Finished Implacable by Jack Campbell and Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey.

I’m in the middle of Galactic Patrol by “Doc” Smith and The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey.

Coming soon from the library: I have The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and Dragondrums by Anne McCaffrey on hold!

I’m reading Sharp Ends by Joe Abercrombie. Each time I move to a new section in the book, I feel like I missed reading something else, and need to remind myself that’s how this book is. I’m enjoying it filling in some gaps in knowledge and basically reliving scenes from completely different perspectives. First Law is a great world that he’s built.

And listening to This Inevitable Ruin, book 7 in DCC. Feels like chaos at times, as the books tend towards more and more. I sometimes feel like it’s too big. Still very much enjoy it, although it feels like information overload.

I’m finishing Snow Crash and Will start Do androids dream of electric sheep? Afterwards

I started October Film Haunt by Michael Wehunt. I’m about 15% into it, and it’s alright so far.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. Wasn’t my initial planned read after previous book, however, I realized the movie is coming out this week. It’s my first novel by him, I’ve been blown away as it’s so lovely and poignant with a dash of cheekiness in regards to the human experience. So happy I started it, as I’m enjoying it more since my last two reads were disappointments.

On the non-fiction side, I’m reading Designing for the Digital Age by Kim Goodwin. Another title I’ve discovered through the author Erika Hall, who ascribes the book as an essential read – of which I can see why. It’s a masterclass of a book, despite it being published in 2009, the info I’ve read so far is evergreen (irrespective of AI “hype” of today).

Have been working my way through debt by david graber, and waiting for an order of books that should have arrived a month ago.
Pretty interesting book about the creation of debt and money, though i feel at times it requires a baseline knowledge in both economics and the english language i dont quite possess

Currently reading Carl Jung’s Answer to Job. It has been extremely fascinating.

Currently reading The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross. I picked up a hardbound collection called OnHer Majesty’s Occult Service that had The Atrocity Archive and Jennifer Morgue in one. I read AA years ago, so this has been fun.

Just finished the farseer trilogy, part of the realm of the enderlings by robin hobb. Started the livetrader trilogy which is next in line and I had to drop it.

Book 3 of the farseer trilogy really becomes insufferable, made me hate the main character, and has an unsatisfactory ending. And the amount of sexual assault /rape in the books skyrockets to a degree that makes the act feel trival. I had to drop the first book of the next series a couple chapters in when a character thinks about his sexual assault as a minor paragraphs after meeting him.

SA isnt a deal breaker for me, especially in fantasy. Ive read a song of ice and fire. But I dont like how trivialized it is, and that combined with what a miserable character Fitz becomes I just decided i didnt want to go through it again. So now I’ll need to find something else to read.

Still working on A Memory of Light by Brandon Sanderson. After having complained of the slow pacing of the books, it feels weird to say the final book moves too fast in the beginning. It has since settled in to a more reasonable pace though, so that’s okay.

I’m about to start my first read of Moby Dick. Currently reading the LOTR books.

I finished “The Diamond Age” by Neal Stephenson and “Hail Mary” by Andy Weir, now I’m working on “Ulysses” by James Joyce.

And just… holy shit, how much more remarkably difficult it is to read Ulysses as opposed to the other two. The Diamond Age is a good bit of sci-fi, if a little dense, while Hail Mary felt like reading a childrens story for how easy it was. Now Ulysses is so massively dense, with no quotation marks, constantly referencing Shakespeare, speaking in 4 different languages thus far, while ricocheting from thought to thought, scene to scene like a bullet fired inside a closed metal chamber. It’s a massive shift.

The Outsider by Stephen King. A kid is horrifically murdered in a small town, and the local near-celebrity Little League baseball coach is publicly arrested for the murder with multiple eyewitness accounts putting him around town and interacting with the victim that day. Except the coach has an airtight alibi because he was in a city 70 miles away with 3 other teachers at a conference. Was the murder committed by some kind of doppelganger? I need to keep reading to find out

The Design of Everyday Things. I finally got my hands of a french edition. I’m reading it slowly but I’m already done with the first half.

Just got done with GK Chestertons “The Man who was Thursday” and now I’m starting Tolstois “War and Peace”, which I am really excited and a little intimidated by. So far mostly doing research on the period, will start reading probably tomorrow. I already read some of his older and shorter novels and hated them, Ivan Iljytch aside. I am hoping that the younger Tolstoi had smarter ideas than the misogynist religious fundamentalist of the later period.

Anyways, since I can’t speak on War and Peace yet, here is my review for Chesterton:

Chesterton crafts a humorous and thrilling mystery, plunging his readers and his hero, the poet-turned-detective Gabriel Syme, into a nightmarish chase through London and northern France as he tries to unravel a vast and sinister anarchist conspiracy. It is hard to discuss this novel without revealing too much, so I will tread carefully.
The plot starts out simple enough. Two poets meet in a park and discuss the autheticity of their anarchist beliefs. One turns out to be a detective, the other part of a real anarchist lodge. In the following 15 chapters Chesterton gradually adds layer upon layer until the story seems to have changed completely from it’s point of origin, only for it to come full circle and show that our first expectations were wrong all along. The characters and the reader reach this realisation together: their assumptions have sent them on a quest that is not what it seems. How expectations and biases shape our reality is one of the book’s strongest themes, and it fits Chesterton’s obvious distrust of materialism and rationalism.
The style follows the same arc. At first the writing seems fairly conventional, apart from some comic and eccentric touches. But these grow stranger with every chapter, until the final masked ball feels closer to the ritual in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut than to a detective story.
That said, the book has clear weaknesses. Its portrayal of anarchism is hardly fair and is at best a caricature. Whenever the text talks about anarchism, it has about as much credibility as my grandmother talking about drugs: mostly sensationalist headlines with little substance. There is some critique of society, but it comes from a perspective that is not interested in fundamental questions and is fairly comfortable with the status quo. The strong religious themes won’t be to everyone’s taste, though I found that they never became preachy. There are also some parts that seem a bit repetitive, but I can understand their addition from a structural perspective.
Overall, I found this quite entertaining and fun. Chesterton is definitely very talented when it comes to writing. However, it didn’t impress me as much as I expected given its reputation. Perhaps I simply dislike cops too much to ever truly enjoy a story centered around them.