Hail Dickens 
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fully concur and agree, This is the time of year for a good re-reading of A christmas carol !
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Which reminds me, I haven’t gotten around to my annual listen of Focus on the Family Radio Theater’s audio dramatization of A Christmas Carol yet.
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And I have now rectified the situation, listening to my favorite rendition of A Christmas Carol this evening.
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Slogging through Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, which… I don’t know if I like this guy, and also it’s quite long. I don’t know. Every time I pick it up, whatever’s going on is an adventure and I’m curious what happens next but also there’s that undercurrent of “this author is a clueless annoying bro” and I’m not feeling particularly compelled to pick it up the next time…
Working my way through Melissa Scott & Lisa Barnett’s Astreiant series; I’ve been in the mood for Scott’s sort-of-dry but oddly intricate and compelling (to me) style lately.
Trying to decide if I want to read Brendan Keogh’s The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist: starting with him being surprised by a gamedev being immune to the industry/capitalist stuff and openly admitting that he just wants to “get better and make cool stuff,” and then the rest of the introduction being a lengthy defense of the legitimacy of the idea that it’s OK to make things just because you like making things is… not inspiring confidence in his insightfulness, but I’ve heard a lot of people say good things about the book so I’ll probably give it more of a chance than just the intro.
And I re-read Ursula Vernon’s tome of a graphic novel Digger recently, which was fun.
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Reading “Downfall” by Baldacci (in German translation), a thriller taking place in an US town which has seen better days. Many citizens have moved away or are unemployed and take drugs. And the main detective has a photographical memory and is a bit weird and grumpy when it comes to social contacts.
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Starting to crunch numbers for my end of year look back at my reading. Initial results: 58 books finished in 2024, almost 17,000 pages read. 5 rereads this time, others new to me. 19 books scored 5-star ratings from me in Goodreads (inc most rereads!). More to come in a full blog post in due course.
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Oh man! Ten years ago I clicked through the whole online novel beginning to end, monitor on fullscreen and lights out in my room, completely engrossed in this great adventure. It’s amazing and recognisable and weird and unsettling and amazing.
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Completed Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey.
Started with The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman.
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Just finished Brandon Sanderson’s Wind And Truth. It was great! Though I’m ready for his next books to return to a bit more relaxed pace.
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Looking back at a year of reading 2024 edition - my latest yearly wrap up.
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“…a number of rereads, such as Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring…”
You can re-read one of the Books without reading them all? Wow. Even after having read the trilogy twice, every time one of the movies came out I felt obliged to reread the whole thing. And every time King released a new Dark Tower novel I had to go back and reread all of them in backwards order.
Thanks for the list, there’s a lot in there I want to read too, now.
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I reread them all, but very spaced out. I expect to get to The Two Towers in a few months time. In the meantime I’m reading some other things.
This is probably my 6th or 7th reread of the trilogy 
I felt like reading the Moria chapters again recently so I started Fellowship in the middle, telling myself that would be it. Then I said I would just continue with Two Towers…I started Return a couple nights ago.
I just started Sense and Sensibility for the first time. It’s really great. I was wondering though how much modern editions are different from the originals. My copy (modern library) doesn’t have notes or anything to say otherwise.
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That’s funny, I just finished Northanger Abbey last night! It was lots of fun, with a gothic-novel-obsessed heroine crashing her way through a comedy of manners. My sense is that modern editions of Austen typically regularize the spelling a bit but generally have a light touch with anything else (which is good; she uses a lot of commas but they really enhance the jokes IMO).
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What gives you a “bro” vibe about Vinge? I get more of the generic “slightly tedious professor” feel that a lot of “hard” science fiction authors exude.
For comparison I absolutely do get a tech bro vibe from, for example, Neal Stephenson.
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Talking of old novels, am I unusual for thinking The Pickwick Papers (now rereading for the purposes of the thread) is the best Dickens novel?
Hmm. I guess I think of those as being the same thing? Excited by “big” ideas and wanting to be seen as “thinking deeply” about them but then missing huge swathes of what seem like they’d be the actual human consequences? Musk, Altman, Doctorow, Gibson, Hubbard, Asimov, Heinlein, Card, those kinds of guys? I don’t think I’ve read Stephenson because he didn’t seem like my thing.
Dunno. Maybe they aren’t the same thing at all but they have a lot of the same feel in my head.
Been reading short stories recently; catching up on Clarkesworld, and some stories folks have recommended from other places. Not quite sure why these two because I wouldn’t call them the best I’ve read, but R.S.A Garcia’s The Anchorite Wakes and Pat Murphy’s A Catalog of 21st Century Ghosts have been stuck in my head a bit…
What exactly do you mean by this? I have to admit I’ve never read Gibson, but from reading a plot synopsis of Neuromancer, it seems quite noirish and hence at least implicitly carries a theme of the ideas producing character drama. This would seem far more human consequence-ish than, say, a more abstract exploration of an idea like Asimov’s Runaround.
The thread I have opened yesterday is a solid giveaway, I’m reading late victorian/early edwardian UK engineering magazines.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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