Books

Hi all, I’m taking over the weekly c/Books post this week to talk about what’s happening on the First of May.

But first things first, my update…

I’m finishing up Illumination by T. Kingfisher. I only found her within the last 2 years, but I’m loving all of her stuff.

On to Bingo. In 2 days, in the morning (US Central Time because that’s where I live), I’ll put up a post with details for Bingo. Out hope is to provide a some additional motivation or even gamification of reading over the next year. There are 25 categories that we’ve tried to craft to be flexible no matter what your chosen genre or category are. We’ll additionally have a post where you can find or post recommendations for each category. And throughout the year we’ll post check-ins for those who are participating.

Dresden, Misericordiae, and I are excited and hope you’ll join us.

A fix-up (or fixup) is a novel created from several short fiction stories that may or may not have been initially related or previously published. The stories may be edited for consistency, and sometimes new connecting material, such as a frame story or other interstitial narration, is written for the new work.

I'd just never heard the term before this article popped up last night. Thought maybe it might be a new thing for some of you, as well!

Reading Three Days to Never by Tim Powers. The premise is pretty interesting, can't wait to see where he takes it.

As mentioned last week, @[email protected] and @[email protected] are working on something related to Bingo card for books.

Keep your eyes peeled, just one week (or so) to go.

Also, welcome @[email protected] as a newly minted mod of this community!

Now to topic at hand, what have you been reading or listening lately?

Due to a medical enigma that is awaiting treatment, I am currently experiencing brain fog that is preventing me from focusing well. I've had to DNF multiple books now. I need something that is compelling and moves quickly. No slow-burn for me right now. Any suggestions?

Finished Starsight by Brandon Sanderson. Second book in Cytoverse series. Loved the way the series progressed, though didn't liked the post-ending much. Going to start the novella soon.

Started Three Days to Never by Tim Powers. It's a standalone sci-fi. Don't remember who recommended Tim Powers or when, but he was mentioned in my list, so got couple of his books. I have just started the book, something is happening, but I am not sure what, so no idea what to think about it yet. Let's see how it turns out.

What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening lately?

Finished Dark Moon by David Gemell. Ending was a bit quick, and left a bit to be desired, but overall I enjoyed the book, and would try some more of his work.

Reading The Better Part of Valour by Tania Huff, book 2 of Confederation. It's a next military mission in the life of our protagonist, but rest of the whole cast is changed, would be interesting to see if that happens every time or we get old faces next time.

Also started Your Money or Your Life : 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence by Vicki Robin / Joe Dominguez. It was highly recommended on reddit's financial independence subs, so when I recently saw someone had a copy, borrowed it right away. I am still on first chapter, so can't say much at all, but it seems interesting.

What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening?

My brother has self published a book about our family’s history. This book has been a work in progress by multiple family members over decades, but it’s finally done!

Below is a copy of the description from the linked website.

If you enjoy WW II history and live stories, you might like this view into the past.

———————————-

Louise and Albert is a vivid portrait of life, love, and World War II in 1945 through the letters of Louise (Glasner) Reeves and former United States Congressman and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Lieutenant Colonel Albert Reeves, Jr. ​ As Albert dealt with his challenges in the China-Burma-India theater during World War II, Louise dealt with the rationing challenges and fears of never seeing her husband again while running a household, raising their two children and expecting their third child. ​ The book also chronicles the family’s efforts to battle corruption in Kansas City and Albert’s time in Congress, representing Missouri’s 5th Congressional District. The time after the war included many challenges for the U.S. and Congressman Reeves - government debt, inflation, foreign aid, food and manufacturing shortages, and lingering government corruption. Corruption, before and after the war, involved election fraud to win seats for machine party candidates. This corruption ended up tainting the Truman presidency. ​ Included in the book is the dramatic history of the diplomacy, combat, and engineering activities to build the Ledo Road – one of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ greatest achievements.

This week flew by pretty quickly. Didn't even get time to read all the messages in last week's post...

