Reading anything good?

Hacker book club is reading The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin and I’m enjoying it so far. First novel I’m reading in a long time 😅

I just finished Cormac McCarthy’s top 3 again (blood meridian, the road and no country for old men). I started reading them again right after he died but kinda rushed through. This reading I really took my time. Finished a few other books in that time as well. But currently I’m reading “Krieg” which is from the Warhammer 40k universe.

There is a weekly thread on the books com about what everyone is reading you may want to check out.

This weeks post

I am more litrpg and cosmic horror

I quite like He Who Fights With Monsters. An Australian get isekai’d to an almost earth and gains vast cosmic powers while getting the crap beaten out of him and dealing with the consequences of running his mouth off to authority.

Another is Speedrunning the Multiverse. The god king of time is bored and reincarnates to see how fast he can grow his powers back to god king level and not for the first time. Interesting read if you like amoral main characters.

Beyond the aquillo rift is a bunch of cosmic horror short stores and a couple made it into the Death, Love, and Robots Netflix series.

Ryan North - How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

More interesting and funny than I had expected, not too heavy, ideal for now.

Just finished Prophet of Dune for the second time. It’s about how it’s not a gift to know the future, because if you do, then you have no free will. It also comments on the difference between morality and law and which is better suited to governing humanity.

It’s a weird book, but it follows Dune nicely and provides a fitting end to the story of Paul Atreides. It’s also quite short, about half the length of the first book. I’m looking forward to the movie coming out later this year.

I just finished Ender’s Game and loved it. I was completely enthralled with it.

After years of not touching books, I recently went and renewed mine and my daughters library cards to get her (and me) reading more over the summer. Currently I’m reading Dan Brown’s newest book Secret of Secrets, which has been a pretty interesting mystery/thriller but also delves into the nature of consciousness and explores alternative ideas about what it is, at least in a fictional setting.

Man i love the Mistborn universe by Brandon Sanderson. It’s such cool fantasy that’s not just a carbon copy of Tolkien (a trap a lot of it falls into, I feel?)

Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”

Wikipedia’s description is pretty good:

In the book, Klein argues that neoliberal economic policies promoted by Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics have risen to global prominence because of a deliberate strategy she calls “disaster capitalism”. In this strategy, political actors exploit the chaos of natural disasters, wars, and other crises to push through unpopular policies such as deregulation and privatization. This economic “shock therapy” favors corporate interests while disadvantaging and disenfranchising citizens when they are too distracted and overwhelmed to respond or resist effectively. The book challenges the narrative that free market capitalist policies have been welcomed by the inhabitants of regions where they have been implemented, and it argues that several man-made events, including the Iraq War, were intentionally undertaken with the goal of pushing through these unpopular policies in their wake.

I’ve been reading a fair bit of old, out of copyright fiction over the last couple years. I recently finished Carry On, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse which was amusing. You can find a copy here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/65974

Nope. I’m on book 5 of Dungeon Crawler Carl. It’s trash and I love it. Listening to the audiobook. That absolutely matters in this case. Hell, they got the audiobook narrator voicing Princess Donut for the live-action series. The cat is going to be voiced off-screen/dubbed in since, you know, cats don’t actually speak, but we don’t know how they’re going to do the cat. I’m assuming some kind of CGI, since she wears glasses, a tiara, and has various other adornments. Not to mention shoots lasers out of her eyes.

Never got into the Holly Gibney books by Stephen King. I read the first two Mr Mercedes and Finders Keepers, but I couldn’t get into the third one, so I didn’t read the standalone ones, either. Also, I watched The Outsider on TV and thought it sucked, so I didn’t bother with the book. Also, the subject matter makes me uncomfortable, so that’s another barrier to entry.

I think I might read the Expanse series next. There are nine books in the series, and that’s just the books. There are a bunch of short stories. The TV show adapted the first six books and some of the stories (as they provide background). There’s a whole reading list for the series, and I have it ready to go whenever.

I also want to re-read the Vampire Chronicles series. I read Interview With the Vampire a long time (25+ years) ago, and after watching the AMC series, and watching the 1994 film again, I want to go back to the source material. I started The Vampire Lestat back then, but never finished it. I think I read it after seeing the movie, and I liked Claudia’s story because the actress was about my age at the time. So it was hard to move onto the next one. I heard she gets more content later, though. (Worth noting that while in the movie she was 11 or 12, and in the AMC series she was 14, in the books she was five. Very different ages, very different personality types. So, very different characters.)

I never reread books, but right now I’m rereading Jurassic Park which I first read back before the movie had even come out.

It’s such a weird experience. It’s been over thirty years and yet some of the details come right back as I’m reading. And weird things like remembering exactly where I was when reading a particular chapter.

