What are you reading right now?

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Croco said:
How is it going? 1611 King James is very nice. I think Leviticus is where a lot of people get hung up. For supplementary material, Asimov’s Guide to the Bible provides his secular perspective. godspeed
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I am reading the KJV, so far it is very interesting.
 
Just finished fight club, really liked it and it was cool to see the differences between the book and movie( like the ending). Just started clockwork orange again after putting it down because the language was hard to understand, and im enjoying it so far and plan on finshing it this time.
 
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The Exorcist, never watched the movie (least I don't remember) so I'll start with the book.
 
Arthur Luther's Demon. I stumbled upon it in a used book store and since I read A hero of our time quite recently I got it.
 
Couldn't really figure out what to read next so I gave Assassin's Apprentice a shot. A book I got for xmas on a complete whim and the GRRM praise on the cover made me want to pass it over. Turns out it's pretty good, but reading a trilogy of 1500 pages of fiction sits poorly with me. But sure as shit rather that than Moby Dick.
 
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Currently:

  • Moby Dick - plan is to go slow and steady
  • 8 Ball Chicks - a journalist's account of her time around female gang members in the mid-90s, at a time when law enforcement was mostly denying that women joined gangs
  • Dispensationalism, Rightly Dividing the People of God? - a Reformed/Calvinist criticism of Dispensationalism
 
Just got back from a nice 2 week vacation that I managed to spend mostly reading.

The Tyrant Philosophers series by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Great so far, I liked the varied settings and magics across the three books, and the exploration of weaponized healing magic. They strike a good balance between killing off characters and rotating new ones in; I never found myself getting new character fatigue. Seems like there's a fourth book slated for next year, I hope they let us directly witness what's been going on in the Pal empire with the healing cult and sea cult. I'd be pretty hyped if the overarching plot is the destruction of a warmongering empire by "infecting" them with forced pacifism religion.

Temeraire series by Naomi Novik
If I'm reading something based on the Napoleonic naval genre (plus dragons) I want lots of "huzzah for king and country!"... which this series unfortunately did not have. Still there was a lot of action, intrigue, and adventuring to interesting locales so it definitely kept me entertained and was a nice quick and light read. I would have preferred more autistic worldbuilding. I think it fell into the common trap of 'Europe is a dozen warring countries but all of Africa/South America/Australia is one homogenous group' so even though they spent a decent amount of time adventuring there, they missed some chances for more extensive worldbuilding.

Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family by Nicholas Pileggi
A.k.a. Goodfellas. Thanks to @Pizza Munch recommending this in the nonfiction thread. Got some crazy whiplash seeing these guys flip from highly charismatic, loveable rogues to violent, zero-impulse-control wiggers at the drop of a hat. It gives a lot of insight into how these gangs grew so strong while also being so volatile.

Wool by Hugh Howey
First of the Silo series, a post-apocalyptic story about people living in a giant silo. It did a good job with the plot/setting twists but I don't feel super motivated to go straight to the next book, maybe because so many characters died I was getting tired of having to meet new ones.
 
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Croco said:
How is it going? 1611 King James is very nice. I think Leviticus is where a lot of people get hung up. For supplementary material, Asimov’s Guide to the Bible provides his secular perspective. godspeed
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Asimov is the last person I would've thought wrote a Bible commentary.

I happen to be rereading Nightfall. Asimov's self-professed "cerebral" tone made the details hard to understand as a kid (and even today). It's a great idea with bad execution. The Kalgashites are such wimps for flipping out at the merest hint of darkness. Things like fangs and holes aren't that scary to the average human - we'd certainly withstand a night of spider-zombies. Yet despite living on a planet of unending sunlight they behave too much like us - they sleep indoors with nightlights, not outside on a planet which should be a desert. Except unlike us they have no myth or stories to corroborate the world-ending nightfall. It's all contrived to fit the premise. McFarlane did it best in an episode of The Orville based off the same Emerson quote.
 
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Haffhart said:
Asimov is the last person I would've thought wrote a Bible commentary.

