What BOOK(s) are you reading?

He’s a total modernist.

I hate driving because it has never lived up to the kind of driving Toad does, feet above the wheel.

Gary Sax wrote: Finally finished Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Enjoyed it at first but was extremely glad I was done by the end. A book that is all style with no interesting characters or narrative beats, just a couple of assholes who are irreedemable. Don't really recommend it.

Loved it, personally. Seemed to have plenty of narrative beat to me, and while I can see how you might think Norrel (for sure) and Strange (less so) are assholes, didn't you feel anything for Childermass? But hey, to each their own.

I just finished La Belle Sauvage, the first of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials prequels. You can't help but compare it to the older books, and it doesn't stand up well. It can't match the seemingly endless cavalcade of wonders nor the intellectual and literary heft of that trilogy. There also seems like a lot more Deux Ex, but maybe that's just because I wasn't distracted by so many cool geegaws. But Pullman's mastery of character and pace are undimmed, so it's still a fun read for all that.

GorillaGrody wrote: I've been rereading The Wind in the Willows and concluding that it's my favorite book (which usually happens when I read The Wind in the Willows).

Mole's sense of Spring: "Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing."

Toad's first sight of a motorcar: "Glorious, stirring sight! The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today—in next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped—always somebody else's horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!"

Same. Love the writing. For a moment, when I read the title of the post for Burrows and Badgers, I was excited because I thought it was based on Wind in the Willows.

Stephen King: THE OUTSIDER. Standard boogeyman fare. Almost dumped it once the asshole PI crew showed up, but he kept it to just the autistic lady, so I dealt with it. I can't fucking stand King's Jerome character with his "ironic" shuck-and-jive routine and will never touch those books. I miss old King. I think I'll re-read THE SHINING or FIRESTARTER or something,

Matt Haig: THE HUMANS. Has potential, but ends up kind of bad. Sort of a weird UNDER THE SKIN meets THREE-BODY PROBLEM mess with jokes in it.

Cixin Liu: BALL LIGHTNING. Very flat and affectless. This worked in THREE BODY PROBLEM, with the Cultural Revolution in the background, muting everything, but here it's just weird and makes the book read like a treatment.

I'm between books a the moment. I have two books on hold at the library that aren't available yet, so I was looking to fill the gap. My buddies played Dick this past weekend, an Apples to Apples game where every response card is a quote from the book Moby Dick, most of them pretty raunchy. There's a million great cards in the game so I figured I'd take out the book and listen to it on my commute.

I'm only ten minutes in, and jeeze, every frikkin' sentence in that book is neck-deep in meaning and metaphors. Don't know if I'm up to this while driving in traffic.

This is crazy, because I also am reading MOBY DICK and I am pretty sure daveexmachina is as well! Book club time!

I can only read it in chunks because, as you note, it is dense. I can tell you the preacher chapter is something else.

Our talk about Gene Wolfe encouraged me to reread The Book of the New Sun. Like what you're all saying about Moby Dick, you can't really skim it. It's a vocabulary workout - some things stuck from the last time I read it (claviger, orichalk), but other times I had to go and refresh a lot of word sources (merychip, arnisother, contus, etc). If you're a fantasy fan and haven't read it, you should.

I have read a ton of stuff over the last couple of months during my last rounds of chemo and subsequent fevers:

Fiction:
Inferno! Volume 1: A GW short story collection my friend gave me shortly after being diagnosed so I would have something mindless and pulpy to read. It was not very good as far as GW fiction goes. Only a couple of the stories rose above end-to-end combat. The final story, which is the first installment in some longer tale was probably the best one (not coincidentally by the most experienced of the writers in the book).
The Sword in the Stone and The Queen of Air and Darkness by T.H. White: These were both excellent. I am a big fan of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and this satirical take was quite fun. The books maintain the choppiness and weird mishmash of Malory, while incorporating lots of then contemporary political commentary. Highly recommended.
Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin: I gave the set as a gift to my wife for Christmas and she really wanted me to read them so we could talk about them. I thought it was a good read. The worldbuilding was great and the exposition flowed smoothly and was not just a dump of information. The characters are the most important part of the story with the plot being of lesser importance, which reminds me a lot of Delaney or Wolfe.

