What have you been reading? - Book Discussion Thread

Witcher - Blood of Elves

Atlas Obscura. Got it free with Amazon Prime. It's been an absolutely fascinating read.

https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Obscura-Explorers-Worlds-Wonders/dp/0761169083/ref=pd_ybh_a_16?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=PDHN2611YQ1W5ZKVWFDN

In audio-book form, I'm in the middle of the first book in "The "Stormlight Archive" Series, "The Way of Kings." It was just recently talked about on the Beastcast. The Narration is phenomenal.

Finished Jurassic Park and absolutely loved it. Went right in to The Lost World after.

Finally got around to reading Craig Johnson's The Cold Dish, the first of the Longmire novels the TV series was based on. It's good! Solid characters, downright great descriptions of Wyoming, and a great feel and love for the people of the area. It's got some elements that don't age so well today - particularly some wince-worthy comments between the sheriff and his female employees - but overall I think it's a great deal of fun. Bonus points for not shying away from mysticism, either. It's a pretty neat take on the mystery genre.

Currently reading Murakami's short story collection Men Without Women. First of his short stories that I've delved into and I have to say, despite the opening introduction where he talks about loving the medium more than full fledged novels... I find his short stories just aren't as good?

They haven't been BAD, by any stretch, they just... I don't really know how to describe it. They have no meat on their bones, no depth? His novels always present an interesting world with a weird otherness to it, where his short stories barely have a world. They also seem to follow the template of character x tells character y of his interactions with character z, or narrator recounts a character's life.

@aliciagold: Just started Dune myself, about 200 pages in and I'm obsessed! I'm a slow reader but will definitely finish this.

Do's the Linux professional LPIC1 guide count it's 500 pages long with command you'l never use :D? Also the reprinted version with historic context of a dutch historian of "mein kampf" it's weird seeing that book at #1 off best selling books in Belgium, but none of the less interesting to see what people at the time really believed in and just straight up weird tirades. And the narration by the historian definitely helps, else this thing would have being unreadable.

@gtb08: @aliciagold: I finally got around to Dune last year and I loved it!

I haven't been keeping up with this thread so much as I'd like, but I'll talk about a couple of books I've recently finished.

After many years of seeing it on shelves in the sci-fi section at the bookstore, I got around to the audiobook of Red Mars. While some of it is confusing in how much it jumps from one time period to another, the book eventually spanning something like 30 (Earth) years. Kim Stanley Robinson is an incredible author, able to seamlessly transition from a sweeping, globe-spanning ecological narrative, to deep character studies on a half dozen flawed, likeable, awful, hopeful, possibly-sociopathic, fascinating characters.

I don't know if Red Mars started the idea of Martian revolution, but I can definitely see where some other sci-fi stories have been influenced by it. And damn, but this book also functions as an indictment of corporate interests usurping state interests and being destructively exploitative of human beings and natural resources. I, for one, welcome a Mars free from Terran influence.

Having read Dune last year, some of the similarities are striking, but not egregious. KSR was certainly inspired by that classic tale of humanity, ecology, religion, economics, and social upheaval. He wrote a book that explores all of those things, and has something to say about at least some of them.

If you liked Dune, read Red Mars. If you're interested on any of these topics, read Red Mars. It's a modern classic. I don't know in the 90s will be widely or universally seen as an era of classic sci-fi literature, but I have no doubt that this book will be on the "Must Read Classic Sci-Fi" lists well into the mid and late 21st century as its themes become ever more prescient and timely.

I'm in between two books at the moment.

Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan. Real interesting read, though a bit dated. It's a look at the evolutionary history of the development of the human brain and its implications on history and the future. Although, neuroscience is definitely advanced since its publication, I still think the historical context is interesting.

I'm also reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Its a little all over the place. But, interesting. I'm not sure how to approach the book, as a guide for life or insight into a historical figure. I usually have trouble giving grand titles like that any space for implementation into my everyday life or long term goals. But, stoicism, as it seems, can be quite practical.

I'm going to need something a bit more lighthearted after these two.

@tobbrobb: Although 1984 is definitely dystopia, it seems to get only more relevant with time. Outside of politics, the idea of truth and how much of ourselves we give to others is thought out quite well. If you do pick it up, I would recommend reading "Why Orwell Matters" by Christopher Hitchens to maybe give more context to the novel.

