What Are You Reading? (February 2019)

[ara]

Sorry, no book club this month! I couldn't come up with a good book and nobody in the January thread seemed to have any ideas either, so this is gonna be another regular ol' reading thread. Complete freedom. Read whatever your heart desires! And then post about it here.

Obligatory:

Join the ResetEra Goodreads Book Club to track your progress on our monthly read threads.


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Previous Book Club Threads:

• Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (January 2019)
• The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton (December 2018)
• Solaris by Stanisław Lem and Shogun by James Clavell
• Putin Country by Anne Garrels and Enlightenment Now by Steve Pinker
• Bird Box by Josh Malerman
• Astrophysics for People in A Hurry; Guns, Germs, and Steel (April 2018)
• The Left Hand of Darkness(March 2018)
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (Feb 2018)
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (Jan 2018)
• Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (Dec 2017)
• We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Nov 2018)
• Blindness by Jose Saramago (Feb 2014)
• The Quiet American by Graham Greene (Jan 2014)
• If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino (Sept 2013)
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (July 2013)
• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (Feb-Mar 2013)
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (September 2012)
• Catch-22, by Joseph Heller (January 2012)
• The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (December 2011)
• Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy (Oct 2011)
• The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov (Sep 2011)
• The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas (Aug 2011)
• Master and Commander, by Patrick O'Brian (July 2011)
• The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin (June 2011)
• A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan (May 2011)
• The Afghan Campaign, by Steven Pressfield (Apr 2011)
• Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein (Mar 2011)
• Flashman, by George MacDonald Fraser (Feb 2011)

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Support ERA authors:

• aidan (Hugo Award winner): http://aidanmoher.com/blog/ / Tide of Shadows and Other Stories
• AngmarsKing701: Ahvarra: The Heart of the World ; Knight Descendent: Knight's Journal 1; Author Page of Brian Lang
• cosmicblizzard: Freeze Kill
• Xagareth - Lamplight
• Elfforkusu: Wrath of Flight
• Fidelis Hodie: Derek Agons Slays a Dragon
• H.Protagonist: Dead Endings
• Hop: The Latte Segment
• Plasticine Live Undead
• UCBooties Trumpocalypse
• whatevermort: The Explorer; No Harm Can Come to a Good Man; Long Dark Dusk by James Smythe
• HK Lune - New Tales From Old Yarn: Fairy Tales and Myths, Rewritten and Re-imagined by Writers
• MasseyFect - Where Dragonwoofs Sleep and the Fading Creeps

Explore

• Reddit's Favorite Books Published in 2016
• Goodreads 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime
• Reddit's categorized list of recommended books
• Ranker's list of greatest sci-fi novels of all time

Happy reading!

 

[Django.Mango]

Looking for a good sci fi book, but the link is broken. :(

 

[Spectromixer]

Thanks for making the thread!

 

[TheBeardedOne]

Still reading:

 

[Reven Wolf]

Looking for a good sci fi book, but the link is broken. :(

Click to shrink...

Have you read Skyward by Brandon Sanderson?

It's a pretty good light read!

Currently reading:

As a side note, I really really dislike the cover for both book 1 and 2...

Though I will say I'm enjoying the second book significantly more than the first so far.

 

[random_polymath]

Catch-22.

Just pulled it off the shelf. I've had it for almost a decade. It is hilarious.

 

[GenTask]

I go with whatever Swords and Laser has going on. Reading The Calculating Stars.

 

[Forerunner]

Book:

Audiobook:

 

[Django.Mango]

Have you read Skyward by Brandon Sanderson?

It's a pretty good light read!

Click to shrink...

Thanks. I see its a start of a series, sounds pretty good.

 

[ara]

Looking for a good sci fi book, but the link is broken. :(

Click to shrink...

Oh shit, you're right. I don't think anyone's actually clicked any of those links in a while, haha. I'll look for some new resources.

In the meantime, I'll second Skyward. It's very YA, but as long as you can deal with that, you've got a nice, very exciting scifi pageturner on your hands.

