RIP (Read In Progress) Wednesday

[quillpunk]

It is once more a Wednesday. What are you reading? 👀

Comments

[quillpunk]

Just started on The Martian by Andy Weir and Beware of Chicken 3 by Casualfarmer. Loving both so far! Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey is a library book that I sadly am parted from at the moment due to not being at home, but I'm so close to finishing it (like 40 pages left!) so when I get my hands on it again, it's on. No book can escape me! [evil laughter]

I also just finished Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett, which was my first Pratchett book and I really loved it. Looking forwards to reading more of them :D

Not sleeping well

[dialecticdreamer]

I put nonfiction reading on hold due to inability to properly focus, but I read--

* The Journey Home (126,000)
* Sentry (103,500)

All by Jilly James, and

* Try, Try Again by Rachello 344. I'm 1/4 of the way through it, about 14,000 words read. So, for one week, I read 243,500 words.

And I still DESPERATELY need to improve my speed reading.

Which turns out to be the same volume of reading, but entirely fiction. At least I got a benchmark of the results of two or three hours of reading each night.

[anehan]

I finished the fucking Plato. Go me. Took me only 3.5 months.

I'm now reading Alastalon salissa (In the Alastalo Parlour) by Volter Kilpi -- one of the most famous (or infamous) Finnish novels of all time.

Also, How to Survive as a Villain by Yi Yi Yi Yi and The Odyssey as translated by Emily Wilson.

I got hooked on The Odyssey when I saw a video of Wilson reading the opening. The first line just pulled me straight in, so I had to buy it right away. I usually buy ebooks, but I wanted to have that one as a physical book. (FYI, the Norton paperback edition is really well bound.)

[honigfrosch]

Walter Moers put out a new fantasy novel (The Island of the 1,000 Beacons, again taking place in Zamonia) and I bought the hardcover on impulse. He's still coasting through on my love for his 2004 novel The City of Dreaming Books (how is that fucking twenty years ago?!) - because out of the 5 novels since, I read 3 and they all underwhelmed me. And yet here I am trying my luck with the next one.

I did have three disappointing books in a row (Schrader's Chord by Scott Leed, Prosper's Demon by K.J. Parker, and The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells). I hope to turn my disappointment into entertaining reviews at least. Currently reading another horror novel, Apartment 16 by Adam Nevill which is kinda like Lovecraft through the lens of Francis Bacon, and that should totally be my vibe, but it does drag in places and moves too slowly even for someone like me who likes slow burns. To be quite honest, I was glad to take a break from it by switching to Moers' humorous gothic fantasy this week.

[senmut]

Moonstorm by Yoon Ha Lee. Highly rec if you are one of those readers who likes the world building to just be presented as matter of fact. You start reading, and the POV character is reacting to their world with the details that say "This is not Earth" but they are just THERE and FACT and you can focus on the plot as the world spins up around you.

[senmut]

I ought o give Pratchett another try.

Re: Not sleeping well

[senmut]

That is fascinatingly phenomenal!

[senmut]

I really really want to read that Odyssey version. My library keeps saying it is in, and then trying to lend me an older male translation.

[senmut]

Whoa that sounds fascinating, that last bit.

[starfleetbrat]

Currently reading The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst which is a pretty cozy read about a librarian who escapes to her childhood home and opens a jam shop. Her companion is a sentient spider plant with a sense of humour (and a fear of things that eat plants). Its pretty good so far, very easy read.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199269577-the-spellshop

[anehan]

I highly recommend it! I've read some of it out loud to myself, and it's so easy and pleasant to read. It just rolls forward.

[anehan]

I love that type of writing!

[cactus_rs]

I finished Bel Canto, and now I'm focusing on a random old murder mystery by Helen McCloy I found in a little free library. The Swedish title is Murder On Board but the original English title has slipped my mind, anyway I'm really enjoying it! I don't know why I had never heard of her before? I also need to check if there's a hold on Bright Ages.

Re: Not sleeping well

[dialecticdreamer]

Yet, for me, it's not fast enough. LOL.

[white_aster]

My brain, it's not had so much room for books this week. So I'm still working on:

Fool's Run by Patricia McKillip, On Call by Anthony Fauci, and The Age of Magical Overthinking by Amanda Montell. I also picked up a new book by T.J. Land called (oddly) The Kindness of Meat, which is sci-fi with some romance vibes. I don't know, I saw the author and "sci-fi" and pre-ordered it with confidence!

[white_aster]

Go you on reading the (seriously) classics! I enjoyed Wilson's Odyssey! It was interesting reading not only her translation but her takes on what the events mean and also just...wow was it interesting seeing the whole thing together in all its mismatched glory!

