For fun and pulp I'm deep in Warhammer 40k novels until the final novel of the Horus Heresy series comes out sometime this year. Specifically, the novel Titandeath by Guy Haley has been really enjoyable because of its great mix of giant robot on giant robot action and a series of more personal sections showing the conflict and cooperation of woman and machine, man and machine. I think that it gives a lot of flavor and depth to something that started out as a way to sell plastic toys and has become a series of more than 500 books, shorts, audio dramas and more by a ton of different very talented authors. I'm gonna continue to talk about 40k because there's never been a better time to get into it.
For something more substantial I was listening to an interview with a history professor who said his favorite two books that he assigns every level of student he teaches are War and Peace and a book I hadn't heard of called Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Buddenbrooks is subtitled: The Decline of a Family. I'm looking forward to getting into it.
Anyway.
What are you reading?
Have you read any of those Dark Imperium books post-Guilliman's awakening? HH grew lukewarm for me, but those new developments turned my head a bit. I don't care about spoilers, but only know the broad strokes so far.
Bram Stoker's Dracula, because it's embarrassing I didn't yet. So far, even though it's a very uneven burn, I like it more than any of the adaptations.
Danielle Cybulskie's How to Live Like a Monk, which, despite the title, is more about how monastics dealt with their life of deprivation, what they did for mental health, how they mitigated burnout, and more. Even though the author is a medievalist historian, it's a very light and approachable read. It's respectable to monks, but secular in lessons learned if that's your worry.
I've been trying to left-side read a couple Loebs', but my vocab isn't there yet. Damn you, Cicero, and your septuple-level puns!
- Have you read any of those Dark Imperium books post-Guilliman's awakening?
Yup. I wanted to enjoy them, and certainly enjoyed parts. The more perspective we get from guys like Frater Mathieu and other mortals the better. But overall I felt they were pretty bland. Ultrasmurfs versus Plague Bois is only entertaining for so long. By contrast I thought Spears of the Emperor was AMAZING and is what more warhammer novels should strive towards, specifically because of its emphasis on the relationship between transhumans and mortals.
- HH grew lukewarm for me, but those new developments turned my head a bit. I don't care about spoilers, but only know the broad strokes so far.
The Horus Heresy for me is best enjoyed as a series of moments, vignettes. I LOVE the Siege of Terra series so far specifically because it takes the broad strokes that were fated to happen and gives context to the big events. I will agree though that there's lots to slog through before you get to the juicy bits.
Overall I'm pretty happy with the direction GW is taking with the franchise, mostly because they seem to be a lot more free with the IP and there's lots of other good content out there. Hammer and Bolter the TV show has been a pretty big smash hit amongst the fandom and I'm loving the Warhammer 40k: Darktide game. It's a bit barebones but the developers are committed to supporting it for a while, and its core gameplay loop is fun for me.
Cybulskie's book sounds interesting. I like that kind of side-view take on history. I may add it to my list once I'm done with War and Peace and Buddenbrooks.
- I will agree though that there's lots to slog through before you get to the juicy bits.
Sometimes a painful slog for exceptional bits. The setting and story are fun, but... eh, you know how in LotR, the everyone's favourite encounter with Balrog is about the same length as Tolkien yammering about brambles on a footpath or which capezios Legolas donned that day? Same thing here. I kinda just moved to reading excerpts on r/40klore or running wiki articles through TTS while doing something else, only picking up a book on recommendation or because synopsis/excerpt made me curious.
I will read Spears and Siege one of those weekends, though. You're not the first person praising them for what I like (mortal/ooutsider perspective), and they sound good by synopsis alone, but that's a push I needed. Thanks!
Finished up:
On Writing by Stephen King - very much enjoyed it.
Elements of Style (admittedly a very short book) by William Strunk Jr. Something I'll return to when writing as opposed to chewing on it like other books I'm reading.
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers - another wholesome tale.
Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo - I had been waiting to read this, so was super chuffed to get my mitts on it the week it came out.
Next on my list:
Stein on Writing by Sol Stein (cheers for the heads up on it, kleinbl00.)
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin (for my workplace book club, I'm excited to tuck in.)
