What are you reading right now?

[Freya]

Hill House is okay, but We Have Always Lived in the Castle is much, much better, imho. Constance's failed attempt to escape Merricat is heart breaking, and the ending, where she finally submits to the folie à deux with Merricat, the person who murdered her family and destroyed her life, is pure arsenic and roses.

You think Constance was trying to escape her? She seemed like nothing but a supportive sister to her through the whole thing. I did read Castle but never had that interpretation from it

 

[glass_houses]

You think Constance was trying to escape her? She seemed like nothing but a supportive sister to her through the whole thing. I did read Castle but never had that interpretation from it

Of course she was. Why on earth would she have entertained the repellent, slimy Cousin Charles' advances if he wasn't her literal only chance to marry and leave Blackwood... and mad Merricat?

 

[Freya]

Of course she was. Why on earth would she have entertained the repellent, slimy Cousin Charles' advances if he wasn't her literal only chance to marry and leave Blackwood... and mad Merricat?

she was lonely and wanted to talk to someone from the outside world. nowhere in the book does she give an indication she is upset with her

 

[Alphasnail]

Just finished A Dog's Heart by mikhail bulgakov, also The Master and Margerita. Fantastic books. M&M had me floored with it's rich cartoonishness and the enthralling visions of Pontius Pilate. It's a book so meta, that it's actually just a 100% true story. Maybe the first hyper-reality novel, idk. Almost done with The Shadow of the Torturer. It's like Cormac Mcarthy wrote a novel based on the movie Heavy Metal. Cant fully explain the genius of Gene Wolfe's writing yet, but a scifi/fantasy world that becomes more mysterious as you learn more, with a narrator as trustworthy as Buck Strickland is a killer combo.

 

[GloriousScarf]

I'm reading The Sleep of Reason by David James Smith. It's about the murder of James Bulger. I was about 11 when that happened and not that interested in news stories so I didn't know too much of what happened outside the basics. Christ it's grim, I had no idea the details were so horrific. It's a good book so far, not for everyone I would imagine.

 

[cold comfort]

I read Eifelheim by Michael Flynn (not that one) but while it had a neat premise, I thought the execution was just ok. It switches between two storylines, one set in the present where a historian becomes obsessed with a German village which was inexplicably abandoned in the Middle Ages and never resettled, and the other set in said village pre-abandonment in 1350, narrated by the local priest. All the synopses just tell you what the deal is, so I guess I will too: an alien spaceship crashed into the nearby forest.

Spoiler: spoilery thoughts

The grasshopper-looking aliens are mistaken by some for demons which gives the village a reputation for being cursed, especially after it's hit by the plague. As the "Carl Sagan meets Umberto Eco" blurb indicates, a lot of the novel is either 1. the aliens talking science and the priest talking theology, thinking they're having the same conversation, for example when it turns out the aliens are slowly starving to death because our food is lacking some essential nutrient:

“What was it Arnold [alien chemist] sought?”

The Kratzer [alien scientist] rubbed his forearms slowly. “Something to sustain us until our salvation.”

“The Word of God, then,” said Joachim [monk] from the fireplace.

“Our daily bread,” said the Kratzer.

Dietrich [priest] thought the concordance too neat. The words he heard the Kratzer speak were only those that the [translator] had matched to Krenkish clicks and hums. “What means ‘salvation’ to you?” he asked the creature.

“That we should be taken from this world to the next, and so to our home beyond the stars, when your lord-from-the-sky at last on Easter comes.”

or 2. comparisons between the organization of the alien society (a biological caste system, like insects) and feudalism/manorialism.

The aliens help defend the village from a nearby robber baron with their guns and jetpacks, and they help the villagers combat the plague with their knowledge of bacteria. They in turn are influenced by the heresies and peasant revolts of the time, concluding that though they find comfort in having their innate place in society, it is right to rebel against objectively unjust rule. It's a fun idea but the story is overly drawn out and there's only so much 'ah yes, brother alien, we all want to return to our home in heaven' I can take. Just a liiittle too cute. Then there were passages like:

[the priest, after an alien tried to explain binary code:] “Let us then use the term bißchen for this twofold number of yours. It means a ‘little bite’ or a ‘very small amount,’ so it may as well mean a small bite of knowledge. No one has ever seen Demokritos’s atoms, either.” The metaphor of a “bit” amused him.

