Would you like to share your current reading list?
I just finished Never Flinch- one of Stephen King’s Holly books. Was good.
Currently reading Knife- Salman Rushdie’s book about his attack.
I think Catch-22 is next. I’ve never read it.
I tried Dungeon Crawler Carl but gave up on about page 16.
My son gave me a book called How to Live with Objects. I tend to pick it up when I want something non-scrolling. It’s pretty good.
The Myth of normal by Gabor Mate, so far really good.
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.
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.
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.
oh yeah, the Halting Problem: a machine that can make active decisions (such as a computer or a human brain) cannot predict its own future reliably. Meanwhile, an entity that can predict its own future reliably, has no power to change that future.
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?)
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.
I haven’t read Dan Brown in years. I’ll check that out.
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
Thanks! I’ve been finding a lot of great stuff on Libby.
I just finished Ender’s Game and loved it. I was completely enthralled with it.
That’s a great story!
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.
Working my way through discworld. Currently on the hogfather
That’s certainly a strong entry in the series. Hell, maybe it’s time I gave it another go.
Id recommend that goal. Hes such a good writer
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.
I started reading Stephen King in high school in the 80s. One of my favs is Dead Zone. I also really like his books of short stories- it’s nice to start one and finish it in a day or two. My husband loves the Dark Tower series.
I’m enjoying Knife. Did you see that they just added years to the attacker’s sentence for terrorism? After this i think I’ll read The Satanic Verses.
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.
Sounds like early Dresden Files!
Yes, it is! And the Dresden Files are high on my list of favorite series.
There are a lot of differences between the worlds, but stylistically they have a lot in common. They do have somewhat different pacing. Dresden is very much an ongoing story. Arcane Casebook has some larger story arcs, but to me it feels more episodic. On the other hand, that works nicely with the noir detective genre.
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.
The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting Their Story
It’s great if you’re a weirdo history/language nerd.
That sounds fun! I’ll check it out.
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.
…did you just glaze over Drizzt?
I never expect anyone to know who he is, but many people know what a dark elf is, so… Basically?
Hilarious bit of trivia I always pull out, when he first started writing The Crystal Shard, Salvatore wanted Wulfgar to be the main character, and drizzt was supposed to be more of a side character going forward.
