What are you reading now?

[MajorRewrite]

The Authors’ Hangout has a popular “what are you listening to now” thread but not a thread dedicated to what we’re reading. Seems odd to me, so here it is.

I recently finished The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. I’d seen it on bestseller lists for years (published in 2017) and got curious. It’s well written and I can see why it’s popular, but it didn’t really pull me in. Maybe I didn’t connect with the two main characters because I’m a dude? I dunno. The plot includes a couple of twists that were a bit too telegraphed to work completely. I rate the book a solid meh.

Now I’m reading The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. It’s off to a strong start with inventive world building. I won’t provide any spoilers.

Anyone else want to share what they’re reading? Any books you’d highly recommend that you finished recently?

 

[KeithD]

The AH does have a "What are you reading?" thread that trails back to 2009. Hasn't popped up since mid January, though.

https://forum.literotica.com/threads/what-are-you-reading-at-the-moment.644355/page-61

I'm currently reading:

Michael Connelly's Trunk Music

and

Martin Walker's The Body in the Castle Wall

 

[Inthesewalls]

Theme Music- T Marie Vandelly
And
Five Days At Memorial- Sheri Fink

 

[ElectricBlue]

Russia - Antony Beevor

A history of the 1917 - 1921 civil war between the Bolsheviks and the White Russians.

 

[AlinaX]

I have just finished Raising the Stones by Sheri S. Tepper, and have just started re-reading Grass in the same series.

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

Right this moment I'm reading the short story Sandkings by George RR Martin, which is giving me an idea for parody story, which I'm going to title Sandqueens.

 

[onehitwanda]

That is, when I'm not falling asleep with it on my face. Winter is hibernation time, or so says my body.

 

[SimonDoom]

I just finished Louise Erdrich's The Sentence, which was interesting, and now I'm reading a collection of Elmore Leonard's western short stories.

 

[PennameWombat]

“Vietnam: A History,” by Stanley Karnow.

Prior to this, “Three Miles Down,” by Harry Turtledove, a new alternate history of the 1974 retrieval of a sunken Soviet submarine by the Hughes Glomar Explorer. As in the real event, retrieval of manganese nodules from the sea floor was the cover story, but in the book even the sub was a cover story. I’ve read a number of his books and IMHO this one is definitely not among his best. His MC is a graduate student who gets pulled into the retrieval, but the book spends way too much time on graduate student life and too little on the real reason for the expedition.

 

[MajorRewrite]

The AH does have a "What are you reading?" thread that trails back to 2009. Hasn't popped up since mid January, though.

https://forum.literotica.com/threads/what-are-you-reading-at-the-moment.644355/page-61

I thought I remembered a thread, but a search turned up nothing. Sigh.

 

[Duleigh]

I'm re-reading Equal Rites by my literary hero Sir Terence (Terry) Pratchett. On the disc world the eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth son becomes a very powerful wizard, but what happens if the eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth son is a girl? Hilarity ensues.

 

[onehitwanda]

I'm re-reading Equal Rites by my literary hero Sir Terence (Terry) Pratchett. On the disc world the eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth son becomes a very powerful wizard, but what happens if the eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth son is a girl? Hilarity ensues.

There is such a large and warm section of my heart set aside for Pterry. He was such an accurate observer of human nature.

 

[Duleigh]

There is such a large and warm section of my heart set aside for Pterry. He was such an accurate observer of human nature.

I hope my Geek Pride entry this year is a proper tribute to him

 

[BobbyBrandt]

I'm currently reading:

Michael Connelly's Trunk Music

Michael Connelly is one of my favorites. When I used to travel for business I usually had one of his books with me, or one by Robert Crais.

I always enjoyed the way that the mutual respect of these two authors came across in their stories, with them frequently making mention of each other's main characters (Harry Bosch / Elvis Cole, etc.) in their own stories. Seldom more than a brief mention, such as "Bosch waved a greeting to that smart ass private detective, Elvis Cole as they sat at the intersection waiting for the light to change." If you weren't familiar with the work of both authors, the references made by each would be lost to you.

The cameos that he used to make on the TV series "Castle" were also interesting.

 

[SimonDoom]

Michael Connelly is one of my favorites.

I agree. He's one of those unusual authors who can write a very enjoyable story that satisfies all the "genre" elements while also being a good writer. It's not fancy, "arty" writing, but it's very solid. He's an author I think writers can learn from in terms of mastering the craft of writing.

I think Elmore Leonard was much the same way. A good "genre" writer whose writing was better than the usual genre writer. He also wrote advice for authors that I think is worth paying attention to.

 

[Andrew1968]

I haven't read fiction in a while. I'm usually picking up and putting down a few books at once. I'm reading The Cambridge Companion to Hegel; The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment, selected and translated by Brian Copenhaver; and Esotericism and the Academy by Wouter Hanegraaff. The Copenhaver book is the most interesting and difficult. Copenhaver has selected and included a large number of pieces, which add up to an immense goddamned puzzle - how a relatively well educated and intelligent group of Westerners made sense of the known universe and themselves before modernity and science more or less excluded or rubbed away all traces of their entire worldview.

 

[Dearelliot]

Along with M. Connelly, one or two books a year, usually, my favorite is John Sandford. Unlike, "One a week Paterson," Sandford also writes maybe 2 books a year, so Having difficulty finding a book I like, I now am reading his old books over again. Fortunately, with my age, I've forgotten most of them and have no problem rereading them.
At present, I'm reading "Deep Freeze" by Sandford. 2017
Maybe it's my age but I've gotten so damned hard to please when it comes to books.

