Still reading Whispers Underground by Ben Aaronovitch. Book 3 of Rivers of London series.
Though, technically I hadn’t read anything last two weeks to it’s more of “got back to reading”.
It’s still book 3, but I found it interesting how different it is from Dresden Files. There is no forces of nature with personal enmity with the protagonist (yet), it’s just (magic) crimes being solved by (magic) police. More of a police procedural then whatever genre Dresden Files is 😀
What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening to lately?
For details on the c/Books bingo challenge that just restarted for the year, you can checkout the initial Book Bingo, and its Recommendation Post. Links are also present in our community sidebar.
I just finished Dark Age from the Red Rising series. Started on the Light Bringer audiobook this morning while working! I haven’t been this into a series in a long time so I’ve been blazing through it, though Dark Age was a bit of a slog for me so I’m hoping book six will pick up in pace a bit.
I also started The Colour of Magic last night to give myself a lighthearted option in between the heavier series. I’ve read more books this year I think than I ever have before thanks to the Book Bingo challenge keeping me motivated! :D
Red Rising gets lots of praise here, should get around to it soon.
I’m currently almost completely through The Capital / Das Kapital by Karl Marx.
About 20% into Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Not an easy read but fascinating.
Nearly done with Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir! It’s quite good, and I’m glad I’d read somewhere here to go in with zero context. Would highly recommend.
Continuing to listen my way through the Otherland series by Tad Williams. Currently in book two, River of Blue Fire. It seems to me that he wrote all four books as one book and was told that was ~3000 pages wouldn’t sell well. I’m very much enjoying it. Williams writes in a detailed pace, which can seem slow at times, but I love his use of 20th century literature as the basis of all the VR worlds. They’re never the same as their origin and are wonderfully permuted.
I went into Project Hail Mary blind too, and it was very interesting to see how things unfold.
Someone else mentioned Otherland series in the same thread. Have never read it, but I remember loving Memory, Sorrow and Thorn (though I don’t remember a single thing from that), so will check it out.
I think I’m enjoying Otherland more than Memory, Sorrow and Thorn! They’re both following many of the main tropes of their own genre, cyberpunk, and fantasy respectively, but I think Otherland is more unique of an entry. MSaT possibly would have hit harder had I read it as a teenager.
I did read it as a teenager, maybe that’s why I remember liking it so much.
Will add Otherland to my list, but I have his Shadowmarch series in my TBR pile, so will prefer to read that before getting anything else.
I’m 80% of the way through my star wars: aftermath book by chuck wendig. I plan to pivot to Billion Dollar Ransom by James Patterson after this, instead of reading the rest of the series. I will likely come back to the series after i read that Patterson book.
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Maybe chose something easier to read before jumping into something so dense.
If Audiobooks are your thing, I highly recommend Otherland in audiobook format. It’s slow and methodical, but it scratches the same itch Wheel of Time did. Characters that you know you can come back to for a long time. Comforting, even if the content isn’t always cozy or nice.
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Fair enough! Enjoy your next read :)
Finished Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary In Cold War Africa. A very nuanced look at the man. A real idealist bursting with energy, a brilliant man and a visionary, yet inexperienced in politics and governance and prone to misjudging people by assuming (and demanding) the best of them. By nature an improviser, trying to improvise an entire government, and often with a mindset too military for civilian tastes, but too ‘revolutionary’ for military tastes. It’s made me hungry to read more about the situation ‘on the ground’ during Sankara’s administration.
I ended up tearing through Babel by RF Kuang and finished it today. It was a solid 4/5. I think at times it was very in your face with the anticolonialism and racism but was probably very in line with the time frame. I would have enjoyed some more delving into how the magic system worked/was created as well. But if you can make etemology engaging i feel like you did a pretty good job.
Maybe now i can focus on finishing Lady of the Lake.
Just started From Volga To Ganga by Rahul Sankrityayan
It’s a horror week for me. Currently reading Shoot Me in the Face on A Beautiful Day by Emma E. Murray and also beta reading a horror novel by someone I know. Quite enjoying them both.
Recently read Albert Camus’ The Stranger. That was pretty decent. Think I’ll go for one of his nonfictional works soonish, been intending to for a while.
I am currently reading Legends of Localization Book 1: The Legend of Zelda by Clyde Mandelin as part of a readalong with a friend. It focuses on the first entry in the TLOZ series and I’ve found it really interesting so far. I hesitate on reading fanmade gaming history books cause I don’t trust the information will be accurate or well-written but so far, so good.
I’ve just started another book (haven’t even finished the prologue yet) with another friend called Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein. This book got on my radar after I found out the Laundromat film is based on it. I suspect to get mad at rich people’s audacity by the end of it.
