What books are you currently reading?


Books

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InVinoVeritas wrote:


Next up: Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl.

I really liked it but found one of the POV characters extremely off-putting.


steelhead wrote:
City of Strangers: Kaer Maga have been occupying my time between RPG Superstar rounds.

I liked that one a lot.


So, the first half of Exodus was pretty cool, but somewhere around chapter 30 it got really, really boring. When the rules went from "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" to descriptions of the priestly gaments of Aaron, I started skimming...and didn't stop until I was finished with Leviticus.

Turned back to The Once and Future King which, imho, is much better written.

Liberty's Edge

Let's see. Since the first of the year, I've read the following:

The Fourth Labyrinth - Christopher Golden's novel based in the world of the Uncharted franchise

Last Last Chance - Fiona Maazel's novel about addiction and family drama set against the (remote) backdrop of a Superplague

The Family Fang - a funny novel about the (dysfunctional) children of a pair of (dysfunctional) performance artists

The Debt to Pleasure - part cookbook, part novel, the unreliable narrator is an aesthete with a sinister agenda (highly recommended, though definitely not for all tastes)

The Factory of Facts - Luc Sante's rather slow memoir about his relationship to his past and his country of birth, Belgium

and

I'm halfway through David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, the novelistic equivalent of a matryoshka. Six interlocking narratives set in six different times, from the 1830s to an unspecified apocalyptic future. (Really, really good so far.)


I've been stolen away from the Opium Wars, at least partly, by fanfic. Yes, seriously. I'm reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Most chapters have at least some kind of didactic bit but what's really fascinating me is a completely different Harry Potter.

Not an abused child or a dim jock, which is what canon Harry is, this Harry is pretty much a supergenius quite happy to manipulate anyone he comes in contact with for the greater good. He doesn't think of it as taking over the world; it's optimization. He's not a psychopath, he's just very creative. But he's going along with all of this with the normal set of human emotions and considerable tension between his stated desire to be a Good Guy (TM) with relatively normal, humanist values and the cold optimization-oriented user of people. To the part where I am, he's a bit worried about the fact that his apparently dark side seems to be producing much better solutions to problems than his light side and is doing so without much in the way of atrocity.

And it's hilarious. Even if you're not a Potter fan you might like it, since the author, through his Harry, takes plenty of swipes at all the dumb things in the wizarding world: "But how would we know when a game of Quidditch is over if we don't use the Golden Snitch?" "Use. A. Clock."

I wish I'd had a book like this growing up. Why don't more regular stories have protagonists like this?


Doodlebug Anklebiter wrote:
So, the first half of Exodus was pretty cool, but somewhere around chapter 30 it got really, really boring. When the rules went from "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" to descriptions of the priestly gaments of Aaron, I started skimming...and didn't stop until I was finished with Leviticus.

Well, an important incident happens in Exodus 32 (and it has an aftermath related in bits and pieces in the next couple of chapters), but yeah, for the most part, there's a lot of boring laws for a while.

But the action picks up again in Numbers, around chapter 11. Then it dies down again, around chapter 26, and little happens afterward (except for a brief war in 31 and its aftermath in 32).

If you read that much, I THINK you'll have a good enough background for the stories in the book of Joshua. I mean, you'll miss a few points that might help your understanding of Joshua, but I think that those points are made elsewhere. And from the beginning of Joshua until the end of Kings, there's a lot of famous stories.

(Honestly, you have no idea how funny it is for me to write this post. All my life, I've had this religion shoved down my throat, and my kids are, in turn, often annoyed at my insistence on talking to THEM about it. After all these years, the idea of my recommending parts of the Bible for their entertainment value is beyond weird.)


Re-read the Iron Druid series by Kevin Hearne over the last weekend.

Yumm.

Even better- found out the 4th book (Trickery) will be out in April.


Samnell wrote:
I've been stolen away from the Opium Wars, at least partly, by fanfic. Yes, seriously. I'm reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

IIRC, someone above recommended just this piece of fanfic. It sounds pretty awesome (I enjoyed the Harry Potter books but would be happy to laugh at them), but I don't know if I can sit at the computer screen and read a whole book. :(


Aaron Bitman wrote:

Well, an important incident happens in Exodus 32 (and it has an aftermath related in bits and pieces in the next couple of chapters), but yeah, for the most part, there's a lot of boring laws for a while.

