RIP (Read In Progress) Wednesday

[quillpunk]

At last, the day we've all been waiting for is here. What are you reading? 👀

Comments

[white_aster]

I have started both Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao and (in the effort to actually read physical books that I've been carting around for years) The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.

I remember a lot less than I thought about the Iron Widow universe, but I'm plugging through. The author has strewn some of my favorite anime tropes and character types along my path like candy. Power of Habit is ok so far. Given...:waves hand at the world:...I'm kind of digging a book about how dumb the human mind is and how it can be manipulated less than I expected.

[raspberrysweettea]

How are you liking Heavenly Tyrant so far? I thought it was really good.

[white_aster]

I think it's good so far! I've gotten further into it faster than I thought I would. I admit that I was uuuuuuh unprepared to read Book 2? I guess I read Book 1 so long ago that I don't really remember much about it, and I was kind of worried about that. I just do NOT remember any of the pilots or anyone's name, but I'm repicking it up via context. And I admit, I am a sucker for the sort of power struggle going on between Zetian and His Defrosted Majesty. ;P As-is, he's definitely too arrogant for his own good, but I have hopes that he will have some sense knocked into him.

[silversea]

I had the same problem, I remember Zetian and the existence of her boyfriends and that's about it. But yeah, I'm starting to remember the general gist of the story, and it's getting easier now.

Qin Zheng's a lot of fun so far! I'm digging the power struggle between them too, Zheng's so smug and arrogant and all it's doing is pissing Zetian even more.

Fun beginning so far!

[raspberrysweettea]

His Defrosted Majesty

I love this so much XD

[asphaltcowgrrl]

I started The Briar Club by Kate Quinn this morning in audio. Working on Strange Sally Diamond in ebook.

[florianschild]

I'm reading Yield Under Great Persuasion by Alexandra Rowland. I'll admit this was a "cover buy" (although I got it from the library) because the cover art is gorgeous. That said, I'm enjoying it more than I expected given the prickly, grumpy protagonist.

[raspberrysweettea]

I just finished Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian (weird west fiction), and I'm starting The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk (military fiction).

[petrea_mitchell]

I finished Lord Valentine's Castle. The last part dragged for a while, since it's basically about a drive up a very big mountain, but the ending was worth it.

I read Animals Reviewed, which is a compilation of posts in the #RateASpecies meme started by the local zoo, sold in book form to benefit the Association of Zoos & Aquariums. Reasonably amusing, definitely what I needed when I needed some light reading this week.

Now I've started working my way through the Crossroads Adventures series of gamebooks with Dragonharper, which is based on the Pern books.

[albedinous]

Oh man, I need to reread Lord Valentine's Castle. I haven't read it since I was a kid, but I remember the aliens being very interestingly weird. Glad to hear it holds up pretty well.

[silversea]

Finished reading Strange Beasts by Susan J. Morris. I liked it just fine, but not enough to continue the series.

My library hold for Heavenly Tyrant just came through, so now I'm starting it.

[white_aster]

Tyrant buddies! :fistbump:

[dirty_diana]

Paladin's Strength by T Kingfisher. At no point have I gotten to a oint where I am dying to know what happens next, but it's fine.

[olivermoss]

I've nearly finished The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie. That's my current audio book.

For my other reading, I finished The Darkness Outside Us by Eliot Schrefer and have just barely started Malum Discordiae by Ashlyn Drewek.

I read The Darkness Outside Us for a trans book club that... hopefully exists? A bunch of us showed up to the announced meeting, but the organizers didn't? I'll post a longer review to my journal when I get a chance, but in short I liked it... once I was done with it. The first half is a slog. My of my complaints are based in just not liking YA.

We emailed the organizers that we chose Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe for our next book, and hopefully that meeting happens. But, I was able to check off 'book club book' in the book bingo I set up in my 2025 reading journal.

I did finish organizing my TBR list for 2025

[screechfox]

I just finished Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang today, which is a grim but brilliant read. I'd been reading it a chapter or two at a time, but then blasted through the last third or so this evening.

I'm trying to decide what to start reading tomorrow; it'll probably be Ancillary Mercy, so I can finish that trilogy, but I'm in a medieval mood because of a course I'm taking right now, so it might be Beowulf instead.

[snobbish_cat]

I read The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding by Agatha Christie. Hercule Poirot solves a jewel theft while enjoying Christmas in the English countryside. I was in the mood for something light and fluffy and it fit the bill.

I started The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead which is the opposite of light and fluffy.

[zenigotchas]

Nearing issue #70 of Sonic The Comic. More characters native to this canon have been introduced them and I really like 'em! The best of these new people would be Tekno the canary, she's so cute! But I also like Dr. Zachary cuz the Sonic franchise can always do with more echidnas and Knuckles related lore.

[albedinous]

It's... emotionally easier right now to read things that I don't expect to love; dissecting what doesn't work for me is a lot easier than T. Kingfisher making me cry. (T. Kingfisher is very good. Also very good at making me cry.)

So...

The Thief Lord (Cornelia Funke) - Okay so far, although I keep pausing this one out of secondhand embarrassment. Low magic in modern Venice, and a bunch of runaway kids.

Guns, Germs, and Steel (Jared Diamond) - So very 1990s. Some good ideas, and some baseline assumptions that I'm going to inevitably write a 5000 word essay about.