Bloody Rose book- continues the story from Kings of the Wyld and focuses on the band - Fable. They get a bard, you learn about each character and their flaws, and is similar to the first book.

@bladeofcreation: I always thought there was an interesting ecological parallels between the Mars series and Dune. How's the pros and cons involved in making the land more hospital can affect the culture and how doing so can even erode the identity and ideals of those that first weathered the land and it's hardships. Reminds me of something Vonnegut said about how Americans lost the Western frontier(by way of industry and progress)and trying to recapture it's spirit in less than noble ways.

So I've read quite a lot this year, just finished McMafia, about organised crime around the world, and The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a kind of intense book about how mythological stories from around the world all repeat the same or similar themes of the Hero's Journey and the cycle of time, and how that it connects to deeper human psychology. I don't know how accurate it is, but I'm reading it for its value to fiction writers, because it has a great overview of the Hero's Journey.

I just finished Love in the Time of Cholera. Its an... interesting read. Its a love story between 2 septuagenarians, which by itself is different, but some things are not well developed and the pacing is rather off. The book spends over 3 quarters describing the life of the characters and very little in terms of the love story, so in the end it doesn't feel particularly earned (outside of the fact that, due to their age, they have little time to indecision, there are few reasons why they ended up together). Of course, its a Borges novel, so even when the story doesn't grab you, the writing is remarkable...

Started reading Breakfast of Champions. So far, I am enjoying it.

No Limits - Blow the CAP Off Your Capacity By John C. Maxwell

Its a great read to get the mind right and learn some things

So I decided to finally get around to The Hero With a Thousand Faces and hoo boy is it a slog. Part of it is the droning narrator, combined with complex, paragraph-length sentences. So that I can't really hold against it, since I chose to listen to the audiobook.

What I can hold against it? The low-key racism and the sycophantic devotion to the worst theories of the early 20th century psychoanalysts. Jesus Christ. To put it nicely, this book is a "product of its time."

I get it. It's important for its description of the "Hero's Journey," and I've found myself thinking about the ways this format relates to fiction I'm familiar with. I'm actually planning on rewatching the Star Wars original trilogy after finishing this book, because I've always heard Star Wars is a great example of this. But wow. There's a lot of stuff in here I didn't expect.

I just got done with Redemption's Blade by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and I guarantee I spelled that incorrectly. It's kind of neat! It takes place a month or so after the heroine got done defeating her world's equivalent of Sauron and deals with some of the aftermath of the typical high-fantasy epic adventure. There aren't any flashbacks, but it fleshes out some of the events via dialogue and memories and as such you get a good grounding for the world. I dug it a lot, but apparently Tchaikovsky wants to make it a series of books that are each written by a different author, which I guess is fine if they're all decent, but isn't my favorite way to go about establishing a series.

@gtb08:okay maybe i hate Dune. Its not sci fi, but fantasy. not for me.

I finally bought the HP Lovecraft collection, having only read and loved Dunwich Horror and AtMoM. I dug straight into Call of Cthulhu, and so far it lacks the warmth, strength of character, and communal terror of Dunwich, continuing with the colder, harsher language of Mountains. I like it, though. It's depressing as fuck.

I also bought the M.R. James collection. I'm a huge fan of the BBC adaptations of his horrors like The Treasure of Abbott Thomas, Warning to the Curious, O' Whistle and I'll Come to You, Stalls of Barchester, etc. Just about to dig in to the ones I've not heard of.

The new Richard K Morgan just got released. Excited to dig into that. I haven't read a good sci-fi adventure in awhile.

Finished off Stephen King's Bill Hodges trilogy over the weekend. It's almost unfair to say that I was ultimately disappointed by it, because the writing is really solid and I love the protagonists. But King introduced a wildly unnecessary supernatural element to the third novel, and instead of staying this neat take on the gritty PI novel, it becomes something bland by trying to be something more, like adding too many spices to an otherwise basic chili. It didn't need it, and it suffers from it as a result.

