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I gotta skip the misogyny/alt-right crap today. So here’s a question for you all: what are you reading?
I’ll start: in addition to reading way too many news stories about Donald Trump, I’ve been reading about meditation. Here are a couple of books I especially like:
Mindfulness in Plain English, by Henepola Gunaratana (An older version is available for free online!)
The Mind Illuminated, by Culadasa (John Yates). Website here.
How about you?
As an added bonus, here are some words of wisdom from my unconscious mind:
"Pickles don't just CAUSE hippies. Pickles ARE hippies." — Someone said this in a dream of mine last night. #PicklesAreHippies #TrumpTail
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) September 30, 2016
It didn’t make any more sense in the dream than it does in the real world.
And a Pledge Drive capybara reading a goddamn book!
MissEB47
I loved “gone with the blastwave” is it still going?
And “romantically apocalyptic” is pretty amazing as well.
Dan Kasteray
Yes i’m trying to run a Rogue Trader RP with my friends”for the god-emperor!” …not Trump.
Also how do you reply to specific people? I just wrote their names in the comment box.(i’m a new commentor but a longish time reader of WHTM)
[Note to self: Well of course you just bookmarked this page for recommendations next time you want something new to read. Now make sure you remember you have bookmarked it, self!]
I’m re-reading The Household Guide to Dying by Debra Adelaide, which is a wonderful, funny, uplifting, non chronological novel about an author of household guides coming to terms with the greatest tragedy of her life, which isn’t her impending death. Also, much of it occurs in country town rural Queensland. This is a bonus for me as I don’t see my world in fiction very often.
I’ve just discovered that the author has a newer book out, which I have deprived myself of for a year now by my wanton folly of not reading media with book review sections. So I will be reading that next. Its protagonist is also an author, and I enjoy books where people write about writing. Including Chuck Tingle’s Lonely Author Pounded By Dinosaur Social Media Followers
Slightly off topic tip to fellow Chuck Tingle fans: he has just unveiled his newest project.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ChuckTingle/status/782037752082669568
I’m almost finished The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse. I’m at the appendix part, which is supposed to be the writings of the main character.
So, my thoughts on Herman Hesse: on the positive side, I like his style and themes – thoughtfulness and meditation, rationality, community, the pluses and minuses of hierarchies (e.g. in education)… and if that sounds dull by itself, he’s also got a nice descriptive flair and some gently ironic humour. Honestly, I think that reading his works can make me a slightly better person! Even if I use too many adverbs!
On the negative side, it’s the men in his world who do most of the deep thinking and intellectual stuff. Women are secondary characters. I’m still a bit bemused that the intellectual world of Castalia (in the Glass Bead Game) is all men. Dude, you wrote this in the 1940s. WOMEN WENT TO UNIVERSITIES THEN.
@Brony
No, Roosh is a rapist game counselor. It’s all a whimsical, lighthearted game. Until the finale. Hey, it’s a complex game with lots of rules, the most important of which are kept from the opposing player.
And if the victim — er, opposing player — doesn’t enjoy the game, well, really that’s on her. She’s a spoilsport, a killjoy, a harsher of the buzz of predators — er, game players.
@epitome of incomprehensibility
https://www.amazon.com/This-San-Francisco-Childrens-Classic/dp/0789309629/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8#reader_0789309629
This Is San Francisco (published in 1962) is a lovely, charming children’s book — with very few women or girls in it.
It was sitting on the desk of a publishing client of mine a few years ago, and I picked it up to take a look.
Some 90 to 95 percent of the many people depicted in the numerous illustrations were male.
I was alive in 1962. Many, many girls and women were in existence even in those days. In fact, about half of the population was female.
So I’m gonna challenge author and illustrator Miroslav Sasek on his powers of observation, his mastery of math, and his familiarity with sociology. Plus common sense.
Yeah, I went there.
I’m fairly sure that the Alan Rickman gif is from the movie Mesmer, which is strangely erotic for a film where no one gets naked or has sex.
I’m reading a just-released biography of Shirley Jackson. It’s good, but her husband was such a creep that I want to contact him with a Ouija board so I can yell at him.
I’m also reading a book about Damien Echols, one of the West Memphis Three. It’s about both his life on death row and his life before his wrongful conviction.
And I would like to second the recommendation on the Dark Descent horror anthology. I’ve read a lot of horror, and that book is by far one of the very best.
As for horror novels, Amy Lukavics’ s Daughters Unto Devils is one hell of a debut.
I don’t read prose so I am currently reading The Demon: Hell’s Hitman by Garth Ennis and John McCrea for my blog and the Bendis/Maleev Daredevil Omnibus 3.
The Girl with All the Gifts.
I’m currently reading the Russell’s Attic series by S.L. Huang.
I recommend it to any math geeks 😀
It’s about a 20-something brown skinned girl who has the super power of being able to compute any math of any complexity in real time in her head. She uses that power, along with the help of a black ex-cop turned P.I. and paraplegic white superhacker to take on international criminal organizations with the power to launch nukes and napalm-filled missiles at will, robots, mad engineers with ray guns, natural disasters (such as earthquakes), and the occasional psychic. Well worth the read.
@LindsayIrene
I loved We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
I am working my way through the Lockwood and Co series by Jonathan Stroud. It’s written for young readers, but it’s one of the creepiest things I have ever read. Main character, Lucy, is a ghost hunter in an alternate London where ghost touch is deadly and only children can see (and therefore hunt and destroy) the ghosts. Highly recommended.
