Asklemmy @lemmy.ml

1y ago

What was the last book you read?

92 comments

Last book I finished? The Dragon Reborn. Currently reading? The Princess Diaries.
- Ayyyyy, are you reading The Shadow Rising soon? I liked it more than the Dragon Reborn.
  
  Yep! Just need to find a bit more time for it. I've got a book club with a friend where we're reading through the series.

Do audiobooks count?
Leviathan Falls by James S. A. Corey. It's the final book in The Expanse series. Really got hooked on it. I haven't made time to find another book since then though 🤔
- They absolutely do! I don't understand the snobbery against audiobooks. When Borges lost his sight he had to have books read to him, and just consider the amazing stories he came up with (and the literary devices he developed) to make up for his blindness.
- I read up to Cibola Burn but then ran out at the time, I haven't gone back since books beyond that came out. I need to start over. Would you describe it as a satisfying conclusion?
  
  Yes, I was more than happy with the ending. Loose ends were pretty well tied up.
  One day there'll be an expanse movie that covers what the tv series didn't.. one day..
- They definitely count as ingesting books but there is a difference between reading a book and listening to an audiobook.
  Reading IS the activity but I feel like with audiobooks people are typically driving or something where the book is in the background. Though maybe some people put on headphones and just sit and listen or something. I don't know if this makes me a snob lol.
  Also The Expanse was the first book series I ever read. It was so good. And it made me like the show less even though the show is still great.

Last finished was Acceptance by Jeff Vandermeer. Currently reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
- Project Hail Mary was excellent. Loved every second.
  
  Same, I'm flying through it right now. Started it on Monday and already like 3/4 of the way through it.
  
  Story-wise, it felt a bit clunkier than the Marsian but I liked the worldbuilding a lot.

I just finished Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Great book, that not only coined terms like "avatar" and "metaverse" (for better or worse), but is also really well written. It somehow manages to find a tone that is consistent for the dystopian worldbuilding, the silly and self-aware things that happen in the world, and the philosophical aspect dealing with culture, religion and free will. Highly recommend!
- And I'm currently reading his newest novel, Termination Shock. Quite different, but still has that Stephenson sense of world building that I love.
  
  This was the first book of him I read, but I will definitely check out his other works if they're all like this!
- Everyone goes on about how important this book is, but I got barely 1/3 if the way through and bounced off it hard.
  Horses for courses I guess.
  
  I think it laid a lot of groundwork for books that came later. But as you said, not every book is for everybody.

The iRobot series by Asimov. Going into Foundation now.
- I loved the 'Foundation' series! The 1st is in my top 5. 'I, Robot' was such a fantastic book as well, infinitely better than the movie.
  
  I loved the first Foundation, but never read beyond that, for some reason. I know I have the first trilogy around here somewhere. I should dig up the other ones.

hemingway's debut the sun also rises, i went in blind and didn't expect it to be about bull fighting. i enjoyed the vibe of the 1920s travel through spain and france, the aimless plot and the character interactions.
i learned that bullfighting is terrible and cringed at the casual anti-semitism all over the book
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Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
- I just finished this yesterday! Great read esp since I'm right around the same age as the main characters all the gaming nostalgia rang particularly true to me.
  
  Yeah I’m really liking it so far! I’m at the Both Sides section now and I really like the imagery the book paints in my head.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, and I hated it.
It takes a very cool premise, then fills it with incongruences and predictable twists that you understand chapters ahead of the protagonist. Then it all ends up being (SPOILERS AHEAD) a "humans used to literally talk to nature, modern society bad" mumbojumbo with some kind of unexplained multiverse in it.

Old Man's War by John Scalzi - not high literature by any means, but a fun read nonetheless. Currently reading the sequel, The Ghost Brigades, which is equally as fun :)
- I was recently reading Scalzi too! His blog is great too.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I keep starting some books after this one but I can't seem to finish anything.

Yumi and the nightmare painter by Brandon Sanderson. (very good)
Last series I finished was Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson. (probably the best fantasy series I've ever read)
Current read: The God is Not Willing by Steven Erikson

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch -- a really fun heist-y story set in an engaging and well-crafted fantasy world

Last book on paper: D&D 5th edition Player Handbook (German edition)
Last novel on paper: Frank Herbert - Dune
Last audiobook: P. Djèlí Clark - A Master of Djinn

The Broken Earth Trilogy by NK Jemisin. Fantastic and heartbreaking. It's kind of a crossover in science fiction and fantasy, set in a world that experiences apocalyptic levels of climate and geological change every few hundred years. Jemisin does excellent world building and a very admirable job of writing parts of the narrative in second person in a way that seems seamless/not gimmicky. Highly recommended.
- I loved those books! In the beginning second person felt extremely weird, but the "resolution" of why it is written that way made so much sense that it made the books even more enjoyable IMO.

