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What are you reading these days? #15
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.
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 · Week #13 · Week #14
Reading Compass by Mathias Enard. Usually dense, wandering narratives like this lose me, so I'm taking this book in small doses. But I like the style and also the content here. The narrator has been diagnosed with a fatal disease and writes from his apartment in Austria.
He writes about a woman who he seems very attracted to, but who is cool to him. She's a researcher obsessed with the "Orient," and he has a musical background. So far most of the story is based on Istanbul and the Bosphorus. I had to look that last one up on a map, it's a strait that runs between seas to the north and south of Turkey.
Anyway, the narration makes you feel like you're there. It's languid and evocative, I feel it should be boring me, but I keep coming back. Also it's very easy to jump back into, because the narrative and prose seem to carry you along together. Here's a snippet:
I'm only a quarter of the way in, but I could float along there forever. I know nothing about the author and will wait to research when I'm done.
Hey, I live in Istanbul, feel free to ask me anything about that!
I am intrigued! I found a couple reviews which I added to my reading list. Back when I was planning to study comparative literature, this would've been a gold find for me b/c one of the things I though I would study was a comparison of images of Istanbul and Turkey in premodern and modern European authors. I wanted to examine how the establishment of the Republic in Turkey affected the narratives, stereotypes and images. And whether those narratives, especially premodern, had an input in building the republican post-Ottoman Turkish identity. Later on I discovered I was not interested in these stuff enough to make that my career, but I'd still love to dabble with them when I have some free time just for fun.
Thanks for mentioning this book!
I'm reading Understanding Media by McLuhan. It was written in 1964, but it's astonishingly relevant today. It posits some pretty non-standard definitions and perspectives of media. The essential theme so far is that each piece of new media is an extension of a human's senses. What this means is that the impacts of new types of media are at a far greater scale than traditionally attributed.
I'm also kind of reading Sapiens by Harari, which I accidentally lost under my couch last month and just discovered yesterday. It's interesting, but it's not as mind-blowing as people led me to believe.
Decided to give Brandon Sanderson another try after I was disappointed in Mistborn: The Final Empire, so I went ahead and read Steelheart. And overall I was just really disappointed once again, and hated how it ends.
Overall I felt like I was reading Mistborn: The Final Empire again, with a very similar set up and plot. Just with difference characters and a different world. But that immediately put me off. And I was really excited when the major event with a character near the end. Thinking that finally this stupid romance that I don't care about at all is over with. Now he can grow as a character with this event, and become stronger from it. Also helps that I felt it was great he was putting forth that choices matter in this book, and serious consequences can occur. But alas, it was all essentially undone. Sure new info is released and questions raised, but it just doesn't matter much to me at that point. Guess this just makes it show that I just don't really like Brandon Sanderson, while lots of people like him I guess I just don't.
Have to hand it to you for giving an author another go, after being disappointed the first. But yeah, sometimes no matter how hard we try, we just can't like something even if we really want to.
I've been reading his Cosmere universe for the first time and it really has lit my passion for reading again. While I enjoy them, I can certainly start to find some similarities between his works (besides what connects these worlds in the lore). He loves to hop around multiple characters' perspectives, there is usually some character of noble birth who is also a perfect morale person integral to the story, almost no women that are "useless" or not strong, the book is set after a disastrous event has already happened, etc. I don't know how representative Steelheart is of his writing style, but it's a young adult novel so I assume it features some of the tropes associated with that genre.
That said, I was really impressed at his short stories in Arcanum Unbounded. "The Emperor's Soul", "Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell" and "Sixth of the Dusk" are fresh, intruiging narratives that honestly don't play very much to his usual book framework and are enjoyable quick reads. I know you said you've been put off by his books, but if you can borrow the book from a friend or library, the interesting worlds and magic systems themselves are worth the short read.
Mistborn isn't that great because I believe it's the first actual series he wrote. I did enjoy the Steelheart books even though they were quite YA for me. Emperor's Soul is a novella he wrote which is fantastic, but his best work is easily Stormlight.