Xenocide (Orson Scott Card) - It's very bad. I am going to write a grumpy essay about it and then donate the book to the library thrift sale. But I will know why it's bad, rather than just having a sense of vague discomfort from when I last read it at 14, and I will feel no nostalgic "what ifs" about getting rid of it. (This is... an ongoing project for me. Rereading and getting rid of the old, shitty books from when I was a teen.)

Next up when I have the emotional bandwidth for something I like is rereading Gideon the Ninth, and then catching up on the series.

[got_quiet]

Guns, Germs, and Steel was everywhere for so long it seemed. I'm curious as to how it holds up with the passage of time.

[albedinous]

I'm about 100 pages in now, reading it for the first time, and... apologies, my thoughts got long, but:

First, every few pages there's something that feels super racist. I'm 90% sure this is just that society has changed since the 1990s, in the same way that "lol gay people exist" was such a common joke back then.

There's a pervasive assumption that all societies progress from hunter-gatherer society through basic farming until they become, basically, European. Like it's the tech tree in a Civilization game, and some societies are just stuck in the Classical Age.

I wouldn't usually expect to see otherwise-progressive folks touting that idea today, at least not so overtly; indigenous rights activists have really gained some ground in showing that non-European cultures are equally complex and valid.

The author also assumes that societies always progress toward intensive agriculture, never away from it. He seems completely unaware that many societies were both hunter-gatherers and farmers, depending on the season, specific location, or other conditions. (Navajo people, for instance.) He omits the emergence of agriculture in some places because they aren't well-known as places agriculture emerged. (Wild rice farming in the American Midwest probably predates the introduction of corn by centuries, for instance - but that's not on the list.)

I think all of these assumptions are easier to challenge now, because more diverse voices are easier to find.



The other thing I find really striking is the conflation of the initial military conquest of the Americas with... well, Europeans taking over the world. In my mind, those are two separate events, and that makes his entire premise questionable.

Early modern Europeans were great at military conquest, for sure. They had more effective weapons and armor than most of their opponents. But that's not unique to Europeans. Overwhelming military strength, the displacement or enslavement of whole populations and cultures, horrific death tolls... Not to diminish the human toll involved, but that's not unique. The Romans did that, the Mongols, the Turks, the Babylonian exile, on and on.

Ditto, the pandemics that swept across the Americas were horrific, and unusually severe. But horrific pandemics are not unique. Take the Black Death - perhaps 50% of the European population dead in six years. A generation before, the Great Famine of 1315-1317 killed 10-20% of the European population. The first smallpox pandemic in Japan killed a third of the population, in the 8th century. The Plague of Justinian may have been just as bad as the Black Death. A plague so severe that it led to the collapse of society, mass displacement, social unrest, political upheaval - again, that's not unique, especially if we look at the mass toll over a century or two rather than a single outbreak.

If there had just been a massive conquest and a conveniently-timed plague, that's just the Ottoman Empire.

What seems unique to me is that in the nineteenth century, Europeans decided they needed all the land. Not just the good land. Not just the land they wanted to live in. All the land. That's strange.

Compare, for instance, the Norse. They had every ability to reach North America. They didn't choose to settle it, because most of the land wasn't land they found valuable. There were no fjords to harbor their boats, no open grasslands to plant their fields, the weather sucked. Maine or Virginia might as well have been a barren hellscape - they weren't valuable to the Norse explorers.

19th century Europeans, on the other hand, settled dozens of places that they found non-valuable, unpleasant, and inconvenient. Places they had never bothered to settle before, like Australia, Wyoming, Panama, Zimbabwe.

And this weird, unique thing happened 300 years after the initial conquest. It wasn't caused by the guns, germs, or steel.

Here's my personal theory:

What really colonized North America - the US in particular - was poverty. You had millions of poor, huddled masses, yearning to not die of starvation, who would accept "an empty, rocky chunk of land to try to farm" as better than anything they had at home.

Europeans created a huge population of people so poor that they wanted a rocky field - and then helped and encouraged them to leave, rather than using them as a valuable resource, because the Industrial Revolution changed the economic value of individual workers such that reducing your unskilled labor population could be advantageous.

I would bet that something similar happened in other places too, though I'd need to do more research to confirm that.




So... basically, so far, it's interesting reading, and interesting to see how it shaped popular understanding of world history, but I find its central premise very flawed.

[got_quiet]

Don't apologize, this was interesting, thanks for writing it up!

[mistressofmuses]

Been doing better at reading so far this year! So far this week I finished reading Somewhere Beyond the Sea and Down Among the Sticks and Bones. Since then, I've started reading Never Say You Can't Survive and Trouble and Her Friends.

[cornerofmadness]

When the Bones Sing by Ginny Myers Sain. This is Appalachian horror (and an arc, is out in March) I'm really enjoying this.

[got_quiet]

I stared reading How to Protect Bookstores and Why by Danny Caine. I just started so haven't formed much of an opinion yet but it promises "action steps" and I'm curious as to what those will be.

[valoise]

I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons by Peter S. Beagle was a lot of fun, although the end felt a bit weak. I'd never read any of his stuff before (although I was familiar with The Last Unicorn movie), but this book made me nostalgic for the years when I binged epic fantasy published in the 80s.

[meteordust]

I finally finished Alliance Unbound by CJ Cherryh and Jane S Fancher. I loved it a lot, much more than the first book in the series. I could just happily roll around in all the worldbuilding, and it managed to be so suspenseful for a prequel.