What are you reading?


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SadisticCynic
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by SadisticCynic »

More books.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. This was excellent and I enjoyed it more than No Country... but maybe not more than Blood Meridian. I got a very strong vibe of The Last of Us, which is one of the best story-telling games I've played.

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. This was a a masterpiece of English writing but it didn't have quite the fully developed sarcasm I loved in Pride and Prejudice. Austen manages some amazingly polite brutality though: "She was not a woman of many words: for, unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas; and of the few syllables that did escape her..." :lol:



In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell. Every word Russell writes is pure gold. From Fascism to Communism to Socialism to the effects of architecture on society (and in this, especially women's rights). He even has a short essay on why he believes the idea of the gold standard is nonsense, and everything is presented with the crisp clear reasoning one expects from one of the premier logicians of the last century. His dry wit certainly doesn't detract from the enjoyment of reading his thoughts either.

Tamed: Ten Species that Changed Our World by Alice Roberts. Roberts is an anthropologist from England who has featured in several BBC documentaries on human history. In this she tracks the history of a list of species which, through their close association with humans, changed their nature completely and by converting to human allies changed human culture and society equally dramatically. In particular, I liked that she didn't spend time on explaining how evolution works or why it's true but instead emphasises how incorrect it is to think of humans being the masters of their domain and selecting certain species to tame. It was a more slow and mutual transformation that didn't really have anything to do with foresight on the part of our ancestors.

God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens. I don't need to be converted, but I do wish I'd read this in 2008 instead of 2018. Differently to the usual New Atheist style of scientific refutation of religious claims, Hitchens focuses on antitheist arguments, which personally I generally find more convincing. Sadly, now I can just read it for pleasure and in memory of Hitchens.

In the meantime, I picked up a copy of Eye by Herbert. Completely slipped my mind that he had short fiction I should try. As I checked the Wikipedia page I noticed a few more posthumous novels since High Opp. I remember the fuss about that one, but did anyone here know about Angel's Fall, A Game of Authors or A Thorn in the Bush?
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distrans
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by distrans »

not eye!

havnt seen that book since the 80's when it couldn't hold my attention and as I recall I only finished one of the stories

white plague showed up and i grabbed it but no inclination to start in
still sitting on children of dune and finishing up the first book of kim stanley robinsons mars trilogy
all the protagonist get gifted with life extension and the psycological impacts of this on recipents who lived to 50 before the idea was anything but fantasy seemed interesting when i read this 20 years ago and im looking forward to catching all the stuff i missed then

on the serious side its "city of inmates"
kelly lytle hernandez

and im looking for this documentary
http://thelongshadowfilm.com/
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Re: What are you reading?

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I thought Eye was awesome. IMHO it was the best of Herbert's several volumes of short fiction, plus it has the only non-novel length Dune entry by Herbert.

I always liked Bertrand Russell too. I first encountered him when I took a philosophy class in college. Never read that collection of essays before, but I may give it a go.
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Re: What are you reading?

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I finished up Eye last night and I agree, it's awesome. So many wacky ideas in such a short space of pages. It was pretty cool to revisit Dune and Jorj McKie. This also contained the short original version of The Dragon in the Sea. I miss Herbert's psychological style of writing characters, I don't think anyone does it quite like him.

I knew about Russell from uni as well, but from the perspective of mathematics and logic mostly. I was reading a lot of that stuff at the time. Now I find his philosophy and politics a bit more to my taste.
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Re: What are you reading?

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Oh, before I forget, there was a short story in Eye called Murder Will In, in which a parasite type of mind occupies a person's body and more or less eliminates the previous personality. This reminded me a lot of Butler's Patternist books, in which Doro (sp?) does something similar.

I couldn't quite remember if I had the correct title, and googling 'frank herbert murder will in' brought me to Omphalos Book Reviews, where I was able to confirm. :D Cheers, Omph!
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Re: What are you reading?

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:D

Still, it lives.
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Re: What are you reading?

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Finally got round to reading a bit more China Mieville, with This Census-Taker and The Last Days of New Paris. They're a pair of novellas that I have to say I didn't enjoy as much as i have his other writing. TLDoNP was definitely the better of the two, having a kind of surrealist (literally) urban fantasy setting during WWII.