+1 for stormlight. Mistborn felt very pop fictiony to me, but stormlight is on a whole other level imo.
I have been craving light-snack sci-fi-esque tidbits, so I've been going through The SCP Foundation reading about interesting phenomena. If you have about 2 minutes at a time to dedicate to reading, and only have your phone, then it's, well, as I said a nice light sci-fi snack.
I've been reading The Belgariad to my 8-year old. It's a nice, low-key entry into fantasy. She is enjoying it, and I'm enjoying reading it to her. Eddings is a comfort read for me; I don't think anyone will ever argue that he was one of the greats, but as far as pulp fantasy goes, it's pretty enjoyable.
I've started reading "The Phoenix Project", which is a book about DevOps. It's okay thus far, but hasn't really grabbed me.
There's a lot of what you've just said, but there are a few themes that I find interesting. The main thing that I've found about SCP is that you don't want to browse by number; you probably want to browse by theme, which means finding a story you like, and then using the tags. I like misters and things from the factory and also some others that elude me, but the main thing is to find a subgenre that you like and try to stick to it.
Because I am in a few weeks long marathon for applying for my master's, for which I'll have to study some books and also prepare for a stupid national exam, I am unable to read any serious literature currently. I had to drop Il fu Mattia Pascal (gonna read later), and I managed to finish Language in Society (talked about them in Week #13). Now I started reading "Language Contact: An Introduction" by Sarah Thomason. I only read the introduction, but it feels like a good book on the topic. It is a celebrated introductory book into the field of language contact, which I plan will be the main focus of my master's.
Language in Society is a great book, but is also a bit dated at this point given it was published in 1994 and sociolinguistics is a young, quickly evolving discipline. I am not exactly sure how it is outdated, but it feels so in the context of prior introductory material I read (I'll need to review what's new in the field ever since to have an exact idea, but I have to move on ATM b/c there is lots of other stuff to read). Nevertheless, when you're aware that there are some possibly outdated info in it, it is a great introductory text. An engaging read, with beautiful examples. A couple criticisms might be made about the small amount of citations (not every example / paraphrasign quotation is cited) and the parts about feminist issues where at times there are unobjective passages (tho the overal discourse on feminist approaches and gender issues w.r.t. language is quite good). I really suggest the book to any newcomer to the field (which I am, so take that w/ a grain of salt, too).
Still, tho, I read the latest issue of the Natama Turkish literary journal that I talk about sometimes in these threads. This issue will probably be the last one too, because I can hardly find anything enjoyable in it anymore. It went from beautiful content---poetry and criticism---to pseudo-intellectual rants and ramblings over a few issues for some reason. I will be on the look for a better one after I sort my master's out. Also, I started reading a 100-page novella called Bir Çift Ayak "A Pair of Feet" by Ertuğ Uçar. I noticed this book because the name of the author was same as my brother's rather uncommon first name, and it looked nice. Now I started reading it, and 20 pages in, it is interesting, but I can't tell what it is yet. A narrator observes a crack in their home's wall for a couple chapters, and then we're going around in the taverns and pubs of Istanbul for a couple more.
I recently read Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, about a social misfit working... well, you can figure out where she works. It's a sympathetic, amusing look at someone who's happy in her niche but looked down on by family and friends.
Currently just about to finish Happy: A Memoir by Alex Lemon. As a young baseball player in college he began having brain bleeds, and the book takes us through his eventual diagnosis, treatment and recovery. I hope he's a changed man now because he (and his friends) seem like such terrible human beings, I honestly didn't know how I wanted the surgery to turn out. Their whole lives were nothing but drinking, drugs, getting laid, swearing at each other and casually destroying property. I'll take the social misfit at the convenience store over the jocks any day if that's what they're really like.
Your comments about the second book remind me of the Kavanaugh case :) The US high school culture is so different from what I'm used to, it can be rough where I'm from too but nothing near the unchecked irresponsible freedom which what I've seen recently suggests me that they have there.
