What are you reading these days?

General Off-Topic Discussion
282

My partner and I spent Christmas in London, where we visited the British Library’s exhibit Fantasy: Realms of the Imagination. One of the cases featured Susanna Clarke’s sketches of the house in Piranesi, showing how the tides move through the various rooms. So now I’m reading Piranesi and loving it! I’m so impressed with how much modulation of emotion and tension and momentum the author manages, despite the “limited” setting and the fact that there are only two (so far) live characters.

I also picked up The DallerGut Dream Department Store by Miye Lee, but it’s taking me a little while to get into that one.

8 Likes
283

Just wrote my annual blog post looking back at a year of reading.

6 Likes
284

Just started with The Paleontologist by Luke Dumas.

2 Likes
285

I just finished Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides.

Family, kinship, blood relations. The things one rejects, the things one embraces, the things one cannot possibly deny in the end.

For Christmas my father got me the The Armour of Light, the fifth novel in Ken Follet’s Kingsbridge series. Looking forward to once again diving into the history of the town of Kingsbridge.

Amazing book! Her debut novel is one of my favourite books of all time:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Wikipedia

4 Likes
286

Finished it yesterday, and it was a fun twist on twist at the end (though I saw one of them coming). If you don’t read too much into it, it’s a fun read. If you go looking for meanings and lessons, the ending will cheapen the whole.
Entertaining nonetheless!

7 Likes
287

Kingsbridge will have to wait a bit longer. I forgot I still had a book from the library that I want to read before the loan-deadline: A History of the World in Twelve Maps by Jerry Brotton.

A history of cartography through the ages, the various uses of and intentions for maps (scientific, ideological, religious, philosophical,…). The reciprocal influence of maps on worldviews and worldviews on maps.

Fascinating stuff.

4 Likes
288

Found a new hardcover of Supernova Era by Cixin Liu for 5 bucks yesterday in town (along with The Plotter by Un-Su Kim, which I HIGHLY RECOMMEND! THAT ONE WAS SO GOOD). I had read The Three-Body’s Problem from the author before, though was disappointed by the writing of the second volume (imo prob a translation friction, since it was the only tome translated by someone else).
Even if it was translated by the person who did the second volume, the premise is a bit wild (Supernova event essentially wiping out all peeps older than 13 y/o). Really looking forward to see where it goes…

4 Likes
289

Reading The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions by Jonathan Rosen.

The story of 2 childhood friends who grow up with eerily parallel lives which diverge dramatically when one of them gets schizophrenia. It’s a tome, switching from the autobiographical to the biographical to looong sections with deep dives into the history of mental health policy and law. But it’s well-written and painful as hell.

One of my best childhood friends is schizophrenic and has been homeless for 25 years because of it (assuming he’s still alive-- I never know until the next time he calls for help). So this book is hitting me very hard with its similarities to his story-- of a brilliant and charismatic young man who is poised for every success, until things go tragically wrong.

10 Likes
290

Started with two new books this weekend: Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak for fiction reading and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction by S. T. Joshi for non-fiction reading.

5 Likes
291

I’ve started to read a fantasy/YA book called Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros.

I’m not sure I can keep going. I had this feeling around page 10. Then page 11. Then again at page 30, then again at page 80. Obviously I’ve kept going so far, but there are 500+ pages. It’s easy to read, even if it’s really getting up my nose.

Context: Received this book as a we-think-he’ll-like-this purchase from parents last birthday. It’s about teen dragon riders in a merciless academy for teen dragon riders.

The first 10 pages were ruthless in their expositional efficiency at the expense of the present. Every sentence about anything anyone did was immediately matched by one about the past.

Then on page 11, someone winked. You may have read about my winkometer before. The more winks in a book, the worse the book tends to be. (Especially if the world view is that everybody and anybody can and will wink. It’s okay if an individual who winks, winks.) For the record, the Da Vinci Code has the most winks I’ve noted.

The heroine set eyes on the hottest man alive on about page 11. He was her arch enemy. The second hottest man alive was her old friend, but now her teacher.

In this society, they conscript people because the place is under constant gryphon attack. But they’re happy to immediately let 40% of the dragon-rider candidates die when they’re forced to walk along a narrow wall two hundred feet up in the air in howling winds. It’s meant to be like a natural selection for dragon riding, but it just seems like a stupid waste of conscripts. Even Vladimir Putin would make sure these people died on the battlefield.

