages IIRC, including a compared chronology of the author's life and of the related world events in his lifetime, and a good foreword, followed by a bibliography. A copy of Ossi di Seppia I read before had upwards of a hundred pages of front matter, including a detailed scholarly critique of the text and the author, apart from what the Pirandello book has.
I'm going to start my journey into Discworld with Guards! Guards! this weekend.
I just finished it and am a few chapters into Men at Arms. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
relevant discworld comment :)
That site is why I originally bought Guards! Guards!, seemed like the best place to start :)
I just started reading Infinte Jest at the behest of my roommate and coworker. I'm pretty pumped to get into it but it's a very daunting task. I've got some fresh notebooks as I was told notes are essentially required.
I have tried that book but I have to admit I have not finished it. Interestingly enough I keep remembering the parts that I have read from time to time. It is pretty unique. But I have to agree, it is daunting.
Yeah, it's definitely an interesting read. The author writes very manically about a mostly relevant dystopian future (references things like a stylized social media obsession "putting on masks with their best faces" etc.) back in the 90s.
The author actually ended up committing suicide due to his bleak relatively spot on theory as to what the future would become. Obviously I'm a little morbidly curious due to my own general disatisfaction with the modern world.
So far it's been a chore, but very rewarding.
Yeah, I am aware of the author. I discovered him through tennis. He has essays compilation on tennis and was well-known in the scene.
I am sure if you stick to it, eventually it will be hard to put down the book instead of it being a chore.
I'm not taking actual notes on it, which is probably why I'm on hiatus at the moment. But there is something about picking up where I left off a book and trying to settle into it, like putting on an old coat at the beginning of autumn. Or in the case of Infinite Jest, spraying yourself down with Lemon Pledge.
I started reading Dune a couple of days ago and I’ve been pretty engrossed over the past few days. The world and universe are so interesting and mysterious.
Starting at God Emperor the series gets remarkably existential and deeply esoteric with a significant amount of navel gazing involved, and as a result many people recommend stopping after the original trilogy (or even after the first book)... but I actually enjoy the series back half more than the front precisely because of the futuristic metaphysics. So if you keep going I would love to hear your thoughts on the latter books. :)
The Brian Herbert books on the other hand, while I still enjoyed them as the pulp scifi space operas that they are, are objectively not great and the writing is rather juvenile... especially when compared to the brilliance of his father's work. However even so, IMO they are worth reading at least once, if only just for the glimpse you get into what might have been had Frank lived long enough to extend the universe as he had planned to.
Yea I remember reading it only a few years ago (late twenties) and I was nearly upset that I've been so late to the game - it should be mandatory reading at a young age for anyone in an interest in scifi. It feels like the universe is absolutely massive, and "realistic" in the sense that, at least to me, it could be history.
I would also strongly suggest The Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, it too has an interesting and mysterious universe and the timeline spans multiple centuries (over the trilogy, which is still shorter than Dune, I think)
I also started reading it recently(well the audio book, which is amazing) with my girlfriend whose read it before. We've been listening to it before we go to bed at night and the story is so enthralling kinda makes it hard to fall asleep!
I’ve got a few going at once right now.
How do you manage 4 books at a time? I usually have only two on the go - a fiction and non-fiction, so that I always have an option depending on the mood.
Like, how often and how much do you read in a sitting, do you keep notes, or are you just that skilled/gifted with comprehension (no need to be modest).
I don’t really have a problem juggling non-fiction, so the first two are a non-issue. Blood Meridian is almost an educational experience - it is taking me a very long time to read. I’m re-reading The Passage and it is on my phone, so I read that whenever I have a few spare minutes here and there. It’s a lot though. Probably too many at once.
Yeah, do you figure your comprehension is still as good when you just do quick reads on your phone? Maybe better?
Céline - Mort à crédit. I already read it 10 years ago but I didn't remember very well. It's quite different from le Voyage, less poetic, but very good nonetheless. It's mostly about Céline childhood and early adult life. Main theme is the lack of money. The style is extremely rich, dark, funny and feverish.
Remembrance of Earth’s Past series by Liu Cixin. Just finished the first book Three Body Problem and now a few pages into The Dark Forest.
They're good, but I definitely think overhyped. Maybe it's just me, but I don't find it anywhere near as mind blowing or unique as the reviews seemed to say. I'm also surprised it won the Hugo considering it's not exactly unique as a sci fi (character realises video game is actually portraying real life).
It's well written though, and is far from bad. I'm still keen to read it all through if only for the interesting writing style.
I needed something light because it's been a dismal week on all fronts.
So it's Quackery:
A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything.