 

[HanSoloCup]

Almost done with Sanderson's Warbreaker, then it's on to the Way of Kings.

 

[Django.Mango]

Oh shit, you're right. I don't think anyone's actually clicked any of those links in a while, haha. I'll look for some new resources.

In the meantime, I'll second Skyward. It's very YA, but as long as you can deal with that, you've got a nice, very exciting scifi pageturner on your hands.

Click to shrink...

I guessed this. :) Thanks for your effort.

This could be a pretty solid one. https://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/the-greatest-science-fiction-novels-of-all-time

Dont know the site or have any relations to it, just googled.

On Skyward, ive just bought it and im glad you also recommend it. :) Never mind its ya or light im currently finishing the Foundation Trilogy so its a good change i think lol.

 

[Spectromixer]

Here is a link for reddit's Most Recommended Scifi

 

[RepairmanJack]

Finished Steelheart by Sanderson.

Really liked it, but it definitely came across as written for a younger audience and kind of feels like it's written perfectly for a movie adaptation.

Thought it left the two girl characters kind of out in the cold for personalities. The guys all seem to have distinct characteristics and ongoing quirks, but then Tia like soda and Megan is professional and that's basically it.

Not sure what's next, my copy of The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu became available, but not sure I"m feeling that right now.

Still going through:

 

[patientzero]

Oh damn, it's February already.

I'll update through the end of last month.

Severance is a compact, stunning debut by Ling Ma about a young woman, Chinese-born but living in the US from a very early age, who plays witness to humanity's downfall by the disease known as Shen Fever, which puts its victims into ruminative trances in which they repeat patterns. Characters within the novel explicitly point out these are not zombies, though the novel harkens back to the "willful sheep" model of zombies once popular in those tales. Namely, the fever is a means for Ma and her main character to deride, mostly subtly, the machinations of capitalism and work. After all, is someone repeating a routine out of rote tradition any different from their infected selves? In raising the question, Ma implicates the apocalypse less as a result of current trends than as something happening right now. In a lot of ways, it feels like a novelistic approach to many movies of the 90s - Reality Bites, Office Space, etc. - but updated to account for the proliferation of technology's iron hold over us.

Otessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation felt like a sibling to Severance in many ways, though far more ambitious in its limitations. The novel is about a woman, bereft of empathy through a few strands of her early life, who elects to undergo a year of near-hibernation, hitting up a quack shrink for ungodly amounts of muscle relaxants, sleeping pills, and anti-anxiety meds to attempt to sleep for a year. The story is primarily told in dueling tracks of the main character's fuzzy present and her somewhat cliché but sympathetic past. That is not to say this is a particularly sympathetic character; you'd be hard-pressed to find a more unlikable protagonist in modern fiction. But that's not the point. Instead, we have to come to terms with the societal bonds, or rather the lack of them, that could make her regimen appealing. Again, this feels like a novel that speaks to the past as it is set in 2000, but illustrates how the critiques of that era only ring louder nearly two decades later. On a sidenote, the one-page epilogue is sure to raise some hackles.

I followed up with Nick Drnaso's graphic novel, Sabrina, which looks at the extended lives that inhabited the space around a young woman's disappearance. Namely, it follows the travails of her boyfriend, the boyfriend's friend that takes him in, and the woman's sister. If there is a main character to be found it's that friend, someone one step removed from the woman whose fate lingers over the whole work. In this way, Drnaso is able to comment substantially on the proliferation of conspiracy theories, once held at bay through disconnected communities derided by the public but now running roughshod over every video, comments section, and even thought among huge swathes of society. After all, we see right on this site all sorts of suspicion of family, friends, acquaintances, and coworkers for any and everyone suspected of even minor misdeeds. It's a quick but important read to get a handle on current trends in this direction, ones that seem to have no brakes.

