It’s been a while since the last book thread. Anything nice you’ve read recently? Or even this year?
I’ve been totally sucked in, perhaps way late, with “the poisonwood bible”. Not even my kind of book generally, would not have picked it off a shelf. But it was recommended in my favorite podcast “Heavyweight “ on the last episode and I picked it up from the library. I feel I haven’t been this engrossed in a book for a loooong time.
It’s Congo’s decolonisation through the eyes of 5 women that came live in a rural village as wife and children of an American preacher.
Any “coup de cœur “ for you lately?
Mmkay recently.. The long way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. I was in the mood for something optimistic, and that book delivered. On Writing by Stephen King. Next up to read, sitting on my bedside table. Just itching to get stuck in. But not before I finish.. Jade City by Fonda Lee. I'm honestly not sold on it. But it's a strange feeling. I know this book is objectively well written. The characters are nuanced, there's some solid world building and political intrigue but.. I just don't care about the characters. I don't know why, but I'll finish it. I just likely won't read the rest. A Memory called Empire by Arkady Martine. Sci-fi, aztec "inspired", political intrigue and a subtle romance. I'm a sucker for a romance sub-plot. The sequel just arrived in the mail for me to tuck into! I'm reading whatever I can get my mitts on to be honest. Got some books about ADHD and anxiety for my partner to read over, following her recent diagnosis. Will tuck into those too.
I very much enjoyed A Memory Called Empire. Her portrayal of the role of poetry in politics was excellent.
Just finished it! Surprising is a good descriptor. I think I'll take a lot of useful lessons from it. I didn't expect to see my own "methods" staring back at me, so that was pleasing. Of particular note is his suggestion about writing for the love of it. I have no ambitions to be a famous author, I just enjoy writing because it's fun. Crafting a world, and the characters. Setting them loose and seeing what comes of it.
I enjoyed On Writing. It's the book authors tell you to read. Editors tell you to read Stein on Writing. My editor told me to read John Gardner's "On Writers and Writing". Stephen King's book will teach you how to make writing fun. Stein's book will teach you how to make writing a successful pursuit. Gardner's book will teach you why both matter. Of the three, I read King twice, Gardner once and Stein three times.
Read a lot more this year than the last several years combined. Nonfiction In chronological order: A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn - unrelenting, I had to break it up with multiple fiction books between the sections. The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt - I read this following kb's recommendation, it has given me some food for thought at the last few family gatherings. The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow - also read because of kb's recommendation. This one had a lot of history I had never heard before, and new context for a lot that I had heard. Highly recommend. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann - interesting, but less impactful than the Dawn of Everything. Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman - argues against common ideas that human nature is bad. I didn't get much out of it. Fiction in no order, I jumped between series as audiobooks were available from the library: Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand - better than I remembered Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe by George Eliot - so much slower than I remembered The last four books of the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold (the only ones available as audio) - the background setting of the Galaxy was a little confusing since I jumped in at the end, but the stories are self contained. If I remember correctly these were recommended to me years ago as an example of how women write scifi with less wooden characters and more emotion than men, though the comparison was mostly to golden age of scifi authors. I liked the books. Definitely not 'hard' scifi, but I'll argue they're definitely scifi and not 'fantasy with spaceships and lasers.' A couple of the Peter Wimsey mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers - cute, kinda twee Firsrt quarter of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace - was reading this and liked it, but had to return it and then had no desire to check it out again once I picked up something less self referential. Ra by qntm - fun idea, but chaotically written. Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman - fun Isle of the Dead by Roger Zelazny - Sometimes I search an author on hubski, trying to get an idea of whether I'll like a book. I was searching Neil Gaimon and found this recommendation for several Roger Zelazny stories. I had heard of Zelazny but never read anything of his. It made a bigger impression than anything else I read this year. Thanks kleinbl00 for leaving that recommendation for someone else eight and a half years ago. The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny (Corwin books) - enjoyed these. The Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski - enjoyed all of these, though I thought the short stories were more engaging and the novels leaned more on political intrigue.