[anehan]

Aaaaa, you're making me even more interested in it now! I've never read it before and know only the general shape of the story, but even the beginning is pretty wacky.

Plato and the Odyssey

[dialecticdreamer]

My mother gave me a poetry translation of the Odyssey when I was in sixth grade, and I was absolutely FLOORED. It made Bullfinch's feel like paste in my mouth in comparison. I'll have to find this version to the book sadly lost to a house fire.

If you survived Plato, try Aristotle instead. *G* I like to think that they would've had a philosophical cage match...

Re: Plato and the Odyssey

[anehan]

I take it Aristotle will not make me froth at the mouth in frustrated anger at his general idiocy and also arguments that leak like a sieve? And also abusing the format of a dialogue?

[white_aster]

Oh wow, I see! That should be really interesting, then, and I'll be interested in how it strikes you! I'd definitely recommend reading the essay at the beginning, then, if you want to get an early sense of the themes and overall structure, as well as some explanation of things like jokes/puns that are included but not obvious in translation.

The structure is a bit odd to a modern reader (both in "this is just weirdly episodic" and "here's some extra stuff that doesn't really chronologically fit in, but it's traditionally part of the narrative, so we shoved it at the end" ways.), but I found it quite readable!

[anehan]

Thank you for the info! I'd been planning on reading the introduction afterwards, but I'll follow your recommendation and read it now.

[rhi]

I'm currently rereading Carpe Jugulem, by Terry Pratchett, and smiling and looking for jokes I missed the last time. I'm also trying Chuck Tingle's Camp Damascus, but I'm only on the first chapter. Over the last couple weeks, I've binged my way through Katherine Addison's Goblin Emperor and it's two sort of sequels, and then Angel of Crows, same author. Then I devoured Vivian Shaw's new Greta Helsing novella which was oddly comforting and I highly recommend that series.

Non-fiction, I'm still browsing back through King's On Writing, sometimes agreeing and sometimes yelling, 'you're an idiot! Not everyone writes like you; you know enough other writers to know that!' Next nonfiction up may be the Kindness of Strangers, on adoption in Europe through the ages, or just reread A Year In Provence.

[rhi]

I keep meaning to reread Fool's Run. How is On Call?

[rhi]

Ooooh. :adds to my list for later!:

Re: Plato and the Odyssey

[dialecticdreamer]

It might, but it will be an entirely DIFFERENT set of {idiocy, stupidity, classism]. I would include mansplaining in the list, but... Frankly, I suspect that the cultural attitude toward women was that they couldn't cope with "difficult" mental exercise of any kind.

It's also better as a foundation for the field of ethical discourse, but really that's all the earliest philosophers are seen as now; foundations for next generations of ethical thought. I'd no more trust their arguments to be unassailable than I would allow a Galen-trained doctor to treat me.

[white_aster]

If you're worried about spoilers, the intro will have some, fair warning. And heck, I was introduced to this in grade school, so you can definitely enjoy the bonkers mythology on its own. I did feel like the intro gave me some perspective on parts that otherwise would have sailed blithely over my head, tho. :P

[petrea_mitchell]

I'm now working my way through Ovidia Yu's Crown Colony murder mystery series, set in Singapore beginning in 1936. Book 1 was great. I'm now on book 2, The Betel Nut Tree Mystery, which I've been looking forward to ever since seeing the back-cover blurb, which mentions a character named Victor Glossop, and wondering if he's a reference to the Glossops of P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves stories.

Well, I'm only a little way into this book, but we've learned that Victor is the son of Sir Roderick Glossop, which is the full name of a Wodehouse character, and he has a history of pulling pranks, including stealing a policeman's helmet, which is mentioned in the Jeeves stories as the sort of thing Bertie Wooster got up to in his slightly younger days. So yeah, I'm definitely reading the work of a fellow Wodehouse fan.

[anehan]

I think I've been spoiled just because of cultural osmosis. :D

OTOH, I expect I'll be rereading this one at some point, so there's also no need to get everything at once.

Re: Plato and the Odyssey

[anehan]

The funny thing is, I found Plato's sexism the least objectionable of his various idiocies. He was certainly misogynistic, but he also had a more nuanced view of women than just treating them as baby-making machines. Sure, according to him, women are worse than men at everything, but I thought his argument that women too have natural inclinations towards different fields, just as men do, and that they should be employed in those fields surprisingly progressive.

