If you’re willing to count audiobooks, I’ve been tearing through Nathan Lowell’s To Fire Called. Which is from his Tales From the Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper series. It’s a sci-fi series that focuses on space based merchant shipping crews and fells somewhat reminiscent of the Aubrey-Maturin series by C.S Forester (something I read many years ago).
I also picked up a hard copy of On the Edge by Nate Silver (yes, the 538 guy) from the library and planned to crack into that this weekend.
I recently finished The Three Body Problem and loved it, so I’m reading anything I can find from Cixin Lui on libby now - which this week means Supernova Era. Super interesting so far, feels like the novelization of a thought experiment and I’m here for it.
The Skeleton Soldier Failed to Defend the Dungeon
https://comick.io/comic/01-skeleton-soldier-couldn-t-protect-the-dungeon
Latna Saga: Survival of a Sword King
https://comick.io/comic/01-survival-story-of-a-sword-king-in-a-fantasy-world
Eternally Regressing Knight
Just finished Worm not long ago! I really liked it. :) https://parahumans.wordpress.com/
Rereading Ender’s Game. I had first read it when camping years ago and somehow misplaced it when I was 5 pages from the end of the book. I was so salty about it that I never picked up another copy to finish it until now.
I think it’s good that I waited because the political B plot hits home with the state of the world today.
Edit: I finished the book tonight. I was not prepared for that kind of trauma.
A bunch of the Murderbot Diaries books. They are short, but fun.
I did the audiobooks and tore through the whole series, I absolutely loved them. I can’t stand the tv series, I think the books set the bar too high. I think they went way too “cute” with the whole concept and completely missed the mark, I always pictured murderbot as this awkward hulking warhammer beefcastle but thats not at all the direction they went in. Oh well, I had my fun with the books, I hope a new one comes out soon!
I mean, I thought the first book was “too cute”, and was just going to be an almost-YA comedy. There are only a couple episodes of Murderbot out, right? It seems oddly on the mark and well done, TBH.
Apple bats 50/50 IMO. Lasso? Fantastic, the first season, anyway, and the second was good. I absolutely hated Foundation, and forced myself to watch the first season hoping the characters would get less fucking stupid; I spent the last two episodes yelling at the TV, I was so frustrated. Murderbot, I’m excited about because it’s staying pretty close to source and is well done.
I read TMBD for the first time last year, so it’s still fresh for me. It got more serious as the series progressed, although it always maintained a comic streak. I’m hoping the show sticks with the source and doesn’t get canceled; the fact that Wells is still alive, fully successful, and established gives me hope she has enough influence and an agreement that allows her to keep it straight.
Have you read the first book again, recently? I think it has the same vibe as the first couple episodes of the series.
I just finished blasting through the entire series so the first book is a little fuzzy now. I always thought the humour worked because the over-arching plot was serious and he was a serious killing machine that happened to be awkward, which made it engaging/thrilling with charming/funny moments. I just think they leaned way too hard into the goofiness of it all, I don’t remember the scientists being absolute hippies, but that is all just my opinion. The show seams to be doing pretty well and good for them, its just not for me and thats fine.
I didn’t realize there was an overarching plot until book 3(?). It really impressed me, and to this day I wonder if she started the series knowing the arch, or made it up after the success of the first book.
Read the first one again! He definitely initially views the Preservation scientists as hippies. Their society is essentially an extremely socially liberal communism; I don’t remember it Wells makes it explicit that it’s post-scarcity, but she does make a point that visitors to the Rim from Preservation have trouble with the concept of money.
Written in memoir form, how people are presented evolves along with Murderbot. They start out loopy and not very bright (from MB’s POV) and get more rational and clever the longer he’s around them.
I’m halfway through Bible and the Transgender Experience, by Linda Herzer.
The title is intriguing. What’s it like?
It’s been incredibly informative. The author starts off by stating plenty of other books talk about the “LGB” letters (sexual orientation), but she’s focusing on the “TQI” letters (internal identity of self). Additionally, the most important thing in reading/studying/applying Biblical scriptures is understanding the context of them.
