What are you reading right now?

cold comfort said:
Also read this. Definitely the most challenging book I've read this year. Very philosophical with loads of references. There's no way I'm picking up on everything she's doing here.
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It's pretty much impossible, tbh. Carter lived and travelled all over the world, was fluent in four or five different languages, and did a shitton of translation work. She's well known for collecting and translating fairytales, but even "simple" translations need a fuckton of knowledge and research and interaction with the origin culture in order to do even a moderately acceptable job of it. When a writer has a background like Carter's, working out their influences and whether or not a given work is a multifaceted blending of a dozen different concepts, or is merely a one dimensional hack job spat out in the course of a week when the power bill was due, is a heavy task.

Carter was absolutely brilliant. If her prose wasn't quite as dense, and she wasn't slapped with the off-putting "feminist writer" label, she'd be much more well known than she is now. It kills me that I only discovered her after she'd already died. I could have met her irl if I had started reading her in high school.
 
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Jewthulhu said:
For stuff I've read and can say are good:
2001 by Clarke
I, Robot by Asimov
If you can find a collection of Bradbury's short stories grab it.

I'd also be on the look out for anything from Phillip K. Dick, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle. 3 other great scifi authors you didn't mention.
Look out for:
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Dick
Minority Report by Dick
Ringworld by Niven
The Mote in God's Eye by Niven and Pournelle
Lucifer's Hammer by Niven and Pournelle
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2001 is the Clarke book or are there better ones to get introduced to him? I saw a hardcover copy of Childhood's End and Rendezvous with Rama at a local store for around 10 bucks each. Chose to buy Theodore Sturgeon and Roger Zelazny short story collections instead.

Robots is on the list. I found a neat old book club edition of Asimov's The Gods Themselves in a goodwill bookstore somewhat recently.

Bradbury's short stories feels like I'll find inevitably. Farenheit 451/Clockwork Orange/Handmaid's Tale/1984/Animal Farm/Brave New World are all books I've seen repeatedly.

PKD, I've read Androids and own HIgh Castle/Flow my tears. Niven/Pournelle are names I've heard of but never prioritized due to the Man-Kzin Wars being the only books I've seen in the wild.

I've also heard good things about Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos and I did enjoy that college course on Canterbury Tales, so I'll also keep an eye out for that.

I've been developing a fondness for de camp & pratt's Enchanter. Wonder if pratt's other stuff is as fun.
 
Alexander Thaut said:
2001 is the Clarke book or are there better ones to get introduced to him? I saw a hardcover copy of Childhood's End and Rendezvous with Rama at a local store for around 10 bucks each. Chose to buy Theodore Sturgeon and Roger Zelazny short story collections instead.

Robots is on the list. I found a neat old book club edition of Asimov's The Gods Themselves in a goodwill bookstore somewhat recently.

Bradbury's short stories feels like I'll find inevitably. Farenheit 451/Clockwork Orange/Handmaid's Tale/1984/Animal Farm/Brave New World are all books I've seen repeatedly.

PKD, I've read Androids and own HIgh Castle/Flow my tears. Niven/Pournelle are names I've heard of but never prioritized due to the Man-Kzin Wars being the only books I've seen in the wild.

I've also heard good things about Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos and I did enjoy that college course on Canterbury Tales, so I'll also keep an eye out for that.

I've been developing a fondness for de camp & pratt's Enchanter. Wonder if pratt's other stuff is as fun.
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2001 is just the one I happened to read (because my dad already owned a copy). Someone else can probably say better whether the other books are better introductions, but I thought 2001 was pretty good.

I'd definitely recommend Niven/Pournelle if you can find them. I can only vouch for the ones I already recommended, but they're really good.
 
Finished A Theft by Saul Bellow yesterday

really solid! Fun book. Not for people who dislike women or who have a clumsy American point of view on race, distinctions matter!

besides that reading The Osterman Weekend by Robert Ludlum, really pleasant. The copy I have was edited poorly spotted, 4 typos so far across 200 pages.
 
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Jewthulhu said:
2001 is just the one I happened to read (because my dad already owned a copy). Someone else can probably say better whether the other books are better introductions, but I thought 2001 was pretty good.

I'd definitely recommend Niven/Pournelle if you can find them. I can only vouch for the ones I already recommended, but they're really good.
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I mean, Ringworld popped out before the awards turned to shit so I'll keep an eye out for it.
 
The e-right has been praising a book called "Incel" by ARX-Han, so I gave it a try. I did not like it at all. I could't even get past the first chapter. It had some of the most obnoxious prose I have ever read. It feels like it was written by a pretentious, pseudointellectual midwit who abused his thesaurus more than he abused his penis. It made me feel like I was listening to the most boring college lecture on the planet. To give you all an idea of what I mean, here is the very first paragraph:
incel_book_excerpt.png
>binocular skull
>BINOCULAR SKULL
Who the fuck talks like this? Holy shit, it's no wonder the main character is an incel.
 
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ScurvyRat said:
I cannot speak highly enough about the Hyperion Cantos. Please read it.
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It's good - well at least the first 2 books are amazing. The last 2 are just OK - for some reason I never connected with the protag(s) in those books. However they do provide a great ending to the series and are worth reading.
 