But the action picks up again in Numbers, around chapter 11. Then it dies down again, around chapter 26, and little happens afterward (except for a brief war in 31 and its aftermath in 32).

I'm pretty sure this is as far into The Torah that I've ever gotten. In fact, the whole bread in the desert miracle was new to me.

Anyway, I'm committed to reading the whole thing. There's so many stories that I know bits of from so many sources (black music, European literature, allusions in a million different sci-fi movies, etc.) but have never read the Biblical account.

Don Juan de Doodlebug Addendum

Plus, there's lots of hawt sex!!


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The Book of Enoch was more popular at the time, but those blue-noses at the Council of Nicaea wouldn't put it in. Most likely because they didn't want everyone to realize Jesus was an alien.

Just for you Doodle ;)


So was Jimi Hendrix!


Doodlebug Anklebiter wrote:
Samnell wrote:
I've been stolen away from the Opium Wars, at least partly, by fanfic. Yes, seriously. I'm reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
IIRC, someone above recommended just this piece of fanfic. It sounds pretty awesome (I enjoyed the Harry Potter books but would be happy to laugh at them), but I don't know if I can sit at the computer screen and read a whole book. :(

There's also a podcast of it, which you can get here or via iTunes. So you can kill your ears instead of your eyes.


The Queen of Air and Darkness by T.H. White.

Man, I sure am glad Kirth hated this book, 'cuz otherwise I wouldn't have read it so soon, and, man, is it awesome!

I am unaware of any other scenes in books where four boys kidnap a scullery maid to capture a unicorn and then

Spoiler:
butcher it.

Nowhere near as cutesy as The Sword in the Stone--except, of course, for the love affairs of the Questing Beast and, boy, was that cute!


Doodlebug Anklebiter wrote:
I am unaware of any other scenes in books where four boys kidnap a scullery maid to capture a unicorn and then ** spoiler omitted **

In one of his notebooks Leonardo da Vinci wrote:

Spoiler:
"The unicorn, through its intemperance and not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears to fair maidens forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear it will go up to a seated damsel and go to sleep in her lap, and thus the hunters take it."

Also, you might be interested in _Into_the_Land_of_the_Unicorns_ by Bruce Coville, which sort of qualifies, I think. I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of stories in which the bad guys kill unicorns, or try to. _Harry_Potter_and_the_Sorcerer's_Stone_ comes to mind.


I did have good guys in mind. I don't know if you've read The Once and Future King (and if you haven't--do! It's great!), but the unicorn slayers are

Spoiler:
Gawaine and his brothers.

Also, has anyone out there in Paizoland read the original, individual, volumes? According to wikipedia, there's whole swathes of stuff that cut out from the original books when it was compiled into one volume--for example the wizard duel in Disney's The Sword and the Stone. The entry says that TQoA&D itself (which had a different original title) was twice as long! :(

RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32

Just finished "Gears of the City" by Felix Gilman. It, and its prequel "Thunderer," reminded me of a slightly steampunk Dickensian cross between "Perdido Street Station" by China Mieville and "Neverwhere" by Neil Gaiman.

I just started "Green" by Jay Lake. I think it's going to be about how an assassin/courtesan grew up. But as I just started it, the POV is still 3 years old or something.


Aaron Bitman wrote:

In one of his notebooks Leonardo da Vinci wrote:

"The unicorn, through its intemperance and not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears to fair maidens forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear it will go up to a seated damsel and go to sleep in her lap, and thus the hunters take it."

Revisionist history, forcing the myth to fit an unwieldy Christian allegory! Here's the real deal:

Spoiler:
“There is an animal called dajja, extremely gentle, which the hunters are unable to capture because of its great strength. It has in the middle of its brow a single horn. But observe the ruse by which the huntsmen take it. They lead forth a young virgin, pure and chaste, to whom, when the animal sees her, he approaches, throwing himself upon her. Then the girl offers him her breasts, and the animal begins to suck the breasts of the maiden and to conduct himself familiarly with her. Then the girl, while sitting quietly, reaches forth her hand and grasps the horn on the animal’s brow, and at this point the huntsmen come up and take the beast and go away with him to the king.”

--Physiologus, Translated, into Latin, by J.P.N. Land in his Anecdota Syriaca, Lugd. Batav., 1870, vol. Iv. P. 146


That's wicked hawt!!!!


