Ask Lemmy

Last book : the wheel of time (#5) by R. Jordan. I don't really recommend. I mean the story's great but the way the characters are written is dull and sexist (men saying that women are mysteries, women complaining about how men are dumb and other ridiculous clichés), it feels like following people that are somewhat the worse of both teens and boomers, it takes me out of the book every single time. I prefer the king killer chronicles (P. Rothfuss) although we're still waiting for the last book.

Current book : Trapped (C. Lackberg and H Fexeus) it is a great polar, with nice twists, I recommend!

Last book: This is How You Lose the Time War - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_How_You_Lose_the_Time_War
It was good. I don't normally like love-stories, but this was poetically written. A lot of fun sci-fi and beautiful imagery.

Current book: Little Brother - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Doctorow_novel)
Lots of fun hacking and rebellion against an increasingly authoritarian government, very much inspired by 9-11. It's a fun Young Adult Novel so far.

Last book: The Apothecary Diaries 6 by Natsu Hyūga

Current book: The Magic Engineer by L.E. Modesitt Jr

The Apothecary Diaries series has been pretty good so far. Enough quirky characters and situations to not get to dark, but some definite darkness so it doesn't get to sweet.

The Magic Engineer is the third in The Saga of Recluse series. Overall I enjoy Modesitt, but it also is clearly a cheap paperback fantasy from the 90s. It's fun tracking down these second hand and they are fun reads. However, I enjoyed the first 3 books in his Imager series more.

Last book: The West Passage by Jared Pechaček. Delightfully surreal fantasy; highest recommendation. Almost purposefully confusing at times, it wants you to infer the bizarre structure of its world through the mysteries it presents rather than ever try to over-explain itself.

Current book: Everything Must Go, The Stories We Tell About the End of the World by Dorian Lynskey. Also strong recommend. I've been feeling rather apocalyptic lately due to the everything and some dramatic life changes I'm going through and this is having the intended effect. By taking an unflinching, academic (yet sometimes humrous) look at various eschatological stories they become demystified and help reduce the anxiety. Do we really believe we'll be the lucky generation to witness the closure of all things? Probably not. But also ... maybe?

Last finished was Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey. It's a haunted house story with a twist. I would recommend to people who like horror.

Currently reading a first aid manual, On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, and The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. The first aid manual is handy, but reading it doesn't do much good without training and experience. OT is short and good, very on the nose for this Trump term. Woman in Black is another horror book; from 1983 and proving "elevated horror" isn't a new thing.

Last book I finished was Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. Good read.

The books I'm currently reading -

Mainly 'The Three Body Problem' by Liu Cixin. Thoroughly engrossing.

Also a chapter or two a night of 'Finding Your Comic Genius' by Adam Bloom, dipping in and out of 'Before and Laughter' by Jimmy Carr, because I'm interested in the art of stand up comedy, and 'A Stroke of the Pen - The Lost Stories' by Terry Pratchett. Also working my way through my old Asterix comics that I dug out of storage recently.

Edited to correct titles.

Last book The Peripheral by William Gibson

Current book Chapterhouse Dune by Frank Herbert

Yeah, both are good. I really love Gibson, and I’d have read Dune 1,2,3 before, but just decided to reread the whole series that Herbert wrote. Great downtime filler.

Last book: Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

Current book: Absolution by Jeff Vandermeer

Doctor Sleep was good, it's been a long time since I read The Shining but this was a good follow-up. The movie is pretty decent too, but as always not as good as the book.

Absolution is the fourth book in Vandermeer's Southern Reach series. It's a challenging read, as are the other books but not bad so far. I don't think this is what I was expecting from a fourth book, but I'm not disappointed.

Last book: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Current book: Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Never Let Me Go was not my favorite book, but not a waste of time either. The story had some good highs and lows but it did not resonate with me personally.

Hyperion is excellent so far, I'm about halfway through and Simmons gives just enough information at the right time and pace to build the world out slowly and thoroughly, and each short story so far has left me contemplating for hours afterward. Definitely enjoying the journey so far but I have been warned not to expect definitive answers towards the end, so we'll see.

Last finished: The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind by Dan Davies.

Currently reading: Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism by Leif Weatherby.

They’re about how two mid-20th century intellectual movements (cybernetics and structuralism, respectively) that would have provided valuable tools for managing contemporary issues (institutional collapse and artificial intelligence) were sidetracked in the 70s and 80s by other movements (neoliberalism and poststructuralism), and proposals for updating them for our present needs.

Last book: Human Phoenix, current one Human Man, both from an author with the handle "Refusenik". Human Man is basically the second part of Human Phoenix, kind of "coming of age" with a bit of mystery and scifi.

last: All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai

Could not finish it. The story would not start, eventually I stopped caring.

Current: James Acaster's Classic Scrapes

Funny collection of stories that happened to him over the years. Very entertaining and funny.

Last book: Perfume: The story of a murderer by Patrick Süskind. I ravaged through it quite fast and enjoyed the descriptive writing style immensely. It's supposedly a book with many intresting layers, but I loved as a novel about world of smell.

Currently: Though I tend to read several at the time depending on my mood, my main book is Breaking together: A freedom-loving response to collapse by Jem Bendell. I work with environmental stuff and I feel like we are past the point where ecological modernisation is a answer to all of our woes. It is well-written book and you can download it for free.

Last book: "Last Call" by Tim Powers. It's great. Poker and archetypes. Big inspiration for Unknown Armies, which I loved.

Current: Medusa's web, also by Powers. Not sure if I'm into it yet but it's got some of his signature weirdness

Last book: Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa

Current book: not really reading anything right now but I should be, not sure what it will be, maybe this nice list will help

I definitely recommend Musashi.

I was reading the He Who Fights With Monsters and that is lots of fun. I finished book 12 so I have to wait. But its a great story arch of how a nobody could become a god like powerful character by defiance and resistance to what what is the normal.

I went back to the Hell Divers books series by Nicholas Sansbury Smith. Its totally pulp fiction but the big picture story is great. Some of the in-between can get stale.