I'm about halfway through Do Not Become Alarmed by Maile Meloy, a very well written story about kidnapped children in South America and their parents' struggles to find them and deal with the kidnapping. I was initially interested by her writing because she's a fellow Montana writer who was listed in one of those clickbait articles as being the best the state had to offer in terms of fiction. She also helped start the Decemberists, so that's neat too. Her fiction's pretty terrific, with a good eye towards complex characters that never feel quite good or bad but lie somewhere firmly in gray territories, often driven by plain simple human emotions to do dumb things that somehow don't come across as plot contrivances. If you're at all into literary fiction, give her work a look.

I've started rereading Dune; I read it the first time about twenty years ago. I really didn't like the book as a kid, and figured I should see what I think of it now as an adult.

There's some interesting world-building, but man I hate all the characters in this book. This is one of those rare occasions where I fully agree with child-me.

Pet Semetary. The cool trailer for the new adaptation finally pushed me to check this out after being a fan of King since I was a teenager.

The first movie traumatized me as a kid. Particularly Zelda and that one death. Hereditary made me realize family tragedy is the most horrifying thing to deal with in a story. I expect this book to deliver and I hope the new movie brings justice to it

I just listen to these two novel back-to-back: "The Calculating Stars: A Lady Astronaut Novel" and " The Fated Sky: A Lady Astronaut Novel".

This is the sort of page-turner alternate history that I love. Both novel provide that alternative history, but they never sugar coat or flinch from the fuggly relaties of 1950 and 1960s America. Both novel deal with the human issues of space travel and provide a 'what could have been' glimpse of what we could have achieved if just some of the plans NASA made were realized.

After listening to the second book it seems very much like the proposal Wernher von Braun called the "Integrated Plan." Boeing published a few documents on the Integrated Manned Interplanetary Spacecraft Concept Definition January, 1968. I'm a sucker for pictures, so looking at some of the pictures in the Boeing proposal is a nice visual for "The Fated Sky" .

Just finished the latest Hieronymus Bosch novel, Dark Sacred Night. It stars a new character that was just introduced in her own book awhile ago, Ballard. She's a good addition to the world, and is an interesting character/counterpart to Bosch. It's pretty good! This author knows how to write a page-turner, and it's pretty satisfying to read. There's a lot going on, and some parts of the book made me feel stressed out for the Bosch character. Two thumbs up.

@monkeyking1969: Those are on my to-read list.

Reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams for the millionth time and The Crusades by Michael Paine. Hitchhiker's is just a pleasant read that I can always come back to. The Crusades is a very short (134 pages) but well put together overview of the major crusades of the Middle Ages and does a fairly good job of touching on the perspectives of the major players (Crusader, Muslim, Byzantine, and even Armenian). I recommend it to someone looking to dip their toe into the history of the time.

I'm about halfway through A World Undone: The Story of The Great War, 1914-1918. This being the 100th anniversary of the end of that awful war that kicked off a century of industrialized slaughter, and recently having discussed with a friend who visited the UK early last month the fact that we, as Americans, tend not know much about this war, I decided it was time to educate myself.

The scale of the war is staggering. Battles that lasted a few days or weeks would see casualties of the same order that the US lost in all of Vietnam. Tens of thousands of soldiers slaughtered in days because no one knew how to deal with machine guns yet. Blunders and miscalculations on both sides that resulted in lives being lost to gain little or no ground at all.

It's a fascinating overview of the war, and every other chapter is a quick background on an aspect of the war (either political or technological) that provides crucial context in a way that doesn't require one to be familiar with the time or place or setting that the war takes place in.

I recently finished Before The Fall by Noah Hawley (head guy of the Fargo tv show). I was entertained but ultimately disappointed by it. I'm a huge fan of the first two seasons of Fargo and had high expectations for this book. It has its page turning moments but more than a few of the main characters are too predictable in their actions and some side characters laughably cliche. I also found some of the pontificating on western culture and the 24 hour news cycle and how technology affects them to be pretty basic; it felt like the typical takes of an older dude. I found the back 3rd of it to be really engrossing with some great characters introduced towards the end that didn't feel underdeveloped or unnecessary. I thought that this book had come out before he started his tv writing career but it turns out it was in the middle of it. I'm interested to read some of his work before tv because I feel like between this book (which he adapted into a screenplay), Fargo, and Legion he's really stretching himself thin and some of the work is suffering for it.