I started reading In the Balance by Harry Turtledove yesterday. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's a historical "what if" about aliens invading earth in the middle of WW2. I'm only a few chapters into it, but I'm really enjoying it. It's a multi-part series, so looks like I've got plenty of reading ahead of me.
My only regret is buying the kindle version of the book. It's full of typos, punctuation hiccups, spacing errors, etc. that aren't a part of the print version. It's certainly readable, but also a bit distracting at times, causing me to re-read things because the flow is goofed up by errors.
I feel your pain, I totally hate it when there are typos in my books. I haven't used a Kindle before, but you're the second commenter here to mention negative experiences with it like this, so I'm glad I did not get into it.
Maybe these books are lightly edited OCRs of paperbacks?
I've been using Kindle books for a few years now and this is the first time I've had this kind of negative experience with it. It's really bizarre.
Have you ever heard of Darwinia? It's kind of a what-if story where most of Europe is suddenly replaced by jungle in, like, 1914, so WWI never happens. It gets much more complicated from there and becomes a pretty interesting sci-fi story, but In the Balance made me think of it.
Are we allowed to talk about comics/graphic novels?
I've been reading Paper Girls. Me and a friend went to our local (but not local enough) comic book shop two days ago, and they had a display of the best-selling trade paperbacks, one of them was Paper Girls Vol. 1. The cover caught my attention right away, with beautiful vibrant blues and pink. I just had to get it.
After reading the first volume, I went to Books-A-Million to grab the second volume. It's even better than the first. I'm going to order the third volume today on Amazon. I highly recommend this series.
Besides that, I'm reading Watchmen, I've only read the first chapter so far, so there's not much to say about it. I mainly picked it up because of the HBO series coming later this year.
Sure! Anything that one can "read", for any definition thereof, goes. Paper books, ebooks, audiobooks, comics, graphic novels. As long as it involves some sort of long form text, it's okay.
Watchmen is great, I read it last year after my housemate recommended it to me. The movie is also a decent adaptation
I've been reading 1984! I checked it out as an e-book from my library, as my SO had suggested I read it. I never had to in high school which I count as a blessing, mostly in part because I never really liked the "greats" when I was younger. I now have a different appreciation for them! But so far I'm really enjoying 1984. I love the play of reality and memory; there is no memory and no history that isn't fabricated as well as questioning what's real if all there is is one man remembering it.
I've heard miscellaneous things about 1984 and A LOT of people talk about the overarching antagonist of big brother, which I thought was going to more central to the book? Like obviously, BB IS central, but when I hear about it in popular media it's usually to talk about the surveillance aspects of life in Airstrip 1 (I believe is the name of where Winston is at). I feel like that's doing a huge disservice to the book to only remember it for BB being able to look at everything you do where there's the very real and very small struggle of one man trying to come to terms with his reality. And trying to parse together what is truth and what is a lie. I didn't know it would be such a human story, at least from what I've read so far. I'm really enjoying it though I'm nervous about how it will end.
been re reading meditations and also trying to go through the pragmatic programmer for the past 5 months already since its been recommended by many people. I'm having trouble staying interested though since so far every thing seems to be common sense for anyone who has any experience in software development.
How do you like Meditations? I got it as a gift some time ago and have yet to read it.
it really depends on what copy you get. I got the one translated by Gregory Hays. The notes it included in the beginning gave a great context to what I was about to read and made it that much more enjoyable. I love being able to pick it up and put it down whenever I want since it was structured as notes that Marcus Aurelius wrote for himself.
What got me interested in reading Meditations was reading "How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life" by Massimo Pigliucci. It's a great introduction to stoicism. I highly recommend reading that before or after Meditations.
Cool, thanks for the overview and recommendation! I'll add Pigliucci's book to my list.
