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)

Fascisme et grand capital by Daniel Guérin, which explains how and why capitalists funded fascism between WWI and WWII. The scary thing is that many passages read like they're talking about these very times we're living in.

I can't read.

@Post-retro average undertale fan:

Don't derail the thread thank you

The Art Of Impossible by Steven Kotler

im not reading anything atm. i would like to read more though it is a bit difficult for me for various reasons. many things i read are technical texts which are neither particularly easy reading nor do i ever read them back to back. last longer thing i remember reading in full was bunnie's Hacking the Xbox. quite introductory in many aspects but it's pretty fun

i want to read The Design of Everyday Things (i actually started years ago and dropped around page 50 or so simply because pdfs don't exist in meatspace and are way too easy to forget about forever). as for fiction? Crime and Punishment. i have Umineko in my backlog too, if you count that.

actual book: The Animals Praise the Antichrist by Alex Older
not really a book: Totsukuni no Shoujo by Nagabe
definitely not a book: "Air" for PSP and "Reverse 1999" for google play

Music related fiction: Air Guitar - an essay collection on art by Dave Hickey

Music related Non-Fiction:
Re-reading and studying my "Music of Claude Debussy" by Richard S. Parks

Just fiction:
Exploring different medium-sized tales by Mark Samuels and B. Traven

I am currently reading The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman, in the His Dark Materials series. Also, I am finally back! I don't know how much I'll participate here bc life has been so busy and I've been doing a lot. But it's good to be back :)

Finite and infinite games by james p carse

madame bovary................................................................


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I read quite a lot.. right now I have hefty reading project: Horus Heresy.

There are 54 novels in the series and I've battled my way to Book 36 so far. I enjoy reading about the Warhammer 40K universe even though I don't play the tabletop game or paint models.

When I get feed up with space marines (yes it happens) I read another novel to mix it up :)

I just finished reading Der Sandmann by E.T.A. Hoffmann again, everytime I re-read it I notice new things about the story, writing, characters etc., I really like it. Would reccomend, though idk if there's a english translation for sale.

"North Bank Road" a company history of the spokane, portland and seattle railroad

wait i'm reading the wikipedia description of rocannon's world and the higher intelligence life forms are called hilfs?

I don't remember it being acronymed but that is amusing

I should be starting jingo by terry pratchett but I keep getting distracted

I'm not currently reading it, but I really enjoyed and would recommend "Tribalism is Dumb" by Andrew Heaton. It's a straightforward but entertaining conversation by an indie comedian/political commentator on tribalism as a part of human nature and its impact in culture and politics. Some about thinking fallacies too. Sharing as it's relevant to the discussion in chat today on political echo chambers and internet fights among other things.

I recently finished a book on the internet and philosophy which was called "the internet is not what you think it is". beyond delivering a scathing commentary on the gameification of social media, it explored at length the various ways "the internet" (as in telecommunication device, external memory storage) has been conceived over several centuries of philosophers, inventors, innovators etc, as well as computing machines and artificial intelligences and the arguments for and against machine consciousness.

it was a pretty cool read overall, although it maybe digressed a little much into the philosophical analysis side of things in the latter part of the book for my own tastes, so that part was slow going. I read it cause I read a very compelling review of the book and I've been having a lot of thoughts about "online-ness" lately anyway. they had it at the library and I snapped it up.

e.f. schumacher "small is beautiful" and ivan illich "tools for conviviality", two books from the 1970s arguing against the scale and ideology of 20th-century industrial civilization. schumacher is more concerned with economics, sustainability, and development aid; illich is more concerned with consumerism and individual freedom; both criticize reckless/thoughtless application of new technology and see work as a (potential) virtue in itself, rather than just a means to a quantitative material end

definitely more "opinion pieces" than "research papers", & pretty free with their leaps of logic, but i broadly agree with the theses... i think about The Industrial Revolution And Its Consequences often (as well as the infotech revolution), which is why i wanted to read these, but there are no simple or easy answers

it's interesting to read these 50 years after their publication and consider what has and hasn't changed. sustainability seems to be moving in the right direction but ever-so-slowly (certainly not fast enough for the climatological tipping points); mainstream ideology regarding industry & economics doesn't seem to have budged though

