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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.
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On recommendation from @tindall, I started up How to Survive a Plague by David France. It's a harrowing and illuminating look at the AIDS epidemic in the United States, which is a part of our history that has only grown in importance, especially as of late.
I also just finished with Andi Zeisler's We Were Feminists Once which was a very interesting critique of the corporate and capitalistic co-opting of feminism.
In terms of larger goals, I am closing in on finishing the alphabet for my audiobooks. I have books planned for every letter except Q, so if anyone has any nonfiction recommendations for a book whose title starts with Q, or whose author's first or last name starts with Q, let me know!
Current Alphabet Challenge Scorecards
Print Books
A: Asimov, Isaac - Foundation
B:
C:
D: Dark Matter (Blake Crouch)
E: Emily St. John Mandel - Station Eleven
F:
G: Gracefully Grayson (Ami Polonsky)
H: Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despite One Another (Matt Taibbi)
I: Ishiguro, Kazuo - The Remains of the Day
J:
K:
L:
M:
N: Nevertheless She Persisted: Flash Fiction Project (Various Authors)
O:
P:
Q:
R:
S:
T:
U:
V:
W:
X:
Y:
Z:
Graphic Novels
A: Alex Robinson - Box Office Poison
B:
C:
D: Drawing Power: Women's Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival (Various Authors)
E:
F: Fies, Brian - A Fire Story
G:
H:
I:
J:
K:
L:
M:
N:
O:
P:
Q: Queer: A Graphic History (Meg-John Barker; Julia Scheele)
R: Robinson, Alex - BOP!: More Box Office Poison
S:
T:
U:
V:
W:
X:
Y:
Z:
Audiobooks
A: Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation (Andrew Marantz)
B: Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth (Rachel Maddow)
C: Cottom, Tressie McMillan - Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy
D: Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs (Michael T. Osterholm; Mark Olshaker)
E: Edward Snowden - Permanent Record
F: Farrow, Ronan - Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators
G: Gladwell, Malcolm - Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know
H:
I: Ijeoma Oluo - So You Want to Talk About Race
J: Jodi Kantor; Megan Twohey - She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement
K: Khan, Ali S. - The Next Pandemic: On the Front Lines Against Humanity's Gravest Dangers
L: Lee, Justin - Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate
M: Margaret Witt; Tim Connor - Tell: Love, Defiance, and the Military Trial at the Tipping Point for Gay Rights
N: Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (Peter Pomerantsev)
O: One Person, No Vote (Carol Anderson)
P: Pollan, Michael - In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
Q:
R: Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice (Bill Browder)
S: Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story (Jacob Tobia)
T: Tressie McMillan Cottom - Thick: And Other Essays
U:
V: Virginia Eubanks - Automatic Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
W: West, Lindy - The Witches Are Coming
X:
Y:
Z: Zeisler, Andi - We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement
I started reading Ascendance of a Bookworm, a series of Japanese light novels about a teenage book-lover from Japan who is reincarnated as a small, sickly peasant child in a fantasy realm where most people are illiterate, and therefore she is determined to make books. Despite minimal character development and uneven world-building, it's strangely compelling in a sort of survivalist way, going into the details of her attempts to figure out a feasible technology for preserving writing while being unable to do most things herself. I'm in the second novel of the series where she is attempting to make paper with the backing of a merchant who sees promise in her ideas. (The society uses parchment, but it's very expensive.)
Up to volume 3. There is a supply and demand chart.
Legionnaire (Galaxy's Edge, #1) Jason Anspach. This was a fun gritty military sci fi. Space Marine pov, nothing deeper than pencil pushers bad, bad officers bad, other branches bad (mostly) and we are fucking badass, a lot of violence in space totallynot-Afghanistan. I enjoyed it, unfortunately the second is book is star wars-esque space opera, so i passed.
Live Free or Die (Troy Rising, #1) John Ringo. Awful book i kept reading until i finished because i had already passed the 50% point. Aliens open a "gate" and dominate Humanity until one man finds a product the aliens actually want.... Maple Syrup. With his new found wealth and contacts he sets about freeing humanity from their alien overlords. I was really looking forward to this book when i heard the premise but the characters are nonexistent, there are too man political and technological info dumps and the politics (of which i generally agree with) is hamfisted to the max, he often sounded like someone taking the piss out of libertarians..
