Books, CAN YOU READ?! Options

[Dr Strum]

This thread is for discussion of books. Books you're reading, books you've read, books you're interested in, etc.
--Tom Clancy is lame--


But anyways. I'm currently reading Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It's interesting, but I'm having difficulty getting into it, partially because of school, and partially because the month before I started it, I had just finished the Dark Tower series.

[Raijinili]

I read Wizard's First Rule ... The whole thing seems to exist just to hate on communism. There were some odd lines throughout the book that made me raise an eyebrow, but I realized I wasn't imagining it and it wasn't a coincidence once they described a master torturer villain's outfit with colors and a symbol very much conjuring up the whole hammer and sickle thing.

Let the record show that I almost knew EXACTLY what she was talking about from the keywords "fantasy book" and "hating on communism":
<~Rhiannon> Alright I was getting weird vibes from some things before
<~Rhiannon> But I'm 600 pages into this fantasy book and I am now 100% positive this writer is just hating on communism
<Raijinili> Sword of Truth is definitely hating on communism.
<~Rhiannon> THAT'S WHAT I GET FOR PICKING THIS BOOK UP AGAIN TO GIVE IT A TRY AFTER I DITCHED IT WHEN I WAS WAAAAY YOUNGER BECAUSE I DIDN'T LIKE THE COVER
<Raijinili> WAIT IS IT ACTUALLY SWORD OF TRUTH FAITH OF THE FALLEN
<~Rhiannon> (it was actually bought by someone else for me)
<~Rhiannon> No
<~Rhiannon> It's Wizard's First Rule
<Raijinili> oh
<Raijinili> well i got the sword of truth part right
<Raijinili> yeah the author is an objectivist

Because there's like one author that that describes.

Here he is defending himself about two quotes attributed to him:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/1...oodkind/c9nnrqq

[Dr Strum]

I've stopped about a quarter of the way through Rushdie's Midnight's Children. It's really good and I plan to get back to it soon, but I've been blasted by a bunch of library holds and other distracting reading:

My Favorite Thing is Monsters was an amazing book I picked up ahead of the creator's appearance at the Olympia Comic Book Festival last month. She was a sweet lady and I eagerly await the continuation of this story.

Blueprint (Christakis) This one was about the evolutionary genetic basis for society. Discussed studies on phenomenon like animal culture, hippy communes and shipwrecked survivors. Examined potential inherited survival strategies like monogamy and paternal investment and capacity for non-familial affection (ie friends, homeland, pets, and so on) through the above phenomenon. Interesting but not especially valuable.

Conformity (Sunstein) Almost finished with this one - the first two thirds of the book examined sociological/economics experiments studying how people's behavior changes from individual to group experience. Now it's discussing the ramifications for governance and the judiciary. One interesting takeaway thus far has been the significant impact even a single dissenter can have: shattering delusions of group unanimity balances the discussion often resulting in better outcomes.

African Samurai (Lockley/Girard) Biography on Yasuke. Thus far has been an exploration of 16th century Japanese politics and the Jesuit influence thereupon.

May have to set aside Rushdie still longer though because I kinda need to plow through a Murakami novel I started in 2016 and never finished before seeing a friend in August...

[Rhiannon]

Read Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman, which I liked. I really feel the main girl. Everything's so much easier if it's known and predetermined.

Oliver Sacks' The River of Consciousness was also very interesting. I'd only read The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat before, but unlike that, this wasn't descriptions of odd patients or anything like that. It was just sort of musings on a few subjects. I learned a looot of lesser-known things about Darwin from it, I feel like.

And what really made me want to post here was finishing Dave Eggers' The Parade. The book was entertaining enough to go through, but then that ending! It just comes out of nowhere, hits you like a rock and then you're knocked out. It's so right, and so depressing... Really makes the book, I feel like. It reminds me a little of Waiting For the Barbarians but the different mood Eggers builds compared to that changes how it affects you, significantly. HIGHLY RECOMMEND.

[Dr Strum]

The Parade had a rock'me sock'me ending that's for sure.

I read Clea, the last book in the Alexandrian Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. If I aspire to any writer, it's probably him.

Finally finished Midnight's Children by Rushdie. Really enjoyed it it was a wonderful book with a satisfying (in the sense that you're okay with the) ending. Reminded me a lot of 100 Years of Solitude, though I'm not the first to make the comparison.

Read Cixin Liu's The Three Body Problem which was very entertaining. I don't read much SciFi to be honest, but I was told to pick up Hyperion as a result of my reading that, so I'll get to that soon.

A night of serious drinking by Rene Daumal perplexed me but also made me LOL on my bus commute. Google describes the subject as being about the drinking of alcoholic beverages which means Google never actually read it.

My roommate got on a Vonnegut kick so I wound up reading Mother Night which was a fun mystery kinda novel. Really densely sparse in his trademark way, but maybe more so than some of his more famous works. What's the adjective to label a Vonnegut writing style? Vonnegutian?

