What are you reading right now?

[helligoland]

Im reading through the Armada Wars series, nothing special but the first few books have a good way of building tension and the twists are perfectly fine. Also waiting for the next Locked Tomb book which is out in september i think

 

[LoveBunny<3]

I found this book at a local community center (people donate books and you can take those books for free, it's pretty cool) called "Manwhore". I'm not someone who normally reads erotica novels but it seemed like it would be a funny book to read. It's one of those office romances. It reminds me a bit of 50 Shades of Grey.

 

[HullDown]

I just (re-) bought Dürrenmatt's The Promise and The Suspect. I usually get into an author and try to read all their works in publishing order, but I know FD will just give me serious depression if I try. Still, if you have True Detective S1 withdrawal symptoms, there really isn't anything better than him in the detective/crime genre.

 

[Hugbox Kommissar]

Finished reading Let the Right One In by John Lindqvist. Not great, not terrible. Felt like it could have been ghostwritten by Stephen King, what with the psychotically violent bullies, all the adults being neglectful divorced alcoholics, and the obsession with pre-pubescent children's bodily fluids. Good atmosphere though, very bleak and sterile. I feel like if it were published today Eli would be a "non-binary transgressive femme icon" or something ridiculous.

 

[Andrew Neiman]

Felt like it could have been ghostwritten by Stephen King,

DELET THIS

I feel like if it were published today Eli would be a "non-binary transgressive femme icon" or something ridiculous.

It's one of those works I think came out juuuust on the cusp of when such things were possible -- a few years later and the publishers would have felt the need to focus-group its portrayal of Eli's gender.

 

[Coffee Druid]

I'm reading through the Elfquest collectors edition right now. I read the main series back when I was like 12. I was probably a little too young to read it then but I really enjoyed it. I'm wondering if there's some content I've never read before.

No one ever talks about Elfquest comics. But I think the art and story holds up well 30+ years later.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Orconomics.

The gimmick of it is that it's a high fantasy novel based on Dungeons and Dragons type stuff where the fantasy world has modern understandings of economics and financial instruments. (Ad)venture capitalists finance heroes to recover loot (it seems that in this setting there is an ancient history of monsters deliberately plundering settlements, so loot hoards are common). To minimize risk the shares in adventurer expeditions are pooled together and sold off as financial instruments in which shares can be bought and then pooled into other shares, but the valuation of these shares have been drastically overstated.

Basically, it's a high fantasy metaphor for the 2000s United States housing bubble.

So far I don't like it much, I was never into Dungeons and Dragons or high fantasy, but the problem for me is more that it's just not real good writing.


Edit: Would make a good game. Adventure thing where instead of managing a party you negotiate over contracts, approve or reject quests, and conduct auctions/market loot, basically a fantasy-skinned investment banker simulator.

 

[Dread First]

I don't read much in the way of conventional literature as far as fiction is concerned. With that said, here's the latest diversion in my life:

The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam by Muhammad "Allama" Iqbal

Amazon; Archive.org

For context: Allama Iqbal is a Kashmiri poet and scholar who was born in modern day Punjab, Pakistan back in the 1870s. He's simultaneously considered to be among the last "classical" authors of India while also being credited as first "modern" author of South Asia.

He grew up entranced by Islam, such that it remains a central theme to his works all throughout his life. However, he was also a contemporary of Einstein because he went to Europe (first Britain then Germany at the turn of the century) to finish his education. Witnessing a field like physics go through a fundamental restructuring of sorts during his time in Europe set off a fundamental spark in his brain that perhaps the same type of fundamental restructuring needed to happen at home.

During Allama Iqbal's lifetime, India was being farmed for wealth by the British while the civilians themselves languished in stagnation. Among Muslims in India specifically, he saw that they were languishing more than anyone else. Remember: he was extremely literate in Islamic, Persian, and South Asian history. Once the Islamic Golden Age ended, the Gunpowder Empires dominated huge swaths of Asia and they clung to the Golden Age's laurels as they slowly but surely stagnated. By the time he was born, Bahadur Shah Zafar was already living out his final days in Rangoon. What's worse is that he saw that Muslims, the people responsible for countless innovations in mathematics and the sciences during the Islamic Golden Age, were now rejecting modernisation as the rest of the world prepared to leap into the new century.