I wrapped January up by finally getting around to Sam Quinones's Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic. So much has been written about the book and it's so widely-read that I won't spend much time on it, but I do think it's very smart how Quinones organized the book, choosing to weave numerous, short chapters together across time and geography. It keeps the book propulsive and highly readable, even as certain details repeat in very obvious ways. The thing is, if you're going for mass readership of such an important topic, making it a page-turner beats having meticulous prose. Mostly, I'm impressed with how well Quinones makes clear that the last few decades of pharmacological painkillers and illegal heroin mirror one another - they were run
in almost identical ways, especially in heroin's embrace of fast-food models - while also exacerbating one another.

That brings me up to eight books read on the year, right about in line with my goal of 100. February and March are going to have a lot of time-consuming items in my life, so the reading will be quite a bit lighter as I go through the 27 volumes that comprise Fullmetal Alchemist. It's one of the very few animes I ever found enjoyable, in both its forms, so I've been looking forward to this for awhile. I'll have some interstitial novels and such in between.

Current year list -

1. The Legends of Luke Skywalker
2. The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age - David E. Sanger
3. Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays) - Rebecca Solnit
4. Beautiful Country Burn Again - Ben Fountain
5. Severance - Ling Ma
6. My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottesa Moshfegh
7. Sabrina - Nick Drnaso
8. Dreamland: The True Tale of the American Opiate Epidemic - Sam Quinones

 

[ara]

I guessed this. :) Thanks for your effort.

This could be a pretty solid one. https://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/the-greatest-science-fiction-novels-of-all-time

Dont know the site or have any relations to it, just googled.

On Skyward, ive just bought it and im glad you also recommend it. :) Never mind its ya or light im currently finishing the Foundation Trilogy so its a good change i think lol.

Click to shrink...

Here is a link for reddit's Most Recommended Scifi

Click to shrink...

Thanks - added both to the OP!

I'll have to go through these lists this weekend. Really feel like reading a fun, info-dump-light sci-fi book would get me back in the reading groove.

 

[AngmarsKing701]

About 1/3 of the way into Promise of Blood. Pretty solid so far.

 

[AvernOffset]

Just finished The Stars Are Legion. It's very weird and undoubtedly niche, but I loved it. It follows an amnesiac woman wrapped up in an inter-ship conflict in the Legion: a collection of living, planet-sized starships that attempt to be self-sustaining by recycling all of their organic matter, including all of the humans on board. I'm not sure how to even describe it further without spoiling things, but if you like space opera, sci-fi adventure, and body horror, you should check this out.

 

[H4zeVentura]

I backed a copy of The World of Warcraft Diary from John Staats on Kickstarter in last October and it just arrived. :)

Spoiler without being a spoiler: It's awesome!

 

[Deleted member 38227]

patientzero Sabrina is going to wind up on the short list of best graphic novels of all time. It's that good.

I'm reading

Real textbook-y, but I'm enjoying it.

 

[patientzero]

Sabrina is going to wind up on the short list of best graphic novels of all time. It's that good.

Click to shrink...

I think I respected it more than I outright liked it. If I'm back in front of a classroom in a few years and teaching about modern trends I could see throwing it on my syllabus without a second thought. I do think it could have stood to be a bit more focused on the nature of media, but then that also isn't its primary goal. It's still trying to tell a story about grief first and foremost, though I think it gives short shrift to the boyfriend and sister compared to the boyfriend's friend. Still, I think it's important, which might count for a lot more than being enjoyable. I'm also always down for more innately outlandish media - comics, video games - to scale back into small dramas.

Basically, it's the sort of thing that's still going to be churning in my brain for a long time, which is how I come to find my favorite media. Weird example, but the Uncharted series did this to me. I was very mixed on the first game, but it just stuck in my head for the longest time and I realized I really loved what it was doing.

I mentioned Severance in that post, and it's doing the same thing to me but at a much quicker rate. I set the book down after reading it, thought it could be something like that, and in thinking about it and talking to people about it in the last few weeks I absolutely adore it.

 

[Saphirax]

Had a great January reading wise. Wish every month could be like that.

Click to shrink...

The Winternight trilogy was a treat. I'm actually bummed that it's over. Hopefully there'll be more. Bloody Rose was...alright? I certainly liked Kings of the Wlyd better. On the other hand, Crown of Stars is getting tedious and from what I'm seeing the sequels get worse before they get better. Not sure if I'll continue.