Almost finished ‘Les entretiens’ de Confucius (in French, because, well, I’m French). Started today: ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave’.
Work of fiction waiting to be started: Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, J.M. Barrie ‘The complete Peter Pan’.
Lots of classics! Have fun!
Thx.
Yep, a lot of classics indeed. Moving back to print from ebooks a little over a year ago was also an opportunity to (re)read a lot of them as they can be found for dirt cheap, on the used market.
The Douglass one was annotated by the previous owner (I don’t mind that, provided that doesn’t make the page unreadable) and the funny thing is that their notes so far are really not focusing on what I’m getting out of this very unsettling text. In its own way, next to the text itself, this person’s notes are another enriching encounter.
That’s interesting. A luck find, I would say.
Depends the kind of book you read and the shop you’re visiting but it can be relatively frequent, and sometimes it’s more interesting than the others.
Ahan, I am apparently going to wrong bookshops.
I’m still working through Drew Hayes Super Powereds series, I’ve finished book 3 and am reading a spin-off called Corpies that takes place during book 3.
The quality has definitely improved. Still could have benefited from a good editor but not quite as much as before. It’s moved into A tier.
I thought you might give up after the last one. Glad it improved.
Oh, I have finished plenty worse series 😂. I read the first two books of a trilogy that was cancelled because it was so bad once.
lol, don’t even know how to reply to that 😀 Have fun, I guess!
Allow me to be clear, I was not aware that it had had been canceled until I tried to find the third book in the series, but when I found out that it had been canceled, I was like, “yeah… That makes sense“. 😂
lol, still not sure if I should be happy for you that you were saved from a bad book, or sad for you that you couldn’t finish the story 😀
I finished The Black Tongue Thief a few days ago so I’ve bounced around a few books. But I seem to have settled on Swords & Deviltry by Fritz Leiber and The Mosaic Effect by McGregor and Mitchell
How are these? Would you recommend any of them?
I enjoyed the light hearted narrator in a dark world aspect of Black Tongue Thief. And I would recommend it, if that is appealing.
I think I’d caution some people on Leiber. He’s a good writer, and important in fantasy Canon. And I am enjoying him.
But he is writing during the 1950s to 80s, so there is some inherent misogyny. He tries to make powerful women characters, but it doesn’t quite work. I think he was pushing boundaries in the 60s, but a modern reader with modern conceptions may not enjoy his work.
The Mosaic Effect is about the CCP setting up an underground and parallel state in Vancouver/Canada. So if that’s your thing, yeah read it.
Thanks for the info!
About halfway through Roman Sexualities. I know the broad concepts, but the details elaborated on are fascinating.
ahem Any interesting tidbits?
Sure thing! It’s noted, for example, that scratching one’s head with one finger was considered a ‘dainty’ affectation and potentially indicating a passive homosexual - likely in relation to the connection Romans saw between vanity and passive homosexuality, with scratching one’s head with one finger being to minimize mussing one’s hair (Julius Caesar, famously handsome and vain, was noted by Cicero to scratch his head with one finger).
Another is that Romans considered a man performing oral sex on a woman to be more degrading than a man performing oral sex on another man, or receiving anal sex from another man. This is largely because the Romans didn’t conceive of sexual relations in the form of their partner’s sex, but in what acts were performed on who. Some men in Roman history are noted as liking men or liking women, but what defines their sexuality is not that, but rather whether they ‘give’ or ‘receive’. The former is entirely normal for a RESPECTABLE citizen; the latter is proof of some inherent servility and disreputability.
During the Principate, sexual and gender boundaries weakened with the rise of the autocracy of the Roman Emperor disrupting traditional social divisions. Part and parcel with this was a spike in concern from moralists about the decline of ‘traditional’ Roman morality. Nowadays, all the men are going down on girls, marrying boys, and worrying about their appearance! O TEMPORA! O MORES! 😭
Regardless of whether that kvetching represented an actual increase in such behavior (it likely did, to some degree), it gives insight as to how the Romans perceived sexuality as part of the broader social structure, not just a private matter. It was not that transgressing it made you ‘bad’ or adhering to it made you ‘good’, unlike later Abrahamic notions of sexuality; it was that transgressing it was a challenge to the social order of inviolable citizens who could ‘defend’ their liberty and their self from ‘intrusion’ of others. The worrying, thus, was connected to the worry that the autocracy of the Roman Emperor was stripping Roman citizens of their liberty-oriented mindset, and creating a more ‘servile’ citizenry and social order.
That’s actually pretty interesting.
Thanks for the detailed response.
