Ask Lemmy

I just finished Dune: Messiah and am gonna read a short monograph about Commodore Perry and the Battle of Lake Erie before cracking into Hornblower: Flying Colours

One of the Wheel of Time books.

My 6 favorite authors either haven't published in a long time, or they've begun publishing early works that weren't good enough to get published when they started out. 2 of my other favs have died. This has pushed me out of my comfort zone and delved into Steven Fry's Mythos series... and I rather like it. Oh, and if anyone sees Patrick Rothfuss around, please smack him upside the back of his head.

• Finnegans Wake - my 'big read' which I am doing over the year along with a group over on reddit: one of the only things that still has me dipping into reddit now. Fascinatingly incomprehensible.
• Tchaikovsky's Children of Time - some good thoughtful worldbuilding and a solid story.
• Robert Brightwell's Flashman's Waterloo - one of his series of Flashman prequels featuring the uncle of George MacDonald Fraser's protagonist. Very well researched and entertaining
• A collection of Neil Munro's Para Handy tales - gentle humour and a glimpse of a very different world - albeit rather stereotypical and patronising in some ways.

• 4 Noble Truths.

So far, I get the impression that it's a phiosophical treatise discussing the suffering in life and the inevitability of it. I'm not sure when I'm going to end, because I don't approach philosophical texts sober and my stash of beer has ended abruptly.

• The Way it went down volume 2

An anthology of stories relevanat to Delta Green role-playing game. It's one of those rare cases when a RPG-inspired material doesn't suck. The stories are usually very short, horror, borderline Lovecraftian. Some are quite disturbing to read.

After a long time of no reading, I started reading on the beach The Handbook of Epictetus. I bought it thanks to the recommendation of PewDiePie of all people in the video he did after losing the first spot in YouTube rankings

Beyond Command and Control by John Seddon, my second time though and a good book about systems and how systems dictate human behavior and how to alter them instead of beating people up to get results.

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang, a series of short stories. I'm on the third story in the book now and I've loved each one of them. Compelling hook, well written. They have all gotten me obsessively thinking about the world he's created.

Wouldn't consider myself a bookworm but

Finished recently:

• Handmaid's tale
• the eerie silence (the german one from Harald Lesch)
• Jesus Video

Reading currently:

• One trillion dollar

And I think the next one is gona be Sci-Fi. Maybe I will check out The Wandering Earth from Liu Cixin. But I am open for recommendations.

Why we are polarized - Ezra Klein

Lost Metal by Sanderson.

I'm trying to read the other Sanderson books. Got through Way of Kings, but it was a slog. I don't love really long books.

So I'll probably read Tress next and then give Storm Light Archive stuff another shot.

"The Peacock And The Sparrow," by I.S. Berry. It's a spy novel the same way 'Catch-22' is a war story. The narrator is a burnt out CIA agent trying to convince himself and the world he isn't a loser.

"The Crook Manifesto" by Colson Whitehead. Stand alone follow up to 'The Harlem Shuffle.' It's like going into a local bar on Malcolm X Blvd. and listening to the oldtimers talk about back in the day. A semi-retired fence goes to a crooked White cop to get tickets to a Jackson 5 concert for his teenage daughter. High jinks and hilarity ensue.

Currently reading Drunk by Edward Slingerland. https://www.alcademics.com/2021/09/review-of-drunk-by-edward-slingerland.html

Pro difficulty: I am only reading it in bars.

Reading "A Tale of Two Cities" for the first time.

Fairytale by Stephen King

Currently reading Manifolds, Tensor Analysis, and Applications by Abraham et al. Basically, how do you do geometry and calculus on surfaces or objects that are enough like a surface?

For STEM nerds: this book discusses manifolds in infinite dimensional spaces as well as finite dimensions. I believe there is a fluid dynamics application in the book that requires the infinite dimensional theory. There are far simpler books to learn this material if you just need to speedrun into calculations, but I really want the "full story".

"Full Sea" by Chang-Rae Lee. Dystopian fiction, but not sci Fi and not like any dystopian fiction I've ever read. It's about a young girl who makes her living as a tank diver in a giant hydroponics farm/fish farm. They make her boyfriend disappear for genetic experimentation, because he's the only human the researchers have ever seen who is completely cancer-free. She poisons the fish and leaves the farm compound forever to find him. Very few workers have ever left the compound, because it's so dangerous outside. Some bad stuff happens.

Currently reading The Wandering Inn, a fantasy web serial.

It's really hard to communicate just how good it is, because the synopsis sounds very much like a million really bad books.

It's set in a fantasy universe where RPG things like levels and classes and skills are all real... And humans from Earth start appearing in this world for reasons unknown.

Told you it sounds like a bunch of other (bad) books. I promise it's great though. The writing goes hard. Characters are distinct and feel fleshed out, and the author isn't afraid to kill off a character you like - or to give you sympathy for the devil.

It's a long series, but it's never been dull. And if you don't believe me (fair, you hardly know me), it was also the highest-grossing serial on Patreon for long time. I still pay my monthly due just to get access to the latest chapter a few days early.

The whole thing is available online for free (barring the latest chapter delayed for a few days).

Start here. Have fun!

Misery. My second time reading it.

Before two years ago it was the only Stephen King book I’d ever read. I read it when I was a teenager, then never read any other King.

A couple years ago a friend talked up the Dark Tower series, but listed me off some other books to read beforehand as the books tended to loop in with each other.

I decided I’d just give myself the fan-since-way-back experience and read all of King’s books in order of publication. There’s like 50+!

So far I’ve read:

• The Stand
• Salem’s Lot
• Per Semetary
• The Shining
• The Long Walk
• Firestarter
• Carrie
• The Dead Zone
• Cujo
• Roadwork
• The Running Man
• The Mist
• The Gunslinger
• Christine
• Cycle of the Werewolf
• Thinner
• It
• The Eyes of the Dragon
• The Drawing of the Three
• (currently, again, at age 40) Misery

I love how Misery’s about an author. I bet King started with the image of himself with broken legs, looking out at the barn. The presence of the sadistic jailor, the big evil nurse woman acting as his editor. I bet that image is where the whole notion of the book began.

How to make a setup that enables that scene to exist?

Reading Stalking Darkness, by Lynn Flewelling. 2nd book of the Nightrunner series. Up next is the rest of the series! :P This is my 2nd read through. After that, I'm planning to re-reading a few Mercedes Lackey books before finally reading the newest one. Might just hop into the newest one if I get impatient though.

Juggling multiple books:

• Naked Don't Fear the Water by Matthieu Aikins. It is definitely recommended if you are interested in refugee issues, border control and similar topics.
• Mind is Flat by Nick Chater, in which the author argues that we don't have any kind of mental depth and our mind just makes sense as it goes along. I am not bought in on the idea yet.
• The Strategy Paradox by Michael E. Raynor is an amazing read if you are interested in business strategy. Almost on par with Rumelt's Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.

• Python Crash Course by Eric Matthes
• Icerigger by Alan Dean Foster