But at the same time how I’d originally pictured the characters? Who knows; it’s completely lost to me; they’ve all now been replaced with the actors from the movie.

I am reading the river has roots by amal el-mohtar. This lady has such a nice way of writing its so refreshing and enjoyable to read. Ive always been terrible at writing and communicating ideas. She inspires me to write and just try and express thoughts in a flowery manner. Its like the text is imbued with emotion.

The book is cool because the magic is called grammar and to the average person its just grammar as is but to the magically inclined it can be transformed and weaves there is a land that exists where time is flexible. She explains the magic of the world while also showing it by transformating the sentences through past current and future tense. Its a short book I got it yesterday and I’ll finish it next time I pick it up.

Semiosis and Interference by Sue Burke were my last two, but while interesting they didn’t go in the way I thought, and it feels like there’s a big hunk of… I hesitate to say wasted, but certainly unrealized potential. At the same time I feel like my expectations or preconceptions about what could or ought to happen are causing me to miss the point that Burke is trying to make.

I have so far bounced off the third and final entry in the series, Usurpation, but I have faith in both it and me and will take another crack at it soon.

If DCC hasn’t put you off litrpg entirely, I’m really enjoying Chrysalis by RhinoZ. Brutally neglected kid is reincarnated as an ant monster and enjoys being part of a loving family (colony) 👍

Working my way through discworld. Currently on the hogfather

The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting Their Story

It’s great if you’re a weirdo history/language nerd.

Last two books were Dark Blood by Stuart MacBride, I like this detective series so far but I need at least a few months between books. And this week I finished La Chica del Lago by Mikel Santiago, mistery novel, not bad.

Now I want to change genre, I’m thinking about reading Olvidado Rey Gudú by Ana María Matute.

*A Desolation Called Peace*. It’s the sequel to A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. Very strongly recommended. Really excellent political SciFi thrillers with amazing world building, really good character work and a lot to say about the nature of culture as a form of power.

Just finished Arthas, and just started with Cyberpunk’s No Coincidence. So far, reads well!

I consider all the books in my collection good, even if I don’t exactly love them.

Mid-book in a D&D series about a dark elf that I love. The author is still making books for it, but I haven’t read anything past book 16 or 17 yet

Just started the audiobook for LOTR book 2 as read by Andy Serkis.

And I just recently finished a book based on the Halo video games.

Mining Energy in an Expanding Universe

In principle, the expansion of the universe can be harnessed to provide energy. In a gedankenexperiment, energy is gained by connecting together widely separated bodies with strings. The tension and the energy generated are calculated for single strings. Mining energy in an expanding universe in this way raises unresolved issues concerning the conservation of energy. Apparently, the tethered-body experiment delivers “nascent” energy that previously did not exist in any identifiable and quantifiable form. It is argued that energy in a homogeneous and unbounded universe, in general, is not conserved on the cosmic scale.

I’m working on the most recent book of Dan Willis’ Arcane Casebook series. I stumbled onto them and got hooked.

The series is noir detective set in the 30’s, but with magic. As specific as that niche is, it has been done before, but these have been well worth reading. The way magic works is well-defined and has a lot of built-in limits. That keeps it from overshadowing the detective stories that are at the heart of the books.

These also do a good job of acknowledging the common tropes of the genre, without accepting them as limitations. For instance, cops don’t generally like private detectives, but the specific relationships between cops and detectives are varied and interesting.

The worldbuilding often goes in unexpected directions. The implications of magic affect everything. A lot of the world looks very familiar, but there are some prominent differences between our world and theirs. It’s a fun place to learn about.

I’m looking forward to the next book.

Not a book but I’ve just about collected all the pieces of historical evidence you can obtain in Caves of Qud and have just been reading all that recently (it’s pretty dense). The lore and writing of this game is awesome as hell and I certainly would get books of it if they ever wrote any.

Reading Serj Tankian’s memoirs: Down with the System.

It’s an interesting insight to how music was more a means of activism and bringing visibility to the Armenian genocide. It’s a very interesting story with almost as much history about his people as it has about him so far.

The Myth of normal by Gabor Mate, so far really good.

I just finished two books, and your post was the first thing that popped up when I opened lemmy, what ahappy lil coincidence! The Stephen King one sounds interesting, what’s your favorite? I quite enjoyed the one about the apocalypse (forgot the name)

The books I finished are: A prayer for the crown-shy by Becky Chambers (Cozy second part of a nice little Solarpunk novel, the first one is really nice too)

Shards of the earth by Adran Tchaikovsky (A not so cozy but gripping first part of a Sci Fi trillogy about a mysterious Alien invasion of god like world destroyers)

Thanks for the posts, If you like give some recommendations, I read the Knife too, moved me to tears that one.

Edit: “The Stand” is the King book I meant.