After recently finding out some of my favorite books aren't what I thought they were, I'm going back through my library and seeing what I have that grabs my interest.
Today? I'm reading Irish Fairy and Folktales, edited by W.B. Yeats. It's full of short stories, poems, and randomness of the sensical and non-sensical variety. If you ever come across a copy at a used bookstore, I'd recommend picking it up.
Currently not reading often, but I started reading The Unwinding and am a few hours in. I also tried reading Disrupted but the writing style annoyed me and it didn't tell me much new so I stopped reading that one. Just today Michael Lewis' newest book The Undoing Project launched about Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. I pre-ordered it and I'm eager to give it a listen (kleinbl00). Bill Gates talked about some of his favorites. I am interested in reading Shoe Dog (in no small part because I've been enjoying listening to NPR's How I Built This podcast) and maybe also Siddharta Mukherjee's new book The Gene so I added them to my reading list.
Ooh I finally have one! Currently making my way through Chris Kelty's Two Bits (available for free here whenever I have time. It's an anthropological study of free software, but along the way he talks a lot about the history and development of computers, the internet, and geek/hacker culture. Super interesting! His main contention is that free software and the internet exist as "recursive publics," a term he uses to describe publics (after Habermas, spaces of debate and contention existing outside the state and the market) which are interested in the infrastructure in which they exist. So geeks are a group organized around pushing forward their idea of what computers, the internet, and free software ought to be. If that makes sense.
I'm on page 308 of the Fowkes translation, although I've read considerably more pages than that if you count the ones I've reread. :) I definitely understand the feeling that it is going right over. I already know I'm going to end up rereading this fucker at some point. I've read a couple of different discourses / texts on dialectics from Marxists at this point, but to be honest, I don't really feel like they've helped me. A lot of the time I find I realize I've lost the contradictions he was working with and end up having to go back.
Newest Michael Chabon. It's not quite as fresh as circa-2000 Michael Chabon. But he has a really, really keen sense of a specific type of person and a specific idea of American life. To the degree that it maybe resonates with me, even though I've barely experienced it in a real context. So that makes him, by some definition, an extremely good fiction writer. Actually I enjoy contemplating that more than I do learning about his characters.
I'm trying to find the time to finish Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson at some point. After that, I plan to move on to the Wheel of Time series. Maybe once I finish with that the next Game of Thrones book will have come out... I've also recently picked up beginner's books in Russian, French, and Python (the programming language, I'm not gonna speak snake) and would like to delve into them; again, when the time presents itself.
I paused Red Mars to get through this monster. I made it to Book 8. Will finish the other 3 next season. Recently started Red Mars again. Maaaaaaaaaan that shit be talky. I picked it up because I enjoyed the idea of The Years of Rice and Salt. That was before I read 40-odd books on the history of the world in general and the middle east in general. I'm curious how I'll regard it when I try it again.
Red Mars is super talky, yeah. Robinson's specialty is "hard" fiction so whatever he writes has excruciating detail. I actually don't mind it when he gets into the weeds with the descriptions, though (like that bit where he describes how they make the bricks for the first permanent hab- captivating), because I'm in the sciences so I'm always asking, "How did they do that?" He actually answers my questions most of the time, and I appreciate that even if the writing is dry. Never read The Years of Rice and Salt but I'd imagine it's got many of the same hallmarks.It totals four million words across nearly 10,000 pages, but is incomplete
Oh god.
My problem with Robinson is exactly the opposite - it's when he burns an entire chapter describing his alternate sociological theory involving the four humours just fucking because or spends three chapters retreading the exact same love triangle without resolving anything or doing the JRR Tolkien "list ALL THE THINGS" approach to burning wordcount by rattling off everything in the hold in alphabetical fucking order. There's an impressive array of engineers and physicists who write science fiction. To no one's surprise, they geek out on the science rather a lot. That's fine. That's appropriate. What drives me to distraction is where they go "I understand fluid mechanics, therefore I can postulate a one-world government without needing to understand the first fucking thing about human dynamics" aspects that bug the shit out of me. I was gonna buy a used Easton Press copy of the Durant books. Then in surfing around on eBay I found Gore Vidal's copy. Should be here by Friday.
The last time I read the Lord of the Rings was when the last minute came out in '03. I was in middle school then, so my memory of it is vague, but I remember thinking Tolkien was probably the greatest writer ever. I'm curious for your opinion if him, as a well read contrast to my middle school memories.or doing the JRR Tolkien "list ALL THE THINGS" approach to burning wordcount
My fundamental issue with Tolkien is that I expect to see Pooh or Christopher Robin emerge from the bushes at any minute. The style of writing is just so... twee. And he's in the weeds a lot. Most fantasy writers are. But when we're talking fantasy, it's not the way I would have chosen things to go. Robert Howard, 30 years before Tolkien: Jack Vance, 4 years before Tolkien: Tolkien: It's just a little too TH White for me.“Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.”
“Earth . . . A dim place, ancient beyond knowledge . . . Ages of rain and wind have beaten and rounded the granite, and the sun is red and feeble . . . A million cities have lifted towers, have fallen to dust. In place of the old peoples a few thousand strange souls live. There is evil on Earth . . . Earth is dying . . .”
“Of course, it is likely enough, my friends,” he said slowly, “likely enough that we are going to our doom: the last march of the Ents. But if we stayed home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later. That thought has long been growing in our hearts; and that is why we are marching now. It was not a hasty resolve. Now at least the last march of the Ents may be worth a song.”