Its hard to find anyone this decade willing to give much interest in development aid - folks from the 70s rightfully looking at our present thinking wtf have we as a world done

anyway I've done the thing I told off others doing and nearly derailed apologies

currently : the frugal wizards guide to medieval england by brandon sanderson
jingo by terry pratchett was fun although I'd be intrigued to think what anyone of an arabian origin would think of it, since while it deeply apologises for the slaphead racist you'll find in every corner of the uk it doesn't exactly cover itself fully in glory either with the portrayal. Its like the literary equivalent of the movie four lions where you wonder whether a point is worth making when you engineer it in a such a loaded way

@Jangler you should check out "The Human Use of Human Beings/Cybernetics and Society" by Norbert Weiner, maybe also look at "The Technological Society" by Jacques Ellul (really fascinating and scathing stuff in that one but I haven't given it the time yet ;)

oh i'd heard of ellul recently, i'll check it out

currently about halfway through cormac mccarthy "the crossing" as mentioned prior (I read something else first in the end). it's long, and intense! but I continue to find his writing style immensely evocative. it's eye-opening as a way to play with language in convention-defying ways. I feel it shaping my own run-on sentence structure.

I like pulling up a dictionary to look up some of the incredibly obscure and niche words he uses. this time I think I might have looked up more words in spanish than in english. there's a lot more spanish in this book it seems, and he doesn't always offer context clues (perhaps he only does when he feels it especially relevant). current favorite new word: tertuliar (to gather/get together socially).

I love revisionist westerns; I haven't gotten around to cormac mccarthy somehow but warlock by oakley hall and the oxbow incident by walter van tilburg clark are two of my favorite books probably ever. I have mixed feelings about wallace stegner but he has sum really good stuff

Timeline, by Michael Crichton.

hunter x hunter :3

i bought a used remarkable 2. i think it's a *very* expensive toy and not a true paper replacement, but the deal i got (a little over 200eur, including bunch of accessories) made it more justifiable. anyway, i can finally read books without distractions or straining my ears looking at the computer screen! for the time being, i loaded it up with some random pdfs i had on my pc.

the first book i started was Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy (the pdf is a free download, btw). i finished it yday and i think it was a pretty nice read. it's a rather in depth analysis of warez scene and its dynamics based on publicly surfaced documentation such as leaked nfos or past law enforcement raids. among the more interesting claims, the author argues that the "scene" is very much an alternate reality game. the book also briefly touches on other venues of piracy such as public and private torrent trackers or fxp boards.

not sure what's going to be my next read yet but i'll keep you updated ^_^

been reading a lot of short stories for a project in my Creative Writing class, in particular the mystery variety

one i particularly liked was The Stolen Crime

by Richard Connell. it's a pretty light read so i'd recommend it if you have a few minutes to spare. kept me in suspense the whole time, and it's not quite what you expect at all!

The Iliad

I finished that mccarthy book (the crossing) a bit ago, it sure ended up being pretty bleak. the first book in that trilogy had a lot of rough stuff but I felt like its outlook was considerably less desolate and its protagonist was considerably more likable through his adversity.

I read john mountain goats' first book "wolf in white van" after that. it wasn't bad but it kinda missed me overall. at first I was irritated that the main character's situation was only alluded to vaguely; I didn't like being thrown right in without a reason to care. but I came to realize over time that the whole point of the book was to slowly encircle that issue and attempt to zero in on it for climactic effect. I saw it coming too early and found the result underwhelming. I'm not sure what it wanted to say, other than to paint this picture of a guy.

I have now started gabriel garcia marquez "the general in his labyrinth". I loved one hundred years of solitude way back in high school, but that was almost 20 years ago so reading garcia marquez again is like catching up with an old friend from lifetimes ago. it's wonderful prose as ever though.

I've been trying to read books but I can't tell if I need a new glasses prescription (yeah very likely) or if it's undiagnosed ADD.
Books that I've left unfinished since last year include the collected Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and The City in the Autumn Stars by Michael Moorcock. I'm having an easier time with comics, though :3
Currently reading the following

- series I've followed for at least a year or so -

From Ahoy Comics
▪ Toxic Avenger - A reimagining of Toxic Avenger by Matt Bors, the guy that used to run the Nib and did political cartoons. I was uneasy at first because they set it in a suburban part of NJ instead of North East NJ like it was in the original movies but still fun, still gorey.

