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OftenBen  ·  337 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What are you Reading?

For non fiction my diet has been pretty sparse, but not nothing.

American Prometheus - Nothing earthshattering. Gave good context for Oppenheimer I felt. Curious if anyone else has read it.

The Woman They Could Not Silence by Kate Moore - A 13 hour telling of the work of Elizabeth Packard exposing the horrors of the mental health treatment system of 1860's era america by the same author who wrote Radium Girls. Mini book club with my wife on this one, she finds it relates a lot to her work in behavioral therapy with very young, very combative children.

Now to the candy and confectionaries

The End and the Death Volume 2 - The second of the final trilogy of the extended Horus Heresy series and the Siege of Terra. There's nothing but brief vignettes in this one, almost all of them so emotionally taxing in different ways the sum effect is numbing. At least if you give a shit. Lots of critique that its dull and unnecessarily long. I enjoy it a lot. The final scene is so bleak it was painful. It's the known, prophesied, long coming, guaranteed outcome of a fight that had its conclusion written in like 1991 in a footnote of ancient sci-fi history. This entire series truthfully is the exposition of about 3-4 paragraphs in a rule book from a tabletop game that almost nobody plays anymore. Wild stuff.

Helldivers XI: Renegades - Absolute pulp, also bleak, but chewy and enjoyable in the same way Phase 1 Marvel was enjoyable. No real surprises but the author has managed to keep my interest over close to a hundred hours of what amounts to contemporary spaceman spiff ray guns and aliens and Thomas A Swifts Electric Rifle saving the day, and that's something. I'm drawing a parallel to the collection of Western pulp novels my grandfather accumulated over a lifetime. I inherited most of them.

A Song of Ice and Fire - Over the summer, I finally half-watched game of thrones while hiding from the sun from extended antibiotic treatment this past summer. Apparently this changed my taste enough that I can listen to the ASOIAF audiobooks and enjoy them. There was some quality to them stylistically that I couldn't really get into when Game of Thrones was popular. But I'm halfway through A Clash of Kings right now and enjoying it a lot. Honestly I think I enjoy ASOIAF conspiracy theories on youtube and reddit almost as much.