I'm nearly finished with Neverwhere by Neil Gaimen. This book is delightful. In the forward Gaimen talks about how he wanted to write a fantasy book for adults, and he really nails it. This thing is the right amount of whimsical, lyrical, and fantastical. I haven't read much by Gaimen before this - the first half of American Gods and his Norse Mythology - and I'm having a bit of the same issue here I found with American Gods in where I'm not always on the same page with the flow of his writing. I find myself re-reading sentences to understand them and then thinking if he just put the information from the back end of the sentence up front I would've understood on the first pass. It's a weird issue that I distinctly remember running into in American Gods as well - not so much with Norse Mythology though. Anyways, this book is still wonderful and I can't wait to finish it. I will definitely be reading more of his work later on, including another shot at American Gods, which I enjoyed but had put down for a bit and couldn't get back into it.

I've been reading the Witcher series, and it's surprising how little actually happens in these books. As a complete work it's pretty fun but individual novels tend to be a slog at times.

@humanity: I agree. Where are you at in them? I liked the two collections of short stories the best, and Time of Contempt (I think) was my favorite full fledge novel in the series.

I recently finished Skyward by Brandon Sanderson. It’s like a mix of Top Gun, The Last Starfighter, and The Dragonriders of Pern. It was amazing.

I'm about halfway through the Lady of the Lake and my favorite was probably The Tower of the Swallow since it seemed to have the most exposition and most of anything really. In the Tower I thought the story was finally starting to get going, like all those full fledged novels that came before served as a longwinded backdrop to fill you in on the world and now we are finally getting to the meat of the action. Then it ends on a major cliffhanger and the following novel, Lady of the Lake which is the final in the full series, is back on it's typical track of third or fourth rate characters recounting something adjacent to the story at hand. Sapkowski really leans into this way too hard, of suddenly transitioning to an old man telling kids a tale of something that at the very end you recognize as having something to do with the story. He enjoys telling these stories backwards through minor players, and hardly ever focuses on what is going on right here and now. The books are also curiously devoid of much action considering this is sword and magic fantasy type stuff. There are wizards and sorceresses that hardly ever do much of anything except display contempt for the common folk. There are elves that likewise broodingly sequester themselves away and mainly talk of how the humans ruined everything. There are constant elvish phrases not translated in any way that are utterly pointless yet spring up constantly. Most surprising of all is that considering this is a story about the famous Witcher Geralt, there is no "Witching" at all and there are hardly any monsters present. Geralt is this cynical, grumpy old man that is a far cry from the protagonist we see in the games.

I do wish I had explored these novels prior to playing the game though. As much as CD Project Red deserve praise for creating an interesting story from these novels that to be frank are not nearly as captivating for the most part, the books do serve as great filler content. When playing the games I didn't realize the important of Nilfgaard, when I rode there on my horse I just thought it was another area with different colored guards. Likewise Ciri makes a lot more sense when you read the novels, as the a lot of the other characters. It's surprising that Triss plays such a key role throughout the games when shes such a minor character in the novels.

Anyway I am happy to have experienced the series, but I'll also be happy to be finally done with it. I doubt that I'll pick up the next novel in line which is a prequel story from what I heard, and the one after that is another collection of short stories. Maybe somewhere down the line when I'm bored but now I'd like to move on to something else.

Guys,what book would you recommend? I've only read one book: Metro 2033.

@damenco: If you'll feeling like another scifi book, IMO you can't go wrong with The Martian. Near future scifi where a astronaut gets stranded on Mars. There was a movie based on the book that came out a couple years ago.

I read:

The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey. A very amusing book describing a group of four who sabotage industrial equipment throughout the canyons of Utah and surrounding areas, with an ultimate goal of destroying the Glen Canyon Dam. The characters are kind of sociopathic but also entertaining. It gets a bit repetitive and gets bogged down in parts. I give it a 3/5.

A Wild Sheep Chaseby Haruki Murakami. An ordinary Japanese businessman is visited by a mysterious figure and forced to track down a particular sheep in Hokkaido (the island in the north of Japan.) The tale only becomes stranger from there. This was my first read of Hurakami, and I was so entranced by it I am vowing to read all the rest of his stuff. (or at least, until I get bored with it.) Something about the way Murakami describes the strange inner life of his characters really resonates with me. 5/5.