I tried to get into 1491 but... it rubbed me the wrong way. I think it flew in the face of a lot of stuff I already knew, and generally minimized anything that didn't suit their cozy theories. kind of like The Big Fix, which I'm halfway through because of dublinben's recommendation. Yeah it's kind of hopeful but it also relies on things like "nuclear accidents really aren't that bad if you take Soviet statistics at face value" and "we'd all be better off if we trusted oil oligarchs to audit their own environmental impact statements." It is neither as dire as the uninhabitable earth nor as imaginative as Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Where are you that only the last four books of the Vorkosigan saga are available? I gave it a run again a few years back in storyworld order and made it to, I think, "Memory" where Bujold just straight up throws away Miles' mercenary fleet in order to write cozy bullshit. Which, I guess, is what you do when you get old? Anyway I read "The Warrior's Apprentice" when it was still a ratty first-edition paperback you buy at grocery stores and it was pretty good as far as sixth-grade me was concerned but I put that series away with no regrets at uhhh thirteen years in. Also holy shit you made it through all of Amber. I stopped at Book 4 and I don't think I'm alone. Now read Earth Abides. The world is divided into two camps: those who have read Earth Abides and those who haven't.
I could get them all on paper from the library, I just couldn't get the others as audio for no money or effort on Overdrive. Yeah they're kinda cozy, but it must put you off more than me. I read a couple Peter Wimsey books and didn't regret it. To be clear I made it through the 5 Corwin books, haven't read the other 5. I have read Earth Abides!Where are you that only the last four books of the Vorkosigan saga are available?
Overdrive is so weird. This is the second time I"ve been reminded that just because I can get it on Overdrive doesn't mean everyone can. For a while I had my Los Angeles Public Library card loaded up next to my po-dunk redneck Seattle County library card but the Snohomish County one nukes the shit out of LA every time. I think I was pissed because I really liked the swashbuckling side of things and really hated the Gormenghast-fake palace intrigue bullshit because she writes Palace Intrigue as if she's writing about King Friday and Lady Aberlin. Sci fi writers suck at palace intrigue which is okay if your baseline is 1-world government let's go fight space aliens but whenever they set up some bullshit fake lines of succession nonsense that mostly just illustrates that their understanding of politics comes from the World Book Encyclopedia? I tune out.
This year.... Not much. So I'm prolly including things from end of last year. The Body Keeps the Score is fucking great, and depressing, and I broke kleinbl00 with it SORRY The Righteous Mind by Haidt was phenomenal until it nosedives into speculation 4000 Weeks is the antidote to productivity books / mindset that I really needed. I feel like it was directly written for me and it's on my select list of books that I actually look forward to reading again. Rendezvous with Rama is so far my favourite scifi book I've read, I think. (I haven't read a lot.) Finally read Bullshit Jobs and Utopia of Rules in its entirety which are good, but I like the latter more. The Anthropocene Reviewed is amazing but I like the podcast format better. I thought Piranesi was alright, until it became heartbreakingly great about two thirds in. Did my best to hold back tears in the fucking grocery store listening to it. Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino is an essay collection by a Gawker/New Yorker writer and had a few interesting things to say but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
So that book has been on my list for a long time now but I haven't read it yet. Can I ask you and kleinbl00 how it "broke" you? Like, is this in a "this book is a piece of shit" kind of way?
The first half of the book is "here's all the ways people adapt to trauma, 99% of it negative" and the second half of the book is "here's all the great ways people can cope with that trauma if it just happened but you'd best get on it MFer because if you let it go unaddressed for more than a month or so there's absolutely fucking nothing you can do about it." Metabolism? - nothing you can do about it. Tendency to fly into rages? - nothing you can do about it. Lack of physical coordination? - nothing you can do about it. Fundamental distrust of the world? -nothing you can do about it. Flat affect? -nothing you can do about it. Inability to bond? -nothing you can do about it. Bessel van der Kolk is very explicit that if you do not start aiding people in their processing of trauma within a very short amount of time after it happens, they're fucked. He mentions a little bit about talk therapy and Freud and getting through stuff but he also spends a lot of time talking about the time horizon for dealing with such things. "In an Unspoken Voice" is worse because while van der Kolk dealt with a lot of veterans and a lot of recent trauma victims, Peter Levine dealt with people in the goddamn emergency room and he's even harsher about it. If you don't start healing mental wounds before your physical wounds scab over, they will never fucking heal. I get that these books are great for clinicians and people with recent trauma and people dealing with people with trauma in your past, but if you see yourself in that book, that book is telling you "you are broken and utterly beyond repair. Let's focus on people we can actually help." I was going to buy a copy and go through it with a highlighter so that my wife would get a sense of the kind of shit that's going on behind my forehead but even that was a bridge too far. Talk about it? Hell nah. Shit I can't even pick up a mutherfucking highlighter.
