What are you reading right now?

[VeteranOfTheRetardWars]

I finished Combat Codes and it was solid. The second book was the best one, the third was a little bit of a rushed ending tbh but I felt mostly satisfied with how our characters evolved and how all my theories about the secret shit going on turned out correct. Except I am still one hundred percent sure that the Daimyo are aliens, though if that got brought up I don't remember that happening.
Now I'm on Tertium Organum, pretty lit but I wouldn't recommend it for those new to esoteric philosophy because it's a lot. It's good, but it's a lot.

 

[Hunnenschlachter]

Currently nostalgia reading the Deltora series. You can tell it's for kids but it holds up surprisingly well and has some very based themes. Very brutal and dark for the intended audience, but a lot of fun.

 

[Alexander Thaut]

Currently nostalgia reading the Deltora series. You can tell it's for kids but it holds up surprisingly well and has some very based themes. Very brutal and dark for the intended audience, but a lot of fun.

doesn't it also have a legit anime adaptation too

on a side note, here's the tbr stack I've been dipping into

• I, The Jury- Mickey Spillane
• Roadside Picnic- Strugatsky Bros.
• Good Neighbors & Other Stories- Edgar Pangborn
• He Rules Who Can- Arthur G. Brodeur
• Beyond Armageddon- ed. by Walter M. Miller Jr.
• Retief!- Keith Laumer (Omnibus collection).

In rotation, to be dipped into as time goes on

• The Black Company vol 2-3
• Dying Earth vol 2-3-4
• Foundation, vol 2-3
• The Stainless Steel Rat, 2-3

Upcoming, will read as time goes on

• Dune
• My first Vonnegut. Probably Sirens of Titan.
• Downward to the Earth - Silverberg
• Mirror For Observers - Pangborn
• Hainish Cycle vol 1-2-3-4 (hopefully)
• LoTR Book 1
• Three of Swords- Leiber
• Asimov's first Robot novel
• Heinlein's Moon is a Harsh Mistress
• Neuromancer (Gibson)
• The Broken Sword (Anderson)
• Some Leigh Brackett, CL Moore, and Andre Norton. Gotta get my fix.
• Some more classic masters of SF. de Camp, Wyndham, Bester, Pohl, del Rey, etc. Maybe I'll get to Forever War within a year.
• Some more classic Weird Tales Authors.
• Hopefully some other stuff, like Nostromo or Heart of Darkness, but I love SF/pulps and anything with the DNA of those two.

 

[Hunnenschlachter]

doesn't it also have a legit anime adaptation too

It does, I rewatched it a bit ago and enjoyed it, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have if I hadn't read the books and watched the show as a kid. It kid-friendly's a lot of the more violent and gory scenes and changes a lot of the plot points. Overall quite a bit worse. It's also only the first series. There's also these abominations (original series art on the left, anime on the right):

 

[Bigfootstinker]

I've been thinking of reading all the Goosebumps books for a while now. I think it could be fun. I read the first one last year and while it obviously wasn't the greatest thing ever, it was still enjoyable enough. And if I ever think about writing my own horror book one day, who knows, maybe I could draw some sort of inspiration from at least one of them.

 

[LordOfZhbagva]

What's your favourite fantasy book? I own a few but I've never really read much. The first one that I'm gonna read is Between Two Fires.

Hard to pin it down to just one, but I'll just put it to some compilation of Conan works. Conan just has that extremely attractive vibe to me which in great part comes from the environment it was written in and the experiences of its writer. We all know REH lived in a remote village, went to the city to get drunk and fight in bars, read (the fun) history books of the early 20th and late 19th century during which the pseudo-scientific racism was in full swing and talked with theosophists and various other cultists and new wave religious proselytizers, wrote letters to various other writers of weird tales (of which he was an avid reader), only to incorporate it into a history-inspired fantasy world of his own creation. It's just such a inspired world he created, at least to me in the 21st century.

the black company is fun, I found the crippled wizard nigga to be horrifying at first and then he got powercrept. The Lady is legitimately kinda terrifying. Hope you have fun, Croaker is a neat lead.

