What are you reading right now?

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I first heard of this series from a video about the album based on it. Imagine the tone and setting of The Eye of Argon, the characters and humor of Tintin, and the plot of Steven Universe. Then make it pulp sci-fi with the latter's politics flipped, told from the aliens' prospective and written by a madman. It's certainly entertaining. The vibes pulsing from the page are pure "14yr old with a word processor." Just like SU there are some interesting ideas that you just wish you could airlift into better fiction. Hubbard had some talent - he could have been a Heinlein or Bradbury, but then we'd lose the THIS IS WHAT [GROUP] ACTUALLY BELIEVES meme.
 
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Reading "The End of Gender" by Debra Soh. It's okay - there's good points in here, but she rambles a lot.

Also just started "A Fire Upon the Deep" by Vernor Vinge after someone suggested I might like it.
 
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For some reason I thought this was a good book on the battle of Stalingrad, which it isn't really. More of a description of daily life of soldiers, the "boredom and extreme fear" kind of a routine. What stood out to me were the stories of humans facing tanks - exceptionally dark and sinister.
I've read letters from the Eastern front before and they felt a bit more authentic than this, probably due to Koschorrek's memoirs being edited and published in 2005. He deals with the question of ideology by barely addressing it and there are attempts to make the whole situation of Germans in Russia and Poland feel neutrally tragic and general proclamations that war is disastrous and pointless. That apparently made some readers mad and the lack of acknowledgement of Germans being the aggressors stood out even to me, and I'm not particularly sensitive about this kind of stuff.
Quite a captivating read overall. While I never remembered who is who among all the named comrades, many of the stories were touching and memorable without an extra personal context.
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Fish Fudge said:
Reading "The End of Gender" by Debra Soh. It's okay - there's good points in here, but she rambles a lot.

Also just started "A Fire Upon the Deep" by Vernor Vinge after someone suggested I might like it.
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I was interested until I realized it was using Ben Shapiro as a blurb. I've taken shits more intelligent than that guy.
 
TurdFondler said:
McCarthy's The Road
It's real good, even if it irks me that he has a habit of making two words into one and never putting dialogue in quotations. Dude's amazing cos it all just works.
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I've enjoyed almost everything he's put out and came to prefer his style with dialogue. Amazing storytelling especially with The Road, the lore on that one is great with his relationship to his son and all that. It's too bad he has been fucking around at the Santa Fe Institute for the last eight years, but his body of work would still be excellent if he didn't write any more books.
And this interaction still entertains me:
 
Crimewave said:
I've enjoyed almost everything he's put out and came to prefer his style with dialogue.
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I had to re read a bunch of the dialogue because it wasn't always immediately apparent who said what, but most of the time it was really good.

I'm also torn on some of the parts where he veers off into prose. A lot of the times it's really, really good but sometimes it doesn't add much at all.

I'm gonna read No Country for Old Men next. What's he been up to at the Santa Fe Institute?
 
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TurdFondler said:
McCarthy's The Road
It's real good, even if it irks me that he has a habit of making two words into one and never putting dialogue in quotations. Dude's amazing cos it all just works.
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I read this not too long ago, great story!!!!!


I’m currently reading A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, only three chapters in so not much of an opinion yet on the story.
 
TurdFondler said:
McCarthy's The Road
It's real good, even if it irks me that he has a habit of making two words into one and never putting dialogue in quotations. Dude's amazing cos it all just works.
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Blood Meridian is better. Psychedelic western allegory for colonialism and the hideousness of mankind. Has some of the most nightmarish images ever written. Child Of God is pretty good also, but you can tell it's before he settled into the kind of style he's famous for.

Thing with McCarthy I noticed though is that there's not really much in the way of "plot" usually, he's painting pictures with language and letting you make whatever sense you want out of them yourself. Some people love that, some people absolutely fucking hate it. The Road is probably the most straightforward thing he's written that I've read
 
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The Road was very cinematic and the straightforwardness worked in its favor.

It's bleak, but still very quintessentially American. It's very much a story about owning things, and our relationship with consumer products, but it also has that American optimism. The overall feeling is one of perseverance. Russian novels usually end with everyone much worse off at the end and with no hope for anything ever getting better, just a kind of return to status quo but with a defeated protagonist.
 