Ulf had been working with a device that magnified very small things, by which Dietrich had named it mikroskopion.

There are several more of those (microbes, evolution, electricity, psychology, etc) and I found them eye-roll inducing. The whole book was teetering on this edge between heartwarming and clever, and tedious and cringe, tipping into the latter a bit too often for me.

 

[FieldPiece]

Just finished Empire Of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio. Fuckin KINO, could not put it down to the point I bounced between actually reading it and listening to the audiobook at work. Give it a 9.5/10
+Scope is insane despite really only taking place on like 2 planets
+Prose is fantastic
+I really love the use of first person past tense
+Never took the road I was thinking the narrative was going to, "subverted my expectations" in an actually good way
+Characters are balanced in such a rare way where they're just the perfect amount of flawed
+The "borrowed" elements from stuff like Dune are tweaked to the point they feel wholly their own
-I didn't like how they gave Valka a Russian accent in the audiobook
-The cover for the audiobook is a little goofy looking
-Pacing dragged just a little bit in the middle

Gonna start reading either Howling Dark or The Lesser Devil next. Probably gonna marathon the whole series if what people say is true and Empire is the weakest one in the series.

 

[cold comfort]

I read a novella called The Eyelid, by S.D. Chrostowska. To maximize productivity, a totalitarian state makes sleeping and dreaming illegal, issuing a drug that eliminates the need for sleep. The two main characters are part of a tiny resistance, arguing that without dreams and daydreams, resistance and hope are impossible. I liked the imagery of the eyelid (representing hidden depth and private thought/dreams, but also blindness and inaction) but I don’t know if the minimal waffling story added much. It’s more like a Platonic dialogue than a narrative sci-fi novel like Brave New World. While the main characters extol the virtues of dreaming (to the point of not wanting it sullied and compromised by taking action in reality) and anarchy, I'd say the narrative dunks on that outlook pretty heavily. But then, the idea that people need privacy and time for themselves, and that you have to take action in the real world to affect change is really obvious? I mean it’s a novel of ideas but I feel like I already got all the interesting ones - better delivered - from Ted Kaczinsky, Huxley, Zuboff, Greenwald, etc: government subversion of resistance movements, the redirecting of disruptive impulses to serve corporate and political interests, omnipresent monitoring and manipulation of online content, mass media mollifying the masses and hobbling their imagination, replacing the natural with the technological, the breakdown of nuanced debate due to increased polarisation, the use of ‘duplicitous slogans’ and religious language to sell the corporatocracy-propagated drug-aided denial of our natural bodies. They're topics that I love but I'd have preferred them presented either in a proper fleshed-out narrative, or as non-fiction or journalism.

 

[Angry Mug]

Dune, Frank Herbert

Wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Pretty invested so far.

 

[VeteranOfTheRetardWars]

I currently started reading Clausewitz's "On War" alongside a commentary by Bernard Brodie.

I have the Penguin Classics version of On War, and it is in my opinion a really good book. I will admit that many of his ideas are pretty well inapplicable to modern war, it's how he frames the concept of war and in turn human conflict that makes this book a great read.
Right now I'm reading Orlando Furioso, and bro it's some fucking goon shit. I just picked it up and already we've had a ton of duels, weird magic shit, and as it's an epic poem it's just awesome language and it's just a blast so far.
I'm also reading a collection of Stanley G. Weinbaum sci-fi short stories, and I'm on A Martian Odyssey. It's really nice classic old pulp sci-fi, just aliens and Mars being this insane place.

 

[glass_houses]

I've taken Minette Walters' Acid Row into the loo. So far it deserves to be in there.

 

[Jewthulhu]

I have the Penguin Classics version of On War, and it is in my opinion a really good book. I will admit that many of his ideas are pretty well inapplicable to modern war, it's how he frames the concept of war and in turn human conflict that makes this book a great read.

"Continuation of policy by other means" is a great thesis and very applicable, even when considering the aspects of war Clausewitz didn't consider.
The Brodie commentary is also great, it goes chapter by chapter and helps distill a lot of Clausewitz's ideas, and brings them into a more modern context.

