Finished the end of all things, not so great. He broke the book up into 3 separate books and the style just didn't work for me. Thanks to you all I have a lot of suggestions for reading this week though!
Part of why I started these threads is I'm trying to read more. I have a goal for 2015 to read 52 books this year - https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/2385546 . As you can see I'm behind.
Do you all have any reading goals? And as usual, what are you reading right now?
I'm reading Hyperbole and a Half which is terribly funny but very depressing when you find out the end before you finish reading.
I'm still reading The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared in Swedish! It's my first book in Swedish, so I never read more than about 10 pages per day but it's quite an entertaining read and I really notice how much I progress in Swedish. Last week I finished American Gods (though I haven't read the additional novella at the end yet) which was quite a nice read too. I've also put The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making on my phone so I have something to read when I have nothing better to do and just my phone with me. I'm only three chapters in but liking it so far!
^ (sci-nerd) I just started The First and Last Men by Olaf Stapledon, but I JUST started it so I don't have anything to share yet. I just finished Encounter with Tiber by Buzz Aldrin. Really good and realistic fiction, I especially like the way he makes the aliens seem both alien and familiar. Their prejudices that they bring to the stars resonated in a way that I find hard to describe. In recent past I finished Dan Simmons' Hyperion 4-novel set. (Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, Rise of Endymion). Really fantastic hard sci-fi that also has engrossing characters. Highly recommended.
I just finished "Earth Abides" - very thought-provoking, one of those books that sticks with you. It's a little slow-paced but well worth a read.
Just starting "World War Z". I saw the movie recently (it was okay); I've heard the book is different, and better.
This is for when you get through the second book. http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/04/11
This is one of my favorite geeky shirts - http://thetinkerspacks.com/products/eolian-tee The first two are really fun. Wish Rothfuss would hurry up already!
I'm reading eaarth, based on a recommendation from kb. I'm yet to make it past the part of book telling us how bad global warming has got.
I've been mired in A Prayer for Owen Meany for, like, 6 months. As an audiobook, I'm finishing off the Elon Musk biography, a dual recommendation from veen and insomniasexx. I recommend it. On Kindle, I finally sucked it up and started The 12 million dollar stuffed shark. It's awesome.
I'm glad you enjoyed Musk's book. I was quite impressed by his determination and the complete absence of subtlety in many situations throughout the book. As for the Literary Thing, I forgot to bring it along on the trip here to Sweden. I'm currently sitting at a beach near Malmo with a book from one of my friends - Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Minds. Its 600 pages is not a summer / light read by any account and it is much more math-heavy than I was expecting, but it's also much more interesting than I'd expected. His argument (which takes him forever to build, starting with freakin' Plato and ending with Hawking) is that we have not yet developed (or will never develop) an intelligent AI because we don't understand the actual physics of the mind and of consciousness. I'm at chapter 8. bfv or mike, have either of you read it? Anyway, once I'm back home I'll start with Zero Days, a book on Stuxnet.
That point about AI reminds me of this time I heard China Miéville speak. Someone asked him what it's like to try to imagine an alien intelligence. His response was something along the lines of - we can't, it's impossible for us to imagine something that isn't inherently biased toward our own world and experiences. But even though we will inevitably fail, those failures are pretty damn interesting on their own. Even if we don't make a Turing passing AI, I think so far all our failures have been pretty interesting, and I can't wait to see us fail some more :)
Regarding those 'failures,' here's an even more tempting possibility. In the process of trying to create a 'Turing-passing' AI, we invent/discover a class of transitionary intelligence that somehow defies our current understanding of machine learning/intelligence/consciousness.
I finished The Club Dumas, which was mostly great, though I didn't like the ending much. Moving on to Point Counter Point by Huxely. I've been putting it off because it's pretty thick and has tiny print. As I get into it though, I can appreciate Huxely's style and the plot more than I expected, which is a relief.
American Gods it is. It's been sitting on my bookshelf for a while now but I think I'm going to actually read it, since so many other Hubskiers have recommended it.
So, I'm kinda going through a Russian Lit phase right now that was spurned on by both my Junior and Senior year English teachers. I'm reading Anna Karenina by Tolstoy and it's fabulous. Tolstoy is just so good at fleshing out his characters. I've, so far, found myself deeply enthralled in the nuances surrounding the strained relationships between Stiva, his wife, his lover, and his servants. I'm not too far into the book yet, but it has been very hard to put down (which is a problem because I've been needing to pack for college). So far, this book reads very easily, and, even with all of the different names for characters, it is easy to follow without beating you over the head with the plot. It's slow, but it doesn't drag and it's never boring.
My reading goals are as follows: The Brothers Karamazov
War and Peace
Crime and Punishment (re-read because I didn't appreciate it for what it was the first time)
In Search of Lost Time
Vanity Fair
I've heard! I'm really looking forward to it! Also, and this is unrelated, how do you make the words italics?
I'm about halfway through Post Office by Bukowski, I have a pretty strong affection for his plain writing style. His debauchery is entertaining to me as well. If even 1/3 of his stories are true, the man has many times for stories than I do.
I just finished Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio and started Ugetsu Monogatari again. Both are excellent - if anyone here is interested in medieval Japanese/Chinese culture and myths, I'd definitely recommend them. Especially since these sort of folktales tend to have a lot of historical merit as well - fiction like this really gives me (as a historian) an idea of trends people were thinking about on a day-to-day basis and how they were reacting to certain events. Once I'm done with this current East Asian folk-lore binge that I seem to be on, I might move onto some non-fic. I've seen a couple of really good historical biographies (namely, Doris Kearns Goodwin's biography of FDR and a few Western-written biographies on the Prophet Muhammad) that I want to dig into but they seem a bit daunting. I might opt for something a little smaller (though not really 'lighter') like The Things They Carried.
I'm re-reading Arthur Schopenhauer's "Essays and Aphorisms." One of my favorites that I first came across about a decade ago, and occasionally I skim through it again for giggles. :)