Ask Lemmy

Reading Stalking Darkness, by Lynn Flewelling. 2nd book of the Nightrunner series. Up next is the rest of the series! :P This is my 2nd read through. After that, I'm planning to re-reading a few Mercedes Lackey books before finally reading the newest one. Might just hop into the newest one if I get impatient though.

Currently reading Drunk by Edward Slingerland. https://www.alcademics.com/2021/09/review-of-drunk-by-edward-slingerland.html

Pro difficulty: I am only reading it in bars.

Beyond Command and Control by John Seddon, my second time though and a good book about systems and how systems dictate human behavior and how to alter them instead of beating people up to get results.

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang, a series of short stories. I'm on the third story in the book now and I've loved each one of them. Compelling hook, well written. They have all gotten me obsessively thinking about the world he's created.

recently finished:

• Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
• last night in Montreal by Emily St John Mandel

Currently reading the haunting of Hill house by Shirley Jackson

My 6 favorite authors either haven't published in a long time, or they've begun publishing early works that weren't good enough to get published when they started out. 2 of my other favs have died. This has pushed me out of my comfort zone and delved into Steven Fry's Mythos series... and I rather like it. Oh, and if anyone sees Patrick Rothfuss around, please smack him upside the back of his head.

Currently reading Man in the High Castle, and also Scythe since I saw it on a friend's bookshelf and am always looking for something new to read while waiting for more malazan books (can't commit to another reread right now).

After a long time of no reading, I started reading on the beach The Handbook of Epictetus. I bought it thanks to the recommendation of PewDiePie of all people in the video he did after losing the first spot in YouTube rankings

• 4 Noble Truths.

So far, I get the impression that it's a phiosophical treatise discussing the suffering in life and the inevitability of it. I'm not sure when I'm going to end, because I don't approach philosophical texts sober and my stash of beer has ended abruptly.

• The Way it went down volume 2

An anthology of stories relevanat to Delta Green role-playing game. It's one of those rare cases when a RPG-inspired material doesn't suck. The stories are usually very short, horror, borderline Lovecraftian. Some are quite disturbing to read.

• Finnegans Wake - my 'big read' which I am doing over the year along with a group over on reddit: one of the only things that still has me dipping into reddit now. Fascinatingly incomprehensible.
• Tchaikovsky's Children of Time - some good thoughtful worldbuilding and a solid story.
• Robert Brightwell's Flashman's Waterloo - one of his series of Flashman prequels featuring the uncle of George MacDonald Fraser's protagonist. Very well researched and entertaining
• A collection of Neil Munro's Para Handy tales - gentle humour and a glimpse of a very different world - albeit rather stereotypical and patronising in some ways.

Fairytale by Stephen King

I just finished Dune: Messiah and am gonna read a short monograph about Commodore Perry and the Battle of Lake Erie before cracking into Hornblower: Flying Colours

Currently reading Manifolds, Tensor Analysis, and Applications by Abraham et al. Basically, how do you do geometry and calculus on surfaces or objects that are enough like a surface?

For STEM nerds: this book discusses manifolds in infinite dimensional spaces as well as finite dimensions. I believe there is a fluid dynamics application in the book that requires the infinite dimensional theory. There are far simpler books to learn this material if you just need to speedrun into calculations, but I really want the "full story".

Lost Metal by Sanderson.

I'm trying to read the other Sanderson books. Got through Way of Kings, but it was a slog. I don't love really long books.

So I'll probably read Tress next and then give Storm Light Archive stuff another shot.

Reading "A Tale of Two Cities" for the first time.

One of the Wheel of Time books.

"Full Sea" by Chang-Rae Lee. Dystopian fiction, but not sci Fi and not like any dystopian fiction I've ever read. It's about a young girl who makes her living as a tank diver in a giant hydroponics farm/fish farm. They make her boyfriend disappear for genetic experimentation, because he's the only human the researchers have ever seen who is completely cancer-free. She poisons the fish and leaves the farm compound forever to find him. Very few workers have ever left the compound, because it's so dangerous outside. Some bad stuff happens.

Finishing up “The demon-haunted world” by Carl Sagan, which is really good but a little repetitive, and I’m a few chapters into Bertrand Russell’s “The Problems of Philosophy”, which is a great little book that summarizes the big questions of philosophy up to that point in time (in Russell’s view, of course).
After those I’m looking to start Richard Feynman “The Pleasure of Finding things out”, since the Sagan book got me wanting more popular science stuff, as well as “the people’s history of the United States”, since that comes recommended from some friends (and will hunting of course!).

Belgarath the Sorcerer, part of the Belgariad series by David and Leigh Eddings. I read the series as a kid and pick it back up once every few years.

I'm currently reading "tremendous" by Joey Diaz and "a promised Land' by Barack Obama

No Game No Life Volume 4

Currently reading the third Percy Jackson book right now