I'm a sucker for "how did they figure out the best answer" stories. This book is a compilation of proofs that blind faith and hucksterism never get you to proper answers at all.
Everything okay? :(
p.s. Quackery looks like a fun read. In a similar vein, have you ever read Flim-Flam! by James Randi? It's quite dated now, but still a fun read. Encyclopedia of Claims/Frauds/Hoaxes is less dated and still fun but not quite as good, IMO.
One of the best things about Quackery so far is that it's got the intellectual humility to say, "people usually believed these things because they were desperate and didn't have the tools or resources to learn better."
I've never taken to James Randi or some of the other debunkers because there's an underlying theme of gloating about their superior insight.
Oh, and the bad week? Still got an amazing family, and I shouldn't fail to acknowledge that. Mainly just trying to wrap my head around some messy career challenges.
Randi is quite acerbic and incredibly sarcastic/dry humoured which sometimes comes across as bitter, but I have never gotten the sense he is really gloating in any way (other than when he publicly beats a "psychic" at their own game, e.g. James Hydrick). But he absolutely, undeniably does look down on both the purveyors of non-sense, as well as those that have gotten hoodwinked by it. I'm not a fan of the latter attitude, since as you said, it's usually just desperate people looking for some shred of hope to cling to that fall for that sort of stuff, but the former attitude I absolutely support since spiritualists, psychics and the like are complete scumbag, scam artists IMO... without exception.
Ah, that's good to hear. My family has been a tremendous support for me over the years, too. I couldn't live without them. :)
I posted in the books for 2019 thread the other day, but:
Korea's Place in the Sun by Bruce Cummings. I picked it up last year but I read this off and on because it has quite a lot of information.
좋아하는 일을 하고 있다면 (If you are doing work that you like) – A pure Korean book, about ~220 pages, that I hope to finish by the end of this year. I can do about 1-2 pages in a few hours but I need to look up 70-80% of words usually.
Men at Arms - Terry Pratchett
Vimes is quite the character. I love Pratchett's mix of cynicism and optimism.
Hitch 22 - Christopher Hitchens
Much sadder than I expected but I'm only 5 chapters in. It's incredible hearing it in his voice in the audiobook.
The Boy who was Raised as a Dog - Bruce D. Perry
A look into child abuse and the challenges of trying to help those children. It's heavy.
The last two weeks I've read;
The Remains of The Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, whom I embarrassingly forgot was British, so I borrowed the Swedish translation from the library. I really enjoyed it, but I think it'd have been better in it's original language. It made me think about loyalty and dignity, and had some really interesting pieces. SPOILER [The writing of an unreliable narrator was brilliant] END OF SPOILER
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which I read purely for general knowledge's sake. In my opinion it was pretty boring (except the last few pages), but interesting nonetheless. What frightened me most was that the government didn't even kill the dissenters. It actually was a perfect world.
Oostende, de zomer van 1936: Irmgard Keun, Egon Erwin Kisch, Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig aan de Belgische kust by Mark Schaevers, in it's Swedish translation. This is one of the best books I've read in a long time. It's a (semi)biography of the two Austrian authors Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig. It's mostly about the summer they spent in Ostend 1936, together with other exiled Jewish authors. It is very interesting, and I can't do it any justice just by writing about it here. Read it! Yes, now!
The last three books I read were:
The first Culture book. My dad let me dig through his old collection of science fiction novels a while back and he had The Player of Games, and I liked it enough that I picked up Consider Phlebas when I came across it at the bookshop. I think it might be one of my favourite space opera settings.
Part of the Hainish Cycle. A peaceful apelike species called the Athsheans rebel against the humans exploiting them and their planet, but as a result they can't go back to being nonviolent.
Book I got from my dad's collection. Definitely among the strangest novels I've read. Human society collapses and the only survivors of the apocalypse are stranded on one of the Galapagos islands - over the next million years, they evolve into small-brained furry creatures.
At the moment, I'm reading Count Zero by William Gibson. I bought the Neuromancer trilogy a while back but I only recently started into them. So far they're very good, but Gibson has a very dense-but-interesting-to-read style that can be hard to make sense of sometimes.
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
It's a nonfiction book about the early days of computing and talks a lot about the hacker ethic. I'm only 120 pages into and still reading about the folks that were in MIT in the 60s.
I haven't read that much books except some novels in my native language, it was years back though. So I researched for less intense books written in simple language since I'm still learning English and ended up with "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes. I just started it, I'm enjoying it so far. :)
Usually in a new language, I start by reading thrillers (if you are into them that is). They are fast-paced to keep my attention while I navigate through the new language.
Are you reading the original short story or the expanded novel version?