It's not entirely true to say there's nothing you can do. Bessel van der Kolk is big into yoga. He thinks everyone should do yoga. Yoga will solve all your fucking problems. I did yoga until COVID. Then we all did yoga on our own, over zoom. And COVID fucked me up so much I couldn't do fucking yoga. I'm almost to the point where I might consider going back to do yoga? But I mean, I used to run, I used to bike, and I used to do yoga. And I can't run anymore, and the bike path is closed, and everything around me is under construction, and COVID took away yoga. So you generally want self-help books to, like, you know, help? And that entire genre of books is one big happy ball of "if you have childhood trauma you are irrevocably fucked, isn't it fascinating."
Bessel van der Kolk and Peter Levine think that if you have trauma, you should have a pet. Pets help. I had a cat when I was five. Cougar. He lived about five months. Apparently he got hit by a car (he probably got hit by my mother), they took him into the vet without telling me, he got put to sleep (or he died being hit by my mother) and they didn't even let me see the body. Then a year later they got my sister a cat. She was two. So I had to feed it, but it was my sister's cat. Because I'd had my turn, it was my sister's turn. Fucking cat lived to be 22. We had dogs. They were my parents' dogs. When they died? My sister got a dog. And then when that dog got lonely, the dog got a dog. So technically my sister had two dogs, a cat and 42 gerbils. Pets help. Unless you are reminded every day that you don't get one. There's nothing quite like being surrounded by animals that are explicitly and completely not yours. Particularly when the only photo of you on display anywhere, in any relative's house, is the same fucking photo of you holding that goddamn cat during the brief, shining five months of his life. So yeah Body Keeps the Score is a deeply insightful book that makes you ruminate for months at a time on why, exactly, you've always wanted a pet but know down to your very bones why you're never going to have one.
self help books are checklists for things to get you out of the gutter: clean your room, don't drink so much, go outside, get your blood moving, have a conversation, spend time doing something you enjoy instead of staring at the walls self help books written by scientists are like reading studies on what causes cancer: don't smoke, don't eat bacon, and don't get old, otherwise you're in the control group my dad has hammertoes on both feet. i have bad flexibility in my toes. you know what i mean? there's always those diagrams and plans for the stages of grief or your hierarchy of needs or whatever but i have never found a checklist to make a difference in my happiness. either there is a proximate problem to be solved or there's nothing to be done and yoga is the solution to "i'm stressed out and i need to breathe deep a bit" tier problems and not "i am filled with pain and resentment" tier ones feelings follow facts. the facts can be very different and the feelings stay the same long after they aren't caused by anything current, and the last thing that's helpful is some egghead saying "um actually it's biologically imprinted on your crainular stem and will never leave you" because even if that is true that doesn't mean there's a point to be actively thinking about this shit all the time i dunno honestly i just get annoyed by this shit
I'm reading all day but never a book to be seen. it's all rabbitholes online and stolen pdfs I've been reading different source documents for tabletop roleplaying games to try to cobble together something to run for a group of friends, also been reading up on 1500s middle eastern history and technology for the same purpose the last physical book i held in my hands was a 1942 published copy of chatterer the red squirrel, a book my mom's dad had as a kid and that i was given as a kid
The unrelated trio of Red Notice, Thieves of State and TraumaZone is going to be a bl00's review. I did the whole of David Brin's Uplift Saga. It should be more popular than it is, but it isn't because the story is random, forgettable and depressing. You put in an awful lot of work in an awfully rich environment and get "the answer is 42." David Brin doesn't so much as finish a book as get bored with it and put it down. This is probably why I also hate the Culture Series and the Hyperion Cantos. If we're going for "this year", David Gelles "The Man Who Broke Capitalism" is the sort of thing only I enjoy, but I enjoyed it. "Under the Streets of Nice" is a great, true, Ken Follett book about a bank heist. I did "The Body Keeps the Score" and it broke me. I followed up with Adam Grant's "Think Again" and Peter Levine's "In An Unspoken Voice" and all three books are utterly devoid of help or advice for anyone in my situation. "Made for Love" the book is not the same as "Made for Love" the series, but it's adjacent. If you want to read an entire book on embargos, "The Economic Weapon" is such a book. Thomas Rid's "Active Measures" is a seminal look at how the Russians manipulate the world, principally because the Russians are the only ones employing disinformation campaigns and have been since before WWI. I read two of Peter Zeihan's books mostly so I can tell anyone who brings him up how full of shit he is. I read Graeber's "The Dawn of Everything" and it's legitimately great. I read "A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century" and it's a libertarian polemic written by idiots. I am currently reading Gillian Flynn's "Sharp Objects", having finished the HBO miniseries. It's not spectacular, but I see how it landed her a book deal. I also suspect that the genesis of that entire career was a particularly haunting song off Curve's last album.