Record of a Spaceborn Few, again by Becky Chambers. I'm getting through her works by sprinkling them in when I want something light. Basically if I re-read anything by Joe Abercrombie, I'll need her books as a palate cleanser.
Pondering:
Anything by Guy Gavriel Kay. Apparently it'll be right up my alley, keen to explore.
King's On Writing is half memoir, half guide to music appreciation. It may have been written to help writers out but it's a better guide for people who enjoy reading to grasp why they enjoy reading. His instruction on how to write better won't hurt your writing, for sure, but is probably more intended for someone who is thinking of writing, not someone who has been at it and wishes to improve.
Stein's On Writing is okay bitch, you want to get paid for this shit? Here's how. It's much less entertaining, much more ruthless and much more insightful. Unfortunately it's also contemporary to John Grisham's breakout (Stein hated the fuck out of Grisham) so it's paleoinstruction, a guidepost from an era where there were dozens of publishing houses, books came on paper and cassette tape and vanity publishing meant driving around with a trunkful of paperbacks to sell city-to-city.
I'm about four fifths of the way through A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay. It's a singular masterpiece.
Next on my list is The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy (along with the companion novel, Stella Maris).
I had a hard time stomaching some chapters of This Is Vegan Propaganda because it does the Uninhabitable Earth thing of beating you to death with depressing facts. The book aims to convince people to become vegan on, mostly, a moral basis. While I am the easiest audience for that, I didn't find their argument very convincing to people who aren't already open to consider the feelings of nonhuman animals.
Read Ryan Holiday's The Perennial Seller which is an easy read that succinctly explains what it takes to be successful long-term as a creator or entrepreneur. It's a good book to gift anyone who wants to become a writer, entrepreneur or artist and can use an honest talk on the hard part of creating for a living, being dispiriting only to those who probably wouldn't have made it anyway. As always with Ryan's books I don't think it's the best read, but I got a bunch of useful things out of his clarity of thought.
It is much better than Tony Fadell's Build, which is a SV techbro trying to generalize his life's luck into advice. I quit a third of the way into it because none of it was of any use.
Another book I gave a good shot is The Murderer's Ape, a Swedish novel that's probably fantastic to read aloud as a bedtime story and is endearingly written, but not the kind of book I enjoy reading myself in no small part because there was little to no plot.
I read Bill Browder's Red Notice. It's an interesting book in that the self-reflection is well hidden; Browder is the grandson of Earl Browder and he decided to take vengeance on his lineage by becoming the douchebaggiest capitalist he could, including stints with Robert Maxwell, BCG and Solomon Brothers. While at BCG he discovered that you could absolutely pillage the former USSR thanks to the shitty way douchebaggy capitalism decided to piss on communism's grave. Then Browder runs up against the rise of the oligarchs who aren't particularly interested in sharing the wealth with the West, complications ensue, Browder hires Sergei Magnitsky to sue Putin basically and the dude becomes a humanitarian on his way to talking congress into treating the oligarchs like pirates instead of diplomats.
Dude still thinks he should have been allowed to ass-rape the former USSR, though. I started that book about three days before Traumazone dropped.
Which is not a book but is 100% worth your time because rather than Adam Curtis going out and shooting a bunch of stuff and pontificating, it's just Adam Curtis grabbing content out of the BBC's b-roll library and sparingly subtitling it.
Browder's book had an advertisement at the end for Thieves of State, which I was absolutely there for. Sarah Chayes decided reporting for NPR in Afghanistan wasn't rewarding enough so she tried to run a women's NGO there for a few years. It's pretty gnarly. She makes the point, quite insightfully and exhaustively, that it isn't so much the form of government that determines whether you live in an oppressive shithole it's whether it's corrupt or not. Which is why every Indian I've ever talked to thinks the world of Modi - he's anti-corruption. MBS? anti-corruption. Lukashenko? Ran on a platform of anti-corruption. Hugo Chavez? Anti-corruption. You can be a dictator for a long-ass time. A corrupt dictator? You're just opening the job up to anyone more ruthless than you.
And then I read all of the Uplift Universe. Which should have been better. Which is pretty much David Brin in a nutshell.
