I’m not having a problem reading it, I just didn’t start it until recently, and I only have a short time to finish it before it’s due back.
Yeah, I can see that. I know that I shouldn’t need to like characters to be interested in their stories, but it’s something I always struggle with.
Never seen the film, beyond the trademark long DePalma shot.
I got a Humble Book Bundle recently filled with helpful sounding books for professional folks (Be The Best Bad Presenter Ever by Karen Hough, for example) and plowed through several of them in a short space of time.
Be The Best Bad Presenter Ever was good. I Moved Your Cheese was ok but I was pretty much over Who Moved My Cheese? like as soon as I put it down so I didn’t get much out of it. I know what book to give the next person I overhear suggesting Who Moved My Cheese? to anyone else. I’m not going to get into the other ones because I have really bad things to say about them and I don’t feel like getting into them right now.
My reading isn’t normally so … boring? (Although, Bad Presenter isn’t boring. If you talk in front of people, it’s a useful and entertaining book.) It’s just I’ve lately heard if you’re not working to improve, you’re getting worse. I’m personally taking that in a relativistic way.
I’m theoretically reading Consider Phlebas … along with a good dozen other books.
I’d really like to read a paranormal fantasy book that isn’t a part of a series but I haven’t found any. I’m sure they exist but a profound amount of trawling through that orange site with the A didn’t get me anywhere.
A present from Mrs daneel, I’ll be reading this shortly:
Interviews with loads of 80s British games programmers.
The Library at Mount Char fucking blew me away. It is truly apocalyptically weird, very very dark yet not completely hopeless, and brilliant. It has made me think a lot, in a number of different directions.
And it’s got ‘Buddhism for Assholes’ as one of the chapter titles, which feels like it’s speaking right to me.
That’s the one. That first paragraph of the blurb isn’t a very good description - makes it sound like some kind of rom-com - but it’s hard to imagine what could describe it well without saying too much. I think it’s best to just plunge into it.
Charlie Stross’s comment else-net was “Not sure how to pigeon-hole it genre-wise unless we invent a new category like “theopunk” or dump it on the New Weird “unsorted” heap, but it’s good (if a bit grim at times).”
Oh, I’ve also been reading some of the early Pali Canon (the earliest recorded Buddhist teachings, passed on by memorization for several hundred years and set down in writing around 100 BCE) in part because I started thinking about the origins of the trope that “Eastern religion” says “Reality is an Illusion!” or “Reality is just a dream.”
I want to write something about that, because the Buddha didn’t say that, but he is recorded as saying something superficially similar to both of those in different contexts, and the difference between what the trope says and what he actually may have said is interesting.
Still this.
But I’ve also started working through the Judge Dredd Complete Case Files (h/t @tobinl), just got Vol. 2.
I finished Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand a few nights ago. It took me about 9 months to get through it, having read other books in the meantime. I dug it but man, it was dense. (Or maybe it’s me that’s dense.) I wish I had read it (or even heard about Delany) back when I was 23-24, when I was smart as I had ever been, or was ever going to be.
After I finished _Stars_I started and finished Habibi and last night I started an anthology called Black Noir.
Finished both of those now.
Now reading China Miéville’s new one This Census-Taker, and then it’ll be on to Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation.
I listened to this trilogy on a cross country road trip by myself. It’s good, it gets my recommendation, but I wouldn’t suggest the complete binge listen. I was a bit off for a day or so after arriving.
Are you sure it was the same you that arrived?
I’ve heard good things about The Library at Mount Char.
I’m finally reading Postmortal and just finished The Girl With All The Gifts.
Here are a few recent reads from my goodreads account:
Man, I’m a Buddhist and love parts of the Pali Canon but some of it makes me long for Schopenhauer.
Oh, it certainly wasn’t. It’s been a long time since I’ve read Heraclitus, so that was a totally different me also, one in a whole string of 'em. On the up-side, we’ve maintained the thread of memories so life hasn’t become completely absurd (just mostly ridiculous and occasionally hilarious).
I’ currently sneaking in the House of Leaves, which is a strange and spooky book.
I’m also reading Assimilate, which is a great critical history of industrial music.
The Girl in the Spider’s Web. Poorly written, badly plotted. Skip it.
I came within a hair of picking up House of Leaves at B&N today over lunchtime! It seems like it should be my kind of thing.
Given the shit fight around its publishing, I expected it to be a shitshow.
It’s good, like a story inside a story kind of thing. I’m liking it so far and would recommend if you like non-linear narrative stuff.