Currently reading
Furies of Calderon (codex alera) by Jim Butcher. This is a book that has been on my radar since i got into fantasy years ago but always put off because the premise sounded fucking stupid and every review mentions it. Pokemon meets Roman Empire. So fucking stupid and not good stupid either, self aware laden with irony and reddit-tumblr bait stupid. Thankfully the pokemon aren't as pokemony as i was expecting (at least so far). They are more just animism type spirits that can manipulate their essence. I'm not far enough in to talk about the characters or plot but both seem readably generic so far.
Longer Reads (aka big boy reads, aka not finished and wont be for a while).
The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan by Yasmin Khan. Good concise narrative of the Partition of India. Yasmin Khan is the author and a professor at oxford. This book explains the context, execution and aftermath of the partition which left a million dead. I'm only on the "context" of the partition but its a very readable book that tells you what the feeling like was on the ground and by the elite, both "Indian" and British.
The Odyssey by Homer (Fagels translation.) I consider myself a "Reader" and so its about time i read the classics. I read the Illiad earlier in the year so it's time for the Odyssey. I'm at the part where she some Witch turns his shipmates into pigs, he manages to avoid being turned into a pig because a god gives him a potion of anti pig. The Witch is so turned on by this she wants to bed him but he gets her to sign a verbal contract not to try anything dastardly when he is in a vulnerable position. She unpigs his shipmates and they party for a year. Metal. Im sure there is some deeper meaning to all this but i am just enjoying the ride.
Just finished The Golem and The Jinn by Helen Wecker. It was very enjoyable, I loved it! The characters were all so good and the ending was very satisfying!
I'm getting back into reading Pachinko as I only got about halfway through it. It's a very, very long book but very enjoyable as it goes through all the different generations.
Finished volume 7 (for now) of The Wandering Inn, but I can't say I like where it's going very much.
Spoilers for TWI - volume 7
I already dislike sexual content in stories I did not pick up for their sexual content - and let's be honest, fucking is fucking everywhere - but the last Mating Rituals chapter just felt forced, like pirateaba was trying to shove as much stuff out of the door as possible. I also know that there was already a plot hook with the whole "Zel Shivertail was a Turnscale" thing, but I don't really feel like reading yet another story about LGBT+ people struggling to find their place in the world.
I didn't like how the goblins were handled. The Antinium are arguably a much worse threat than the goblins, for all that their [Lords] and [Kings] can topple countries. Until Erin popped up even the Free Antinium were just made up of mindless drones (with a penchant for going bursar when asked "what's your name?"), but they are accepted much more readily as people. Goblins, on the other hand, who can even pass for human if they cover up a bit? Not-people whose capacity for speech is somehow surprising, with Erin cast as a somehow crazy saint for going against this frankly ridiculous cultural milieu.
I can't help but feel that LGBT characters will only join the story to feed this... struggle porn, for lack of better terms, and to prop up those characters who are not complete assholes towards them. In any case, I don't want to read a rehash of the civil rights movements, which I keep on finding odd in worlds where struggle literally gives you power.
I also started reading A Practical Guide To Evil and I have no idea what I was expecting, but this was not it. It has been enjoyable so far.
I've read this story https://www.reddit.com/r/9M9H9E9/wiki/narrative, which the author originally posted in random reddit comments. It was a pretty interesting multiple timelines sci-fi light horror story (a bit like the scp foundation), so if you like that check it out!
I just started Children of Virtue and Vengeance, the sequel to Adeyemi's Children of Blood and Bone, which was great. Getting back into the world is taking some remembering, but from the first chapter, it's good :)
Of course, nowadays I'm not doing a ton of reading books. Just dicking around on the internet.
No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai.
I watched a movie about it a year ago and am only now reading the book. I'm liking a lot.
Pretty short book.
On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins. I’m really enjoying it, and it’s doing a good job of rebutting a lot of the GOFAI beliefs. I also like the model of intelligence it proposes.