I found the Black castle to be the peak. It's very pleasantly morbid. I also wish they had done more with Stormbringer in the books of the south, they way she goes is pretty disappointing to me - she gets run up on and just thugged.

 

[Hentai-Semitism]

Roadside Picnic- Strugatsky Bros.

I like Stalker a lot. but I wish we had a more faithful adaptation of the book. Strugatskis are fantastic in general.
Have your heard of Jacek Dukaj? He's from Poland and he's very solid as well. Really makes your noggin work. I don't know how much of his output gets translated, though.

 

[ScurvyRat]

I like Stalker a lot. but I wish we had a more faithful adaptation of the book.

My problem with Roadside Picnic is there doesn't seem to be any decent translations. This is a common problem I've found with Russian literature.

 

[Hentai-Semitism]

My problem with Roadside Picnic is there doesn't seem to be any decent translations. This is a common problem I've found with Russian literature.

Well, my translation was fine. It wasn't an English one, though. I won't say what language for privacy reasons.
Did you read any other books by the Strugatskis? Monday Begins On Saturday is another favorite of mine. It's very funny and absurd.

 

[ScurvyRat]

Did you read any other books by the Strugatskis? Monday Begins On Saturday is another favorite of mine. It's very funny and absurd.

No, most of my Russian reading has been Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn.
I also read thru Night Watch (hated it) and Metro 2033 (7.5/10)
Both of which also suffered from their translations. I hesitate to define the translations as "bad" or "poor" because I know very little of the Russian language. However, as an English reader, there were many times where I felt like there was a strong disconnect between the voice of the author and the words on the page.

 

[Jhonson the Two]

I wanted to read Houses of leaves for a long time since I like experimental books and a lot of people said it was hard to read/decipher. While the way Danielewski use the book as a medium is very fun, it wasn't challenging reading it, at least to me so I'm a little disapointed on this side.
I'll still recommand it because the format is stimulating and it gave me on some passage the 'big think while reading" itch I like to have sometimes. So if you're affraid the book will be too hard for you don't worry it's more digestible than it looks.
Maybe I'll go with some good old pulp fiction next time.

 

[Greedy Fly]

I hesitate to define the translations as "bad" or "poor" because I know very little of the Russian language. However, as an English reader, there were many times where I felt like there was a strong disconnect between the voice of the author and the words on the page.

I know that feel. I think I only manage to pick up on problems when you can obviously see the translator is struggling to "localize" idioms and puns.

Nabokov did a few translations (if there's anyone in this world you can trust to do RU -> EN, it has to be him right?) and his autismo foreword to A Hero of Our Time was an interesting read.

 

[P. Barnes’ THOT 2.0]

is there any Stephen King worth reading? I've never read anything by him.

I liked The Long Walk and The Stand

What's your favourite fantasy book? I own a few but I've never really read much. The first one that I'm gonna read is Between Two Fires.

Between Two Fires was great-I really enjoyed it.
I always seem to pick up something, then just dive into the author. Recently it was Nabokov-Pale Fire was nice. But now it’s medieval shit. Like I just picked up Dan Jones historical fiction series and it’s not bad.

Before it was all southern gothic

 

[themanwhowalks]

All Quiet on the Western Front - meh. I guess the only reason it's constantly touted as "the best war novel of all time" is simply because it's so anti-war. The fact that Remarque only spent like a month actually in the trenches kind of soured it a bit for me as well. I kind of want to watch the 1930 film now though.