Finished The Book of Numbers.


Finished The Blue Star -- just when I was about to give up, there was a lot of very cool revolutionary politics stuff, when the Sons of the New Day (of which the main character is a member) depose the aristocracy and start imprisoning former nobles. Vive la Galt, indeed!


Imprisoning former nobles? What is it with you people anyhow?! Ruling the unwashed masses is a terrible burden!

I finally finished the Baroque cycle last night, and have felt rather empty inside since...

But Connie Willis (Blackout and All Clear) await; hooray!

Shadow Lodge

Samnell wrote:
InVinoVeritas wrote:


Next up: Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl.
I really liked it but found one of the POV characters extremely off-putting.

I'm curious as to which one. I'm about a third of the way through the book. All the POV characters so far have their flaws, so it's hard to say which might be the off-putting one.

The story's quite interesting. I can only imagine the scope of the train wreck that's going to occur.

Liberty's Edge

Pathfinder Adventure Path, Rulebook, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

I've heard from a reliable source that the worldbuilding in The Windup Girl is highly problematic, if you're compulsively numerate. Apparently the springs can hold orders of magnitude more energy than chemical bonds, per unit mass or per unit volume, and there are a few other places where the author really didn't think about economics. If you can ignore things like that*, the writing is good.

*If you can't read Pern books because the orbital dynamics of the Red Star make Kepler spin in his grave, or get compulsive facial tics at how the stillsuits in Dune violate the laws of thermodynamics, don't try to read TWG.


John, I would live to take you aside and take about the 2 science fails I spotted in the first hour of Avatar :)

Ringworld is unstable!


InVinoVeritas wrote:
Samnell wrote:
InVinoVeritas wrote:


Next up: Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl.
I really liked it but found one of the POV characters extremely off-putting.
I'm curious as to which one. I'm about a third of the way through the book. All the POV characters so far have their flaws, so it's hard to say which might be the off-putting one.

I think his name was Hock Seng. The Chinese guy who works for the calorie man. You're right that all the POV characters are pretty seriously flawed, but the way the book switches from Anderson, who is amoral at best but doesn't spend a lot of time grinding you down with it, to Hock's in your face constantly racism was pretty rough. It took me three or four of his chapters to finally get over it.

Not that the racism is gratuitous or unrealistic. It's just really hard to read.

Also on the worldbuilding: Kink springs are definitely plot device science.


2 people marked this as a favorite.

And topicality:

Took a brief break from The Opium Wars and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to ready Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True which was fun and surprisingly readable. I like science and science books, but most of them do take me some effort to get through. Coyne's is an exception. I read it in two days of fairly leisurely reading and came away wishing I'd read it before Your Inner Fish. But YIF predates WEIT by a few years so that wasn't going to happen.

WEIT is the second general survey of evolution I've read, the first being Zimmer's Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea. It was neat to see how they overlapped and where they differed in focus. Zimmer, to my recollection, spends a bit more time on the intellectual history of evolutionary theory where Coyne is mostly about its present state, with history involved only insofar as it informed present findings.

I'm kicking around whether it's worth emailing Coyne about a point regarding human/chimpanzee hybridization I'm curious about.


Coyne is surprisingly approachable; he sent me a book as a gag gift from a contest on his blog once, and we emailed back and forth a couple of times. Great sense of humor, too. Before emailing him about the chimp thing, though, I'd do a quick web search of his blog; I think he talked about that a bit on some thread that got derailed.

And I'll second the recommendation of Why Evolution is True -- in my opinion it's the best popular science book since Hawking's A Brief History of Time.

Liberty's Edge

Pathfinder Adventure Path, Rulebook, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
Hitdice wrote:

John, I would live to take you aside and take about the 2 science fails I spotted in the first hour of Avatar :)

Ringworld is unstable!

Avatar was always going to live or die on how cool it looked, which I suppose is sort of like ignoring the science (or language) fails because the story is so much fun. Tim Powers is good at this. There's also a point in Taltos, I think, where a character makes a wordplay that only makes sense in English. But Steve Brust is a good enough writer that I could skip over that, where similar things pushed me right out of a couple of Piers Anthony stories whose names I've mercifully forgotten.