 

[BLACKHAWK_Entropy]

"The Camera Man" by Machiavelli

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Seen Art of War and Book of Five Rings in the bookstore and bought them. The former is a lot more basic than you'd expect, very common knowledge and shit you have no way to really use without experience. The latter feels like a gigachad explaining his worldview while mocking every other worldview, very fun.

 

[ScurvyRat]

Seen Art of War and Book of Five Rings in the bookstore and bought them.

Art of War is fantastic, especially for planning strategies around war games like Warhammer 40k.
I also think it's a great read for those of us in the corporate world, since working in business feels like war so often.

 

[Commander X]

The Deep by Mickey Spillane, originally published in 1961. The narrator is a former 'hood known as "Deep", who returns to NYC after 25 years to see about the murder of his old friend A.C. Bennett, shot in the back while answering his door. Both Deep and Bennett had been founding members of a Brooklyn street gang called the Knight Owls. The KOs gained a rep as guys who would fight anyone who tried to horn in on their neighborhood, be it rival gangs, the cops, anyone. Bennett had climbed the underworld ranks to become a big-shot crime boss, rubbing shoulders with crooked politicos and businessmen and owning some of the flashiest nightclubs and expensive apartments in town, but as Deep notes, he still kept the old apartment building that had been the KO's headquarters up and furnished in luxury out of slobby sentimentality. When Bennett and the former KOs stars seemed to be on the rise in NYC's gangland, as they were going from street 'hoods to the big time, he and Deep decided the town wasn't going to be big enough for the both of them. A coin was flipped, and Bennett stayed while the Deep went off to find his own fortunes elsewhere.

Now he's back in part because Bennett's will makes it clear that he feared being murdered and if so, The Deep was to inherit his criminal kingdom, but only if Deep discovers who killed him within a week. All sorts of characters come into the mix, from hard-bitten crime reporter Roscoe Tate, who's from and still lives in the same old 'hood as Deep and hates him. Former lover Helen "Irish" Tate, Roscoe's half-sister. Once she and Deep shared a first kiss, now she says he hates Deep and hopes she's there to see it when he gets killed. There's Cat, a clever hood Deep knows from the old KO days, who aligns himself with Deep out of loyalty. The lawyer, Batten, a former 'hood himself who handled Bennett's legal affairs and stands to inherit the empire if Deep fails...There's Sullivan, the old beat cop who managed to stay on past retirement age and is hoping for his shot at Deep, as well as vengeful Lenny Sobel, a gangster who caught a bullet from Deep years before, and Helen is apparently his girl now....And there's vicious NYPD detective Ken Hurd, who comes from the neighborhood himself and seems to be itching to take The Deep down, but also demonstrates a strange respect for him...

The Deep certainly demonstrates Spillane's familiarity with the parts of NYC the tourists didn't see then, having come from a rough neighborhood himself, and his sort of love/hate affair with the city.

 

[Absolutego]

I've been reading the fuck out of the Tony Hillerman novels after Dark Winds alerted me to their presence and I have to say a) that show making Jim Chee into literally the opposite character he is in the books is a feat, and b) he blames Peyote for pretty much any time Indians start getting testy.

 

[glass_houses]

Art of War is fantastic, especially for planning strategies around war games like Warhammer 40k.
I also think it's a great read for those of us in the corporate world, since working in business feels like war so often.

If you haven't already, read The Prince. When I first read it, I thought that I was reading a 1980s Wall Street business manual.

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

I just read the synopsis on "A Little Life" on Wikipedia and I'm calling it a shit book, the whole purpose of it is to encourage suicide and it depicts any attempt to lead a good life as being futile and the instant you begin to escape abject misery, the hand of God will personally reach down and squash you like a bug, so just lay down and die.

It's also very cliché, including Catholic church diddling and killing off the protagonist with a fatal car crash. I have no idea why people glob onto shit books like this.

 

[isalaide]

Today a quick read of a book called Nina Peanut and the most recent David Walliams to check for anything questionable before I hand them over to their little owners. I always read what they read first.