 

[InfinityDOK]

Had no Idea this was a thing. It is super cool and just in time as I wanted to get back into reading. There two Books I am currently reading for this month.

Vengeful is the sequel to an earlier book of V.E. Schwab called Vicious and is the second book in the Villians series.

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels is a book I have been wanting to read for a while currently just finished the Pillars of Eternity chapter can't wait to read more.

Not really sure what I will read after that either A Darker Shade of Magic or Scythe.

EDIT:Fixed some errors lol

 

[1000 Needles]

I've fallen a little off the wagon, so still working through Stephen Fry's Mythos. Though it's still absolutely fantastic, so I look forward to getting back on the horse.

I'm also working through Dreams From My Father, by Barack Obama. I left off after he talked about his struggle as a young man to reconcile where he fit in with the black and white communities, and found it incredibly riveting reading. Also looking forward to getting back to that

 

[Deleted member 38227]

I think I respected it more than I outright liked it. If I'm back in front of a classroom in a few years and teaching about modern trends I could see throwing it on my syllabus without a second thought. I do think it could have stood to be a bit more focused on the nature of media, but then that also isn't its primary goal. It's still trying to tell a story about grief first and foremost, though I think it gives short shrift to the boyfriend and sister compared to the boyfriend's friend. Still, I think it's important, which might count for a lot more than being enjoyable. I'm also always down for more innately outlandish media - comics, video games - to scale back into small dramas.

Basically, it's the sort of thing that's still going to be churning in my brain for a long time, which is how I come to find my favorite media. Weird example, but the Uncharted series did this to me. I was very mixed on the first game, but it just stuck in my head for the longest time and I realized I really loved what it was doing.

I mentioned Severance in that post, and it's doing the same thing to me but at a much quicker rate. I set the book down after reading it, thought it could be something like that, and in thinking about it and talking to people about it in the last few weeks I absolutely adore it.

Click to shrink...

How the narrative outright ignored certain aspects of the crime, instead focusing on the aftermath on someone tangentially involved, was genius. I loved how it spread out, not in.

 

[B.K.]

I'm almost half way through Words of Radiance. It takes me forever to get through big 1000 page books.

 

[ShadowSwordmaster]

Starting to read All the President's Men by Woodard and Bernstein. It's pretty good so far.

 

[patientzero]

How the narrative outright ignored certain aspects of the crime, instead focusing on the aftermath on someone tangentially involved, was genius. I loved how it spread out, not in.

Click to shrink...

Oh, totally. At no point did I want to know the minutiae of the crime. To do so would defeat the purpose entirely, and even prove counter-intuitive because every reader would focus on that.

For what it's worth, have you read Noah Hawley's Before the Fall? Very brisk novel about a man caught up in a horrific accident and how media plays on that. It would be a really interesting companion piece.

 

[Just Some Rando]

On my Audiobook livestream on Mixer, I just finished narrating H. G. Wells' The Time Machine last night.

On Monday, we're starting in with some Fighting Fantasy Choose Your own Adventure titles, and the following Monday I'll be reading Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

For myself, I'm continuing with The Republic by Plato, and my Libby app just downloaded Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward.

 

[meow]

I started but didn't manage to finish House of Leaves last month. Actually I didn't really even get close, I think I'm like 80 pages in + I've read through one of the appendices (the one with the letters).

The choices for Amazon First Reads, from a glance, look interesting this month.

 

[Deleted member 38227]

Oh, totally. At no point did I want to know the minutiae of the crime. To do so would defeat the purpose entirely, and even prove counter-intuitive because every reader would focus on that.

For what it's worth, have you read Noah Hawley's Before the Fall? Very brisk novel about a man caught up in a horrific accident and how media plays on that. It would be a really interesting companion piece.

Click to shrink...

Nope. But I'll check it out. Thanks!

 

[fakefaker]

150 pages into Noumenon Infinity by Marina J. Lostetter and so far it's really well done.

