and if you have a goodreads you want to plug thats also cool too

im currently reading Beowulf, and ill be honest its kind of boring and limited but since its short ill just finish it and see whats next on the shelf

i'm reading Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel on the strong recommendation of my mum & partner who both adored it. it's a semi-fictional account of the early life of the author's mother, a half-cherokee girl growing up in poverty in rural appalachia in the mid 20th century. it has that style of whimsical, self-consciously lyrical prose which seems to be quite in vogue among contemporary novels. that often puts me off books because it feels like it's compensating for a lack of substance in the content, but that's certainly not the case in Betty - there's plenty of depth here.

I am currently reading this thread

Seriously though, I am currently reading "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories" by Gene Wolfe. It's a collection of science fiction short stories written from 1970~1980. Like most Gene Wolfe it's interesting but kinda confusing sometimes, often layers of hidden stories beneath the story

Just finished The Faithful Spy by Alex Berenson, and I started Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy (and no I don’t play siege, I actually enjoy Clancy novels)

Michael Hann - Denim and Leather

An oral history of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Some pretty funny stories in here, and it prompted me to check out Diamond Head, who had some killer tunes.

I just finished Heavy by Kiese Laymon in audiobook form (read by the author). It was pretty gut wrenching but thought provoking and powerfully written. A memoir on American society and racism, sex, violence, obesity, and other issues from a Black perspective. I don’t typically read memoirs or non-fiction but I’m glad I picked this up.

I’m currently towards the end of Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s pretty interesting as a blend of science and human psychology / sociology wrapped up in the form of a story about the colonization of Mars.

i have regretfully not read anything in 2024, with the last couple things i started before not really resonating and keeping me out of the habit. so inspired by this thread i have picked up cormac mccarthy's all the pretty horses and read a bit of it. dude has such a powerful and poetic way of writing about even the most mundane things

Creations of Fire by Cobb and Goldwhite. It's the history of chemistry from ancient times to the mid-20th century. I was particularly interested in the first part, about how chemistry turned from a magic-like tradition to a science. It felt a bit too surface level though, maybe because it covers so much ground, and maybe because neither of the two writers is a philosopher of science. The second part, which covers the 18th and 19th centuries, is more fully realized, with a step-by-step description of how atomic theory, thermodynamics and knowledge of the elements came to be. Starting part three now.

Apart from that I'm also listening to the Fall of Hyperion audiobook, and sporadically digging through the bibliographies of Borges and Calvino.

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/77144244-paulo-silva

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. It's a fantastic science fiction novel (am I allowed to describe the book or is that considered spoilers?)

books are NERD SHIT

Currently reading this rn. Pretty interesting so far

That Andy Weir book is on my list, I enjoyed The Martian and thought I’d give that one a try. Also in the vein of books about Mars, Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles is fantastical and weird sci fi that I would recommend.

I second Project Hail Mary. Loved that book!

The hobbit! love me some high fantasy

I am reading... your mind.

You're thinking:

Give...
Hexer...
Boons!

good thread.

I'm currently reading "Die Blausteinkriege" Pt.1
it's actually on my shelve for 9 years now and I never finished it soooo I kinda have to finally. it was a gift.
I usually only read fantasy, so this is right up my alley. but so far I am missing the "point of the story", like that one thing that puts everything together. reads more like a big description of people's life in a made up world. kinda cool to read. but I don't see the reason why I shld read it.

it seems to have 3 sequels... or whatever the name is for books that follow a book.bnot sure if I'll get pt2. maybe the end of pt1 will rly catch me, who knows.

my fav book at this point is probably Eragon, all 4 parts. it had everything I like and has been a big inspiration for my own writing too!

there are ~10 other books on my shelve that are waiting for me to read them. I dedicated an hour every day to reading so I'm making slow but steady progress on it c:

Im reading "Watch the Northwind Rise" by robert graves
its about a future primitivist utopia which summons a britisher from the 20th century to clear up some misconceptions about english. but he accidentally brings along his vile ex-wife and they destroy everything

just finished Project Hail Mary, by far the best sci-fi book I've ever read

I was never much for reading fiction until I realized my work was slow so, why not find what suits me.

And I figured the Fire tablet I bought to use as a glorified TV/video player is originally designed for reading books. These are now readings and some recent reads from the past year

The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk
Three Days of Happiness by Sugaru Miaki
Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs by Kerry Howley
I Want to Eat Your Pancreas by Yoru Sumino
The Honzuki (Ascendance of Bookworm) series
The Weakest Tamer Began a Journey to Pick Up Trash

i was reading dracula but in the back half the victorianism of it all is starting to really drain me, so i might drop it... i wanted there to be a lil more to discover beyond the common cultural vampire image but i don't think the book honestly has a lot of that. besides pages and pages of tortured victorian era gender concept. it's like when an author thinks you Dont Get the magic system so they go into way too much detail explaining how everything works. except for gender

next i will probably get back to reading the neveryon series by delany. i loved the first one as a very "philosophical" fantasy. philosophical in the sense that it feels like you're reading the book's marxist analysis of itself lol. very fun to get that explicitly in a genre that is usually drowning in implicit libertarian power fantasy

best book i read recently was "bear" by marian engel. refreshing like a walk in the woods

"i was reading dracula but in the back half the victorianism of it all is starting to really drain me"

would you say it was sucking out your energy? like some kind of... vampiric book?