Making my way through Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World, Brandon Sanderson's The Well of Ascension, and Nisioisin's Onimonogatari. I've gotten super into fantasy lately ever since Vinny mentioned Sanderson's The Way of Kings on some random video. I picked that up and eventually finished and absolutely loved it. I finished Words of Radiance and Edgedancer recently too, but I'm waiting on Oathbringer for a bit. I don't wanna have to wait too long for the fourth book. So I think I'll wait til he at least says he's started writing it.

I want to get into more sci-fi, but I feel like I'm not as into the space opera genre and all the cyberpunk is quite old at this point. Is anyone writing good modern takes on cyberpunk? I'm generally interested in anything with a Ghost in the Shell style world (though I'm not sure if that is technically cyberpunk, but I feel like the setting is something I like). I really liked Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep too, so maybe near future dystopia is what I want in this area?

My unread light novel stack is growing pretty large at the moment though, so I'm probably not gonna add any new books to my list for a good while yet.

@wollywoo: I would really recommend Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - that book is such a trip and the ending is so great, probably the closest to otherwordly literature he has ever written. For more of the regular slice of life with a bit of the weird creeping in - Sputnik Sweetheart has some of that and After Dark is definitely peculiar. Kafka on the Shore diverges from his typical formula of a 30 something year old single man, that enjoys jazz and making delicious food, but has more of the mystical element to it. Wind Up Bird I always have mixed feelings about because from what I read the translated version of the novel has been edited to the point where it's a good deal shorter than the original and that book is already one of the thickest he has written. My favorite one of his full length novels is probably Norwegian Wood which has basically none of the otherwordly elements that tend to permeate his stories but it's a coming of age tale that really connected with me somehow.

I started reading “Tropic of Cancer” recently, knowing nothing about it except that it was supposed to be a literary classic. I assumed it was going to have a plot, but... it totally doesn’t! It’s just kind of the diary of this sleazy dirt bag living in Paris during the Great Depression. I feel kind of gross reading it, but something keeps drawing me back to read a chapter every day or two.

Before that, I read “Living with a Seal” (some good light reading) and “Sapiens” (pretty heavy, a condensed version of human history). Those are two books I could recommend without reservation.

I recently read Flowers for Algernon. I advise! This is a good book

I've been reading "The Broken Earth" trilogy by N.K. Jemisin, it's been so hard to put them down. She does a tremendous job of getting you invested in the characters right away and curious to see how it all plays out.

Have you tried Commendatore yet? I'm eager to read it once I start, and finish "The Count of Monte Cristo"

@sombre: I have not and I was actually really surprised to suddenly see it in stores a few days ago. It shouldn't be surprising that an author wrote another novel but somehow I heard nothing about this coming. 1Q84 was incredibly disappointing for me and his next novel Colorless Tsukuru.. failed to really engage me. This was kind of a shock because up until 1Q84 Murakami was an author that could do no wrong for me - I had read all of his full feature novels and really enjoyed them all in various degrees. After Dark is probably the one that was beginning to be a little too wishy washy with ambiguity but I still really liked the concept of it. In comparison 1Q84 was incredibly boring and spanning three entire novels didn't help that at all. Colorless.. was ironically just that - kinda flat, nothing stood out.

So I'm interested to read this new one after I'm finally done with the Witcher books, but I'm also a little anxious about it. The few reviews I read were very middle down the road.

@humanity I just bought Kafka on the Shore and Norwegian Wood. I'm about 20 pages into Norwegian Wood and loving it already. I was thinking about 1Q84 after those two, but maybe I should wait on that.

@wollywoo: Norwegian Wood is a great slice of life story with a melancholic twist. I found it as depressing as I did endearing. Glad you like it so far it’s my favorite Murakami book. Personally I would leave 1Q84 for last and enjoy his earlier works first. Kafka is an interesting second read because it breaks all Murakami conventions of a 30 something year old single guy that loves jazz and cooking spaghetti being the protagonist of the story.

I need to keep up a current list of things I've read during any given year because I'm trying to come up with an end of the year book blog and I'm just drawing a huge blank. Anyone get in enough reading this year to talk about your favorites?

I have been reading "The Apprentice" by Greg Miller about Donald Trump and the Russia hacking of the 2016 US Presidential Election and have also been reading "Baseball Cop" by Eddie Dominguez about the darkside of Major League Baseball.