Currently Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Dune: Messiah, second one in the series. Way better than I thought, and honestly don't get the criticism
I don't think there's much criticism around the first 2 or 3. God Emperor (4) is where it starts to get really weird, but it still definitely worth the read as it wraps up most of the original threads. 5 seemed way off to me and i couldn't finish 6. I loved 1-4 though.
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Finally almost finished with Neuromancer.
Then I'll be flipping to work mode and reading "The Grammar of Systems: From Order to Chaos & Back".
Almost done with Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight. Had a few friends and family members talk about how great the Dragonlance books are, but I grew up reading The Legend of Drizzt books. So far I absolutely love it, and if you play DnD I suggest you get a copy.
I have fond memories of Dragonlance. Spent good part of my childhood reading every Dragonlance book I found from the library. The chronicles and the legends (the ones with the twins) were awesome.
Notes from a Dead House by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Very interesting so far. I'm about a third of the way through it.
I'm reading The Anglo-Saxons by Marc Morris. It's non-fiction. Morris' books have a good narrative, but they are scholarly works. I haven't gotten very far into The Anglo-Saxons yet, but one bit I greatly enjoyed was the author drawing parallels between Beowulf and Tolkien's Rohirrim, all while discussing the archaeological evidence for feasting halls and the zeitgeist of the people who'd built those halls.
Currently halfway through Mercury Pictures Presents, and almost finished with a reread of EVE: The Burning Life.
I’m reading The Earthborn trilogy by Paul Tassi. One of my favorite series. Not my first read through
- The guns of August - Barbara W. Tuchman : An engaging and narrative-driven recounting of WWI
- The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies - Clark Ashton Smith : A collection of Lovecraftian short stories and poetry. CAS is what you get when a poet writes Lovecraft stories
- German Philosophy 1760-1860 : The Legacy of Idealism : A book about Kant, Fichte, German Romanticism, Schilling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, etc
Feeling guilty that I’m stuck halfway through two different books: Beloved by Toni Morrison and A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipul.
Neither have really hooked me with their characters (the last book to do that was Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin) but both have undeniably pretty prose. Borrowed both books from friends, so I feel the urge to finish them in a way I never did with similarly pretty books. Looking at you, Infinite Jest, my beloved doorstop.
If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe
This is going to hurt by Adam Kay, a funny biography from a UK first-year doctor
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I'm reading The Historian by Elizabeth Tova. It's been a difficult read because I have to actively fight the urge to skip ahead and see what happens—the story is so tense and stressful and I can't take it LOL.
I just read Uprooted, by Naomi Novik, simply because it was available with no wait time on Libby. What a great find! I devoured it in two days. It has a really nice take on folkloric fantasy and magic, and a nice satisfying arc that explains enough, while leaving a good amount of mystery.
I recently finished Black Rock and the rest of the Eddie Dougherty mystery series by John McFetridge and thought they were really well done. The books have the attention to detail of Michael Connelly police procedurals, but are set in Montreal in the 1970s, starting with the events leading up to the October Crisis, which provide a really fascinating backdrop. The city really becomes its own character.
I had a hard time getting into McFetridge's earlier books, but these are very different and have become some of my favorite mystery novels. I read an interview with him saying that it was a conscious shift in tone.
Finished reading The Once and Future Witches by Alix E Harrow (4.5 stars), and now am juggling between Upgrade by Blake Crouch, and Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett.
I've just picked picked up The Girls by Emma Cline. Not far into it yet but the premise intrigues me with the combo of historical fiction + disaster girl vibes.
I'm reading count zero by Willson Gibson. Its the sequel to neuromancer and so far it's pretty different. A whole different vibe, I'm not sure if I like it yet.
I felt the same, like the Sprawl trilogy was really two close but different works (1 + 2&3) smashed into one. Personally, while I liked Count Zero, and despite the close ties, it's Mona Lisa Overdrive that I had the most difficult time to finish.
just finishing The Indifferent Stars Above about the Donner party - really great. these folks were built of different stock than we are.
Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor. As usual, I'm also slowly making my way through Joyce's Finnegans Wake in parallel to whatever else I'm reading.
A random question: is anybody aware of active modern writers with mastery of style comparable to Nabokov's?
I'm reading the savage detectives by Bolaño. I read it about 6 months ago and haven't stopped thinking about it. Re-reading it now in Spanish to help practice the language and it's great. He writes pretty simply and i can't put it down!
Twig by Wildbow. A long web-series about a group of experiments in the dystopic biopunk 20s Crown States of America
House of Leaves. It's a strange book.