 

[ChloeTzang]

Working my way thru Kramer's "History Begins at Sumer."

This isn't a typical history book in that it doesn't go into any detail at all about the different city-states of Sumer, who ruled what lands, where Sumer was, or even mention any dates or events of any widespread significance, etc. What is is, is a collection of writeups on 39 "firsts" of life in Sumer taken just about exclusively from information recorded on 4,00 year old cuneiform tablets. There's an essay on a tablet Kramer describes, where a father tries to convince his son to study hard and become a scribe. Another on the origins of Sumerian writing - driven by the need for accounting records. Another on how a farmer should tend to his fields, as well as one on Sumerian proverbs and wisdom, and Sumerian mythology stories. There's even an essay on sexuality. The Sumerians were a little less inhibited than we are! He uses a lot of straight quotations from these tablets so you really get an idea of how Sumerians thought as well.

What most people don't realize is that there are tens of thousands of Sumerian tablets in existence, and while they can be translated now, there aren't many people who can read them (surprise surprise) and thousands upon thousands of them are still undeciphered, sitting in the British Museum, and many more have been illegally excavated, and have made it into the antiquities market and now sit in private collections. When they were first translated, they opened up a whole new civilization to historians that was almost unknown, having vanished beneath the sands of Iraq, as far before Christ, as Christ is before us. Except for brief references in the Old Testaments, largely in Genesis, Sumer was unknown, but the discover and translation of these old tablets, many of which came from collections of later civilizations such as the Assyrians, and the Library of Nineveh, where the Epic of Gil-Gamesh was first found and translated, opened up a world of insight into a civilization that was the first to use written language, the first to document a legal system, the first to build cities - and that's what the book is about - firsts that were documented.

What's also documented is that many of the Biblical stories in the Old Testament were taken from the Sumerians, including Noah's flood, Eden, the Adam and Eve "rib" story. The Bible itself says that Abraham was born in Ur, one of the Sumerian Cities, and records a number of Sumerian cities and their rulers. The Old Testament was compiled somewhere between 1200 BC and 200 BC. but the Sumerians wrote many of the same stories down well over a millennium before that. Quite fascinating, and somewhere else (not here), I read that archeologists have found tablets that document that Jahweh, the old testament hebrew name for God, was actually the city-god of a specific Sumerian city. And through linguistics, we can trace the old Sumerian goddess Inanna, later know as Ishtar and then Astarte, as he made her way into the Old Testament as "Eve".

 

[SimonDoom]

I've been re-reading Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale, which is a backwards journey through human evolution. It starts with the present and then proceeds back in time with each successive chapter discussing the point where humans share a common ancestor with other species, until we get back to the origin of life. It's eye-opening and interesting. Dawkins is an engaging writer for a scientist.

 

[SyleusSnow]

Best American Short Stories 2015, this one collected by T.C. Boyle. Because I've read most of the more recent ones.

I like short story collections like these. Fits well with my goldfish attention span, plus it's educational to see what sort of short stories succeed in the mainstream.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Mysterious Island by Jules Vern. I read In Search of the Castaways, first, followed by Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. It was a trilogy of related tales the books are connected by one or more common character. However, the chronological order is suspect as Castaways is set in 1864, Leagues takes place in 1866, but Island is sandwiched in between in the year 1865. However, Island is the last in the trilogy must take place after the events in Leagues. Rather odd.

I'm not certain of this, because I just started the book. It is possible that the Island had been used by Nemo prior to the story and that as story progress, unknown to them, he returns after the ending of Leagues. but if the movies are accurate, something is a miss. Still, I'm keeping an open mind that they are on the Island a longer time than I think they will be.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I've been re-reading Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale, which is a backwards journey through human evolution. It starts with the present and then proceeds back in time with each successive chapter discussing the point where humans share a common ancestor with other species, until we get back to the origin of life. It's eye-opening and interesting. Dawkins is an engaging writer for a scientist.

You might enjoy: https://www.onezoom.org/

Me: currently reading The Red Scholar's Wake by Aliette de Bodard. Space opera/romance: Xich Si, a scavenger and bot programmer, fears the worst when captured by the Red Banner pirates. Instead, she ends up agreeing to an arranged marriage with the pirates' spaceship. That's chapter 1.

There are a few points where the plot didn't quite work for me. I wasn't entirely sold on the need for the arranged marriage. But it held my interest; the setting is neat, and it's the first time I can recall reading a human/spaceship sex scene.

 

[MajorRewrite]

and it's the first time I can recall reading a human/spaceship sex scene.

“Feel my turbo-lift, baby.”
“Oh my, that’s a big one!”

 

[SimonDoom]

You might enjoy: https://www.onezoom.org/

Thanks. I wasn't aware of that, and it's a fun tool to play with.

An interesting thing about that, which might set some people on edge, is the way it depicts the "branch" for great apes such that chimpanzees are shown as being further out on the branch than humans.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Thanks. I wasn't aware of that, and it's a fun tool to play with.

An interesting thing about that, which might set some people on edge, is the way it depicts the "branch" for great apes such that chimpanzees are shown as being further out on the branch than humans.

Yeah, that could easily be taken as suggesting that chimps are somehow "more evolved" than humans, but it's just a quirk of how the graphic represents branchings. From what I can see, whenever the tree splits, the branch that has more living species is depicted as a continuation of that main branch, and the one with fewer is depicted as a side branch. For the split that happened about six million years ago, homo sapiens is the only surviving species in our branch but the other one has chimps and bonobos, so they get shown as the main branch. If we'd kept the neanderthals alive, maybe we'd get to be the main branch in that graphic!