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shameful existence said:
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A pretty brief study of Napoleonic wars from the perspective of the organization of the army, weapons and tactics. More of a collection of interesting tidbits, a good start for someone who's not quite sure whether to try reading one of the huge books on Napoleon.
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Spends most time on philosophy and politics of Weimar. A liberal take, but not an overly preachy one. I find the subject fascinating, though I'd appreciate a bit more structure to it - felt chaotic at times. A book I may return to.
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Frogs lol well that second one is funny
Krauts lol but I've always felt a sense of pity towards them

B2_Spirit said:
Stephen King's Rage (as Bachman). I'm not a big King fan because his tangents remind me of being stuck listening to shitty elevator music and he's been sperging out on twatter again lately, but this book is withdrawn from print, kind of hard to get hold of where I am and by King's own request, so I decided to expressly get hold of it and see what the big deal is. So far it's okay, just waiting now for the MC's freakout to be blamed squarely on a Republican daddy who sucked at gutting deer.
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Rage has always been funny to me. King admitted that the edgelord's motive was "overly Freudian." I own a beat-up 70s anthology of four of his Bachman novels including Rage (The Bachman Books), didn't know it was rare.

Hugbox Kommissar said:
Finished reading through Atlas Shrugged. It's not really a book you read for pleasure, but I found it interesting enough, both as a novel and a manifesto (obviously more the latter than the former). I would recommend giving it a read if you're curious.
Never knew that "Who is John Galt?" is a rhetorical question in universe rather than a genuine one.

All the main characters act autistic.

Setting is interesting, with society crumbling at the edges and starting to regress.

Someone should pull a 50 Shades and turn the subplot about the Hank/Francisco/Dagny love triangle into an objectivist romance novel.

"Don't think for yourself, just trust the science" is an actual subplot.

The section where Hank and Dagny try to track down the inventor of the static power generator reads like a technothriller.

Big business consortiums being unable to innovate or even reliably produce a quality product so they just have their DC lobbyists crush any competition while they survive on government subsidies is a concept that's only gotten more relevant in current times.

Also the idea that in a healthy society the strong and successful make the rules, while in a sick society the incompetent and weak "victims" hold the power through guilt and manipulating the moral standards.

"Dissolute playboy millionaire is secretly a driven genius working with the hero" is basically a cliche now instead of the twist it was back then.

The James Taggart/Cheryl relationship is a pretty accurate picture of an emotionally abusive marriage.

The original crowd of intellectuals and theorists who championed the progressive cause gradually disappearing as the gangsters and thugs take over feels very Soviet.

Ayn Rand really hates the doctrine of original sin apparently.

I'm a little surprised objectivism hasn't been picked up by atheists given how rigorously anti-religion it is. Or are the modern lesswrong/rationalists just objectivists by another name?

"You do not know what to surrender or demand, when to give and when to grab, what pleasure in life is rightfully yours and what debt is still unpaid to others—you struggle to evade, as ‘theory,’ the knowledge that by the moral standard you’ve accepted you are guilty every moment of your life, there is no mouthful of food you swallow that is not
needed by someone somewhere on earth—and you give up the problem in blind resentment, you conclude that moral perfection is not to be achieved or
desired, that you will muddle through by snatching as snatch can and by avoiding the eyes of the young, of those who look at you as if self-esteem were possible and they expected you to have it. Guilt is all that you retain within your soul—and so does every other man, as he goes past, avoiding your eyes." John Galt vs cancel culture.

The length of Galt's monologue was not exaggerated.

"The negation of a negative is not a reward." John Galt one liner.

Ending is surprisingly melancholy. Galt has "won" but the world has basically regressed back to the early 1800s (except for Galt's Gulch) and it will take decades, if not longer, to rebuild.

Eddie is the most relatable character in the book; he's not a conscienceless moocher or an autistic industrial genius, he's just a competent middle manager whose cardinal sin is apparently working for another instead of himself.
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Rand lol
 
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Plato's Republic. I'm quite enjoying it. Can't say I agree with all of it so far (the third book especially has been a little hit or miss for me), but it does give me something to think about.
 
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Republic isn't really a book you can agree with, a lot of what he says is completely inapplicable. The ideas in the book are interesting, though.

My favorite part is the lengths he goes to when trying to explain to the reader how to picture something in their head. It was so long ago that modern ways of imagining the written/spoken word were still new.
 
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