Been reading a lot of books on typography as of late.
Also restarted Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles which I had picked up (maybe even posted here about) several years ago but then stopped so I could lend it to a friend who was trying to get laid and now they're engaged so I guess it was worth the delay... It's pretty good. I dig Murakami's bullshit though, maybe not everyone does.

[Rhiannon]

I don't think I said before but I did finish The End of Trust, and then immediately decided I must convince coworkers to use it in our remedial reading classes and they were like "f yeah we need this kind of content." But then we couldn't use it because we're all online now using some random site that was not built for us or our highly specific methods. Anyway, the point is it had very informative parts explaining various surveillance technology, and there were some essays in it that were very right and a bit feelsy.

I read Spirits Rebellious, a book I randomly picked up out of my work's yearly book giveaway because it had a pretty cover and a cool name, and wow, this is beautiful and locks right into the way I feel about the ways society and religion wind up functioning even though this book's setting is so far removed from mine. I ordered The Prophet, another book Khalil Gibran wrote, almost immediately after finishing it, because I loved it so much. While I definitely liked that a lot too, it didn't hit me hard like Spirits Rebellious did. I still wanna read more from this guy, man. Can't believe I stumbled on something I loved so much in such a random way.

Slowly reading through The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge, which I picked up thinking it would be a fantasy story, because I wanted to read some random fantasy. I don't know why I thought that. It's Sci-Fi. It's fine though, they're about to unleash a terrible virus that's going to kill everyone in the story so this one person can remain in power.

Also reading... Werewolf Cop. The main guy's name is Zach. They even spell it right! It's so far kind of a dumb book though, yep, I said it, I don't care what praise Stephen King gives this author. Its attempts to conjure up a noir-style narration keeps making its descriptions of some of the female characters extremely weird and kind of bad in ways that an actual noir story would be unlikely to do (not like noir's a super nicetowomen genre in the first place either, so that's kinda bad). I was also hoping it would be funnier, because the title is very silly, but it's not very funny. It is very easy to read, though! That's some praise I can give it, it's pretty good at keeping you moving.

[Dr Strum]

Hmm. Well I finished Windup Bird Chronicles. Felt more conclusive than his other novels. I also liked how a lot of its internal narratives were historically couched rather than fantastically.

I read Shusaku Endo's Silence. It's kind of a depressing novel about the Christian Purge. At the same time it grapples with a lot of universal ideas of courage and love. I liked it but I don't know if I'd recommend it to any except those with an interest in reading about Christian missionaries being hunted in Japan.

At the same time I was working my way through Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (and I'm also presently rereading it in Russian). It's this weird little novel about a strangely confused man. He's cocksure but directionless. He always says the right thing to make the girls ragelove him and to disarm and confound the men who scheme to replace him. He does everything he can to force his friends and family out of his life. Very interesting character.

Yesterday I finished Where the Crawdads Sing. Recommendation from my Grandma. I really enjoyed it. It was one of those really easy reads I don't engage with often. It was also a great throwback to the types of books I read as a kid: the YAFic novels about kids surviving alone in the wilderness, like The Hatchet or Iceworm.

Currently primarily reading Gravity's Rainbow which I took a stab at back in college and then just kinda stopped halfway through for a life reason of some sort or other. Almost up to the point I left off again. Have to say I appreciate it far more now. It's a hard book to read if you're stupid, and I'm less stupid now than then iirc

I wanted to pick up Cixin Liu's Dark Forest, continue on that trilogy, but I just got an email that I have a hold waiting at the library so I guess I gotta take care of that first...

[Dr Strum]

I went through my brainstorage yesterday to try to figure out what books I read this year and I'll try to come up with something clever to say about each:

• Gravity's Rainbow - Don't subject yourself to it, no matter how good it is or how badass you are
• Dark Forest - I've never wanted to sabotage radio equipment more
• Maxwell's demon - Now this is some toxic relationship #GOALS
• The Voyageurs - Canoes, polygamy, cannibalism: what more could you want from a history book
• The Confidence Man - Need nineteen arguments for or against trust? Melville's gotchyer back
• The Demons - Who knew labor could be so comical! Dostoevsky, who seems to think it's the only part of life not worthy of tears
• Siddhartha - You should go live in a van down by the river
• Uzumaki - Cochlea are overrated anyway
• Invitation to a Beheading - It takes Nabokov 200 pages to tell you can stop reading
• Fathers and Sons - Tell your child they're a disappointment or they'll probably die young
• The Power of Babel - Language! It's a helluva drug
• Self Reliance - You're not self reliant if you read this book, and Emerson will make you feel bad about it
• The Ministry of Utmost Happiness - How to hide an anti-neocolonial-capitalist story inside an anti-neocolonial-capitalist story
• Low low woods - Shudder To Think was a well-chosen town name for the setting of this #metoo horror
• A theory of fun - "Clever things make people feel stupid and unexpected things make them feel scared!"
• Snow Country - Memoirs of a Geisha's Worthless Lover