Nonfiction:
A lot of 1900-1950 stuff:
The Third Reich trilogy by Richard J. Evans
The Third Reich in History and Memory by Richard J. Evans
Mussolini's Italy by R.J.B Bosworth
The Theory and Practice of Hell by Eugene Kogan
An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson
Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton

I am currently reading The Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes.

RobertB wrote: Our talk about Gene Wolfe encouraged me to reread The Book of the New Sun. Like what you're all saying about Moby Dick, you can't really skim it. It's a vocabulary workout - some things stuck from the last time I read it (claviger, orichalk), but other times I had to go and refresh a lot of word sources (merychip, arnisother, contus, etc). If you're a fantasy fan and haven't read it, you should.

Past month has been busy on the reading

Wolfe is probably my favorite sci-fi/fantasy author, so I decided to reread a bunch of his stuff. Just finished Fifth Head of Cerebus -- truly an excellent collection of three novellas. Starting in on Peace next.

Also read Lord of Light by Zelazny this month -- another truly great sci-fi book.

The Hunger A historical fiction book -- the history part is the Donner party's trek across the country, the fiction part is a supernatural presence that is driving the madness and the party to their ultimate fate.

YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE, 2nd ed. A classic of the personal finance genre and relevant to my interests.

Unfortunately I am already on board with most of its message, so it's a bit of preaching to the choir:

- Most shit you spend money on doesn't make you any happier.
- When you subtract out the costs of commuting, destressing, and other work-adjacent expenses, most people make vanishingly little at their ostensibly high-paying job.
- Since you are literally trading finite amounts of your life on earth for stuff, you should spend money on stuff that makes you happy. (Whether it's actual stuff, or experiences, or whatnot.)

It's a good book and always nice to be refocused on this, but I find myself skimming it as a result.

If I had found it ten years ago my mind would've been blown -- and I'd probably be retired already.

Just picked up the new Atkinson history about the revolutionary war. Excited.

Read a few things since I last posted here:

Big Game: The NFL in dangerous times. I read this mostly for the author, Mark Leibovich, who wrote the greatest modern political book ever. I don't care about the NFL. It was an interesting look inside the billionaires club.

The Fifth Risk. Michael Lewis' latest, which was a too-brief assessment of just how unready the Trump Administration was to take over and how incompetent they've been at running the world's largest and most complicated machine.

City of Devils: The two men who ruled the underworld of Shanghai. Despite the wonderful detail of everyday Shanghai between the two world wars, I was unimpressed. The book didn't really go anywhere or do anything besides give you this vision of a couple small-time hoods.

Just Another Ni***r: My Life in the Black Panther Party. Don Cox was the party's primary gun-runner. I've read some stuff by the leaders and listened to some firsthand accounts by other members and this alternately refutes and corroborates a lot of that. This was really interesting.

State of Play: Under the skin of the modern game. It's a discourse that tours the various levels of modern English football- players, coaches, fans, reporters. Parts of it were brilliant. Others were less so.

At the moment, I'm finally getting around to reading Scalzi's Redshirts for a book club I might be joining soon (and because I like Scalzi) and The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination.

I just finished Guinn's "Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple."

It's a well written, thorough account of Jones and his rise to hubris, deviance, and abuse.

Maybe two-thirds of the way through Neil Faulkner’s Apocalypse: The Great Jewish Revolt Against Rome AD 66-73. It’s a pretty engaging read that moves along at a reasonable clip, but it’s hardcore Marxist. Kind of makes every third sentence predictable. Who were the Jewish collaborators? Property owners! What’s revolutionary religion? An expression of class consciousness!