Either way, you should have tissues ready for the final chapter. Seriously. Everyone cries at the end of 'Flowers for Algernon'. It's one reason I don't read it often, even though it's my favourite story of all time.
currently focusing on A Brief History of the Car Bomb, through which i offer up the story of a particularly ridiculous oil tanker bomb that the OAS attempted to detonate during the Algerian War in hopes of starting a genuine race war:
very fun book to read, not so fun to actually imagine in practice!
I'm reading two:
Mastery by Robert Greene - I'm rereading this one because I'll be graduating from grad school soon and this is a good reminder about the path to mastery. The first time I read it was when I just started, about 4.5 years ago. I also recently reread Advice to a Young Investigator by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, for the same reasons.
TiHKAL by Alexander and Ann Shulgin - I just finished the prequel, PiKHAL over Christmas and it was an impressive read, in terms of the quality of content and writing. Not that I underestimated them, but it has been on my shelf for several years, bought it when I was more obsessed with psychedelics. It's a trove of quality information and stories from the very pioneers themselves.
I'm reading The Mastermind by Evan Ratliff. It's a really captivating story, right up my alley!
Raymond E Feist - The Complete Riftwar Saga. Thoroughly enjoying it so far. Hard to believe it has taken me so long to get around to reading this.
Oh man, that brings back good memories. It's been soooo long since I last read that. <3 Pug.
I should really go back and read Riftwar again some time, along with all the other Fantasy series from my youth (e.g. DragonLance, Belgariad/Malloreon, Dragonriders of Pern, Xanth, Forgotten Realms: Drizzt, Elminster, Pools, Harpers, etc., ) just to see if they live up to my memories. That could be a rabbit hole I never come back from though. :P
I just finished the Discworld novel Men at Arms. I'm going to start reading Nathan Lowell's By Darkness Forged next. It's the latest book in his Seeker Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper-series.
I'm currently reading Boku no Hero Academia as far as manga goes, and re-reading The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini. I'm always down for new manga suggestions!
Better Web Typography by Matej Latin. All about typefaces and how to invite reader to the text on web. Huge fan.
I am reading the sandman comics by Neil Gaiman. So far they are really entertaining. I'm not far into them yet but i enjoy them a lot.
I'm reading 'Public Enemies' by Bryan Burrough, having earlier in the year finished his 'Days of Rage' and 'Barbarians at the Gate'. He's a former WSJ reporter who now does a series of longer form histories, with Public Enemies being about bank robbers in the 30s, and Days of Rage being about radical groups in the 70s.
I think of the three so far, if you're at all interested in the Weather Underground or like minded groups, give 'Days of Rage' a go. The WU were essentially the first two chapters, and the remainder was about a host of groups I'd never heard of before.
Game Engine Black Book: Doom by Fabien Sanglard. I read the first book on Wolfenstein a couple of months ago. The Doom book is equally good - I'd recommend either to someone who enjoys reading old C code and learning about 90's video game history.
Just started Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami. I'm only 20 pages it and the only thing I can say so far is that it is definitely a Murakami book.
I'm very nearly finished with Freedom Hospital, a graphic novel about a hospital for rebels in Syria. The art is very striking and hard to parse sometimes, but the book is good!
Never been reading so much at the same time, but I'm currently reading:
The Outsider - Stephen King, reading this with my girlfriend because usually our tastes don't overlap.
The Way of Kings - Brandon Sanderson, re-reading this on audible. I went on a long drive last weekend and started it and well.. you can't just not finish stormlight.
Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu, Another re-read. I just like to work my way through this once in a while to refocus myself.
The Stephen King is my first thriller/mystery. I've only been reading as an adult for about a year and I've stuck to fantasy and "classic literature" so it's fun to see how my palette can expand from here!
I just started The Foundation Series again. There were only 1 published edition from years ago, and they were really hard to find, even close to impossible to find in good condition. I think there were issues about the copyrigt with the daughter and the local publishers.
Eventually, I could only read first 2 books many years ago. Well, recently the first 3 books published again, and they are planning to publish the rest of the series. And I must say, since they published all 3 books at the same time, it is obvious that they rushed the translation. The 3rd book is an absolute nightmare to read. I finished the first 2 books in almost a week. 3rd one I am still struggling. I think I am going to continue with the English versions after this point.
But, I feel a great remorse about delaying reading these masterpieces. I read a lot of stories and short novels of Assimov before. But the Foundation is truly one of the best Sci-Fi series ever written.
I'm reading Forever And Five Days, which is about the tragic case of the Alpine Manor nursing home murders. I have been into true crime since my late stepdad brought home several True Detective magazines from a summer camp where he worked (this was the mid 80s), and I have a collection of more than 100 books now. I will start on The Psychopathic God Adolf Hitler next.