I've personally been into slice-of-lifey queer romance novels because that's where my life is, and I finished Legends and Lattes yesterday. what a good easy read!

One.thing that struck me about dracula is that it was lot more Christian than I was expecting
Given what the concepts represent now as a culture

oh and heres my goodreads

i'm five short stories into gorilla, my love by toni cade bambara. it's pretty good! i like the author's prose and the first story made me almost cry

"Klara And The Sun" by Kazuo Ishiguro

Just finished it the other day, and I gotta say - the author credibly serves first-person narration from the perspective of an android AI character!

I wouldn't call this HARD scifi, because the tech of the world is not really a part of the book's focus - in fact, in a very VERY interesting twist, there's more of an element of superstition in play: Klara is fundamentally *solar powered* and consequentially her relationship with the sun (as the title suggests) is easy to recognize as just, like, normal human superstition, the way humans in the past worshiped the big fireball in the sky that brought warmth and light into their lives!

So while she's an artifical intelligence, but she's not an alien intelligence, or even a recognizeably robotic one - she thinks and feels and reasons like a human, albeit one whose mind is, as ours is, closely coupled to the mechanics of her own body.

Sometimes she describes her perception of her surroundings as being separated into 'boxes' - as if she's aware, on some level, of her own subconscious process of 'sampling' the input of her various sensors - sometimes her awareness can be filled with multiple 'boxes,' splitting her own finite attention between all the different sensory inputs, tracking many different things around her - other times, particularly during moments of great importance when her attention is focused on a single subject, each 'box' samples a subtly different aspect of her view (e.g. 16 different elements that make up a human facial expression) It's a lovely storytelling device, and it all comes from Klara, in her own words!

I went into this book blind (my preferred method for approaching media!) and - I was kind of blown away!

Very much recommend if you'd like to read a bit of near-future speculative fiction, with a focus on telling a very recognizably human story through the lens of a non-human intelligence!

I just finished The Visitation by Frank Peretti, and am currently reading Seraphina by Rachel Hartman. Both really good books

House of Leaves by Zampanò Mark Z Danielewski was a wild ride. If you pick this one up, I'd recommend not looking up anything on it first. This book has a lot of depth and some creative exploration of horror storytelling with thematic connections to relationships, hurt, healing, trauma, love. This one was pretty intense

current:
Super Consciousness - Colin Wilson
Psycho-Cybernetics - Maxwell Maltz
不倫女子のリアル - Aya Sawaki

I read a lot lol. I'm currently rereading Tracked by Jenny Martin. It's a sci-fi racing book that I bought at my library that no one has ever talked about. I don't really care for the romance (as the main character is a dramatic, love-stricken teen girl) but the descriptions and setting descriptions are so well written

I just spent a week in the hospital and couldn't have my phone and I literally read (part of) this book called "MIDI Power!"
A small taste of normalcy in a strange situation to read about XG specifications and CC

I also read this Prince biography that was pretty trash but felt like I had to finish it....

Children of Dune, the third book, my second run through the series. I seem to agree with most people that the sequels don’t really hold up to the OG as far as the imagery and mystique; they really feel more like pedestrian 70’s sf, if a little less cornball than some

Also “Whittling and Woodcarving” by E.J. Tangerman

A great sci-fi I just read is "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Jumping spiders evolve as the dominant lifeform in a terraforming project and the book follows their development into a complex society over the span of thousands of years.

Meanwhile, the last humans from a dead Earth are searching for a new home...

Very interesting read. Almost every chapter jumps many generations into the future and brings something new and exciting.

i read this last year but i found myself thinking about it again this week - "Twilight" by William Gay. this is the second Gay novel i have read (lol) and the better of the two, although "The Long Home" was good enough to make me want to try another of his books.

anyway, it's a southern gothic type affair, it starts out with this plot about a devious creep undertaker getting caught doing Things with dead bodies and trying to bury the evidence, so to speak; but that's really just a setup for the latter half of the book which is this absolutely beautiful prose about a long, arduous, scary, feverish journey through deep forest in Tennessee. the way that section of the book is told, and the way it unfolds and the way it's described and the gradual shift of the mental state of the characters, is just stunning imo, i would recommend the book for that reason alone. i don't want to spoil anything further. it's a treat, despite the gross initial premise lol.

My brother who is an English teacher has recently given me a draft of a book he has been working on to look over/ check for errors. It's called Embers: The Near-death of Brighton and Hove Albion, and it's about a particularly turbulent time in the life of his favourite football club where there were pitch invasions almost every match, no money going around and poor ownership. It's also semi autobiographical combining a turbulent time in my brother's life in his teens. So far, I briefly feature as a snotty 8 year old who finally manages to beat him at mariokart.

