What are you reading now?

[ChloeTzang]

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.

I read that a while ago and really enjoyed it. It's a great way to look at our evolution as a species.

 

[SyleusSnow]

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

It's robot/spaceship, but Futurama explored the concept with its usual subtlety:

 

[Bramblethorn]

It's robot/spaceship, but Futurama explored the concept with its usual subtlety:

Red Scholar's Wake was a biiiiiit more romantic with it. But it did have bots, on both sides.

 

[ElectricBlue]

It's robot/spaceship, but Futurama explored the concept with its usual subtlety:

Love the in-jokes from 2001 A Space Odyssey.

 

[MillieDynamite]

So, yes, the timeline from the stories is really F'd up. Jules Vern's Calendar Problems Doesn't make the stories any less enjoyable. It just confused the hell out of me. A least he knew he f'd up.

 

[MajorRewrite]

I finished reading The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. Good book. At it’s foundation, it’s a similar story to A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life (but this book isn’t a Christmas tale). That’s one of the things that makes it interesting, because we see how a long-established plot can be new and fascinating in the hands of a talented author.

 

[Alitaptap]

Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories and Maria Ressa’s How to Stand Up to a Dictator.

 

[ericalauren]

I need to finish Neon Gods! I took a break from it. I'm currently reading How to Write Erotica by Rachel Kramer Bussel.

 

[KeithD]

Michael Connelly, A Darkness More than Light
and
Elizabeth Peters and Joan Hess, The Painted Queen

 

[tenyari]

Outside of erotica, I generally stick to non-fiction only. Mostly history books.

Been flipping back and forth between these two for a long time now, despite their very different subject matter.


Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stamped_from_the_Beginning
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3c/Stamped_from_the_Beginning_%28book_cover%29.jpg

A brief history of Mexico by Foster, Lynn
https://archive.org/details/briefhistoryofme00lynn
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51j112B-szL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

 

[Duleigh]

 

[SimonDoom]

Still wading through Neal Stephenson's Anathem. It feels like it's about 30% longer than it should be. I read it mostly when I've gone to bed so I don't get through many pages before it's sleep time, hence the slow pace.

 

[ElectricBlue]

A Portable Cosmos by Alexander Jones.

It's about the Antikythera Mechanism, a gadget made two-thousand years ago, that reminds me of Lyra's compass in The Dark Materials books.

 

[Duleigh]

A Portable Cosmos by Alexander Jones.

It's about the Antikythera Mechanism, a gadget made two-thousand years ago, that reminds me of Lyra's compass in The Dark Materials books.

Do they ever mention finding any reference to that ancient Greek analogue computer in literature or is all still just conjecture?

 

[ElectricBlue]

Do they ever mention finding any reference to that ancient Greek analogue computer in literature or is all still just conjecture?

It's a history of the detailed investigation and reconstruction. Right now, though, I'm still in 1902, so it's not been cleaned yet.

 

[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.

Belated addendum: Dawkins tends to be perceived as a research scientist with a sideline in pop-science/philosophy writing, but it might be more accurate to think of him as a mostly-retired researcher who's been primarily a popular writer for the last forty-odd years.

Most of his peer-reviewed research output is in the late 1960s through to the early/mid-1980s; from 1986 when "The Blind Watchmaker" came out, and especially since about 2000, his academic output waned considerably and most of that seems to be in the letters and opinions sections rather than research per se.

 

[SimonDoom]

Belated addendum: Dawkins tends to be perceived as a research scientist with a sideline in pop-science/philosophy writing, but it might be more accurate to think of him as a mostly-retired researcher who's been primarily a popular writer for the last forty-odd years.

Most of his peer-reviewed research output is in the late 1960s through to the early/mid-1980s; from 1986 when "The Blind Watchmaker" came out, and especially since about 2000, his academic output waned considerably and most of that seems to be in the letters and opinions sections rather than research per se.

I think this is true, but it doesn't diminish the value of his output. I believe there's a great deal of value in "pop" science books, as long as they're not pushing bad science. Dawkins is engaging both in debates and in writing, and that helps communicate scientific concepts to the public. Something I like about Dawkins is that aside from the polemics he likes to engage in (most of which I agree with) his work communicates a sense of joy in biology. He really likes the stuff and he wants to get that across, and I think he does a good job. The Ancestor's Tale is like that. It's not original research, but it comes across as a labor of love, and it does a good job of recasting the way one thinks about evolution, which STILL is badly misunderstood. I still have conversations with people I know who wonder why if evolution is true the chimpanzees haven't evolved into humans yet. It's vexing.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I think this is true, but it doesn't diminish the value of his output. I believe there's a great deal of value in "pop" science books, as long as they're not pushing bad science. Dawkins is engaging both in debates and in writing, and that helps communicate scientific concepts to the public. Something I like about Dawkins is that aside from the polemics he likes to engage in (most of which I agree with) his work communicates a sense of joy in biology. He really likes the stuff and he wants to get that across, and I think he does a good job. The Ancestor's Tale is like that. It's not original research, but it comes across as a labor of love, and it does a good job of recasting the way one thinks about evolution, which STILL is badly misunderstood. I still have conversations with people I know who wonder why if evolution is true the chimpanzees haven't evolved into humans yet. It's vexing.