From Darkhorse
▪ FML - multiple plots of coming of age teens and their parent's generation dealing with a murder mystery

From DC Comics
▪ Resurrection Man: Quantum Karma - I loved the original run of the series. I think I have a complete run but need to check. This is a more spiritual take on the hero with more of an emphasis on Hindu concepts of Karma. It also brings in concepts of multiple world's of life times and how the powerful consume life, possibly with metaphors of capitalism consuming its own workers to keep elite consumers alive.

From Image
▪ Drawing Blood - What appears to be a semi autobiographical story from Kevin Eastman (Co Creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) of what happens when money, the mob, and losing your creative spark all come together
▪ Farmhand - Fantastic agricultural horror sci fi with strong discussions of racism in Louisiana
▪ Geiger - Post nuclear apocalypse sci-fantasy tale of a man who survives the end of the world but is a roaming berserker with radiation coming to grips with his lost humanity
▪ I Hate Fairyland - violent slapstick story of a girl too dumb to escape a challenge for children but too mean to die and makes it Fairyland's problem
▪ Kaya - Fantasy in the future where humans are endangered follows the tale of a young boy destined to be their savior and his grumpy warrior older half sister and their travels
▪ Savage Dragon - I'm a day one reader from 1993 and only had a few interruptions. Probably more of an adult book now due to a lot of sexual humor.


From Marvel
▪ Daredevil - Radioactivity will blind you but give you super senses. I think Daredevil and Doctor Strange are the only regular Marvel books I can bring myself to read and they keep canceling Doctor Strange books.
▪ Hellverine - this is so dumb it works. Wolverine's son, Daken/Akihiro comes back from the dead possessed by a demon. These are his travels and mission and it's so dumb and good at the same time.
▪ One World Under Doom - I am endlessly fascinated with Doctor Doom

- New series to me within the last month or two -

From Dynamite
▪ Captain Planet and the Planeteers - a lil' embarrassed on this one. I bought it solely because I thought Captain Planet looked cool with a beard and mustache. A retelling/reimagining of Captain Planet and the new origin of the Planeteers but the children are adults now and Captain Planet has been around much longer. In some ways, it's similar to Eternal Warrior from Valiant but less violent.

From IDW / ID Dark
▪ Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees: Rites of Spring - Sequel series to the previous Beneath the Trees - what if Richard Scarry did crime. A serial murderer in a world of anthropomorphic characters finds someone murdering in her hometown and seeks to stop them.
▪ Event Horizon: Dark Descent - Prequel that is "inspired" yet authorized? to the movie Event Horizon (OH MY GOODNESS I LOVE EVENT HORIZON!)


From Image
▪ Battle Beast - A character from Invincible showing the life of an alien monster consumed with a nearly insatiable anger seeking his own death in battle. Problem is he's really strong. Takes place before his actual canon death
▪ Free Planet - space opera. I want to like this more but gosh darn the text is tiny. I can only read it in daylight
▪ Sleep - A man wakes up to horrible tragedies in a small town every time he sleeps and begins to suspect he's doing it

From Oni
▪ Catacombs of Torment (under an EC comics imprint?) - classic style of EC horror books from the 50s by today's creators. Got it solely because Evan Dorkin wrote some stories and if Evan Dorkin's involved, I'm buying, no question.

blue monotone #majoryaoifreak

jojolion!! based off of what i'd heard i didn't think i was gonna like it as much as the other jojo parts but it's pretty damn good!!

Kamchatka: Russia's Land of Ice and Fire by Diana Gleadhill.

I'm a big geography fan. Rocks n shite. Real good stuff. But i've picked up this old book randomly in a local library and i've been enjoying it, documents the geography, demographics, and experience in Kamchatka (the big eastern pennisula above Japan belonging to Russia) that the author had. She's a local author from around my home, funnily she signed the copy of the book I got from the library because it is that local I suppose.