Once im done with that im going to try the lost metal by brandon sanderson

i am reviving this thread because i want to talk about things i read recently

last month was glory by noviolet bulawayo, which is a satirical/allegorical account of zimbabwean political history. some parts were very difficult to read (brutal violence, sexual violence, general inhumanity), others were funny (often darkly so), others were touching. i think it struck a great balance of being powerful, approachable, entertaining, illuminating, basically everything you'd probably look for in a good book

this month was before we were trans by kit heyam, which is an account of 'trans[gender] history' that deliberately focuses on a lot of examples that are related to the modern category of transness in some way but don't fit neatly or unequivocally into it. i had mixed feelings about this book... on one hand, i really like reading about 'gender variance' across cultures and time periods, i'm sure largely because i had virtually no exposure to this growing up and because modern anti-trans rhetoric loves to cast transness as trendy, ephemeral, culture-specific... but frustratingly, there's a lot of sloppy, inconsistent analysis in the book, some weirdly elliptical writing, and the author is surprisingly clumsy at writing about gender and transness. maybe i'll go thru the bibliography and poke at some of the more primary sources, altho i should probably expect some frustration there too for different reasons

the third bear by jeff vandermeer, going very slowly thru it

On the heels of blockblockblock: Just finished Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. One of the most bizarre novels I have EVER read in my life. It's like prologued, awkward nightmare. If Wes Andersson ever decides to make a horror movie, I imagine it would feel something like it...

"The White Pine Route" a history of the Washington, Idaho and Montana Railroad

The Stormlight Archives books by Brandon Sanderson. I'm on book 4. This series is a slow burn at times with big payoff moments and worthwhile character developments including some themes around mental health, trauma, and grieving wrapped up in an interesting fantasy world. Not particularly dark. I've liked aspects well enough to continue the story, but I'm a bit mixed in how I'd score it, and I find a few characters and lots of dialog really tedious or cheesy, which prompted the following because botb has ruined me.








.

I was doing great with reading earlier in the year but it feels like that time is getting occupied by other stuff now! y'all are inspiring me to get back on it. the next thing on my list is Cormac McCarthy's "The Crossing", which is a sequel to another one of his books I read around the beginning of 2025, "All the Pretty Horses", which was just excellent. some really beautifully painted scenes in there... his style is masterful, distinct, and powerful.

other stuff I read recently - a couple books about yokai and the history thereof (super interesting), Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Left Hand of Darkness" (very compelling scifi book, such careful word choice even when the words are made up), and Gabrielle Zevin's "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow", a recent novel about game development which I think is laser targeted at people who are roughly my age, as it feels like so much of it reflects the world as my particular cohort grew up. it was told in this scattershot way that jumped from topic to topic sometimes, in the same sort of way that a person telling you some long elaborate story in real-time has to bring in additional context when necessary or just goes on a tangent. I liked it a lot.

i just finished 1Q84 by murakami, been going through his stuff this year and that one was absolutely amazing. if you're a murakami fan please reach out i have so many thoughts

embers by sandor marai
an increasingly intense monologue between friends (ever had a friend that will not give you a word in edgeways?)

rocannons world by ursula le guin
no regrets and doesnt outstay its welcome

the name of the wind by patrick rothfuss
everyone in the fantasy world raved about kingkiller and i did like it but i didnt get anything that felt like it stood so tall amongst the crowd that it justified the hype. also its hard to invest in a series if youre not even sure it will get an ending

yumi and the nightmare painter by brandon sanderson
i always have a fun time with brandon but it does often feel like, disposable, sometimes in its lasting quality. also prob unpopular opinion but i think it was maybe a bad idea to have tried to tie together all these disparate worlds and systems together into a cosmere, like i dont really want to be thinking about who or what i might need to remember about years from now. thats just admin


rich christians in an age of hunger by ronald sider
pretty bleak picture of world wealth/food inequalities, the causes and factors, and what affluent countries have both done and not done that contribute to that, but also what individuals and societies can do to help turn that around. its a hard read which is why its taken months to digest and some life decisions that go around it

keep em coming

@gtap I also enjoyed the Kingkiller Chronicles when I read those 12 years ago or so now (wow). I'm not hanging on for an ending but if one shows up, at this point I'd be almost as surprised as I would be with a Valve HL3 announcement, and it might face the same issues leaving me a skeptic -- left to stew for too long; too much hype leads to unrealistic expectations, all that.

I'm with you that Sanderson's cosmere idea detracts from his stories rather than adds to them, but I just ignore those aspects and treat the stories I've read as standalone. Starting to read things like they all have to fit makes it feel like the Marvel cinematic universe where you inevitably get some level of disingenuousness, I think. I expect an author to learn and grow and work on different ideas throughout their career, not have one great master plan from the start and execute it perfectly for 30 years or something. And wiki-level complexity is not necessarily a bad thing, but it also doesn't equate to good storytelling.

air freshener composition

hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy (once again lol)