My order of The Fourth Turning just came in… which also reminds me I have an order of “Winner-Take-All Politics” by Jacob Hacker that needs picking up.
Still wildly stuck on Jon Grinspan’s “The Age of Acrimony”. Mostly because everytime I pick it up, I spend more time believing time itself is closer to a flat circle than I previously thought. May be time to swap to audiobook format and go on long walks.
Speaking of audiobooks, my recommendations have made features on hubski book threads in the past: Ray Nayler’s “The Mountain in the Sea” and Scott Lynch’s “The Lies of Locke Lamora”. The former is, unfortunately, a one-off it seems. Great “First Encounter” genre book. The latter is as easy a book to pick up as it is to put down. You’ll have fun with it as company regardless. Lots of quippy dialogue that’s reminiscent of FX’s Justified based on Elmore Leonard’s writings.
Reading Hippocrates (find a Loeb here, it starts at L147), mostly in English because the Greek in it sharply fluctuates between I could read this whole paragraph unadapted after three months of study and dafuq even is this, epic optative?! You gotta love the fact that an author from 5th century BCE opens with an overview of 'ancient medicine' and goes all "it's difficult, meandering, and with lotsa unknowns, and those countless generations wouldn't bother with it if human suffering wasn't a constant" as justification for discipline's perseverance. I'm working through a couple of books on circuit theory, keep finding words and phrases that I want to call gatekeeping jargon because EEs never use those in the wild. Then again, maybe it's so low-level for them it'd be a bit like chemist specifying they mean moles and not some other thing. Normal books-wise, I'm revisiting Ghost Wars and Charlie Wilson's War because they're a) easily the most casual reads from kb's list, b) goldmine for non-fantasy RPG ideas. I also got a great translation of some of Lovecraft's collected stories, and I impulse-bought it for footnotes alone.
Read Quarantine by greg Egan. Picked it up randomly. Nice surprise. I never heard of this dude, and appartently he is a super hard science SF. I dont like hard science, but is was very good. After the revelation that human are destroying the universe through observation of quantum .. it become a bit stale, and the long explanation (of quantum incertainty, to justify the twist) went well over my head, and lasted for way too long (hard science, I suppose) Still one of the best SF I read in a long time. Way above 'the 3 body problem" from which I was expecting so much. Read Promethea. By Alan Moore. Very wordly comic. Not the best Moore, but the charm is still here. This time it is all about human mythos and the sephirot tree, and tarot card as a revelation of human history. All stuff fascinating me since I read "foucault's Pendulum" by H.Eco. The second tome is a bit stale with the exploration of the Sephirot tree being long and without purpose. The very good: All the humor of the "weeping gorilla" comic, background joke. And the fact that the name "Promethea' is an annagram of "Metaphore"
I enjoyed Quarantine a lot when I read it 18 or so years ago. A rollicking tale for something with effectively no violence, no sex and no swearing. I recall the philosopher Huw Price (who was big in axiomatic metaphysics a thousand years ago when I was a postgrad) was a bit of an Egan fan, claiming that his fiction explored stuff that was only starting to emerge in academic literature.
Just finished Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Just started Big Time by Jordan Prosser.
"Grit, Noise, and Revolution: The Birth of Detroit Rock 'n' Roll" It's a pretty good read. I read it very slowly because I end up going to You Tube at least once a page to listen to a band or song I don't know. A great portion of the book is about MC5, which is fine. I already know a bit about them but they were significant. I didn't know much of the early Black music and plenty of it was wonderful.
Forgot to mention, Scott Lynch is building a series out of the Lies of Locke Lamora. The second book is Red Seas under Red Skies. Nearly halfway done. It’s not as good as the first, but a friend recommended the third and fourth installment. Five through seven are yet to come out. Either way, it’s a great palate cleanser for the world-at-large.