Then because I'm such a fun-loving guy I read the WSJ's take on MBS which is a lot less forgiving and introspective than Hubbard's book.
I'm reading some other damn thing about dictators but since I read with my ears and since I now have an hour or two of industrial music to prep every week I've let it slide. I evaluated 130 albums last week. I kept 40.
I'm also reading J Malcolm Wild's "Clock Wheel and Pinion Cutting" because I bought no less than 66 watchmaker's wheel hobs off eBay and I don't know the first fucking thing about wheel hobbing. But boy howdy once that mill is running I'll be in one hell of a spot to hob the shit out of stuff.
S. Riefler's "Compensating Pendulums and How To Make Them" (1905) is mostly "just add mercury." Not the most practical advice 120 years into the future.
I was recently talking with an Indian friend of mine who pointed out that the Modi government has all but outlawed cash transactions of any sort. The other friend I was with, who is a right winger to the extreme, said, yeah that’s because they want to control you. To which the Indian friend said that no, it’s because it’s the first time in history that even poor people can prove that they made a transaction and it’s not just their word vs someone richer and more connected. He doesn’t have any illusions about Modi, but puts that forward as an unambiguous good for the country.
I had an Indian acquaintance who told me that nothing happens in Delhi without sweets boxes full of cash. That, he said, was why Indians buy so many sweets - you can't accomplish anything official without a gift of sweets (with cash in them). He was pretty incensed about it, too - clearly, his entire life was one big grifty adventure of paying bribes to dipshits.
We talked about Modi changing out all the currency and he saw it as an unalloyed good. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the petty grifters to come clean about some of the taxes they hadn't been paying and a leveling of the playing field for all the mid-level dipshits who had been grifting their entire adult lives.
Notably, my friend is not a muslim.
Berserk Volume 1 by Kentaro Miura
Somewhat random pickup for me as apart from Sandman, Maus and a few other graphic novels I don't usually read them. I enjoyed this one and will grab volume 2 at some point. My guess is that it will improve as Volume 1 did have a "pilot" feel to it in places. 4/5.
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch - 1st of the Gentlemen Bastard series.
Lots of recommendations for this one so I tried it out. I find that highly recommended books are very much hit and miss for me, same with movies. I would say this was a pretty good fantasy with a story that moved along very quickly and didn't really let up. Some parts were done really well and were quite clever, parts of the main character were genuinely sophisticated in a kind of Ender's Game fashion, but then towards the end it relied too much on plot armor and big moving pieces. 3/5, good but not rushing to read the next one.
Doom: Game Engine Black Book by Fabien Sanglard - Available online https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/
So this is essentially a deep dive into the software, hardware, tools, processes, and people who created Doom way back in the 90's. I played the game a lot when I was younger and have an interest in how these games were built. Perhaps too eclectic for a general audience but well worth checking out if you want to dig into some retro game building. 4/5, i'll be checking out his other books.
Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom
Bob works at Google on the DART language and has a deep interest and understanding of computer languages. He wrote this as a guide to those of us interested in building your own computer language interpreter (the thing that takes your code, interprets it, and executes it). He brings you through two different ways to implement one, first using an Abstract Syntax Tree approach that is simpler but slower, and then using a Virtual Machine approach (similar to Java) which is faster. Great book, enjoyed creating my own language from it. 4/5.
The City of Bohane by Kevin Barry
Kevin is an Irish author I've been following for a while, he writes some nice short stories like The Pub with no beer for example. The novel is set in a fictional Irish town in the near future where there is little technology and an assortment of violent and vibrant characters. I just finished it today and the story is good but its really the authors use of a corrupted English language full of vivid descriptions that I enjoyed. I listened to the audiobook and the author reads the book himself. It included the immortal line:
- He gave him a side-eyed glance that you wouldn't see on a stoat in a ditch.
4/5.
Babel by R.F. Kuang - Nearly halfway through this gem. Was recommended to me by one of the few friends I keep up with from grade school. Read the summary in the link, since I won’t do it justice… though I did rave about it in chat lately.
Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim - Next on the list, this book caught my eye in a local store. I had a rare moment of being on page 5 without remembering turning the pages due to how well written the opening chapter was. Needless to say, I got the book shortly after.