I'd mostly agree - I put a very high value on science communication, and Selfish Gene/Blind Watchmaker were major influences on me as a kid. Dawkins is great at explaining his viewpoints.

The qualifier there is that there's an unfortunate tendency with a lot of folk to assume that somebody who's visible as a science communicator in a given field must be an expert on every aspect of that field.* It's one thing to say "I agree with the arguments that Dawkins makes for X", another to say "Dawkins asserts X, and he's an expert so that settles it", which unfortunately does happen sometimes.

I'm not a great fan of that brand of argument from authority at the best of times. But to the extent that it has any validity, then the difference between an expert communicator and an expert, current practitioner can be important. I'm not suggesting that Dawkins closed his mind off and stopped learning new things in the 1980s, but a lot has happened in biology since then and it would be unwise to assume he's kept up with all of it.

*Or even in completely different fields; there's an episode of Doctor Who where the Earth is stolen from the Solar System and transported light years away, and Dawkins - playing himself - is interviewed for comment. Even if he were the world's preeminent biologist... why on earth would one ask a biologist about a matter of astrophysics? Might as well ask Neil DeGrasse Tyson how to clone a dinosaur.

 

[TheRedChamber]

*Or even in completely different fields; there's an episode of Doctor Who where the Earth is stolen from the Solar System and transported light years away, and Dawkins - playing himself - is interviewed for comment. Even if he were the world's preeminent biologist... why on earth would one ask a biologist about a matter of astrophysics? Might as well ask Neil DeGrasse Tyson how to clone a dinosaur.

I think the point is the Richard Dawkins was at the time 'Professor for the Public Understanding of Science' - a chair at Oxford University and a remit that extended beyond just Biology. Obviously the producers were probably just happy to get 'famous scientist' on screen, but you could justify it in terms of him having experience communicating 'science to the public without, in doing so, losing those elements of scholarship which constitute the essence of true understanding' (according to the position description)

 

[TalkToMeInSB]

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts

 

[Bramblethorn]

I think the point is the Richard Dawkins was at the time 'Professor for the Public Understanding of Science' - a chair at Oxford University and a remit that extended beyond just Biology. Obviously the producers were probably just happy to get 'famous scientist' on screen, but you could justify it in terms of him having experience communicating 'science to the public without, in doing so, losing those elements of scholarship which constitute the essence of true understanding' (according to the position description)

True - although I'll note that at the time he was married to a well-known star of the Doctor Who franchise, and appears to have been friends with several of the writers going back to the late and infinitely missed Douglas Adams, so there are other explanations available for his casting.

If it was just about finding a highly recognisable science communicator for the role - I'm no fan of Neil Tyson but his specialty seems much more relevant to that storyline, and I doubt the man who said yes to Sharknado 6 would've turned down Doctor Who ;-)

 

[Blind_Justice]

A book about the LeTourneau land trains. Found a video on Youtube by accident and decided to jump headfirst into that rabbit hole.

 

[PandemicReader8]

Just started "Russian Fairy Tales. A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-Lore."

 

[ChloeTzang]

"Georgette Heyer's Regency World" - I've been meaning to read this for a while. If you're like Heyer's Regency novels the way I do, it's a wonderful setting out of the milieu, the social rules and expected behaviors, and all those other little details that Heyer works in unobtrusively and so accurately. That's one of the big differences between Heyer and a lot of more modern writers of novels set in the Regency period. Heyer really gets the milieu, the speech, the behavior and all those little nuances that make the setting accurate whilst not detracting from the stories she tells. I find a lot of more modern writers, especially Americans, are really just writing a modern novel set in the Regency but without understanding the period or the people, and that tends to throw me out of the story. When someone uses language, or behaves in a way that's clearly out of period, it just grates and I tend to toss the book aside and not finish it. It's really the same with any novel in a historical setting. The writer needs to capture and get into the period they're writing in, without throwing the reader out of the story by introducing incongruous speech patterns or behavior. Some writers do this so well - Heyer, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Conn Iggulden, Bernard Cornwall with his Sharpe novels, CS Forester with his Horatio Hornblower novels, Gore Vidal's "Julian," and a host of others. When it's done well, as with Heyer, it's done so well than even with a novel written 100 years ago (which was about when Heyer's first novel was published), you still find yourself immersed in the story because her use of language is so well done.

https://jenniferkloester.com/wp-content/uploads/Georgette-Heyers-Regency-World.jpg

 

[yowser]

Whenever I start to think my life is sexually broad-minded, all I need to bring me back to earth is read a biography like this one (or come visit the AH or Fetish and Sexuality forums). Susie Bright is amazing, daring, broad spectrum erotic, radically inclined and a delightful read.

Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir​

Susie Bright​