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The Gunslinger, by Stephen King. I'm around half way through it already and I practically just started it.
 
i'm about halfway through "bellevue" by david oshinsky and it's both enlightening yet enraging to see where american attitudes towards healthcare (especially public healthcare) came from, because my god, time never stops being a flat fucking circle.
 
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MsFrancisFoster said:
Rereading The Time Machine by H.G. Wells for the umpteenth time. It's a comfort classic for me as an adult.
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I love War of the Worlds, but reading it for the first time was a bit of a shock. I grew up with my father playing Jeff Wayne's Musical War of the Worlds, so when I finally read the book, my mental sound track kept skipping.
 
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Just finished "Storm of Steel" by Ernst Junger. Very good book, I don't understand why some claim it's "right wing" or "conservative". I suppose it's because he didn't just write WAR BAD.
Mandatory reading if you are into wwI history. Goes perfectly with other great wwI books- well-known "All quite on the Western front" by Remark, "Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker" by, well, Louis Barthas and "Memoirs of an Infantry Officer" by Siegfried Sassoon. Different opinions by different people.
 
Susanna said:
The Dark Tower is both fantastic and awful. You’re in for a treat, I quite liked most of it.
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Absolutely agree, this was the last one I enjoyed before we got to the unreadable era of It. I still maintain that book feels like C.S. Lewis took mescaline and got over his distaste of allegory but also realized he had nothing parable so the finished book feels like someone else's fever dream.

Presently reading the works of Enid Blyton to my brother as bedtime stories, I am overcome with a wonderful feeling of sharing a part of my childhood with him that it has masked a lot of the adult recognition of just how boilerplate these stories are - I don't think he minds, I am just happy we get to share a ritual activity together. Can I get some good children's book recommendations? Preferably contemporary.
 
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glass_houses said:
I love War of the Worlds, but reading it for the first time was a bit of a shock. I grew up with my father playing Jeff Wayne's Musical War of the Worlds, so when I finally read the book, my mental sound track kept skipping.
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Oh I feel you there. My nana played the same one too, so I totally get the inner sound track skipping. I think my favorite H.G. Wells book is The Island of Doctor Moreau or The Invisible Man but The Time Machine holds a special place in my heart, as the first "big kid" book my Nana gave me, after I had graduated from reading Junie B. Jones, Judy Moody, and Goosebumps. She gave me the Great Illustrated Classics version of it, and I still have it to this day. 💕
 
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I finally got all the hardcover "Best of XYZ" collections by the Sci-Fi Book Club in the '70s, except for the John Campbell and Murray Leinster ones (which are too pricey for my liking). I figure Campbell's will be found in the wild sometime and Leinster's got an affordable NESFA collection if I ever wanna pick it up used.

Got me the foundation trilogy and john clute's sci-fi illustrated encyclopedia for cheap. I'm just surprised that I found a Theodore Sturgeon and a Greg Bear collection at a library sale. (Theodore Sturgeon is Alive and Well, and Tangents. Both hardcover.)

Reading Dangerous Visions and I'm like 100-110 pages in. Kinda glad Ellison's getting more in print these days, even if it's just the Dangerous Visions books and a "Greatest" collection. (I'll get the Last Dangerous Visions book someday)

So far, I think the Lester Del Rey story was interesting. Evensong just stuck in my head for a bit.
 
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Alexander Thaut said:
Reading Dangerous Visions and I'm like 100-110 pages in. Kinda glad Ellison's getting more in print these days, even if it's just the Dangerous Visions books and a "Greatest" collection. (I'll get the Last Dangerous Visions book someday)
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A few of them haven't aged particularly well but there's a lot of pretty seminal material in there that later became common. ADV I think aged somewhat more poorly and was less well curated. Ellison needs to be smacked for sitting on LDV until he croaked.
 
AnOminous said:
A few of them haven't aged particularly well but there's a lot of pretty seminal material in there that later became common. ADV I think aged somewhat more poorly and was less well curated. Ellison needs to be smacked for sitting on LDV until he croaked.
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I just wish his stuff was reprinted more because it seems like there's a market for it. All of his books tend to be pricey.

On a side note, SF HoF set is complete. Surprised this one's been in constant print for 50 years by different publishers.
 
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Going through some more sci-fi short stories. Recently read "The Dead Past" and really loved how it dealt with the topic at hand. Foster's descent into anarchy was fun to root for and the way the rug was pulled out from underneath it all made perfect sense while addressing all the questions this kind of research would entail diegetically and with tact. It was also a nice change of pace for the stereotypically antagonistic puppet of the government to turn out to actually have a thought process... which sounds backhanded, but I swear it isn't. I've never seen such a well-done turn of character before, especially not with such a well-trodden trope, and the way it was pulled off outright inspired me when I first read it. Congrats for making me sympathize with a glowie you Russian bastard.

Another thing I loved: the way the world was built around solely what characters said or thought. No set-up was given besides some indeterminate time in the future, made obvious by the opening scene involving a history professor asking an unfamiliar government agency about time travel, with further context coming solely from description of research or characters' casual conversations as opposed to narration or outright exposition dumps. It made the world feel incredibly solid despite the lack of info and really helped not to distract from the main plot.

Really looking forward to more of these. I don't know why I didn't dive deeper into sci-fi sooner. I've really been missing out. :)
 
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