I happen to be rereading Nightfall. Asimov's self-professed "cerebral" tone made the details hard to understand as a kid (and even today). It's a great idea with bad execution. The Kalgashites are such wimps for flipping out at the merest hint of darkness. Things like fangs and holes aren't that scary to the average human - we'd certainly withstand a night of spider-zombies. Yet despite living on a planet of unending sunlight they behave too much like us - they sleep indoors with nightlights, not outside on a planet which should be a desert. Except unlike us they have no myth or stories to corroborate the world-ending nightfall. It's all contrived to fit the premise. McFarlane did it best in an episode of The Orville based off the same Emerson quote.
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IIRC, a lot of his notable short stories from the '40s often came from ideas he talked about with John W. Campbell Jr.

Flawed? Yeah. Asimov's still worthwhile.

Asimov wrote a shitload of non-fiction. Lots on literature, science, humanities, and etc.
 
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I finally managed to get myself to read House of Leaves and it was mostly very enjoyable. Its trying a lot of stuff that doesn't all work, so I both wanted more weirdfuck formatting and less of it, because it doesn't do a great job at making the most of the idea.

I know a lot of people really enjoy the house parts and want less of the narrator, and while I don't disagree, I think its a different sort of horror that's worth having.
 
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Big Miss Steak said:
Currently:

  • Moby Dick - plan is to go slow and steady
  • 8 Ball Chicks - a journalist's account of her time around female gang members in the mid-90s, at a time when law enforcement was mostly denying that women joined gangs
  • Dispensationalism, Rightly Dividing the People of God? - a Reformed/Calvinist criticism of Dispensationalism
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I read Moby Dick. You definitely want an annotated version. Enjoy learning an autistic amount of detail about Greenlander whales among other exotic whale species in between story.
Haffhart said:
McFarlane did it best in an episode of The Orville based off the same Emerson quote.
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Read this with based Todd McFarlane in mind but to my disappointment it was closeted homosexual Seth McFarlane who you were referring to.
 
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Croco said:
I read Moby Dick. You definitely want an annotated version. Enjoy learning an autistic amount of detail about Greenlander whales among other exotic whale species in between story.
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I'm tempted. I didn't pay attention when I bought my copy from Amazon and it's some cheap knockoff version with occasional spacing/formatting errors, no copyright info, a blurred and blown-up jpeg as the front cover, and a completely blank back cover.
 
Big Miss Steak said:
I'm tempted. I didn't pay attention when I bought my copy from Amazon and it's some cheap knockoff version with occasional spacing/formatting errors, no copyright info, a blurred and blown-up jpeg as the front cover, and a completely blank back cover.
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"Moby-Dick or The Whale : Edited with an Introduction and Annotation (The Library of Literature) (The Library of Literature, Volume 5)"
I can vouch for that one, was unforgettable. Somehow it's priced over $80-$100 on Amazon whereas it was found for a few dollars at a book store 15 years ago? ​

 
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Frederik Pohl- A Plague of Pythons

This is a Pohl book from the early 60s, published in book for in '65 and then revised in the '80s as Demon in the Skull.

This is one of those books that's so ridiculously dense with the worldbuilding and implications. Pohl seems to be pretty good at that, as seen with Gateway. However, it's also a fairly short book and a lot of it relies on the suspense and unraveling of everything.

So, the premise is that people are caught in a possessed state. Why? How? We're given tidbits on how this works, how this "plague" of possession seems to be viewed from normal suburban America, and it all gets dialed up to increasingly horrifying levels. The main character is a man accused of horrible crimes while possessed. Random religious iconography and exorcisms are used in an attempt to stave off the cause of the possessions. It doesn't seem to work, but society is built around trying to ascribe rules to these horrifying possessions in an attempt to cope. Am I being too vague? I don't know how else to explain this because it's very much a proto-cyberpunk post-apocalyptic thriller wherein a man's indomitable spirit wins the day (or does he?).


I won't spoil it. But Pohl does go over a bit of the "macro" scale aspects of this. Towards the end of the book you see a touch of transhumanist or "proto-cyberpunk" stuff. It's really difficult to explain without spoiling it. The book's in public domain and a fairly breezy read.

Go check it out. It's probably not Pohl's best, but it's a fine story that touches on Pohl's imagination of how a future could go wrong, of humanity's desperation with dangerous and seemingly alien phenomenon. This is a short serialized novel that could easily be expanded into a far longer piece. Hell, it'd probably make a good movie.
 
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