Some super-condensed highlights of the book:
- Discussion of exclusion (of outsiders, specifically non-Hebrew, women, eunuchs, etc.) in the Old Testament for the purpose of protecting the identity and purity of patriarchal Hebraic society vs. the radically-different inclusion brought about through Jesus in the New Testament.
- The application of Deuteronomy 22:5 against cross-dressing (A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing…) is based on a mis-translation of the original text. The original word for “clothing” is keli; other appearances of this word include vessel, receptacle, armor, tool. The word for “man” is geber, or warrior. Thus, a better understanding of the text is “women should not wear a man’s armor”. Another interpretation is not to cross-dress for the purpose of pagan worship, which was popular amongst other religions at the time.
- “God created them male and female” in Genesis is not an argument that only male and female identities exist and anything else is against his plan.
- The author questions why some medical body changes are culturally-accepted (Botox, breast augmentation/reduction, teeth whitening, hair dye, etc.), but HRT for trans* individuals is unacceptable for some people.
- Gender-variant individuals in the Bible: Jacob (who appeared very feminine compared to his “manly” brother Esau); Joseph of the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat fame (the original words for the “ornate robe” that he wore were ketonet passim, and the only other usage of those words appear in Tamar’s story, where she wore “the kind of garment the virgin daughters of the king” wore. Thus: Joseph the flamboyant cross-dresser); Deborah, the judge and prophet (but women at that time were property, so she was doing some serious gender-defying; other eunuchs that play a major role in their stories.
That sounds absolutely amazing. Adding it to my reading list.
About half way through Revelation Space by Reynolds.
Enjoying it so far.
I’m finishing up Permutation City, then onto Distress (both by Greg Egan), then the Revelation Space series is next in my list! It’s been there for a while, looking forward to reading it.
Have you read any other hard sci-fi lately you can recommend? I’m getting close to the end of several lists I just scraped off the internet for “best hard sci-fi”, so I might have already read it, but in case I haven’t, I’m always looking to add things to my reading list!
When I run out of other things to read, I already have all 6 Dune books on standby…
I bet you’ve already read some Iain M Banks? If not, that’s an obvious choice.
I’m not sure if I read a lot of hard sci fi, but I’ve read some maybe semi-hard good stuff over the years.
Tried Gregg Bear’s Eon series?
Juice by Tim Winton was good.
I loved Gateway by Pohl, but don’t bother with the sequels.
Roadside Picnic by the Russian brothers? Super weird and intriguing.
J. G. Ballard? Alfred Bester? China Meiville?
This is all pretty mainstream stuff, I bet you’ve read it all.
Huh, I’ve actually read NONE of those things, and none of it even looks familiar from the lists I saw.
Over the last 2 years since I started reading again I’ve blasted through Hannu Rajaniemi, Poul Anderson, Peter Watts, Richard Morgan, Amy Thomson, William Gibson, Dennis E. Taylor, Robert L. Forward, qntm…
The only authors left in my reading list are Alastair Reynolds and Vernor Vinge.
Looks like my reading list is about to expand significantly! Thanks! I’m not super picky with what I read, and I tend to enjoy pretty much anything. I think the only thing I haven’t enjoyed to the point of not even finishing the series was Liu Cixin’s trilogy. I read The 3 Body Problem because everyone says you just have to read it, but it just felt like a slog to me and I never picked up the next book, I think mostly just due to the way the novel translates to English.
I’ve been reading Human Acts by Han Kang. It’s a sad and touching book about the Gwangju massacre and its effect on people. A couple of months ago I read The Vegetarian by the same author, she’s quickly becoming one of my favourite writers.
My sister read the new Hunger Games book and was dying to talk about it, so I just started it after finishing book 3 of The Expanse
I’m on the second thursday murder club book, I think I’m going to go through the whole series I’m just loving these books. Listening to the dune audiobook too, dune rules.
