What are you reading these days?

Unfortunately the NRC Handelsblad review is behind a subscription wall. I’ve read favorable reviews in Belgian publications, with the most frequent criticism being that the book is too longwinded.

But I think those reviewers misinterpret. Alkibiades reads like a Classical Greek text faithfully translated to Dutch, paragraph-long sentences full of clauses, aesthetic digressions and seemingly redundant asides included.

Personally, I was immediately drawn into the novel both by the story that alternates between high-stakes politics and deeply personal and intimate slices of the protagonist’s life, and the stylistic tour-de-force.

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Addendum to my post about the novel Alkibiades by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer:

For good measure, I have to add this link too:
The Eleusinian Miseries - Details (ifdb.org): Mike Russo’s take on some of the events in the book I’m reading.

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My “take”? You wound me – everything is actually as it could have, nay, must have happened!

(Thanks for the shout-out :slight_smile: )

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That’s why it’s a take; you’ve been given the truth, and you’ve taken it.

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Perhaps… But my PMed complaint that you did miss a crucial time- and character-appropriate command still stands. Of course I’m talking about PUSH UNMENTIONABLE IN SPHINCTER. (I even added the language-appropriate term…)

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I just started Drowned Hopes by Donald E. Westlake. It’s part of his series of John Dortmunder novels, a theif who seems to be cursed as most of his capers go wrong.

But I’m mentioning this one in particular because they just introduced a character who’s a computer expert and when we first meet him he’s playing IF. And it’s labeled as such. Granted, in the book his commands to the parser sound a lot like the way they talk to the computer on TNG, full sentences, nuanced questions, etc.

But still, I had no idea the term “interactive fiction” had enough tread to appear in a novel in 1990.

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I just read this totally awesome article where the author unearthed an essay by Ian Fleming in 1963 titled, How to Write a Thriller. It’s a short read into the mindset of the author writer behind James Bond, in his own words. There’s some really interesting conclusions drawn by Fleming. Sage advice.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/ian-fleming-explains-how-to-write-a-thriller

Some notable exceptions…

Forster’s “The Machine Stops” describes social media shockingly well for 1909.

Heinlein’s For Us, the Living, written in 1938 but published posthumously relatively recently, includes people using a home terminal to order a book online. I think there were other web-commonalities but I forget the details and can’t find an online reference.

Overshoots the thirties by seven years, but Murray Leinster’s 1946 “A Logic Named Joe” does an impressive job of describing something web-like.


As to what I’m reading, I recently tore through the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. It’s “LitRPG” and likely to appeal to a lot of computer gamers.

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It’s funny you should be mentioning this just now… I just finished enjoying Mike’s @DeusIrae game before this Alcibiades talk started up…

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Just read the first installment of James S.A. Corey’s (pseudonym for the 2 authors who also wrote The Expanse books) new trilogy, The Captive’s War. Book 1 is The Mercy of Gods.

It’s not as good as the Expanse books. But that’s a really high bar, and this was pretty enjoyable. I hate it that now I’m over a barrel waiting for the next book-- usually I can wait until a series is finished, or nearly finished, before getting into it. But I was a greedy pig and snarfed this one up in a day.

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I met half of James S.A. Corey on JoCo last year and he was very nice. He signed a bookplate for my friend who’s a huge fan. I think I also watched him play D&D on stage.

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You were on the JoCoCruise? My wife and I had tickets for it in 2019, but had to cancel when my life circumstances changed.

2019 was my first year and I’ve gone every year since. Though '26 is up in the air because my circumstances are changing.

It’s how I discovered Ryka Aoki’s amazing book Light From Uncommon Stars. One year Patrick Rothfuss read us the first chapter of Kingkiller books 3. Matt Fraction did a fake TED Talk called “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Is the Best James Bond Film and This Is Empirically Provable”. I saw Strong Bad play Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes live on stage. Met Marc Evan Jackson.

Plus all the music. It’s a really really great time.

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Nearing the end of my annual October reread of “A Night in the Lonesome October” by Roger Zelazny. And enjoying it as much as always. It is a fantastically creative piece of gothic storytelling, richly imaginative, and so much fun. Perfect for the run up to Halloween each year.

Here is the cover, with alt text below:
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The original cover of Roger Zelazny’s “A Night in the Lonesome October”, featuring a cast of gothic horror characters, including Sherlock Holmes, the Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster and more. At front right is the book’s narrator, dog Snuff.

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I just finished Swan Song by Edmund Crispin. It was quite a clever golden age detective puzzle, and not very long so it never outstays it’s welcome. A solid 6/10, competently executed but not one that I am likely to remember clearly in even five years time.

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I’ve been reading The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. It’s narrative nonfiction, a fascinating combination of the story of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, and of a serial killer who committed his crimes just outside the fair itself.

After I finish, I have a hankering to play 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery.

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A wonderful plan for a double-feature. Enjoy!

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I finished Alkibiades by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer a few days ago. It’s a hard but good read. Overwhelming at times, but always engaging and satisfying.

Now that I’ve finished, I can also see clear literary family-resemblances that were more obscure while I was in the thick of it. It shows heavy picaresque elements akin to Don Quixote and Till Eulenspiegel. The protagonist’s moving around to different lands with different cultures reminded me a lot of Gulliver’s Travels.


And just now I finished Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers, a not-quite-sequel novel set in the same universe as her A Closed and Common Orbit, which I wrote about in this thread earlier. Even more than that previous book, this one made me wonder if “cozy” SF is already a thing. Record of a Spaceborn Few sure seems to fit.

I liked it. Chambers knows how to get up close with the characters in an empathic, non-intrusive way, making the reader’s witnessing of their private lives an intimate privilege.

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I’ve been reading the script for Real Sound: Kaze no Regret, an old audio game for Sega Saturn and Dreamcast. I’ve mentioned it a few times before but never tried to get through it until now.

It’s never been translated into English as far as I know. It’s really good. Even reading the auto-translated version, I was one step ahead of the plot and figured out what was going on.

There’s a very effective use of symbols and imagery throughout that helps the reader/listener draw connections around both the plot and the theme.

One such “image” is noise: for example, the sound of an incoming typhoon and the sound of bee buzzing around you are both used to evoke a sense of calm within a storm. That one’s not really relevant to the plot and the two images are not explicitly linked, which is why I’m sharing it as an example.

I’m trying to adapt it to Twine, but I’m not sure how much of the branching narrative I’ll be able to figure out. It’s more linear than advertised, or at least the original script was. And, since it was originally meant for blind listeners and sighted listeners, a text-only version might not really do it justice. There’s actually a key twist that takes place involving sound, but it’s not the biggest part of the story.

I wonder if it was influenced by Vertigo, but I guess that movie influenced a lot of other psychological thrillers, so maybe Real Sound is just roughly part of the genre. Actually, I guess Real Sound is more firmly in the romance genre. Is it funny enough to be called a romcom? I don’t know, but I think so.

I always assumed that Kenjo Eno, the game’s sound designer and founder of the development/publishing company WARP, had written the story. However, it was actually written by Yuji Sakamoto, who did the screenplay for the critically acclaimed 2023 film Monster, which I now want to see.

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