This book is a compilation of 6 (i think) lectures he gave all over colonial India during his lifetime about what Muslims need to do in order to avoid being outpaced by the rest of the world. In his eyes, the Islamic Golden Age wasn't a byproduct of the revelation to the Prophet but an outcome that was endemic to the people of the time. He argued that what made early Muslims so successful and what led to the Islamic Golden Age was a common spirit of brotherhood, an unyielding faith in the Qur'an, and a desire to unravel the mysteries of the universe. These were all qualities that he felt modern Muslim leadership (i.e. the ulemas, Sufi mystics, and Muslim kings of the time) were sorely lacking.

Gotta say, it's one hell of a read and if you're a peasant like me, you can just download the PDF like it's nobody's business!

 

[glass_houses]

I'm reading through the Elfquest collectors edition right now. I read the main series back when I was like 12. I was probably a little too young to read it then but I really enjoyed it. I'm wondering if there's some content I've never read before.

No one ever talks about Elfquest comics. But I think the art and story holds up well 30+ years later.

I've read the first half of the series, and I remember thinking it was excellent. From what I gather though, the quality fell around about the time the creators wrote literally wrote themselves into it.

 

[.iota.]

i saw the following two tweets in the keffals thread, and i was reminded of something.

and thus, i felt strangely compelled to revisit candide by voltaire.

 

[Flea Man Marbles]

I've been reading this dessert fantasy/sci-fi series called the Gandalara Cycle. It's 7 books and I'm on book 6. The series started out really well as a straighforward action/adventure with an interesting premise but I've found the middle part to drag out uninteresting character development. I'm hopefully enough to see it to the end.
Just started Iain Banks "The Algebraist" It's quite the chonky book and I'm just at the beginning.
I've also been (slowly) rereading The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Most people don't like the final chronicles but I enjoyed them enough the first time I read them and found them to actually benefit from a second reading now that I know the reason for the weird shit happening.
The bad thing about reading multiple huge books at the same time is it's hard to make progress. Sometimes I temporarily switch to something shorter and more concise to recharge my reading batteries.

 

[Coffee Druid]

I've read the first half of the series, and I remember thinking it was excellent. From what I gather though, the quality fell around about the time the creators wrote literally wrote themselves into it.

I'm on omnibus volume 3 out of 6. I'm getting into some content that's completely new to me, vignettes that happened during a huuuge time Skip. I don't often get affected by things I read, but there's some actual emotional scenes in this series I will say. Also, a shitload of characters with complicated and shifting relationships over time.

As far as the creators inserting themselves, I'm not sure I've come across that yet. The main characters DO meet a human couple that aids them but that very early on. Like the second story arc. Maybe that's them, but i don't know enough about the couple to tell. One thing I appreciate is how the couple has had pretty much full creative control for over 40 years. Even started their own independent publishing early on. That's neat.

 

[Hazel Motes]

Mishima's Life For Sale. Not a masterpiece but a doddle to a read. Very fun and humorous (vampires, suicide, and nihilism) and only recently translated. I also read Mishima's his very short story Star which I preferred over Confessions which I can't stand.

 

[WolfeTone]

 

[HullDown]

Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia is in critical condition, so I am putting down Dürrenmatt and rereading his work. While a lot of extremely online orthobros decry him for his ecumenical efforts with the RCC and several protestant denominations, he was key to the conversion of thousands in the West, both with his original works and his translations of Christian patristics from the Greek. Please spare a prayer for him if you are so inclined.

 

[Jewthulhu]

Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia is in critical condition, so I am putting down Dürrenmatt and rereading his work. While a lot of extremely online orthobros decry him for his ecumenical efforts with the RCC and several protestant denominations, he was key to the conversion of thousands in the West, both with his original works and his translations of Christian patristics from the Greek. Please spare a prayer for him if you are so inclined.

I remember reading "The Orthodox Way" during catechism; it was a great introduction to Orthodox theology and thought. I will definitely keep him in my prayers.