"Greenlights" - Mathew McConaughey, surprisingly good. Currently reading 'Look to Windward' by Iain M. Banks

Upgrade by Blake Crouch. Great book.

The Burning Land by Bernard Cornwell. It's book 5 in the last kingdom series that the TV show is based off of. I love the time period.

Brent Weeks' "The Way of Shadows".
Currently reading second part "Shadow's Edge"

Recently finished the seond book in Ken MacLeod's Lightspeed Trilogy, Beyond the Reach of Earth. Nice SF series with some interesting takes on the complexities of FTL travel, First Contact, global politics, and more.

Most recently finished: The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher - an enjoyable, but not exceptional, folk horror.
Currently in the middle of: Finnegans Wake, Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Flashman and Madison's War by Robert Brightwell, and a collection of Para Handy tales by Neil Munro.

Raft by Stephen Baxter. Part of the Xeelee sequence series.
Currently on book 2: Timelike Infinity and I'm liking it quite a bit.

Napoleon: A Life, really well written biography that reads like a novel highly recommended!

Dune

Dune

1984 (nineteen-eightyfour) from George Orwell. Currently reading nothing but news.

All but my life by Gerda Weissmann Klein.
An amazing autobiography of a lady who survived WW2 and Nazis. It was very emotional and it felt like she was paying homage to all the little things that contributed to her survival.I would highly recommend.

I read The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb and it was fantastic

The last book I read was one of Jack Reacher novel series. Truth be told, I need to restart that reading for enjoyment habit.

Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis.
Reading some of the history that gets left out elsewhere. Did you know that before the end of the Civil War lynching was primarily used to terrorize white abolitionists? After the Civil War during reconstruction, during Jim Crow, white supremacists needed to find a reason to terrorize and control the black community so the myth of the black man as rapist was woven into public discourse. It was the most convenient excuse to find a reason to violently punish and control black people who in whatever way challenged or violated the status quo. Accusations of even inappropriate forwardness were enough to justifying hanging. But the real reason would be that some black person or family started a business, sought education or became empowered in some way, challenging the white supremacist social hierarchy - and were lynched for it.

“Toll The Hounds” by Steven Erikson, it’s book 8 in The Malazan Book of the Fallen series.

I just finished The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. I've kind of half-followed Welcome to Night Vale for years and enjoyed all the books so far.
I'm currently reading House of Leaves. This is my second attempt, after making it about halfway a few years ago. It's a great book, but a challenging read because it's dense and shifts context frequently. I find that the context-switching adds to the unsettling feel that the book is going for, but it's definitely not for everyone.

A. Das and T. Ferbel -Introduction to Nuclear and Particle Physics.
It was an interesting book but a horrible experience in general. I gotta finish this degree

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of Their Lost World - Steve Brusatte

The Hunger of the Gods by John Gwynne.

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. Unsurprisingly, I've become more conscious of my bedtime, but one small diagram was significant to me— having small periods where you wake up every 3 hours or so was a normal part of sleep. Since then, I've become less stressed over the quality of sleep I was getting, which then improved my sleep quality...

It was called “Drunk” and was about human’s history with inebriates with an emphasis on alcohol. For a book on booze it was incredibly dry and while the author made some decent points he tended to just repeat them over and over again.

I’ve been on a memoir kick. Specifically women celebrities. I just finished Mean Baby by Selma Blair and it was good. I’m about to start Hello Molly by Molly Shannon.

Last I finished: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
Currently reading: The Witcher: The Last Wish (for the second time)

I'm chewing my way through the stormlight archives by Bryan Sanderson. Just finished book 2.5, on book 3 now.
- Brandon*

Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis
somewhat interesting and in the same vein as the Barsoom/Mars books by Burroughs but more preachy and less action.
It was on the "free" pile at the library.

fiasco by stanislav lem.

The Gate of the Feral Gods; Book 4 of recently 6 of the Dungeon Crawler Carl LITRPG series by Matt Dinniman. It's been an absolute blast so far, and I highly recommend the series if you like some combination of tabletop RPGs, cats, death games, or explosions.

I just finished Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. It was okay, though I don't think it lived up to the hype for me. I actually preferred Klara and the Sun to this one, though still worth a read.

5th book of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, currently reading. Before that I read the 4th book.

Overlord. I've need to finish volumes 14-17, but it demotivates me that author abandoned his work.

Currently reading war and peace by Tolstoi

I read The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb and it was fantastic

Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything (Viktor E. Frankl)

"GOD: An Anatomy" by Francesca Stavrakapoulou.
"An astonishing and revelatory history that re-presents God as he was originally envisioned by ancient worshippers—with a distinctly male body, and with superhuman powers, earthly passions, and a penchant for the fantastic and monstrous."

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

Death's End by Liu Cixin

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