Oh yeah and also Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is legitimately a parody of the Jack Chalker novel Midnight at the Well of Souls. Which isn't a great book but isn't a bad book. The book that comes after is bad. Which is probably why Hitchhiker's Guide is a seminal classic while Midnight ceased to be remembered about three years after publication, despite being a best seller at the time. This is one of the things that keeps me from reading the Gormenghast books - they were an absolute cultural touchstone until like 1961 at which point nobody referenced them anymore at all ever. I also did Zelazny's Lord of Light which is okay? It formed a theme with the Chalker book, and is ostensibly better. I tried Riverworld again in the same vein and it's still shit. There's a bunch of stuff I started and didn't finish, or started, finished, and can't recommend. In among that stuff is the half of Bourne Identity I slogged through. Shit holds up worse than Ian Fleming I am debating hate-reading Dune again.
ha ha. I also enjoyed it but... I devoured Nathaniel's Nutmeg - which I thoroughly recommend. I met Puffin O'Hanlon and was to talking with her about how much I enjoyed it and was looking for something similar. She mentioned that her dad had written some exploration books and so next came Into the Heart of Borneo and Congo Journey. Wanting more of the same, I was recommended (by a fucking bookshop assistant!) The Poisonwood Bible. I thought this was real, not fiction. :( But I digress. To answer your question, I just started re-reading The Soul of a New Machine after seeing it mentioned on a HN thread . I remembered being totally captivated reading it at school, prompted by my dad landing a job with Data General lecturing some of the later models. It'll be interesting to see how well it holds up and how I feel about it now. I'm pretty sure I'll feel that it's a toxic work environment, but let's wait and see... “the poisonwood bible”.
I read Dave Grohl's "The Storyteller", and ... shit. I didn't think I could love the guy any more than I already do... and now I do love him. Even more. Also absolutely FLOORED to hear that the entire Nirvana experience was less than 3 years, start to finish. It was the least time he was in any band in his life. Crazy. Currently re-reading George Stewart's "Earth Abides", because I need to think there is a future out there, and this one is pretty dang good. My Mom, the Republican apologist, gave me a copy of "The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the myth of the Scandinavian utopia" because - I assume - she wants me to read a polemic against progressive societies and uphold the hate-based principles of the american right wing. I haven't opened it yet. And I am regularly excited, intrigued, and humored by Fermat's Library's Journal Club, a service that emails you a (somewhat) random scientific paper weekly. The contents of these papers are always an interesting read, and it's not just new stuff... one of the papers they sent out recently was written in the 1960's. This link to one of the papers - "Why can't you separate interleaved books?" is a perfect example of the fun and weird stuff I learn from their service.
