What are you reading now?

[lwks]

Not really a "book" in a sense, but Remembering the Kanji is my current read. It's a book for learning Japanese Kanji, and man for sure it is hard, there are more than 2k Kanjis, each with several meanings AND readings. For exemple:

時 (time) is read "Toki"

But 時間 (clock time?) is read "Jikan"

But 人間 (person) is read "Ningen"

But 人 (person) is read "Hito"

It's so messed up that the book only teaches you ONE meaning and how to write the Kanji, its pronunciation you should learn organicaly as you come by.

お前はもう死んでいる

何？

HIGH PITCHED NOISES

[Taw Tu'lki]

Not book.

But manga.

I read manga "Jojo's Bizarre Adventure". Finished to read Stardust Crusaders.

[Hellbent]

I just started reading The Road

[Taw Tu'lki]

Reading some anarchic literature.

[P41R47]

Quite enjoying "The Sound and The Fury" by William Faulkner.

Really like the first chapter. It is an interesting way to depict a mentally disabled man.

[nostalgia]

The Iliad by Homer. Damn the Catalogue of Ships is long ang boring.

[Hellbent]

A excerpt from The Road with some Doomy imagery:

 

They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterns. The first he'd seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

[Hellbent]

Just finished the book. My summary of the book is as follows: It rained and rained and rained and rained. The riverbed was dry. Good book, though! Couple other things niggled me, though.

[kalaeth]

OK, so I've set on which books I'll take with me for vacations :

- Artur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth (a two-volume version in portuguese of a sci-fi classic that somehow I haven't read yet),

- Tolkien's History Of Middle Earth part 8 (I might take part 6 as well, both of the being from the "history of LoTR" subset, where Christopher Tolkien went through is father's notes and drafts and composed them. Fun fact : Aragorn was initially a hobbit who had to wear wooden shoes because his feet were burned in torture ) 

- José Saramago's History of the Siege of Lisbon (and thus I'll be one book shorter of reading all of Saramago)

- Ursula K. Le Guin's City of Illusions (with it's great portuguese title of "time traveler" for reasons.)

 

This should keep me busy for a couple of weeks. I hope.  

[Grazza]

I don't read much nowadays (other than in the course of my work - which involves a lot of reading), but did recently get The Star Diaries (Stanislaw Lem) in audiobook form, and I'll be listening to it at various points when time permits. I read it years ago, and I've no doubt forgotten some of it, but it's a fun kind of book, and easy to dip in and out of.

 

I used to read tons of stuff. Philosophy (incl. everything by Plato), history (mostly ancient Greek; no, I didn't get all the way through Thucycides, but I tried), plays by Aristophanes and Sophocles et al., lots of sci-fi, etc. Oddest choice of reading matter was perhaps The Satanic Verses, which I read from start to finish pretty much in one marathon session. Don't know why. I got it out of the local library when I lived in Svendborg. A fair amount of mathematical and theoretical physics stuff too, not all related to studies - some just for fun. If you want some light reading (yeah, right), then I recall enjoying Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty. I'd read that a little while before interviewing at various universities, so I wasn't short of stuff to talk about to cover up the fact that I was little more than a drunken yob at the time.

 

Just about to finish writing my 30th book. As a wise man once said, "Do you want people to write books or read them? You can't do both."

Edited July 28, 2020 by Grazza

[MassiveEdgelord]

Girl, Interupted.

[Redneckerz]

Currently reading when going to work and going back home, Morning, Afternoon:

Charles Darwin's

Private copy. I snagged a near mint print some months ago at a thrift store, and its not like these books are very common in the town i live nearby at, let alone finding a copy in this near-pristine condition. Obviously i treat it with care, but it gets used, haha.
 

Thoughts on the book:

As i am reaching near the end, of the book (100 more pages to go) it has been good stuff so far. Darwin has a calm and clean style of writing so that his chapters on research are not trite to read, opting to write in a manner similar to orating a speech. It also lays down well why the book became so highly influential - Darwin routinely cites very specific examples for very specific situations regarding evolution.

All in all, good showing. It surprised me, really. I expected a dry book that just laid out results, but its rather emotive, and easy to engage.

[Taw Tu'lki]

Reading Platform Capitalism.

 

[Rince-wind]

[AinuTheTaken]

High literature and/or Asian literature most of the time. I don't always read, though, since I have other things to do like playing Doom.

 

[joepallai]

about halfway through "The Great Eastern" and enjoying the what if nature of the tale (Captain Nemo vs. Captain Ahab)

[DooM Bear]

Currently rereading “Small-Scale Synthesis of Laboratory Reagents with Reaction Modeling“ By “Leonid Lerner”.

 

Sounds super dry but is an awesome book with small scale and relatively simple (for a chemist) syntheses of hard to find or prohibitively expensive (due to Hazmat shipping charges, etc.) chemicals like, Lithium Hydride, Aluminium Lithium Hydride, Hydrazine Hydrate, n-Butyllithium and Phosphorus Pentachloride.