I just finished reading the Dragonback series by Timothy Zahn, who is better known for writing the best of the Star Wars novels. It was a good read, but not quite on the same level as the Thrawn books. I was not impressed with the Kindle version. Lots of typos, and a lack of paragraph separations in a couple places. I haven't read a lot of Kindle books, so I'm going to keep my eyes on that kind of thing from now on.
I just started reading The Game of Work, by Charles A. Coonradt. I'm hoping it will provide some inspiration for how I work and lead those in my firm.
I'm trying to get through The Sympathizer. It's not a bad book by any means, I just have a hard time paying attention when I'm reading in general, depending on the topic. I blazed right through Lindy West's Shrill, and Michael Chriton's Sphere, but this realistic-fiction stuff that lands itself in places that I admittedly have zero experience in (and would like to get more experience in/broaden my horizons) just leaves me so lost when the author makes a lot of assumptions about what I know.
Do you read any form of criticism? The Wikipedia page, even? I find many readers (me included, up until a couple years ago) turn a blind eye on them, even the foreword of a book people avoid reading. But since when I started reading them, they help so much with comprehending what a text is about. It is quite easy to get lost when you're exploring a new genre, or even a new author. Three main things help with that: the superficial knowledge of an authors life, the general information about the historical context of a book, and literary styles / traditions / movements it has a relation to. Two easiest sources for this is Wikipedia, and the front matter to the book if available. I like Italian books for this reason, because they tend to have big front matters that include a biography of the author, and some critical texts about the book, apart from a foreword.
I've given up reading forewords because they always contain spoilers! I tell myself I'll go back and read it after I finish the main text, but I always forget.
I've come to love spoilers, especially for more complex works. Some foreword authors indeed give too much that is enough to spoil the entire thing, but most often they only "tease" the work and only give away little spoilers to get their point across and intrigue the reader. Personally, I've never regretted started reading them, tho sometimes I encounter crap ones and skip them.
Shouldn't the text tell you what the text is about? If a book can't explain itself without the reader having to resort to outside research, it's not a very good book.
That is a stance I used to support but after reading quite a bit and studying literature I found out that it's never only the text that tells you what the text is about. Think this way: you grab a manuscript, it's a text w/o a cover, an author's name, anything. Just this body of text. It is a realistic story. You can't tell if it was some novel, some autobiography, or a historical account. It is the context that tells you what it is, and your interpretation will vary depending on that. Also, many experimental, especially post-modern texts are hard to fit into a category. A few words on it can help frame and comprehend the thing.
Apart from these, most non-contemporary texts are hard to comprehend if one lacks the knowledge of the historical context and the literary context. Say you grabbed a copy of Sappho's work. If you don't know Sappho is a Greek woman that lived in the middle of the first millennium B.C., that she lived in Lesvos, she was homosexual (indeed the word lesbian comes from her being from Lesvos), and she lived in a society with values such and such, you'd understand nothing of it. Or if you wanted to read The Path to the Nest of Spiders, but you knew nothing about fascism and the partisan war against it, you wouldn't understand much. Or you wanted to read La casa in collina by Pavese but did not know his biography at all. A good foreword helps with all these cases, without leaking much of the work itself.
There's a difference between knowing in advance that a book is a novel or an autobiography or a historical account, and a reader feeling like they're left so lost when the author makes a lot of assumptions about what they know (as per the comment you responded to).
I suppose I'm used to science fiction, where authors know that you haven't encountered a food replicator or pocket frannistan in real life, or that you don't live in a society where people don't use money or they live as disembodied consciousnesses inside a computer, so the author has to explain what these things are and how they work. (Or, at least most sci-fi authors understand this... not looking at anyone in particular, Mr William Gibson!) So, the idea of reading a novel and being left behind because the author isn't bothering to explain the necessary and relevant background is alien to me (pun intended). That's what I'm talking about.
Simply doing a bit of research to find out whether you're about to read a novel or an autobiography isn't what the previous commenter was complaining about. They know they're reading a realistic-fiction novel, but they're still feeling lost because the author is making too many assumptions about what readers know.