I was never able to read them, because his writing style strikes me as long and tedious, but isn't part of the reason Tolkien wrote the books he wrote was to show off the languages and history he invented? I haven't seen the LOTR movies since they were in theaters, and if I recall in only saw them once or twice after. I'm thinking about buying the trilogy. I wonder if I'd still like it.There's an impressive array of engineers and physicists who write science fiction. To no one's surprise, they geek out on the science rather a lot. That's fine.
flagamuffin has forgotten more about Tolkien than I will ever know. I'm not going to say a single bad thing about LoTR other than the style of writing didn't really work for me.
I've mostly gotten bored with One Hundred Years of Solitude. I enjoyed it at first, but now that we're into a new generation, I just find a lot of the magic is lost. One of the themes of the book is the cyclical nature of things, but that also means that the second half of the book feels very much like the first. I may go back to it eventually. In the meantime, I'm continuing with the Dune Chronicles, and am about halfway through the third book (Children of Dune). Still love this series. I also started re-reading The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, which is one of my favorites ever. I'm not sure how to describe it...imagine a modern-day magical realist book that is part Mad Max, part old school kung fu flick, with an apocalypse in the middle. It has no business working, but it's brilliant. Finally, I've just begun Los señores del narco (The Drug Lords) by Anabel Hernandez, a journalist with El Universal. It's a history of the Mexican drug trade for the last couple of decades, up to and through the capture of El Chapo. Her descriptions of what northern Mexico is like in the introduction are themselves amazing, and I can tell there's a lot that I'm going to learn. Also finally, I'm still studying Greek, so occasionally reading some excerpts from the Bible.
I have read most if not all of GGM's books and Hundred Years is my least favorite. You might like his News of a Kidnapping, a non-fiction book by the former journalist, which recounts the kidnapping of a handful of prominent figures in Colombia by the Medellín Cartel in the 90s. I recently reread it after watching Narcos, which portrays the kidnapping of journalist Diana Turbay, which is also discussed in the book.
Oh cool, that sounds like it'd be worth reading for sure. I saw a not-100%-verified quote on Wikipedia where he says No One Writes to the Colonel is his favorite book that he's written, and I certainly enjoyed it the most so far.
Kindle reports 92% of the way through The Count of Monte Cristo, which I added to Goodreads in mid-October. Nothing like reaching Chapter 100 and calculating that there are still about 200 pages to go. Like other serialized books, it sometimes feels like a collection of vignettes, but they are great vignettes, so if Dumas was paid by the line he earned it. The kid keeps asking for updates on Edmond Dantès too, in between updating me on Calvin & Hobbes and Big Nate. He was, I thought, insufficiently impressed that I was able to recite with him the password to the G.R.O.S.S. club. I am looking forward to some non-fiction. On my first visit to Carpe Librum I got a great haul for $20: Gallipoli: The End of the Myth Genome Symbolic Logic and the Game of Logic The Selfish Gene an Aerolineas Argentinas version of "Bartleby el escribiente" and brand new: American Prometheus
I'm about a quarter of the way through Jonathan Letham's "The Fortress of Solitude" and enjoying it so far. I grew up as a kid of early gentrifiers in London, and it is fascinating to see the parallels between my upbringing and that of the protagonist - the child of artists in '70s Brooklyn.
Part of my weekend routine is to go out for brunch. I go alone, so I take a book. I recently found myself without anything new, so I grabbed Utopia by Thomas More off my shelf. It's pretty dry. I'll probably finish it again, but to lighten things up I also started the Scott Pilgrim series again. Those are such a fun read.
I just finished The Lies of Locke Lamora last night. Frankly, this is some of the best escapist writing I've read in years. Yes, it's fantasy, so you would need to like that sort of thing to get into this novel, but if you are inclined towards stories of magic, swords and such, you this one is worth it. Also, Scott Lynch's world building is great. I highly recommend it.
I may have misrepresented the book slightly. Yes, it's set in a fantasy world. Yes there's magic, and swords, and fantastical monsters. However, what makes the book interesting is it's basically about a con game set in the fantasy equivalent of medieval Venice. As for other fantasy books, what sort do you like? Do you like epics? Gritty realism? Urban Fantasy? Humour?
Hmm. Well, I don't read much fantasy though I do have a soft spot for folk tales and legends. I think my favorite would probably be Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. There's an ongoing comic series that I've been reading since I was a kid, Usage Yojimbo that sometimes has fantasy elements to it, usually in the form of ghost stories. Other than that, I think the closest I get to fantasy books are probably the cape comics I read. So. Uh. Keeping that vaguery in mind, what do you have? ;)
Hmm, I think I might have to answer your vaguery with an all-purpose list. Please, do not take this as exhaustive--these are merely some of the thing's I've enjoyed that are even remotely flavoured with fantasy. Pseudo-Historical Fantasy: anything Guy Gavriel Kay Actual Historical Fantasy: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Maybe Historical? Fantasy: The King if Ys series by Poul Anderson Funny Fantasy: Small Gods by Terry Pratchett Gritty Fantasy: the Black Company novels by Glen Cook Mind-Numbingly Complex Fantasy: the Malazan series by Steven Erikson Urban Fantasy: Dreams Underfoot by Charles de Lint Epic Fantasy: A Song of Ice and Fire by GRRM (yeah, yeah, I know) Work in Progress: the works of Patrick Rothfuss Bonus, because everybody should read these guys (but they're not strictly fantasy): Umberto Ecco and Jorge Luis Borge. Anyways, that's about all I can think of off the top of my head. Also, I'm exclusively a fantasy reader, so I'm sure there are more dedicated fans of the genre that could likely give you some better recommendations.
I'm almost though [The Collected Stories of Grace Paley](/wiki/The_Collected_Stories_of_Grace_Paley), it's a set of short, character driven stories. Surprisingly good read considering I picked it up from the library on a whim.