While a lot of extremely online orthobros decry him for his ecumenical efforts with the RCC and several protestant denominations

Unfortunately, politisperging and purity spiraling is concerningly common among terminally-online "trad Christians." Perhaps I can sometimes be a bit too judgmental of them for this, but it definitely does more to hurt Christendom than it does to help it.

 

[Sergeant Major Buzzkill]

"The Divine Comedy" by Dante. I've been meaning to try it out for awhile.

 

[Esau]

Don Coyote by Cervantes. Although it's written in prose, it's a superb form of fluid prose which serves the reader. I find it hard to put down.

 

[Dread First]

[snip]

Update: My Allama Iqbal rabbithole yielded this journal (archive).

The tl;dr is that Allama Iqbal, that same Islamic polymath from British India that I sperged about, was apparently quite fond of Friedrich Nietzsche. I know! I can't believe it either, but cursory Google searches on the subject seem to validate this. Nietzsche died in 1900, and he didn't come to Germany until 1905 (if I'm not mistaken). By this point, Iqbal had already conceived an ubermensch of his own some 15-20 years before ever reading about Nietzsche's works.

Holy fucking shit, I know I'm a filthy sand nigger but like... is this genuinely amazing to anyone else but me?
Like... talk about convergent evolution in philosophy.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Orconomics.

The gimmick of it is that it's a high fantasy novel based on Dungeons and Dragons type stuff where the fantasy world has modern understandings of economics and financial instruments. (Ad)venture capitalists finance heroes to recover loot (it seems that in this setting there is an ancient history of monsters deliberately plundering settlements, so loot hoards are common). To minimize risk the shares in adventurer expeditions are pooled together and sold off as financial instruments in which shares can be bought and then pooled into other shares, but the valuation of these shares have been drastically overstated.

Basically, it's a high fantasy metaphor for the 2000s United States housing bubble.

So far I don't like it much, I was never into Dungeons and Dragons or high fantasy, but the problem for me is more that it's just not real good writing.


Edit: Would make a good game. Adventure thing where instead of managing a party you negotiate over contracts, approve or reject quests, and conduct auctions/market loot, basically a fantasy-skinned investment banker simulator.

Book was a disappointment. I'm apparently the only person who thought so out of over 1,000 reviews. I had a strong impression that the book was supposed to be a satire of the housing bubble, or at least have the high concept of a financialized high fantasy world be front and center, but it isn't. The hard-biting "satire" that the fans seemed to think was hot shit was a fantasy world having corporations (lolsowacky), monsters being persecuted minorities and nuance (how original), and the big prophetic quest turns out to be a set-up to get a pretense to genocide the monsters to steal their loot. It also does some of that metafaggotry where game terminology is given a cutesy in-universe meaning (I liked that in Undertale, but it was also integral to Undertale).

The prose and plot is in that sweet spot of mediocrity where it's good enough to be passively entertaining while reading, not actively unpleasant, but not good enough to read closely (occasionally realize I'm missing big details) or care about anything that happens. It feels amateurish. The dialogue is basically modern with mild amounts of ye olde speake peppered in that feels more artificial than if it just committed to one or the other. Characters aren't snarky/Whedonesque, but they do speak like action characters in joking around in fights and such, which is a pet peeve of mine (I didn't like it in The Peshawar Lancers, either, which is a lot more grounded of a story than this).

The author assumes you have a familiarity with D&D, which may not be unreasonable - I knew it was D&D-based when I bought it - but neither is the book specifically marketed, nor is its high concept reliant on it, so I feel it is a problem. Lots of monsters are name-dropped with the expectation you'll recognize what it's talking about and the significance of things.

Throughout the book, lots of individually interesting things happen. Some of the neat parts of lore included things like healing potion addicts cutting themselves badly to pressure pedestrians into giving them potions (it's never made clear, though, how common potions are or if people carry them around or what) and a tribe of fucking LAWYER-MONKS, there's a sect whose goddess basically communicates in Dadaistic nonsense, and other little things like that. Much of the setting feels really undercooked, and I feel like a really cool high concept was squandered on a book that isn't outright bad but wasn't good enough to live up to its ideas. I would have rather seen more thought put into the fantasy world, more economics (I wanted to see fuckery around things like credit rating agencies and bailouts for heroes), and more detail.