Getting back to the actual thread topic, I finally read The Name of the Wind. Good book; it reminded me a lot of LE Modessit's Order/Chaos novels, but better. I have an embarrassment of riches for the next book on the list, but I think I'll go with A Path to Coldness of Heart.

Shadow Lodge

Samnell wrote:
InVinoVeritas wrote:
Samnell wrote:
InVinoVeritas wrote:


Next up: Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl.
I really liked it but found one of the POV characters extremely off-putting.
I'm curious as to which one. I'm about a third of the way through the book. All the POV characters so far have their flaws, so it's hard to say which might be the off-putting one.

I think his name was Hock Seng. The Chinese guy who works for the calorie man. You're right that all the POV characters are pretty seriously flawed, but the way the book switches from Anderson, who is amoral at best but doesn't spend a lot of time grinding you down with it, to Hock's in your face constantly racism was pretty rough. It took me three or four of his chapters to finally get over it.

Not that the racism is gratuitous or unrealistic. It's just really hard to read.

Also on the worldbuilding: Kink springs are definitely plot device science.

Thought it might be Hock Seng. His views are the most hateful on the surface, out of everyone.

As for kink-springs, it's definitely a MacGuffin. There are lots of ways that the energy output of physical labor could be turned into stored potential energy, but capacitors are so last century...


Kirth Gersen wrote:

Coyne is surprisingly approachable; he sent me a book as a gag gift from a contest on his blog once, and we emailed back and forth a couple of times. Great sense of humor, too. Before emailing him about the chimp thing, though, I'd do a quick web search of his blog; I think he talked about that a bit on some thread that got derailed.

And I'll second the recommendation of Why Evolution is True -- in my opinion it's the best popular science book since Hawking's A Brief History of Time.

Maybe this belongs in the movie game thread, but what in your opinion is the best unpopular science book of late?

(Dude, don't ask me, I don't even know what a hydrogeologist is.)


Never Cry Wolf, Belgarath the Sorccer and recently finished The Good Earth


Len Deighton - "SS GB". 1941, England is occupied, but finding out who killed a black marketeer is business as usual for Douglas Archer of the Scotland yard.

Contributor

I'm about halfway through 'House of Leaves' by Mark Z. Danielewski. Only halfway, because my copy had a massive printer error I only found around page 400 or so. And given the umm... unconventional... way that the book is written and presented at times I wasn't sure if it was a defective book or not (it's got stories within stories, multiple layers of editors and footnotes, and using the structure of the text as a visual device for mood and atmosphere). It's been a fun/creepy/funny/horrific read so far.


Hitdice wrote:

Maybe this belongs in the movie game thread, but what in your opinion is the best unpopular science book of late?

(Dude, don't ask me, I don't even know what a hydrogeologist is.)

Who did you like better, Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould?

As for me, made a big dent into White's The Ill-Made Knight. I want to go read all of Malory next, but I won't.


Reading "Heart of Flame" by Janine Ashbless. Superb erotic romance set in (a slightly anachronistic, as the author admits) 9th century middle east. Djinni, princesses, ghouls, the Necronomicon. What's not to love?


Kirth Gersen wrote:
Vive la Galt, indeed!

Oh, and according to my French and Canadien comrades, it is Vive le Galt!

I got you, Stuffy Grammarian mo'fo!


Comrade Anklebiter wrote:
Oh, and according to my French and Canadien comrades, it is Vive le Galt!

I thought Galt was an imaginary place? So there's no telling whether it's masculine or feminine -- although one would suppose that, if feminine, it would be "Galte" instead, there's no guarantee of that.


I'm usually always reading somesort of fantasy novel on and off. Right now im currently reading Gotrek & Felix.


Kirth Gersen wrote:
Comrade Anklebiter wrote:
Oh, and according to my French and Canadien comrades, it is Vive le Galt!
I thought Galt was an imaginary place? So there's no telling whether it's masculine or feminine -- although one would suppose that, if feminine, it would be "Galte" instead, there's no guarantee of that.

There are some general trends in whether something is masculine or feminine based on how the word ends, but they are not followed consistently. (Kind of like English.) My first year French teacher tried to teach these to us by having us memorize the exceptions and then mentioning the rules as afterthoughts. That didn't work so well.

To my recollection, place names are not generally inflected unless they include a word that refers to a person, like a profession name or something. (And some profession names don't change gender even when used to refer to someone of the 'wrong' sex because the feminine traditionally refers to the wife of an X rather than an X.)