Anyone who like's funnily shaped things on maps or cool geography for worldbuilding should look at Kamchatka for inspiration though.

finally got ahold of that book of reporting about spotify "mood machine" which I had on library hold waitlist for like eight months. excited to dig in

been reading The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek by Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal. so far, so good, but i'm not super far into it yet

@ dobra last summer I read a travelogue of a bloke who hired some russian guys to drive him across all of siberia; some of the shit that went down was kind of mind-blowing in a weird way. Maybe I'll remember what it was... Russia's pacific coast is a very odd place...

I am currently reading "Maintenance & Overhaul of the Saab V4 Engine" by Jack Ashcraft...

just caught up to Absolute Martian Manhunter...... don't really care about superheroes but it's CRAZY GOOD

great takeaways about empathy, mental health, and the human condition. plus total modernist eyecandy the entire way through!

When I was younger, my school had a reading point system for books you had read and tested on. Average points per book depended on the book level, but they were around 10-15. I used to read through so many books quickly, I had gotten 500-600 points at the end of the year, and they even had a 1000-point board that I was on.

Anyway, since June, I had not read like this almost two years. I was just too focused on other tasks and honestly, not interested in reading anymore. However, I started reading my old children's books that I used to read all the time, and it completely relit that reading passion in me! I've read forty books since July! Really happy that I'm doing this again, and I plan on reading bigger books after. Small steps!

AR/Accelerated Reading, right? we had that in middle school and it absolutely killed the joy of reading for me for a few years. my teacher specifically made us read above the "average reading level" we tested into at the beginning of the year, and mine was really high, so it meant I was unable to read anything I actually cared about.

we had point quotas every so often - with points gained from comprehension tests on the book you just read - so this meant that reading shit I didn't want to read and being tested on it was mandatory. I have nothing but hate for that system in my bones. I'm glad it worked for you; without the restrictions my teacher implemented I can see how it could be fun for some people. but not me! I was reading david copperfield in the 7th grade. do you think I understood david copperfield in the 7th grade? abso-fucking-lutely not. it didn't even give me all the points I needed, in the end!

i read a comic called girl juice by benji nate over the weekend, it was amusing

I'm onto my first Hemingway novel now, For Whom the Bell Tolls. only maybe 15% through it but quite enjoying it so far, I see why his style of storytelling and sentence construction is compared to McCarthy's.

I also cannot recommend the aforementioned Mood Machine by Liz Pelly enough, it's such a thorough journalistic analysis of streaming era music industry through the lens of Spotify. extraordinarily well done, I'm gonna buy multiple copies just to float them around my friends forever. I think it's a really important read for musicians of today and tbh equally eye-opening for anybody using Spotify or other streaming services to understand what they're really dealing with, which is profit-driven, corporate-serving, billionaire-powered placating drip feed that is decidedly not as neutral or art-friendly or consumer-friendly as its PR team wants you to think it is.

re: damifortune on AR reading

Yes, that's the one! We had to take a placement test at the beginning of the year as well, and for some reason, even though I am proficient in reading, I scored in the fourth-fifth grade reading level in late middle school. I still think it's because the whole system is botched and stupid, but thankfully, it helped me read more! That sucks it didn't go well for you, and I'm glad you still enjoy reading after that!

Just finished reading "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" by Shirley Jackson. It's a Gothic mystery novel, great for the spooky season. Nothing paranormal or gory, just delightfully macabre. It's also quite short, an easy read. Highly recommend!

edit: here's the opening paragraph which immediately hooked me:

"My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”

so among other things i did read jacques ellul tr. john wilkinson "the technological society" (at stupe's recommendation) and kate beaton "ducks" (at lasertooth's recommendation)

"the technological society" was good food for thought; the subject matter was similar to the schumacher and illich books i mentioned in my earlier post, and so was the writing (in that these authors are all more likely to serve up an assertion than a considered argument), but ellul gets to the heart of the problem more than either of the others do. coincidentally i also rewatched koyaanisquatsi recently and noticed that both ellul and illich are cited as inspiration in the credits (as is a mentor of schumacher), which makes a lot of sense. this was a long book tho, longer than i think it needed to be