However, IMO the actual funniest thing about Republic is the way Plato has managed to set up an ideal state where philosophers are the ones in charge -- and not just any philosophers but true philosophers, philosophers like him -- and almost no one is allowed social mobility so their power is safe. The only group who could challenge their rules -- the soldiers -- are so tightly controlled that they don't have any chance to rebel (or so Plato thinks). And he's managed to give it all a veneer of respectability by couching it as a philosophical argument and then proved how it's the best system with arguments that read remarkably like modern religious fundamentalists shrieking about how allowing gay marriage would mean that soon everyone would be marrying their dogs.

At least that's what it looks like if one is determined to assign the worst possible motivations to Plato. And frankly, thinking about it like that was the only thing that got me through that book. XD

[anehan]

I'd be interested in hearing what you think about Camp Damascus once you're further along. I'm sort of interested in trying out Tingle's longer fiction, but OTOH I'm not fond of horror, so maybe not.

I bought the sort of sequels to Goblin Emperor when the publisher had a sale recently, so now they are in my metaphorical TBR pile. I hope they are as good as GE was!

Re: Plato and the Odyssey

[dialecticdreamer]

You're not wrong. One of the themes of homeschooling my boys was tackling all the "utopian" novels starting with "Utopia," and eventually both boys reached the same conclusion that I did: Utopias are only such for those who fit in perfectly.

[yhlee]

Mostly Heather Fawcett's Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries, great so far although I had a rocky start around, hmm, ~anthropological fieldwork protocols.

Rachel Rosen's cli-fi sci-fantasy thriller Cascade has terrific prose and is hilariously mordant, although I'm trying to finish the Fawcett desperately for a book club.

On another note entirely, Aaron Frias' How to Create Your First Board Game. I have an unhinged collection of game design theory books and am delighted that the explosion of literature in this field means I no longer own all of it! For example, the foundational Katie Salen & Eric Zimmermann Rules of Play (2003) is terrific theory/analysis, but it does not at any point tell you how to go about designing your own game, I assume because the book is already a 600-page chonker and it would have been out of scope. Anyway, this is very hands-on and practical and probably a great starting point. Formatting is a little weird (it really looks like the author used MS Word) but it's perfectly readable, which is all I ask.

(I've done some freelance/consulting work in game design and game writing, but usually narrative-focused design or straight-up lore, hence my interest!)

[tinkaton]

I'm currently in the middle of Cat Sebastian's You Should Be So Lucky, a 1960-set M/M romance between a baseball player and journalist in New York City. It's the sequel/companion novel to We Could Be So Good, featuring characters from the same newspaper as in the sequel, which was incredibly sweet so I have high hopes YSBSL will be just as good. I loved Cat Sebastian's other romances that I'd read but I'd put off reading these because I prefer older historical fiction haha. But I'm glad I gave these a chance because they're just as cute and fun as her other stuff.

[tinkaton]

oh a Discworld first-timer, yay :D the whole series is great, but the Watch books are my fave sub-series so I hope you enjoy the rest of them!

[phantomtomato]

I’m most of the way through The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White. I read the prequel novel a couple of years back and loved his writing, and this is the same. In the landscape of mid-late 20th century gay authors, there are a lot of wonderful writers, but White’s writing about his childhood and young adulthood in the Midwestern US, and that feels very precious and rare.

[rhi]

I enjoyed them a lot! I'd have liked more about the court, but I enjoy the day to day life world-building in the sequels!

[vriddy]

Started Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin! I'm really only at the start but I was worried about having trouble with it since it was hyped to me so so so much... but instead I ended up immediately finding a lot of the characters/narrative style really charming and I'm having a lovely time \o/

[honigfrosch]

The book definitely delivers on the "grotesque" component of that comparison. It's really quite dark and occasionally off-putting. Whether it's a good read, that I'm not sure about.

[quillpunk]

yeah i've heard lots of good things about them! and *Guards! Guards!* was definitely super fun so i'm excited for more :D

[suncani]

Re-reading a fair few things so not necessarily have a lot to say about them. Finished The Mermaids Singing, and Moon Called and while they were still enjoyable, time has smoothed over a couple of the bugbears. I got halfway through a full cast recording of Magic Bites by Ilona Andrews but I think that one may work better as a standard audiobook, so will try and look for a copy of that.

I'm about halfway through Witch King by Martha Wells and I broadly like it but it's not wowing me. I kind of felt the same about Murderbot, although I actually prefer Kai as a character. I'll keep going with it as its interesting enough.

Translation State by Ann Leckie is my current "new-to-me" audiobook and I'm really enjoying it although i haven't picked it back up for a bit. I find it interesting that I prefer the Radch- adjacent books more than the main trilogy itself but I haven't put my finger on quite why yet.