If you want a decent on the ground book about fighting during the first world war I'd really recommend Attacks by Erwin Rommel. War for Rommel is a professional problem, theres a lot of detailed notes on tactics and the other practical issues of warfare, its much more chronological than all quiet -- you go from battle to battle instead of emotional vignette to emotional vignette. I do remember liking all quiet when I read it though

 

[Carnavoyeur]

If you want a decent on the ground book about fighting during the first world war I'd really recommend Attacks by Erwin Rommel. War for Rommel is a professional problem, theres a lot of detailed notes on tactics and the other practical issues of warfare, its much more chronological than all quiet -- you go from battle to battle instead of emotional vignette to emotional vignette. I do remember liking all quiet when I read it though

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll add that to my list. All Quiet wasn't a bad read, but I found it to be too "boo hoo war" after years of seeing it hyped up as like, the most harrowing, epic war novel ever written.

 

[themanwhowalks]

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll add that to my list. All Quiet wasn't a bad read, but I found it to be too "boo hoo war" after years of seeing it hyped up as like, the most harrowing, epic war novel ever written.

Rommel: War is an art-form
Junger: War is an adventure
Remarque: War is hell

 

[Neodanthril]

Armor by John Steakley. I'm about halfway through and I am already disappointed as it looks like this is just another cocktease sci Fi in which the REALLY COOL WAR AGAINST GIANT ANTS THAT HAVE LAZER GUNS is just a backdrop for the authors self insert to fuck hot women. I have never enjoyed reading a sex scene in a book and it is extremely annoying how much sci-fi and military fiction is just book ended with action and the majority of the book is just the author's OC having sex in unnecessarily graphic detail

 

[Alexander Thaut]

Armor by John Steakley. I'm about halfway through and I am already disappointed as it looks like this is just another cocktease sci Fi in which the REALLY COOL WAR AGAINST GIANT ANTS THAT HAVE LAZER GUNS is just a backdrop for the authors self insert to fuck hot women. I have never enjoyed reading a sex scene in a book and it is extremely annoying how much sci-fi and military fiction is just book ended with action and the majority of the book is just the author's OC having sex in unnecessarily graphic detail

And yet this is somehow recommended reading for military SF. Why.

I mean, I got a copy, I'll give it a shot.

 

[Hentai-Semitism]

is there any Stephen King worth reading? I've never read anything by him.

As a rule of thumb, try his old stuff. My favorites are Firestarter, The Running Man (underrated; has barely anything to do with the movie with Arnold), Tommyknockers and Dreamcatcher.

 

[YHWH's Strongest Soldier]

is there any Stephen King worth reading? I've never read anything by him.

Not really in my opinion. The Shining was a disappointment and Shirley Jackson was much more successful at scratching that horror itch for me. Despite nothing overtly bad or clearly supernatural happening in the Haunting of Hill House, I found it far more engaging than any of King's books because Jackson creates far better characters and can describe feelings of resentment and isolation more complexly. For example, I found the "cup of stars" fragment far more successful at establishing the character of a resentful nurse who spent her youth caring for her sick mother than any of King's writing:

The lights from the stream below touched the ceiling and the polished tables and glanced along the little girl’s curls, and the little girl’s mother said,

“She wants her cup of stars.”

Eleanor looked up, surprised; the little girl was sliding back in her chair, sullenly refusing her milk, while her father frowned and her brother giggled and her mother said calmly, “She wants her cup of stars.”

Indeed yes, Eleanor thought; indeed, so do I; a cup of stars, of course.

“Her little cup,” the mother was explaining, smiling apologetically at the waitress, who was thunderstruck at the thought that the mill’s good country milk was not rich enough for the little girl.

“It has stars in the bottom, and she always drinks her milk from it at home. She calls it her cup of stars because she can see the stars while she drinks her milk.”

The waitress nodded, unconvinced, and the mother told the little girl, “You’ll have your milk from your cup of stars tonight when we get home. But just for now, just to be a very good little girl, will you take a little milk from this glass?”

Don’t do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again; don’t do it; and the little girl glanced at her, and smiled a little subtle, dimpling, wholly comprehending smile and shook her head stubbornly at the glass.

Brave girl, Eleanor thought; wise, brave girl.

Even the opening line alone is a far better hook than anything I've seen from King:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

In comparison, this is the first sentence of The Shining:

Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick.

I can see it being a matter of preference, but I just don't like King.