The heroine survives the wall by starting to shout aloud her learned geographical history of the country, thus giving the reader the full geography exposition in about half a page. In a book I loved, I’d say this was a hilarious and awesome move. But me’n’Rebecca Yarros are on the wrong foot.

Also, the cadets are allowed to kill each other half the time. Feels sloppy, given they also attend finicky military history classes.

Finally, all the higher ups have cool individualistic haircuts. Potentially annoying in itself, but mostly it doesn’t jibe with the worse-than-Full-Metal-Jacket military regime they’re running.

Unfortunately my desire to see what happens next is winning, but I really am gritting my teeth. My lip is raised even as I type this.

-Wade

8 Likes
292

Yeah, I read this at the behest of a teenager, and I would have liked it as a teenager, because dragons and sex. It’s not great writing, and it’s not an original story, but it is entertaining.

6 Likes
293

You’ve probably put the little wind under my dragon wings to make me favour seeing it through.

-Wade

5 Likes
294

I finished that one last week, but forgot to say it here :joy:
It was great and so engrossing. That is until… the last chapter/epilogue. It just ends so abruptly, my enjoyment of the book just plummeted. I couldn’t even enjoy the epilogue or afterwords (which are just fine and interesting on their own). It soooo needed a few chapters before that ending. Or a prologue set in the same time as the afterwords.

Cause darn was the rest of the book so interesting. A supernova wiping out the population aged 13 or above? How does the world prepare the kiddos left behind? How do the kiddos fare when the adults are gone? What happens in this “kid’s world”? Do they behave as normal or have a widely different society?

Aaaargh I’m still pissed about it.

Also, been reading Invincible by Stanislaw Lem, and I should also love everything about it (oooooh space mystery from one of the best Sci-Fi writer, with a completely novel take on tech (for the time))… but I. Just. Can’t. Get. Into. It.
I’m still finishing it cause I have like two chapters left.

5 Likes
295

I’m reading Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li, which is about a group of Chinese-American college students who are recruited by a Chinese billionaire to steal Chinese artifacts back from Western museums that are refusing to repatriate them. I’d read a very good longform article about the real events the book is based on and I was primed to love the book, but my feelings have been mixed. It’s trying to be a more literary take on the heist genre, but I’m finding the prose cliche and repetitive, and the book seems a little too eager to spell everything out for the reader vis-a-vis themes and characterization points. But I’m enjoying the actual heist stuff and some of the character interactions.

5 Likes
296

I’ve just finished The Lord of the Rings Book 1 - Fellowship of the Ring. (I’ve read it years, if not decades, ago and did reread it now.)

It’s outstanding how Tolkien goes into detail, for example about the emotions and social relationships of the hobbits, or special food items like Cram, or Elven language, and so on. It is far more detailled than your average fantasy novel IMO. At least so it seems to me.

And it’s extremely fun to read. Looking out for book 2 (I think it’s titled The Two Towers.)

5 Likes
297

Actually I think it’s Attack of the Clones?

6 Likes
298

Nah, the clones are in “Eragon” (a bad clone of LotR).

5 Likes
299

Today I started with North Woods by Daniel Mason.

3 Likes
300

I finished Stephen King’s “Fairy Tale” last week.

It took me longer than it should’ve, the hardest part was pushing through the opening third of this near six-hundred page novel. If unfamiliar with his writing, it’s all character building at the start - A trait I usually love in novels, perhaps my frame of mind was different. The rest was captivating! It’s a modern-day fairy tale and, like all fairy tales, has a twist of horror. Interestingly the protagonist draws literal parallels to classical fairy tales.

Then last night I finished William Gibson’s “Idoru”, which I’m most excited about, because now I can read the final book in his Bridge Trilogy, “All Tomorrow’s Parties”. It’s the one I haven’t read before, while the first two had repeated reads.

Ah that brings back memories! I was thinking about rereading them too.

Ooh that sounds fascinating! Do you like old maps? There is a vast collection over at the internet archive.

6 Likes
301

Thanks for the link!

I love the overlap of geographical knowledge with almost mythological imagination on many of those old envisionings of how the world in its entirety looks.

I read Fairy Tales too a few months ago, and I found it to be a bit mediocre in comparison to King’s best work. Still a mighty entertaining read, but also one of his weaker brews of his classic themes.

4 Likes