Last year was full of hits. This year I didn't have as much success finding good reads. I am finishing up Pushing the Limits to hit my reading target for the year. It's another Henry Petroski book mostly about bridges. Some good stories, but there isn't much of a unifying theme, with chapters on the St. Francis Dam disaster and the Aggie Bonfire collapse oddly juxtaposed. The Grapes of Wrath was a memorable classic. I was occasionally distracted by scenes meant to build sympathy for the Great Depression characters that didn't make much sense. At the outset, we find the Joad family and their neighbors being evicted from their farms by the bad old bank. It was bank loans that allowed them to keep their land when times got tough, but now times are tougher and the bank has sent bulldozers. One of the arguments the family makes to establish their claim to the land is that they worked so hard on it, starting by murdering all the previous residents. Property rights are complicated, I guess. Later, in California, the poor migrants suffer further at the hands of big business. In an arresting scene, they watch in desperation as surplus food is destroyed to prop up prices and profits. If you assume that business is evil, this scene is climactic confirmation. But if you live in the real world, you might wonder why we don't see businesses producing goods only to destroy them. When vendors have excess inventory, they often reduce prices, perhaps even selling at a loss to get some revenue. When food products get old, a store might trash them or might earn some good will by donating the food, even though this may reduce demand for their products. So why, during the Great Depression when people were hungry, were food producers destroying their goods? The Agricultural Adjustment Act was a New Deal effort to raise agricultural prices by reducing surplus. Perhaps it was justifiable to subsidize the agricultural sector despite the bad optics, but Steinbeck allows the reader to lay blame on the profit motive: "children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange." The novel tells a great story, and it was not boring like Pride and Prejudice, which was assigned reading for my kid. Much like War and Peace, much of the "action" takes place in ballrooms and salons, and the drama comes from interpreting wooing signals. I don't mind a romance, and enjoyed three Thomas Hardy books over the summer, but Jane Austin was disappointing after the first sentence. Vaclav Smil's How the World Really Works delivered on its ambitious title. I fill too much of my attention span with things that appear on screens: entertainment or the latest technology advances or current events and politics, things that seem important in the moment. I forget about the material house I live in, the energy used to build and heat it, the vast network of inputs that make my lunch possible. Smil traces "the four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia" which make modern life comfortable. The challenge of decarbonization is stark. We think of wind turbines and solar panels, but electricity is just a part of the energy mix. Even if the affluent world can greatly reduce emissions, there is a much larger developing world that also wants Ikea kitchens and smokeless heat. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was very good. I read Andre Agassi's memoir in time to know who Nick Bollettieri was when he died. The Wrecker by Robert Louis Stevenson was a great seafaring adventure but started to list toward the end. I'll try to put together another end-of-year compilation.The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
The most recent book I finished was The Big Fix, which proposes several practical steps to save the climate. Unlike so much in the news around this subject, this book was really pragmatic and inspiring. The authors make a compelling case that if we make realistic improvements on areas like electricity generation, building efficiency, transportation, and diet, both individually and collectively through political action, then we actually have a fighting chance. This is an easily-readable book that will equally serve anyone you know who is apathetic or anxious about this issue.
Somehow I managed to listen to alot of audio books lately (by alot I mean more than my 1-2 books a year). Here is my ranking: - What I talk about when I talk about running (turns out murakami is a crazy runner) - project Hail Mary (the same guy who wrote the Martian) - gifts , leguin - voices, leguin - the Martian - a deadly education, novik Actually all of them were nice. If you have sci-fi or fantasy recommendations, send them my way!
The most creative thinker out there right now is, I think, Paolo Bacigalupi. They're technically "young adult" but let's be honest, so's Clive Cussler, Dan Brown, James Patterson and 80% of what grownups read anyway. Wind-Up Girl is really thought-provoking. Ship Breaker less so. I really hated The Water Knife when I read it but I keep thinking back on it, and it's the book that made me read Cadillac Desert and City of Quartz, in no small part because Bacigalupi references them in Water Knife enough that you can tell they were the two works that directly inspired it. William Gibson mostly works in trilogies. Neuromancer and the rest of the Sprawl trilogy are spectacular but old (and coming to Apple TV, by damn). Virtual Light and the rest of the Bridge trilogy are... okay. The Blue Ant trilogy is interesting? But you'd best be a Gibson fan. The Peripheral, the first third of which is on Amazon, is maybe the best stuff he's done since Neuromancer. I will recommend Midnight at the Well of Souls just because it's really wild in this total '70s way that, if you were Douglas Addams, you would want to parody the shit out of for BBC Radio, then write a book, then a series of books because it's really just that hilarious and then you would be so successful that nobody even remembers that all this started with a parody . You can hear the Hawkwind playing in the background.
I'm about a third of the way through A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay. I went in with few expectations; I must say I've been delighted so far. He's a very visual writer and also an expert stylist (of his period). Beautifully written reflection on morality and human nature, about a man who finds himself a visitor to a beautiful, strange world.