I’ve started reading The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson. It’s a famous popular science book from 1950, maybe one of the first to cover the ocean. I’ve only read the first chapter so far but it’s already pretty entertaining.
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A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire IV) was totally engrossing. I love the series, but I do tend to wait a few months between books. The amount of characters and crossing plots and backhanded strategies would be overwhelming otherwise.
Just now I finished Mrs March by Virginia Feito. The best approximation I can give is this:
Imagine Mrs Bouquet from Keeping Up Appearances, but in a deeply dramatic psychological thriller instead of a comedy show.
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You’ve got the pronunciation right, but it’s spelled “Bucket”. Hence the joke. 
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Rereading Doyle’s Holmes short stories (in German translation). I’ve already read many of them many years ago, so I skip some stories I remember too well too reread. But the rest of them are fun.
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A starship’s AI is transplanted into a humanoid body-kit. It has trouble adjusting to this new embodiment.
A slavegirl escapes the Factory and needs to use her wits and skills to get off the scrapyard planet.
Becky Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit: an exploration of the human condition reflected in a SF mirror.
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I’ve recently finished two books:
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake. It’s a gloomy gothic drama set in a vast crumbling castle. Intrigue, social climbing, actual climbing, madness, attics full of junk… it’s got it all. Definitely going to go on and read the next book, Gormenghast.
The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin. This book is a good illustration of the difference between silliness and stupidity. It is a very silly detective novel with absurd situations pasted together with a healthy dollop of coincidence. But it’s also a very clever novel, with a convoluted plot built on a series of literary allusions. The actual resolution was a bit pants but it was a short, quickly-paced novel and I was having fun with the ride I didn’t mind too much. I’ll probably give Crispin another try.
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“Babel 17” by Samuel R. Delany. A very nice new german edition was released lately, including a new translation. I took this as an opportunity to read it again. My first time reading it was probably 40 years ago or so.
“Babel 17” is a classical SF story from the sixties, written in a very unique style and with a very unique topic: An unknown language works as a weapon in an interstellar war.
And how has the book aged? Good for the most part! Above all, the lifestyles and relationships of the protagonists in the book are still ahead of our time. I love it! The idea with the language is knowledgeably constructed and quite clever. And it reads so smooth that you can’t quite believe it’s 60 years old (alright, it was published in 1966).
I was all the more surprised in a scene where there was suddenly an act of highly awkward written communication. It took a moment for the penny to drop: back then, email hadn’t even been invented yet.
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(Historian pipe in, again…)
Actually in mid-60s the earliest terminal-based timesharing system was online (albeit campus or company-wide, “local” by today’s standards) and was immediately recognised the importance, with multiple terminal rooms, often in separate buildings, of coordinating the sharing of computing resources (many early timesharing was in academia, go figure that I suspect diplomacy was even required for computer operators, dealing with professors argumenting about the importance of their reasearch calculation is surely a nightmare…); so I think that for a sharp and visionary mind, like a golden age/1960s SF author, extrapolating the correct evolution was, I hope without hindsight, relatively easy.
of course, my suspicion on 1960s timesharing handling can even explain why Unix task priority tool is named nice and the highest priorities are negative (after long mail exchanges with obstinate professors and their opinions on the importance of their own reseaches, nice -20 makes sense…)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
The Gormenghast novels are fantastic. Personally, I liked the second even more than the first, so I think you’re in for a great ride! (Keep your eyes open for the cook Abiatha and your ears for Mr Flay’s cracking knees…)
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Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Recommended by an artist I’ve been chatting with on Pillowfort. Hope it’ll help me draw better.
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I’m not an accomplished artist, but the only drawing books that make me want to take up the art form again are these…
→ TACO (LEZHIN): Point Character Drawing - 2 Books
I saw one of them and it was absolutely amazing. It breaks down every aspect of figure drawing in such a digestible way… in a visual way… which should be the way to convey information to a visual artist’s mind. They are high quality, consistent in style, and very fun to explore. Less talky, more showy!
If I ever get serious about drawing again, I’m going to purchase these books. No hesitation. Each book is thick. So much information!
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Honestly, I’m more interested in geometry and architecture than drawing people and other living things, but I would metaphorically kill for a book on constructive geometry that provides tactile illustrations of various compass, straightedge, and beyond techniques.
Also wish there were better options for tactile drawing and something halfway workable for digital drawing as a blind person. I have a tactile drawing board that can technically be used with ordinary pencil and paper, but in practice you want to use at least a lightweight card stock and something like the point of a metal stylus or blunt darning needle and then you can’t really feel the indentations you’re making in the paper as you make it and can only feel the raised lines that form on the opposite side of the sheet, and most options that leave raised lines on the drawing surface often require specialized materials or you have to be careful not to smudge what you just laid down… and I’ve taken a look at the SVG markup, and while line art with full circles and rectangles seems doable, the moment you want to start doing partial circles, you have to use path, the syntax of which gives me a headache)… and then there’s no real way to confirm the image I tried to handwrite SVG code for is actually what I wanted.
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I have been rereading No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July. This short story collection had a large impact on my life as a young adult. It feels good to reread as a comfort book.
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Welcome ender!
Thanks for putting Miranda July’s short stories on my radar. I’ll keep my eyes open in the library or the second-hand bookstore.
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Athens is in uproar! Hermes’ unmentionables have been broken off all over the city… I suspect @DeusIrae might have something to do with this affront to the gods.
I’m reading Alkibiades by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer. Pfeijffer is one of the leading novelists in contemporary Dutch literature. Sadly, few of his work has been translated into English yet, so I doubt many of you have heard of him, apart from perhaps @VictorGijsbers .
Alkibiades is a fictional autobiography, an apologia by the titular character of his decisions during the Peloponnesian Wars, written from exile in the town of Melissa in Persia. Pfeijffer uses the historical lens of ancient Greece and the rivalry between the Hellan city-states with their various systems of government to implicitly critique contemporary European politics, a critique which he makes explicit in his many essays and columns for Belgian newspaper De Morgen.
Amazing stylistical finesse, accurate historical research, engaging fictional dialogue and emotion. A masterpiece.
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Man, must be a pretty long book then!
This sounds great, but sadly looks like it’s not translated into English – per Wikipedia seems like several of his more recent novels have been, though, and this one just came out in 2023 so will have to keep my eye out to see if it eventually make it to our shores as it seems entirely up my alley.
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After the whole “unmentionables”-desecration thing (which was an attempt to frame him), the whole “Eleusian Mysteries”-desecration thing (which he actually did on a drunken night out with friends) came out and Alkibiades was picked up from the Sicilian coast, where he was waging war on Syracuse, to stand trial in Athens. He escaped and offered his services to Sparta. That’s where I am now, and I’m at about one third of the book.
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Haha, Alkibiades has been translated to German! 
Sounds like a fascinating book. There is a Pfeijffer book in my local library: Grand Hotel Europa. Which seem not as interesting as Alkibiades. [EDIT: Little typo]
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Of course! My brain defaulted to English because that’s our lingua franca here, but we have many other languages represented. A simple wikipedia search doesn’t show any translations into French, Spanish, or Italian either though.
EDIT: the official site does show Alkibiades is available in Spanish, German, and Italian.
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Alkibiades got absolutely panned in the newspaper I read, but I take it you disagree with this reviewer?
I still have his Grand Hotel Europa unread on my shelves. Perhaps next year…
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