On the other hand I read The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, which has the best feminist quote I've ever read: "The cunt must come into its own." :lol: There's a lot of weird stuff in that book, but I'm skeptical that it's Greer's fault; most of what she's responding to seems to be clueless attempts at categorising women based on the pseudoscience of psychoanalysis.
There's a lot in here that fits with general humanist (and possibly anarchist, but that might be my own bias) themes and I like that a lot. It's not how feminist activists are usually portrayed in the media, and only the outrageous and ridiculous ones ever get air time on the news. I'm learning that more and more as I read pieces of feminist literature. A good example was Atwood's article on the MeToo movement a while back, in which she criticised the movement for not using it's momentum to continue to change things instead of continuing to just make allegations. It was a good, well reasoned article and like anything interesting was lambasted on Twitter. This was described in the news as 'feminist backlash', which is just bizarre given that Atwood is in fact the noted feminist author, not some twat on Twitter. /rant

Finished Antony Beevor's The Battle for Spain after having started it back in June. :shock: Took ages, but was well worth the read. Think I might try and keep up the trend of reading a couple of large history books a year in parallel with everything else.
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Re: What are you reading?

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SadisticCynic wrote:
Finished Antony Beevor's The Battle for Spain after having started it back in June. :shock: Took ages, but was well worth the read. Think I might try and keep up the trend of reading a couple of large history books a year in parallel with everything else.
I have read a lot of Beevor's work and he has become one of my favorite historians. At the moment I am reading Arnhem, his latest book.

I agree about Mieville. The two novellas don't come close to the quality of his other work. Hopefully future work will thrill me as much again as City&the city did.
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Re: What are you reading?

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I'm reading The Conquest of Bread by Pyotr Kropotkin and came across this passage:
There are, in fact, in a modern State established relations which it is practically impossible to if one attacks them only in detail. There are wheels within wheels in our economic organisation - the machinery is so complex and interdependent that no one part can be modified without disturbing the whole. This becomes clear as soon as an attempt is made to expropriate anything.
I haven't really seen that phrase often anywhere other than Herbert. Just thought it was cool.

I'm also reading Neal Stephenson's Seveneves and he used the word 'woolgather', which I've also pretty rarely seen outside God Emperor.
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Re: What are you reading?

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my mom used to ask me all the time if I was "woolgathering." She was asking if I was lost in thought.
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Re: What are you reading?

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I always perk up when I hear the word

its been mabe 4 times ever...
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Re: What are you reading?

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First books of the new year. :techie-studyingbrown:

Fledgling by Octavia Butler. This was quite an enjoyable entry in her bibliography, investigating her favourite theme of coercion under pleasurable submission. Also a pretty cool interpretation of vampire mythology and a chance to explore polyamorous relationships. Neat.

The Word for World is Forest by Ursula Le Guin. There's an introduction to this one in which Le Guin apologises for being so on the nose with the allegory. I guess she's right in that characterisation, but I really wonder what it would be like to read that in the aftermath of Vietnam. It's a great book, and a blunt but still insightful portrayal of what is now popularly called toxic masculinity.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Finally got round to reading the famous one. Actually I don't think I like it as much as Shirley and Villette, although it's still top tier English literature.



For non-fiction I stuck to Kropotkin and read Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, which is a rebuttal of Social Darwinism from the early 20th century, and Fields, Factories and Workshops which was tough going for the most part, given that it's similar to parts of Das Kapital in having long sections analysing economic details from a different era. On the other hand there are some nice discussions of how work and schooling and small industry should be organised for the wellbeing of the people involved.
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Re: What are you reading?

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It's long overdue, but I'm finally reading A Canticle for Leibowitz!
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Re: What are you reading?

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Redstar wrote:It's long overdue, but I'm finally reading A Canticle for Leibowitz!
One of my absolute favorites. Gives Herbert a run for his money, IMHO.

I started a re-read of Tolkien recently. Going slowly with all of the other crap I have to do for work, but that's not so bad.

You know what I have discovered recently? Maybe its because I am older now, but I am really starting to savor the detail of what I read. I used to really read for ideas. I read to try to extract some "truths" of the world, as the author saw things. I read with different bias' in mind, trying to figure out what, for example, Cordwainer Smith had to say about totalitarianism. Or what Ted Chiang had to say about familial love, and things like that.

And I never really missed the detail, I don't think. For sure my mind forgets that stuff really quickly, so going back to reread is sometimes like reading for the first time, for me. But now I really get caught up in the detail of the story, and just let go of bigger concerns. Its a lot more relaxing, I tell you what.

I am an old fuck, I guess.
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Re: What are you reading?

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Omphalos wrote:I am an old fuck, I guess.
Always liked this quote on feeling that way:

https://youtu.be/fPlY1Pzwj-E?t=72
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Re: What are you reading?

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Redstar wrote:It's long overdue, but I'm finally reading A Canticle for Leibowitz!
One of my favourites as well. Needs a re-read.
"... the mystery of life isn't a problem to solve but a reality to experience."

“There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.”

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and wrote a Dune Novel."
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Re: What are you reading?

