What are you reading right now?

Sergeant Major Buzzkill said:
Gotten done with the Aeneid last Friday, couldn’t say no to starting on the Iliad. I’ve been reading that non-stop with soothing jazz in the background since that night, both are excellent epics.
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Almost through with The Iliad. I've been reading it for an hour each day (sometimes twice, if I really want to see how a certain chapter wraps up). Samuel Butler's translation, while I find it brilliant, is quite a lot for me to take in, hence why I try to take my time with it.

It's not that I don't mostly understand what's going on, just got to let it digest for my brain bit by bit. I was like that with the Aeneid at first, until I started breezing through it (Robert Fitzgerald's translation is also very accessible for me).

I think after I'm done with The Iliad, I'm going to start on this collection of Greek (or was it Roman?) plays I checked out of the library.


Neighborhood Curmudgeon said:
The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft,
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Oh, sweet. I would read him right away, but I'm going off by order of books in my to-read list on Goodreads.
 
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I had to use a translator for this (which is kind of painful to hold) but it's a cute simple story nonetheless.
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"Afterwards" by Rosamund Lipton. Chick thriller. I've ended up forcing myself to continue it by putting it in the loo. I enjoyed Lipton's earlier book "Sister" but this one really is proving difficult to get into. Not to mention that I'm less than a quarter in and I'm pretty certain who dunnit. I don't mind a little sentiment but so far the prose is cloying and the omniscient narrator is incredibly aggravating. The main character and her daughter are both in a coma, but they can go literally anywhere in the hospital and see everything, and she has a husband who's perfect in every way, he's even a celebrity but he's devoted to her only... I'm hoping that things improve soon.

"Exile's Honour" by Mercedes Lackey. Soft fantasy. I was hugely into Lackey as a teenager and I've been feeling nostalgic.

"The Simon Grist Boxset" someone further up the thread recommended it. Enjoying the series so far.

"Della's Web" by Aphrodite Jones. True crime. Not very far into it yet, Jones' prose is grating.

There's always more books that I've got on the go.
 
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I'm reading Path to Ascendancy by Ian C. Esslemont, the first book in a prequel series to Erikson's series Malazan Book of the Fallen. I'm about half way through and while it doesn't hold a light to MBoTF, but it has potential for sure.
 
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Finally finished On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century. It's a fascinating book if you're interested in (and have a bit of knowledge of) nuclear strategy and don't mind academic works. The main takeaway is that the US doesn't really have a prepared strategy for asymmetrical nuclear threats (Korea, Iran, rogue actors, failed states, etc.). The US' conception of limited nuclear war is the Cold War relic of battlefield use (tactical nuclear weapons), which has mostly been phased out by more accurate conventional munitions. Our strategy post-Cold War has been largely counterforce rather than strategic (targeting weapons, heads of state, etc. rather than population or economic sectors). The idea of dealing with a rogue state like Iran or Korea, that would only have a handful of relatively short-ranged weapons, hasn't really been properly planned for despite it being an ongoing threat. We would win any war that escalated to nuclear use against such a state, but there needs to be a coherent strategy so we don't cause more issues than we solve.

Reading Neuromancer next for a bit lighter reading.
 
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Jewthulhu said:
We would win any war that escalated to nuclear use against such a state, but there needs to be a coherent strategy so we don't cause more issues than we solve.
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It would be easy enough to glass any of those countries, but I doubt their neighbors would be particularly happy about it, and some of them have backing from larger states that are actual threats. And there might even be secret treaties that get triggered by that and set off Armageddon.
 
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AnOminous said:
It would be easy enough to glass any of those countries, but I doubt their neighbors would be particularly happy about it, and some of them have backing from larger states that are actual threats. And there might even be secret treaties that get triggered by that and set off Armageddon.
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I'm not sure that Russia, China, or Pakistan have a "nuclear envelope" like the west does, but the risk of horizontal escalation (other countries getting involved) is something that was discussed. I'm not sure if it's an inevitability in most scenarios, but it's something to be considered. Russia, especially nowadays, is a big wildcard. There was discussion of the risk of nuclear flyover of Russia. The way most of our ICBMs are positioned, to hit Iran or Korea they would have to fly over Russia, which could be seen as an attack and trigger a response. We also might not see a nuclear escalation coming (depending on the scenario), so we might not have bombers or SLBMs positioned for a rapid response. And it wasn't discussed in the book (it was published in 2014), but Russia's more hostile, closed off stance, propensity for nuclear blackmail (and general strategy of "threats that leave something to chance"), and disengagement from nuclear treaties makes escalation control harder than it was during the Cold War.

It's kind of a weird situation in that thinking that the risk of nuclear war is lower post-Cold War has created a situation where the risks and threats are higher and more unmanageable. It's something they harped on a lot in the book.
 
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Consider Phlebas. I heard Elon Musk mention it in an interview and saw it in a bookstore on the same day.
I'm starting to get really excited for the whole series. This is the first book of it, but most people recommend starting with The Player of Games instead, which is considered to be the best one. I'm already enjoying this one. It's an outsider's critical view of a civilisation that will become central in the books to come. Deep and detailed, but not too difficult.
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shameful existence said:
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Consider Phlebas. I heard Elon Musk mention it in an interview and saw it in a bookstore on the same day.
I'm starting to get really excited for the whole series. This is the first book of it, but most people recommend starting with The Player of Games instead, which is considered to be the best one. I'm already enjoying this one. It's an outsider's critical view of a civilisation that will become central in the books to come. Deep and detailed, but not too difficult.
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I had no idea Elon mentioned it before. I've been a big fan of Iain M. Banks, as well as his fiction stuff under Iain Banks for almost two decades now. The Culture novels are a lot of fun. I strongly recommend Use of Weapons and The Player of Games.


I've been struggling with getting back into reading lately, which is frustrating as I used to be quite a bookworm when I was younger, but right now I'm reading A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin and rereading Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian. If any of you are interested in naval books set during the Napoleonic War, you can't go wrong with O'Brian but the vocab and terminology do take some getting used to.
 
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FIVE STAR DAYS said:
I had no idea Elon mentioned it before.
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He seems to be a big fan. He named two of the SpaceX's drone ships after General Contact Units that appeared in The Player of Games (apparently it's the Of Course I Still Love You and Just Read the Instructions). There's also a bunch of articles where journos argue he doesn't understand the series at all, lol.
 
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shameful existence said:
He seems to be a big fan. He named two of the SpaceX's drone ships after General Contact Units that appeared in The Player of Games (apparently it's the Of Course I Still Love You and Just Read the Instructions). There's also a bunch of articles where journos argue he doesn't understand the series at all, lol.
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LMAO holy shit, I never noticed that before
 
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For some reason I started reading James Clavell's Shogun again. In the past I had problems with it because it really does come off like (sorry if this sounds SJW-ish but) a white man writing about a foreign culture he basically knows from movies and cartoons.

Which, reading it now... yeah it still totally does. I think Clavell did do some actual research but a lot is still drenched in stereotype.... a lot of the samurai might as well be Joe Jitsu from the 1960s Dick Tracy cartoon. At the same time some aspects of the base story are still fun enough (as far as I am) that I can ignore that for the moment.
 
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This thread.


Really I haven't read in a while. I have a backlog of sorts but nothing's really been filling my current autistic fixation. I need some goddamn military sci-fi with giant robots like gundam or else I'll activate my self-die mode.
 
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Been reading Haruki Murakami's Novelist as Vocation after flipping open to a random page at an airport bookstore and finding it intriguing. Never read his novels. Has anyone here read any of them?
 
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