What are you reading?

Kalm

Finished Kingkiller Chronicles again yesterday. Checked for Doors of Stone update again. Got depressed again. Thinking of going through Dresden Files to take my mind off it.

Aegoth

pre-ordered stormlight 3 yaaa

Kresslack

Finding time to revisit The Saga of Recluce, by L.E. Modesitt Jr. An interesting mix of sci-fi mingled with fantasy.

Kalm

Just finished Andy Weir's Artemis. Same guy who wrote The Martian. Really, really excellent book, highly recommended.

Shirszae

Anyone read or get any interesting books during these festivities?

Aralaya

I'm reading 1984 right now

Tasuu

Bought my cousin a young adult novel called Rebel of the Sands and am reading it since she forgot it. I'm getting a cowboy western in a middle East setting vibe from it.

Caelan

Aralaya said:

I'm reading 1984 right now

BURN IT

Solnir

Or don't. Great book.

Aralaya

1984 is a fantastic book.

Kiet

It's overrated and pretentious, tbh. The modern equivalent is people writing fake-woke tweets for an audience.

I just finished Neuromancer, more on topic, and liked it quite a bit! It's got some issues with pacing and some other minor things, but I read it all in like a couple of days without losing interest.

I've been reading the witcher books expecting some trashy fantasy, but they're surprisingly good, too. The characters are interesting barring a few weird tropes.

I'm also reading Princess Jellyfish because the show was so good, and it's cute so far!

Turns out Kindles are really convenient for binge reading, who knew

Shirszae

The first few Witcher books were very enjoyable, but the last few really started dropping the quality, or so I felt

Xaden

Currently in the middle of reading a collection of the books of Enoch. Started with the Ethiopic translation. Tough read. Should have gone with the Hebrew translation first to ease me into it...

Blujixapug

I was reading this awesome book in a dream. It was modern Lovecraftian detective/investigation, part of a series where each book was named after a tarot card in the Major Arcana. I was reading the first one so it was called The Fool, except it was also called A Qinrah of Light (I think? or Qinroth? idk). Its tone was sort of like John Dies At The End, or the Laundry Files, based on its opening couple of paragraphs: wryly glib but also spooky. It opened with the protagonist hurtling down a hill driving a car made from a hundred fears. Was super stoked to keep reading it. Then I woke up. I went to google it and it turns out the books don't actually exist in the real, waking world. smh It is possibly some sort of Kubla Khan situation where I am supposed to write them myself? Who knows.

Also reading Accelerando which is good so far, about a venture altruist (as opposed to a venture capitalist) in a two-weeks-into-the-future setting.

Also the Worm sequel: Ward.

Recently finished Hyperion. It was very good, but I'm not sure what to think about the ending. Can't figure out whether I missed something, or it ended a chapter too soon, or it was exactly as long as it needed to be.

Kiet said:

I just finished Neuromancer, more on topic, and liked it quite a bit! It's got some issues with pacing and some other minor things, but I read it all in like a couple of days without losing interest.

Amazing book!! What a dreamweaver. I don't remember having problems with the pacing so much as the dryness of the prose. Fantastic, exciting things are happening in these fascinating, vivid, colourful locations, but it's all walled off behind this quite detached tone. I don't know if that was on purpose, due to being narrated by burnout Case, or if that's just Gibson's natural writing voice and he didn't see fit to inflect a bit more enthusiasm. But it's testament to the book that it remains so readable.

The sequels, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, are roughly equally as good - which made them a little disappointing to me. I haven't read much else by Gibson except Zero History. At the time I found that disappointing because I was expecting more futuristic cyberpunk like Neuromancer, and it's set in the current day. On consideration it gave me some interesting things to think about, moreso than the Neuromancer sequels, particularly with regards to proto-cyberpunk and the factors that influence consumerist social trends and commoditisation of technology, and the broader implications of fashion as a means of self-expression.

Kiet

Yeah, it's definitely the dry prose more than plot-pacing. There's these long segments where he's just kind of describing absolutely mundane and unnecessary details, like how long it takes them to get across the hatches from one ship to another later in the book.

Really good otherwise, though, it's got a lot of thoughtful things to say, and it's imaginative and just weird in a good way in lots of ways.

I'm not sure I want to read the sequels right away, especially if they're just more of the same. Maybe after some time's passed.

Hyperion's on my shortlist for reading soon though, as is Ancillary Justice and Left Hand of Darkness. I guess I'm in a sci-fi mood, lol.

Skye

https://fantasy-books.live/index/kusuriya-no-hitorigoto/

Was reading some scanlations when I came across this particular series. I enjoyed the manga adaptation so I decided to have a look at the web/light novel versions. It's an amateur translation and so it doesn't have the same sort of literary flow you might get from the native text and some of the writing is a bit unclear, but I really enjoy the plot so far.

Set in a sort of fictional version of the Tang Dynasty, it follows the experiences of a young girl named Maomao, who was abducted and sold to the palace as a handmaiden/lady of the court. Unlike other girls in similar circumstances, Maomao is literate and a trained apothecary, her skills therefore lead her to become embroiled in various palace intrigues.

Typically, a lot of these sort of stories are often filled with melodrama and such, but the MC is already not your typical handmaiden and her personality is pretty peculiar so I find it interesting. I binged it over the last 24 hours or so, and there have been some twists in the plot where I was guessing and then proved totally wrong :x Both the translation and the original novel are on-going so I'm looking forward to further developments.