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Serkanner wrote:
Redstar wrote:It's long overdue, but I'm finally reading A Canticle for Leibowitz!
One of my favourites as well. Needs a re-read.
Yeah, I loved it! It's been a while for me too.
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by BountyHunter »

Currently I am reading Gerald's Game by Stephen King, and the occasional short story from Planet of the Apes: Tales from the Forbidden Zone.
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Re: What are you reading?

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I actually finished A Canticle for Leibowitz awhile ago. It really was as good as I've been less to believe. The ending is more bittersweet than cynical, though still a solid downer. Overall a very deeply beautiful and thoughtful story that feels ever relevant.

Has anyone read Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman? How does it compare?

After Canticle, I started Dune and really took my time with it. I love catching all the subtle threads that are explored in the later books.

Messiah was an epic tragedy, though the negative impact is lessened when you know what to expect. You can better appreciate the Conspiracy and how Paul walks a tightrope to defy fate.

I'm very excited to now be reading Children of Dune as I remember it the least, though I'm also dreading Alia's downfall more than Paul's. Her arc in Messiah and especially her breakdown at the end really goes to show how things with her could've turned out very differently. I mourn her never-to-exist child.
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Re: What are you reading?

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Redstar wrote:Her arc in Messiah and especially her breakdown at the end really goes to show how things with her could've turned out very differently. I mourn her never-to-exist child.
Could it really, though? I think she was doomed from the moment she was born, and Mohiam wasn't entirely wrong about that. Especially not having had any mentats, apparently, in her genome.

For my own part I'm partway through Stephen King's The Dark Half at the moment.
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Re: What are you reading?

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got an acquaintance on this climbing site
just went under

pays off the cartels to let him run around the woods in Honduras
hes a kook
but the pictures of ancient relics he brings back are amazing

anyway

academia finally got around to some of the standout examples

'the lost city of the monkey gods' covers much of that effort

more than half of them ended up with a deadly disease your lucky to get into remissions
god knows how qball has survived his antics...
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Re: What are you reading?

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I'm reading The Big Book of Science Fiction, the huge collection of science fiction stories edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. I'm up to "Rachel in Love" (Murphy, 1987), which means I am about three quarters of the way through, going by the book's chronological order. (I have jumped around a bit, but have mostly caught up with the ones I skipped ahead to.)

So far, what I've found most striking is the impression of a sudden breakthrough in the genre around 1940 (which roughly agrees with the start of the so-called Golden Age). The stories up to and including "The Microscopic Giants" (Ernst, 1936) are almost uniformly uninteresting (the stand-out exception is "The Doom of Principal City," Zozulya, 1918), but starting with the next story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius" (Borges, 1941), there's an unbroken run of excellence up until 1957 or so (where it's interrupted by just a couple of dud selections: "Sector General" by James White is tediously didactic, and an excerpt from "The Visitors" by the Strugatskys is completely generic).

The best stories in the collection, in my opinion, include the aforementioned "The Doom of Principal City," "Beyond Lies the Wub" by PKD, "Prott" by Margaret St. Clair, "The Liberation of Earth" by William Tenn, "The Voices of Time" by JG Ballard, "The Squid Chooses Its Own Ink" by Adolfo Bioy Casares, "Day of Wrath" by Sever Gansovsky, "Standing Woman" by Yasutaka Tsutsui, "Bloodchild" by Octavia Butler, and "The Frozen Cardinal" by Michael Moorcock. I was also intrigued by the entries from Clifford D. Simak, James Blish, James H. Schmitz and Cordwainer Smith, and will want to check out more of their work.
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Re: What are you reading?

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Aside from that, I just finished Cold Comfort Farm (1932) by Stella Gibbons. A spoof of a more-or-less-forgotten genre of novel (gloomy rural melodramas), it still holds up quite well because of Gibbons' wit and loopy originality. Not for nothing have certain phrases become embedded in pop culture. ("I saw something nasty in the woodshed!", "Oh, child, child, was it for this that I cowdled thee as a mommet?") The depiction of Mrs. Smiling's many admirers (with names like Bikki, Swooth and Goofi) is almost Wodehousian.

It's also, for no apparent reason, also a low-key science fiction novel, set in the "near future" from the time of writing, with video telephony, widespread private airplanes and a 1946 Anglo-Nicaraguan war.
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Re: What are you reading?

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the unpleasant profession of Johnathon houge


my storage
found it near the top


sublime...
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Re: What are you reading?

Post by Naib »

I picked up a copy of Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard at a charity shop. I'm about half-way through and I have to admit it's an entertaining read all in all. It would never win a literary award, but for a light space opera without any complicated plots or themes it works.
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