So it would be le or la Galt, depending on translator whim, but the people from there would be Galtien if male and Galtienne if female. Or something like that, depending how the translators felt. It could also be Galtois and Galtoise, Galtais and Galtaise, etc. You wouldn't notice the difference in collective terms because standard French grammar defaults to a masculine plural in mixed groups and uses feminine plurals only for all-female groups.


Todd Stewart wrote:
I'm about halfway through 'House of Leaves' by Mark Z. Danielewski. Only halfway, because my copy had a massive printer error I only found around page 400 or so. And given the umm... unconventional... way that the book is written and presented at times I wasn't sure if it was a defective book or not (it's got stories within stories, multiple layers of editors and footnotes, and using the structure of the text as a visual device for mood and atmosphere). It's been a fun/creepy/funny/horrific read so far.

I really liked House of Leaves, though the formatting got tiring a few times. I suppose it would be hard to read in public at certain points, since you'd be spinning the book upside down, holding it on edge, and all that. Onlookers would think you were a crazy person, but you know you're really quite sane and it's just this crazy book making you act funny. Like the Navidsons, Holloway, Zampano, and Johnny Truant.

Ok, so to get the full experience I really ought to have read it in public. :)


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Kirth Gersen wrote:
I thought Galt was an imaginary place?

[Adds Kirth's name to the list of stooges of the plutocracy]


messy wrote:
just finished the once and future king. i was expecting to read about king arthur. instead, i read about birds, lancelot, and history. weird.

So, I'm not done yet, but: there are, of course, many different versions of the Arthurian romances, but, once the Round Table is set up, most of the stories that I am aware of follow around the questing knights instead of Arthur himself, who stays home.

Although a late-comer to the Arthurian mythos (according to wikipedia, he was first introduced by Chretien de Troyes), by the time of Malory, he was the preeminent knight leaving old stand-bys like Gawaine and Tristram behind in the dust.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that post-Malory, the Lancelot-Guinevere-Arthur triangle probably IS the main character.


On the le or la discussion - most countries are treated as feminine in French, and thus get a "la" - and obviously there are exceptions, but for the vast majority it's "la."

As for what I'm reading: A book I gave my two christmasses ago: Sisters in the Resistance about French female resistance-fighters.


Doodlebug - have you tried the In Our Time podcast? Pretty sure you'd enjoy it - and the archives almost go back to the turn of the millenium, so plenty of stuff to catch up with.


I asked Smarnil le Couard, as a legitimate Frenchman, and Robert Hawkshaw, as a somewhat legitimate Canadian about this in re: Vive le Quebec!

I don't remember exactly what their answer was, but it led me to the classic formulation that Kirth Gersen has misspelled and shall be publicly mocked for. Hee hee.

Speaking of Kirth Gersen, if he's still here:

I was curious as to whether you read the whole Once and Future King or just The Sword in the Stone? I can totally see you hating the latter, but not so much the former.

Either way, I'm going to go skim through "Epic Pooh" and see if White registered on the Moorcock Reactionari-o-meter.

I'll be back in a bit to check out that link, KJ, thanks.


Kajehase wrote:
Doodlebug - have you tried the In Our Time podcast? Pretty sure you'd enjoy it - and the archives almost go back to the turn of the millenium, so plenty of stuff to catch up with.

Oh my. It looks like I could hang out there for the next couple of years [starts downloading]


I'm "currently reading" too many books to really type out, but I'll share the two on my nightstand.

Claudius the God, by Robert Graves.
Brightness Reef, by David Brin.

I'm near enough the end of Claudius the God I don't want to keep reading

because:
Claudius is about to share how Messalina has been super-naughty (and for a while, too),

... so I keep reading a bit more and more of Brightness Reef.

-- Andy


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Kajehase wrote:
Doodlebug - have you tried the In Our Time podcast? Pretty sure you'd enjoy it - and the archives almost go back to the turn of the millenium, so plenty of stuff to catch up with.

You bastard! I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! Why? WHY?!

*falls down on knees and weeps*

Noooooooooooo! There's so much! I want to go back in time and divert my ancestors to settle in Britain so I could have been listening to this in 1998. It even started on my birthday!


Muahahahahaha


Jerzy Żuławski "The Conqueror". Probably, I'll make Sherns for Pathfinder after I finish.

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