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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.
99 percent invisible (the podcast) recently released a book titled the 99% invisible city of which I am currently reading through. It's a fantastic look into the various pieces of city architecture that are often overlooked and tells some fantastic stories about famous pieces of architecture and other design that graces human civilization throughout the world.
I'm about 1/3rd through. This book is great... far more interesting than it should be.
Hello fellow design or story nerd 💜
It feels so much just like the podcast but in written form. I love it
right! We need Tildes challenge coins.
I'm doing a full Cosmere re-read because I'm waiting on The Way of Kings leather-bound to arrive so I can read it while completing my Stormlight re-read.
Giving up /r/cremposting once Rhythm of War comes out will be difficult until I'm caught up.
I am on the fence about doing a full Stormlight reread for ROW. I did it before the release of Oathbringer but i was frankly exhausted by the time i was half way through and so wasn't giving it my full attention. I remember finding OB to be disappointing and i don't think it was all because i was tired of the Stormlight books/Sanderson. All my favourite moments are in the first 2 books but 3700-ish pages is a lot of reading to do and i don't want to burn out again.
I finally got around to reading Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend. It's a wonderful novel about two Neopolitan girls growing up and their complex friendship. I have nothing in common, other than shared humanity, with the people in this novel, but I'm finding it extremely engaging.
just finished up Dark Matter: On the Surveillance of Blackness, which examines how the racialization and commodification of Black people during and after chattel slavery helped to lay the foundations of the modern globalized surveillance regime. for example, runaway slave posters that described particular physical features and temperaments of people through the lens of whiteness were a biometric practice that can be traced to modern predictive policing algorithms, where those traits reify conceptions of race into supposedly objective and scientific fact with potentially deadly material outcomes. very good read.
Thanks for mentioning this book. Adding it to my reading list!
I finished Leviathan Wakes, the first book of the Expanse series. Previously I had watched some of the first season on Amazon Prime and thought I'd see how the book is.
It's a well-written science fiction/noir/space military action novel that held my interest and had some nice moments that reminded me a bit of Firefly, but the solar system described here is a pretty darned depressing place and I can't come up with a solid reason to recommend it, other than to pass the time.
Did you find it worthwhile enough to proceed to the next one in the series?
Yep, I’m reading it. I guess I’m bored or something?
The background of this series is interesting. It seems it was based on a role playing game by one of the co-authors, and I can definitely see it.
I saw that Isaac Asimov's Foundation is being made into a TV show, and it looked interesting, so I decided to read the book. I'm finding it... mediocre. The premise is interesting – a scientist has been able to predict that the galactic empire is going to collapse in the next few years and has used his predictive power to figure out a path to rebuild it as quickly as possible. He claims he has found a way to rebuild it in 1,000 years, whereas without using his predictions it will take 30,000 years to rebuild.
The characters change every 5 to 10 chapters because it keeps jumping 50-100 years in the future in every section. I get why he did that, but it ends up being more like a bunch of short stories, and we don't really get to know the characters too much before we're on to the next group. That would all be fine if it weren't for the fact that the dialog is very stilted. I have a hard time parsing much of it because the wording is so weird. (And that's before we even get to characters with various affectations, like the one who speaks like Elmer Fudd.) And to top it off, I'm 2/3rds of the way through the book and there literally hasn't been a single woman in the book so far. They do exist in this universe, as at the beginning of the book, one character mentions that there are 30,000 men in the Foundation, along with their wives and children. But apparently none of them were notable enough to actually write about, not even as secondary supporting characters. It just seems really weird.
Anyway, I'll read the rest of it to see where it's going. I would hope a modern TV adaptation would fix some of these issues, but I guess we'll see.
I read Foundation earlier this year, and while I liked it overall, I felt similarly to you.
I'm sure there's an actual term for this that I'm simply unaware of, but I feel like some sci-fi is "ideas-based" and the characters are sort of just functional placeholders that allow the ideas to play out. One of my favorite sci-fi books is Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama and I literally can't tell you a single thing about a single character from memory, but I can tell you all about the ideas of the book despite not having read it for a while. The same goes for Clarke's Childhood's End. The characters in the stories are very much secondary to the bigger concepts the book wants to explore. I feel like Foundation is slightly more character-based, but not by much.
I bought three Agahta Christie books, Death on the Nile, Murder in Mesopotamia, and Come Tell Me How You Live. The last one is Christie's real life account of archaeological expeditions in the Middle East. Planning to read it this weekend.
I'm about 100 pages into The Sandman Universe: The Dreaming, a comic book series in the universe created by Neil Gaiman.
Sandman is my favorite comic book series of all time, so I'm at the same time extremely excited and wary of this acquisition (I got the first 600 pages split into 3 volumes -- they combine editions in Brazil). I must unhype myself somehow because it will most certainly not surpass the original.
The first pages are kinda cryptic (more than Neil Gaiman ever was...), I even read a summary to get a foothold. By page 80 the story really starts to take shape. The art is gorgeous and the plot shows promise.
It's kinda annoying that they're releasing a bunch of comics in this universe at the same time because the title is not as self-contained, and there are definitely things I probably should learn from other series, but I won't buy a bunch of comics I don't care about just to fully understand this one.
I'm also reading "regular" comics. It's been interesting to notice how mainstream comics changed from when I stopped reading those 15+ years ago. I found a reference to the TV show Friends on Superman, this made me feel really old.
I also think there are narrative and aesthetic changes. In the old days, the pages had more detail, probably because more things were hand-drawn (or at least less "automated"). Nowadays there's an abundance of detailed backgrounds, but close-ups are both less frequent and less detailed. Double page spreads are more common, with beautiful, "artistic" framing. But I don't like the overall "vectorization" of character design. They're just less appealing. This is more about DC than Marvel, since I read more of the former (Batman and Superman).