[Dubbag]

On my second time reading IT. Next ill be bringing out my 1500 page HP love craft text book with every story he ever wrote in it.

[Gokuma]

Just read the oldest fiction vampire story, The Vampyre, from 1816.  Of course it uses some historical superstition and misconceptions as some material.

 

Before its introduction and after the story are some historical accounts of Lord Byron and his estate.   Turns out he was simply reclusive and not exiled as many slandered him with various lies while he privately did many good deeds (The movie, Gothic, though interesting, is totally fictionalized BS loosely grasping just a couple actual real details).   Anyway at a get together, people were interested by a German supernatural story, Phantasmagoriana, and by the beginning of Lord Byron's own book, Christabel, and it spawned a little ghost story contest with incredible results.   At only age 18-20, Mary Shelley, (then Mary Godwin but was accompanied by her future husband) wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. (She later toned down her own work but a Penny Dreadful compilation book I have contains the original).   And Lord Byron's doctor,  John William Polidori, wrote The Vampyre.

 

The next vampire story I have to track down is Varney the Vampire, a Penny Dreadful serial which ran 232 chapters.   A full compilation is close to 900 pages!

 

Apparently the third vampire story is Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu from 1872.  Got a book and read it years ago.   Want to reread it again soon.   Want to read it sooner than finishing a 900 pager first, especially since it's about 1/9 that size, but I 'd like to see the progressive development of vampire novels.   Who doesn't want to read about a lesbian vampire?

 

Fourth is Bram Stoker's Dracula from 1897, which I got and read well over a decade ago.    Really captures the eerieness of a vampire castle and of course this is the most well known story.

Edited December 8, 2020 by Gokuma

[Mr. Freeze]

[Percy T]

I'm in the middle of Divine Comedy, a novel-length Italian narrative poem written by Dante Alighieri in 1320. I bought it because some doom levels in the original iwads and some other pwads referenced locations in this book. It's actually really interesting, but the english translation is very verbose and the words are very medieval ages old-timey-english-esque. It's an amazing story so far, and its helps me remember how bad hell really is (if you believe in it). Its a super intellectual read and I recommend it to anyone, religious or not :)

 

[nrofl]

I just got done reading From A Buick 8 by Stephen King. My family loves Kings books and this is no exception. It's more sci-fi than horror but its sure an interesting and entertaining read. 

[Omniarch]

Allegedly reading Cyteen, by C.J Cherryh, a fascinating work of science fiction that acts as both a sociological and character study. The titular Cyteen is a very interesting society, both alien and familiar, with a very unusual and nuanced take on 'enslaved' artificial humans, and the main character is staggeringly deep and well-realized individual, who grows from an infant to a young woman over the course of the story. The supporting cast are also very well fleshed out and dynamic, both from their own perspectives and from the protagonist's. 

 

The allegedly part is because I have a bad habit of getting 90-95% of the way through a book and then pausing it indefinitely because by that point I've figured out the ending and have burned myself out.

 

Generally, I'd rather play video games, watch anime or longform analytical youtube video essays (at 2x speed, because people talk excruciatingly slow on yt) than read, because mindless entertainment is more easy to consume through the audio/visual medium. When I want to be truly engaged by a piece of media, I read.

 

Another series that I am in the middle of is the Wheel of Time, by Robert Jordan, the longest genre fiction series in existence, clocking in at a whopping 14 doorstoppers (totaling over 4,400,000 words. For perspective, Lord of the Rings is about 450,000). It is a very interesting though oftentimes aggravating read, due to the author's many peculiar fixations. The world is incredibly deep and surprisingly original in the details. Its characters are the main selling point, though. While most are not traditionally likable, there is a great deal of humanity present in the way they are written, despite outwardly larger-than-life characterization. The protagonist in particular is fantastic, as he grows from a ignorant farmboy into a competent but also more ruthless leader and warrior who has many skulls to crack if he hopes to lead Humanity against the forces of darkness come Tarmon Gai'Don (basically Armageddon).

[Taw Tu'lki]

Reading Marx "Das Kapital"

[Doritos420]

On 7/27/2020 at 8:50 PM, Hellbent said:

Just finished the book. My summary of the book is as follows: It rained and rained and rained and rained. The riverbed was dry. Good book, though! Couple other things niggled me, though.

 

Great book, the movie was also very good as well.

 

I ordered Masters of Doom, so I'm looking forward to that.

[TenenteZashu]

This old ww2 comic book (emphasis on book since it's like 192 pages long) from 1982 I found in the attic, if anyone is intrested I can upload scans of it (it's in italian btw)

[MDevlin]

Just started reading Andy Greenberg's "Sandworm". It's about the NotPetya worm that was distributed in 2017 using a zero-day vulnerability in the lawless wasteland that is MS PowerPoint.

[DRM-MAN]

I have no mouth and i must scream, i always read it around february.

[xX_Lol6_Xx]

Right now I'm reading the Diary of a wimpy kid 8. So far I've enjoyed it

[Hawk of The Crystals]

Call of cthulu by h.p lovecraft.