Finished Valour's Choice by Tanya Huff. Book 1 of Confederation. Enjoyed the book, going to continue with the series, and may check some more of Tanya Huff's work too.

Read Jujitu Kaisen Vol. 5. Nothing much to say about that, more of a manga goodness.

Started Dark Moon by David Gemell, a standalone fantasy book. This is my first Gemell book and I am enjoying it. I am about 1/3rd of the way in, and the world-building feels like something that can sustain a trilogy or even a longer series.

What about all of you? What have been reading or listening?

Taking a week of medical leave and got excited to settle in with 3BP on Netflix only to find out, that's NEXT month.

Picked up the books instead...

How? How did the Chinese government allow this to be published? There HAS to be some kind of story there...

Reading up on it, the opening chapters that are so highly critical of Mao's Cultural Revolution were always intended to be the opening, but were moved to be later in the book in China.

So maybe that's it? The censors just didn't read the whole thing?

I just finished listening to Iron War by Matt Fitzgerald. I loved the descriptions of the history of the event, the history of each of the racers, and their future after the race. It helped me feel amped for my own exercise sessions. Are there other books like this?

Excluding Matt Fitzgerald's other books, of course.

Oh, this got delayed a bit.

I am still reading Valour’s Choice by Tanya Huff. Book 1 of Confederation series. Almost near the end though. Enjoying the book a lot.

What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/12703676

The text is available here:https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-anarchy

I am an anarchist and I overall like this text, I think it's a good introduction to get some complete basics of what are the goals of anarchists and how they think about the world. I consider his opinion about human nature naive, but given that this is an introductory texts I don't have a problem with that and I like to recommend it to people that want to learn a bit about anarchist movement that has over 150 years history of fighting against every authoritarianism possible and is steadily growing in popularity around the world, inspiring new generations of freedom fighters.

I am so, so excited. I've talked so much with my friends before how awesome it would be to have an ATLA style anime of Cradle, I really hope this is awesome.

Love this series, literally led me to read every book Will Wight's written.

Always loved Baens Library. I still have quite a few free library books (epub and otherwise) from that website. I have bought a lot of their books.

Now that isekai has firmly established itself as a subgenre in western storytelling (although it has always been there in some form), it got me thinking about what to call the subgenres of isekai itself.

If isekai itself is being transported to another world/universe, and reverse isekai is someone from another world being transported to ours... Then what do we call someone from another world being transported to another other wold? Or someone from our world being transported to another time in our world? Do these have names already?

Setting aside if we like or appreciate isekai, if they don't have genres names yet I thought it'd be funny to come up with our own. What do you think we should call all the sub-subgenres?

I'm currently reading this book and found it to be quite accessible even for someone who's not very tech-savvy (me). I think people of lemmy may appreciate its discussions of how to break up the big techs, the way big techs keep users by essentially holding them hostage, etc. I'm also a huge fan of its publisher (Verso) :)

Tl;Dr Spotify turned shuffle on after I closed the app then later resumed my listening leaving me wildly confused and possibly with some major spoilers. Check before you resume listening.

I did a longer road trip this weekend and decided it'd be a good time to get through some of the books in my backlog. Unfortunately, not only was I hit with my audiobook listening limit (15 hours per month, apparently), which is not something I remember Spotify advertising very clearly in the app, but also Spotify decided to turn on shuffle on my return trip. Since I was paying attention to the road I honestly thought that perhaps the author had decided to go with a disjointed narrative for the latter half of the book, but when I got home I found that I had inadvertently listened to a few later chapters, and now I'm a little upset about it.

The book was The Luckiest Girl Alive if anyone was curious (honestly the jumpy timeline narrative kind of worked, it was just a little confusing). If you're new to this one, it comes with a pretty big content warning just fyi.

I guess I'll be finishing it next month when I have more listening hours on Spotify.

Title is a bit redundant; I can't see how anybody could read the book and not come away as a fan, but I'm just wondering if there's anyone on Lemmy who's read it.

What do you think? I'd love to meet some other fans of DFW.