"ducks" was a hard read, and i didn't pick a particularly good time to read it (i more or less knew what i was getting into). i was hoping that there'd be more healing or closure by the end for my own sake but i didn't really feel that. but it is a memoir and that's life sometimes. i was trying to think of something nice to say about the book here but i think my experience of it was so dominated by the negative that it'd feel dishonest to sugar coat it

Socialist Reconstruction: A Better Future for the United States

pretty self explanatory

jen has been doing a lot better with reading than I have, she's just finished Clara and the sun by murakami and now on to "side hustle" (since she started a business recently)

I finished the shack by William Young, which was billed to me as a Christian storytelling book but it kind of ended up flowing more like narrative->theology->narrative, however it ended well and theres not a lot out there attempting to make these concepts into fiction so it's hard to compare, but ideally Id like to see the themes take place more in the narrative, rather than sitting adjacent to it for a bit

Now reading Hamnet by Maggie O'Farell, hard to say much in the 25 or so pages read so far but appears to be a story about Shakespeare's son, even though Wlliam hasn't really featured yet (and may not at all)

I finished Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls a few days ago and think it was really well written. slow! quite long! but ultimately I think the way it's paced was really gripping. I wasn't expecting 500 pages of book to take place in less than four days, but that's how it was - questions raised early on that I assumed would be addressed in the first section of the book were instead the focus of the final climax. where I think it shined though was its thorough, lived-in specificity, both in terms of war, tactics, and munitions and in terms of the characterization and relationships of everyone involved. the main character muses a few times upon how it feels like he's known all these characters - people we just met alongside him - for years, and I think through Hemingway's writing we're made to feel the same. each setback, miracle and development is quite a rollercoaster given how close he puts you.

I would definitely try reading another of his books sometime. his frequent use of the run-on was a little more tactically deployed than McCarthy perhaps, a way to draw you in on the action when something happens. (granted I can think of some particularly feverish scenes of McCarthy's where he does this artfully too!) I wouldn't say this was one of my favorite books as its themes were a little distant for me but nevertheless I found it to be a well-written book by a very capable author.

I have now started Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, which is comparably very short. Pynchon's sense of humor reminded me very quickly that I had actually read one of his books before, Inherent Vice, and forgotten. (I'm borrowing it from a friend with whom I had this whole conversation about how I'd never read Pynchon before, oops.) it feels like he is always trying to wink wink nudge nudge the reader or to absolutely take the piss out of his own characters. I'm having a good time so far even if I don't know what the point will be really.

@gotoandplay " theres not a lot out there attempting to make these concepts into fiction so it's hard to compare" I'd argue lot's of novels written by both believing and unbelieving authors either intentionally or unintentionally end up reflecting biblical theology. Popular tropes like the hero's journey, redemption arc, etc. all reflect biblical concepts in some form or another.

oh, pynchon... i had a great time reading gravity's rainbow about 10 years ago! i also tried V. at some point but that one didn't click with me. i remember being surprised when i heard that he'd come out with a new novel recently, i guess i had assumed for some reason that he was From The Past and couldn't touch us present-dwellers. (*checking wikipedia*) to be fair he is almost 90 now

crazy, I also had a blast with gravity's rainbow but V was a lot stickier for me; people usually say the opposite.... Right now I'm going through a wernher von braun biography and it's got me thinking about all that again. His newest one I've read is bleeding edge, I have to say it's terrible- seems like a lot of people agree it's an outlier though.

If anyone wants more paranoiac half-glimpses of evil, quasi-spiritual mid-century technology conspiracies... phillip K. dick. Especially Valis is amazing, especially because it's autobiographical. Too many people don't know that saying he wrote sci-fi is the same thing as saying wallace stegner or cormac mccarthy wrote "westerns" and leaving it at that

Vanishing World by sayaka murata, it describes a world where marriage becomes purely out of convenience rather than attraction due to widespread artificial insemination and it the norm for people to fulfill their desires with non-spouse lovers both real and fictional, having relations with a spouse is viewed as incestuous.

I finished Stormlight Archives book 5. It was an interesting ending serving as the conclusion of a major story arc for this universe, but I'd say my general review from book 4 still holds, more or less. It was fun and I enjoyed the developments and payoffs, but I wasn't blown away by it.