I'm reading Moonwalking with Einstein, which is about memory, and Cain, which is about, well, Cain.
Moonwalking with Einstein (by Joshua Foer) is interesting, but it's a lot like other nonfiction books (or at least the last one I read, about a pun competition) in that it goes through an author's training for a big competition to get to their research on the subject. It's a frame I'm not sure I'm a big fan of.
Cain is by José Saramago. It's about what happened to Cain after he killed Abel, and it's absolutely hilarious so far. It's very sacrilegious, but that kind of humor is right up my alley. I've actually realized that I really like novels that imagine out-of-scene lives for characters in popular works; I've also read and enjoyed Barabbas by Pär Lagerkvist, Grendel by John Gardner, and Goliath by Tom Gauld; I've read but not enjoyed Wicked. Anyway, Cain is quite good so far.
I am a fan of Saramago (read almost all of his books, one great author) and Cain is one of my favourite ones of his works. Talked about it in another topic recently:
A book that is similar in topic but quite different in what it does is Cees Nooteboom's Letters to Poseidon. It is what the title says, letters written to Poseidon, which among other things include reflections and meditations on religion and on divine. I also strongly suggest The Gospel According to Jesus by Saramago, which is a fictional account of Jesus' private life, intermixed with lots of criticism and reflection as per Saramago's style.
Hey thanks for the recommendations! This is the first of Saramago's I've read, but I've also heard that Blindness and Seeing are very good. I really like the critique of Abrahamic tradition in Cain, like you've said. I'll have to check out the other books too, thank you again! I really like books that explore our relationship to the unknowable, to what some people might call God.
No problem! I reassure you no Saramago novels underwhelm.
I'm now reading The Story of Philosophy by James Garvey and Jeremy Stangroom. I've been wanting to find an introductory philosophy book for a while, and this turned up in my local bargain bookshop, so I picked it up. I'm only a few chapters in so far, but I'm finding it interesting and informative.
I'm still reading Heaven by Virginia Andrews at bedtimes. According to my kobo, I'm about 90% of the way through this book - but there are 4 more books in the series, so I'll be stuck on this series for a while. (Which is not a bad thing!)
I recently finished reading Flowers for Algernon it was an awesome read. I haven't read any books for years and this was the one of the most suggested books for starters. I bought a physical copy of the book, but now I think I should probably invest in a kindle which is more portable and affordable in the long run. So I have to postpone reading until my savings can afford a kindle(I don't have a job).
You could go to libraries, if available where you live.
This book, Flowers for Algernon, is one of those that appear most frequently in these threads. If I counted (I intend to do some stats for the second thread of May or the first one of June, but no promises), it would probably be the top one, or contend with a couple other books I know the name of but can't remember now.
And only now did I give the Wiki page on it a look. Looks quite interesting indeed, I'm considering buying a translation now. Thanks!
I've been reading Brandon Sanderson's cosmere universe of fantasy novels for the first time. Finished all but Oathbringer, Edgedancer, White Sand and Warbreaker (reading now). The magic systems are excitingly fresh and make sense (there are twists near the ends of stories but it's rarely a deus ex machina), there's tons of foreshadowing of future events, and the stories are so interconnected, and it feels like the novels have been refined over a long period of time.
He's singlehandedly rekindled my love of reading.
[Also the guy is a super hardworking and responsive dude. He posts about his current writing status all the time, shares behind the scenes details about chapters, and responds to fans all the time. How many authors do that.]
I just finished listening to AI Superpowers by Kai-fu Lee on my commute this morning. It raises plenty of good points and quite informative on the Chinese tech culture, but it can feel repetitive at times.
Still listening to the audiobook of "After On" by Rob Reid. It's an interesting book, but doesn't translate very well into audio.
I'm not currently reading anything, because I'm a bit behind with my comic books. Almost caught up, so I have D. B. Jackson's "Time's Children" waiting for me