 

[Dec]

Finished Station Eleven. Really great.

Starting either Prisoner of Azkaban or Before They Are Hanged. Hmm...

 

[saenima]

Reading The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem. Really liking it, it has some strong horror vibes. Also reading some Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye. Was loving it until the misoginy showed its face, but i guess that was to be expected. It kinda cooled me off a bit. But i will say that Chandler's prose is phenomenal in its simplicity.

 

[Donthizz]

Looking for a good sci fi book, but the link is broken. :(

Click to shrink...

try Pandora's Star by Peter Hamilton.

 

[luca]

Still going through The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but I haven't had the urge to read for the past two weeks since some stuff have come up in my life.
Besides that, I just bought the physical paperback of Dune on Amazon, so will start over with that one too.

 

[Gernau Morat Gurgeh]

Somehow hadn't got around to Zamyatin before, despite having heard of the book and being a big fan of classic science fiction.

 

[Deleted member 31133]

Back to non-fiction for me.

 

[Muad'dib]

Started Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson, after that looking into starting The Witcher series. As for non fantasy books, been meaning to start Brothers Karamazov for some time now.

 

[Mikebison]

Near the end of Book 2 of Way of Kings. Can certainly see why people love the series. Looking forward to starting Words of Radiance.

 

[FaceHugger]

So apparently we get free "Audible Originals" now if we have a subscription? Any suggestions?

 

[Unaha-Closp]

The Soprano Sorceress by L E Modesitt Jr - don't know how I feel about it as she has yet to let rip and realise how powerful she is, which is what I assume is going to happen. Then fantasy highjinks will ensue no doubt. So not exactly a cutting edge new novel but it's a nice easy read in these freezing times.

 

[ashado]

My first read for February is Leigh Bardugo's King of Scars. I started reading it last night and I can see myself finishing it this weekend.

I meant to post more in last month's thread but I never did. Since my last post there, I finished rereading Katherine Arden's The Girl in the Tower and then I basically devoured the final book in her Winternight Trilogy, The Winter of the Witch. What an amazing series. Books don't usually make me cry but I just had to at the end of this book, mainly because of one particular scene but also probably a little bit because it was the end.

After that, I reread The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty so I could read the newest book in the Daevabad Trilogy, The Kingdom of Copper. I thought it was slower-paced than the previous novel, which was slightly disappointing, but I'm excited to see how it wraps up in the final book which should hopefully be out next January.

 

[saenima]

So apparently we get free "Audible Originals" now if we have a subscription? Any suggestions?

Click to shrink...

I think those are just podcasts.

Edit: Huh looking at it there's other stuff in there as well. Now i have the same question as you lol

 

[Lightning Count]

Currently reading Bret Hart's autobiography, I have actually owned it for a long time. I got through about a quarter ages ago and stopped, I started reading it again recently.

 

[DieH@rd]

I'm finishing the Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter F Hamilton.

 

[ara]

I'm finishing the Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter F Hamilton.

Click to shrink...

You been liking it? I really enjoyed what I read of Pandora's Star (but I ended up never finishing it and doubt I'll ever return) so I've been pretty interested in the Night's Dawn trilogy. The premise is super intriguing, at least.

 

[DieH@rd]

Pandora's Star takes a lot of time before shit hits the fan [and when it hit, it was very massive explosion].

Night's Dawn has a better buildup [still long, but I like the characters], and the enemy threat was very eerie and evil.

 

[RepairmanJack]

Instead of any of my reading options I just opted to plow through the rest of The Reckoner series. About a third through Firefight now. Was actually hoping it didn't jump instantly into another big Epic/set-up/hit. But I guess that's what this series is. I'd actually appreciate more world building from a Sanderson book if that makes sense.

 

[Donthizz]

You been liking it? I really enjoyed what I read of Pandora's Star (but I ended up never finishing it and doubt I'll ever return) so I've been pretty interested in the Night's Dawn trilogy. The premise is super intriguing, at least.

Click to shrink...

if you buy into the " enemy " in Night's dawn, then it's going to be a fun read.