I also finished Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy that I started a while back. This collective work was an incredibly cool hard scifi exploration of humans on Mars, and I just loved the broad interplay of themes throughout these books. Robinson covers science, technology, philosophy, sociology, politics, mythology, spirituality, conflict, sex and love all wrapped up in a compelling way and presented to the reader pretty believably. This brings me up to 2/2 for great recommendations from BotBrs for me now, thanks!

Edit: next up is The Grapes of Wrath.

With my goal in place where I make my grand return into reading literature, I'm reading 'Redwall: Martin The Warrior' in paperback format, currently at Part 1: Chapter 4. I also have a few books such as 'Who Moved My Cheese?', 'Ring', and 'Neuromancer', et cetera in mind.

Woah, I love the Redwall books! Haven't read any in a while, but I think Martin the Warrior was actually the last one I read after I found a copy of it at the local thrift store.

As for what I'm reading I just finished up the manga for Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Super good and deep. The movie really only adapts the first half or less of it.

I really enjoyed Redwall books too. It's been a long time since I read them! I think I read 7 or 8 of 'em or thereabouts

Hoffman's The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr.

Absolute banger of a novel.

I just finished wind and truth as well Kevin
I liked it more than rhythm of war but it sure was stuck in gear 1 for about a third of the book and a third of 1300+ pages is a lot of pages

Now about to start malazan with gardens of the moon

Also have on the go "the race against time" by richard askwith all about masters running, but its very stat heavy and something I'd appreciate more if I was a bit older perhaps. I think a lot of people went into this one thinking it would about the mindset shift when you get to an age where its impossible to get faster race times than before, but it barely brushes on that

I finished lolita recently which was a hell of a book. uncomfortable as all hell but a very well-written book with some pretty killer moments (the end of part 1 especially being an impeccably set up gut punch). I do feel like it's the sort of thing where I'm not any better off as a person for having read it. I hated it but I respect it.

I just started tom's crossing by house of leaves author mark z danielewski. pretty big ask as it's an intimidating 1200 page western. I'm still not sure what I've signed up for but all his other stuff is so fiercely postmodern in its approach to form and formatting that I expect insane things to happen at some point. I guess we'll see.

^ Speaking of lolita (vladimir nabokov), i am actually reading it. i can confirm, this is pretty disturbing. an urban legend tells this book is the origin of the term "l***con".

I just ended the part 1. unironically, this books is not the hardest i have read. i mean, in the preface of lolita, there is an allusion to marquis de sade (at least in the french version). I mean, marquis de sade wrote "the 120 days of sodom"... good luck to anyone trying to read it, i managed somehow but i literally fell sick afterwards

I had a similar-ish reaction to Lolita and to other works by Nabokov. But I will say that Invitation to a Beheading is excellent.

after hardly reading for a year or so, i've been getting back into reading this month!

i finished Addiction By Design, a 2012 non-fiction book by cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schull analyzing the context, design, and culture around gambling machines (i.e. slot machines, video poker, etc.) that lead them to inspire addiction. a major concept throughout the book, elucidated by both the author and the many "problem gamblers" she interviews, is that problem gamblers aren't addicted to the feeling of winning, but the hypnotic state obtained from intensive play, where the outside world and even the sense of self is fully surrendered to machine gambling, this state being commonly referred to as "the zone". Schull posits that, contrary to the common belief that these types of gambling problems are fully an issue of self-responsibility, that the addictive nature of the zone and gambling machines in general is clearly sought after intentionally by game designers (many interviewed say as much), and that this nature can only exist within the relationship between the subject (the problem gambler) and the object (the gambling machine).

the book's analysis of addiction seems to apply far beyond just machine gambling. i discovered it because many indie game designers i follow have voiced concerns that trends in indie genres such as the modern roguelike and the idler seem to parallel some of what is described in the book. i myself couldn't help but consider the more hostile trends in social media, and how under enough pressure, i seem to start mindlessly scrolling myself to avoid thoughts about anything (perhaps i'm chasing the zone myself). idk, regardless, it's absolutely worth a read.

Still haven’t picked up my copy of Dune I got for Christmas :P