Comic books:

• Paper Girls (All) - Lesbians and their time traveling antics
• Ice Cream Man (0 -> 30ish) - I'm not sure if the world is falling apart more or less than normal but I don't really want ice cream anymore
• Homesick Pilots (-> 10) - Evangelion meets Poltergeist meets SLC Punk
• Ginseng Roots (3 -> 9) - I think I got tricked into reading a history of Wisconsin horticulture and Asia-American geo-political-economic relations and I think I'm okay with that

Some poetry:

• Goblin Market - I thought this was a parable about drug addiction but the internet seems to think it's either about capitalism or queer identity
• Ryoukan haikus - Not often written poetry brings me to tears but one of these got me bad
• Rilke - German man fantasizes about what it must TOTALLY FEEL LIKE TO BE a Russian Orthodox Christian

[Frisk]

I've worked my way through Dubliners, The haunting of Hill House, the Throne of Glass books, the Daevabad trilogy, and the Neapolitan Quartet over the last year or two. Right now I'm digging in to Thomas Ligotti's Teatro Grottesco anthology and I'm really loving this shit. When I started it I expected it to be a new take on Lovecraft but it's closer to Kafka.

[Dr Strum]

Another year, another round of bookos.

• American Gods - pretty much captures the midwest
• The Martian Chronicles - The story of America but it's Mars
• Death’s end - the action movie entry of the trilogy
• Smashed - if you only liked the tornado riding part of uzumaki...
• The arrival - immigrants helping immigrants
• Thinking fast thinking slow - all the ways in which your first impressions are WRONG but also IMPORTANT?!?!
• Ulysses - at least 20% dedicated to shipping the Shakespeare-was-a-cuckold theory
• Cry, the beloved country - kinda like Crash but South African
• Ni independencia, ni revolución - kinda like a Mexican graphic novel Zinn
• Too loud a solitude - poop princesses and book hoarders, oh and SORROW
• Fever dream - I think the Spanish title (Rescue Distance) is better
• Their eyes were watching god - what's the most absurd way to die from an heroic gesture?
• Hyperion - Space Chaucer
• Zen in the Art of Writing - According to Bradbury, "zen" in writing is writing about what pisses you off
• Data oriented programming - fuck type systems
• American Loom - the supreme court can't save you from corporate surveillance
• Thinking in Numbers - tell me you have adhd and you're incredibly well read without telling me either of those things
• Maus I - man it was hard to be a Jewish mouse in Poland in the 30's
• Devil House - true crime is for chumps
• Maus II - man it was reallly hard to be a Jewish mouse in Poland in the early 40's
• Rethinking consciousness - "reptile brain" is an offensive slur
• A long day’s journey into night - hurt people hurt people
• Probable impossibilities - helped me understand why the last 100 years of science mattered
• Project Hail Mary - bonding over diy space travel hacks
• Walden - how Thoreau, unable to buy his favorite (unfashionable) pants, became a curmudgeon and how you can too
• Near to the wild heart - one big mirror for so many of my philosophical turmoils
• Ashoka the great - white wash a ruthless conqueror and MAKE ME CRY THE WHOLE TIME
• The jazz of physics - just read the last chapter, or just study Coltrane's mandala
• The prophet - god-tier

My top five for the year? In order, "Ulysses", "The Prophet", "Near to the Wild Heart", "Cry, the Beloved Country" and "Their Eyes Were Watching God." High recommendation for all of them.

The only book I suggest avoiding is "American Loom" because I'm college friends with the author and how dare he publish before me! Nah, actually I just think it would have been better as a screenplay than a novel.

[Frisk]

Let's see if I can recall most of what I've read since my last post (it isn't a lot)

I just finished Piranesei and I thought it was great, but I was still disappointed in it. I expected it to be a mystery, the kind of mystery you can solve, and instead got a very interesting urban fantasy kind of thing.

I'm reading Sarah J Maas's second book series, A Court of Thorns and Roses, right now. They're okay. Mostly these books are filler things I'm reading because other people want me to.

No Longer Human is the only other book that comes to mind. It was quite good, and I want to check out both of the manga adaptations now.

Still think LCN should check out Thomas Ligotti. That shit is fire.

[Dr Strum]

Some books I have recently enjoyed include Hesse's Steppenwolf, Asimov's The Gods Themselves and Vonnegut's Galapagos

Some books that I have recently NOT ENJOYED include Rijneveld's The Discomfort of Evening, Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and a biography of Ho Chi Minh that was poorly translated and quite superficial. I guess I don't know what I had expected to be packed into 110 pages.