“After Li Yu stays up all night to read an engrossing webnovel, he finally falls asleep–only to wake up in the world of the novel itself. And not as himself, but as a helpless fish! Shocked and dismayed, Li Yu quickly realizes that he must live in a tank owned by Mu Tianchi, the tyrant of the novel who never speaks. Whatever force brought Li Yu into this world warns him that there’s only one way to become human again: to win over the cold Mu Tianchi and change his harsh ways. But Li Yu has no idea how to do that, especially as a powerless, palm-sized carp. Can a little fish really swim its way into a tyrant’s heart?”
It’s so entertaining.
I finished Call for the Dead over the weekend and started The Black Company after seeing a bunch of comments about in a post. The writing is choppy, there’s entirely too much literal quaking in their boots, and far too many tortured, menacing souls with good hearts… but the story is good enough and I bought an omnibus so I expect that I’ll finish it.
I’ve also got The Worldbreaker Saga on hold. The writing is superb, the world building is amazingly novel, it’s mercifully free of Idiot Plot… and I just can’t bring myself to care about any of the characters. I have to force myself to read it, so I read other books between chapters. It’s a real conundrum for me, because there’s literally nothing in it that I object to; it’s really technically excellent. I’m almost more interested in why I’m so apathetic about it.
After Black Company I’ll probably go pick up the next Smiley novel from Le Carré. I’d been reading the later Karla novels out of order and hadn’t read any of the early ones so I’m doing a methodical job this time.
On multi media, we’re watching Murderbot, Andor (on recommendation, Apple’s doing their Idiot Plot thing again and we may drop it if things don’t get less stupid within the next couple of episodes), and I’ve got the 2011 Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy queued up. I generally watch the Buster Scruggs “episode” once a month or so; it’s only 20 minutes, and I love it.
For games, I finished Factorio: Space Age a couple of months ago, and I fire it up a couple of times a week to make sure the factory always grows. Most recently I expanded the base on Aquilo, which is astonishingly tedious. It’s a good sign I’m going about it the wrong way, so I may have to change tactics.
Lemmy consumes waaay too much time. I fired up my AP server node again after experimenting with it for several months half a year ago; I guess I have to accept I’m just not a microblog kind of guy. Otherwise, RSS feeds. I read a lot of technical specs and essays. One interesting monograph I’ve been working through is about an interlingua for computers. It’s very dense.
I Roved Out is slowly progressing. I know it’s supposed to be porn, but for a while the art and story was the prime motivator and it was so compelling despite so much porn content. The new book is, just, all porn, and I’m losing interest; I begin to wonder whether Alexis knows where it’s going, because it feels as if he’s padding. He’s got a lot of stories to tie up, and none of them are making any real progress. I hope he gets back on track; maybe his metrics say the prurient content gets him more readers, but honestly I just want the story to continue. There’s plenty of other sources of porn, but good, novel ideas are as rare as angel tears. Anyway, I visit that every couple of weeks to see what’s new.
Also on the web comic front, I binged Three Panel Soul last week. I still haven’t caught up to today (or the end?), but it’s repeating itself more and more so I go back and read a few every couple of days but I’m not binging it anymore. SMBC, XKCD, Oglaf in feeds and as they’re released.
For music, I’m a comfort eater. Most days I have Tomita or Jean Michel-Jarre on in the background, although about once a week I’ll have an Otyken spasm and listen to that on repeat a few times.
My brother had been badgering me for years to read this “Dungeon Crawler Carl” book - but I always kinda said meh - LitRPG ain’t my thing. But I finally gave in and read it, just to get him to stop bugging me about it.
It was a blast! So light and fast and funny. I wound up reading the whole series (seven books so far, I think) in a month. It was a great change - most of the stuff I read is big and deep and depressing, it was nice to lighten the mood.
A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit
If you’re affected by the nature of the times we’re in, I cannot recommend this book enough.