I’m currently reading Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel. It’s pretty good, lots of female characters but also lots of casual misogyny because this is the Stone Age. Quite interesting, though and lots of mammoth hunting!
I just discovered the manga series Rinne recently. Only two volumes in so far, but I’m gobsmacked Rumiko Takahashi managed to write two lead characters who I both like (haven’t had much luck with her bigger series, like Maison Ikkoku, Ranma 1/2, and Inuyasha), so I’m looking forward to more. Basic premise so far is that it’s a slice-of-life story surrounding a girl who was briefly abducted to the spirit world when she was younger (and thus she can now see ghosts) and a boy descended from a shinigami who’s bound to pay off a family debt by acting as a psychopomp to troubled ghosts (but because he’s part human and has no inherent magic, he has to literally buy all the tools needed to exorcise ghosts…and is perpetually impoverished as a result).
When I’m not doing that, I’m rereading a bunch of Bill Bryson’s books and watching the literary news for the next Dresden Files novel.
Currently reading “We Don’t Need Roads,” about the making of the Back to the Future movies; lots of interesting stories in there actually. Next up is The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide just because I haven’t read them for a while and don’t have anything new right now.
On another note, if anyone needs anything new to read I always recommend these as they’re some of my favorites: The Girls He Adored by Jonathan Nasaw, Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, When She Woke by Hillary Jordan (guessing probably everyone around here would *really* get into this one), Honeymoon with Harry by Bart Baker, Christian Nation by Frederick C Rich
I may have read that one. 🙂 I was so happy to find out that he had been released.
Hi guys! I just wanted to say I’ve been reading this site for a long time and loving it. I recently posted my own article that absolutely PISSED OFF the MRAs. Have a look! 😉
https://twitter.com/julialynnrubin/status/781613813590265856
I haven’t been reading much lately, but I have been meaning to finish the Dresden Files. (I’m still on the first book)
@LindsayIrene
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin. I have a library hold on it, and can’t wait. I’m a huge Jackson fan.
I have an earlier Jackson bio, Private Demons, by Judy Oppenheimer. It’s quite good.
Also waiting on Margaret Atwood’s Hag Seed. It’s her retelling of The Tempest.
Right now I’m reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margareta. And since it references the Faust legend, I’m also sorta rereading Goethe’s Faust, which I really didn’t read properly the first time (I skimmed a lot. I do like it, but…sometimes I have attention issues.)
Mostly blogs TBH 🙂 Rereading Gaudy Night—read it as a teen, wondered what I’d think of it now that I’m more than passingly familiar with the whole Oxford schtick. Even back in the day I was never a huge Sayers fan; I’m finding this one almost incomprehensible now. Also reading Joanna Macy’s Active Hope; a friend bought it for me and a couple of her other friends, as she wants us to get engaged with an idea she has.
Just finished The Fifth Season—I wouldn’t have finished it if I didn’t like it, but I do have to wonder if ‘story about a member of a despised minority who in reality are ‘superhuman’/support the majority culture without them realising it’ is the only story we know how to tell any more. Not that it’s not an important one, granted.
I’m majoring in English lit so I have several books on the go. This week it’s Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, and Evelina by Fanny Burney. I’m also reading bits of The Witcher series on the side because I love the games and thought I’d give the novels a try, which are really quite good if you like fantasy and/or Polish folklore. 😀
Right now I kind of want to know more of poetry, so right now I’m reading Robert Frost, and Hồ Xuân Hương, apparently one of the greatest Vietnamese classical poets.
Frost I understand because he’s writing in native English, Xuan’s Huong’s writing, well her stuff when translated to English is a different beast to be sure. By that I mean she’s raunchy as hell.
Seriously this is one of her quotes on being a concubine.
She didn’t take well to that. I am in absolute love with this woman.
http://ci.memecdn.com/225/4817225.jpg
i do a lot of audio books. I just finished “Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits” David Wong’s third book and I thought it was quite good and the narrator for it was AMAZING.
I haven’t started anything else yet but next I will probably try to read a physical book for the first time in awhile because an online friend just sent me a package with THREE books: “Fingersmith” by Sarah Waters, “More Happy Than Not” by Adam Silvera, and “The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August” by Claire North. I’m just not sure which I’m going to try first…
I currently read this month issue of a scientific newspaper. There are considerations on how mammals were actually already well developped and on the rise by Jurassic, so before the dinosaure disappeared ; the scientific implication of finding widely divergent life duration for neutron (either one of the experiment is flawed or it’s a huge clue for future physics) ; and something about the demographic unbalance in the asian countries, aka how bad is the current situation, how it will worsen, what the countries can do, and how the population currently adapt.
In the strange dream category, the weirder one involved an aztec priestess who pursued me. When I almost got away, she transformed into a giant were-platypus, and started flinging cars at me.
Im reading Wolf Hall (slowly) and reading Huck Finn to my son at nights.
Huck Finn… I’m not sure, I can’t make up my mind – we’re into the final weird bits where Tom Sawyer shows up. We’ve been reading on it for ages. I still think it’s an important novel, but I think its messages are too subtle for kids. I’ve been having to stop and explain things a lot. It’s certainly made me realise how much closer I am to Huck Finn than my son is. I grew up in the South. I knew people who were born in the 19th century. I didn’t personally know anyone who was born a slave, but I knew people who knew people who were. I think that probably also means that I knew people who knew people who owned slaves. (Though no one ever mentioned it like that, but it must be the case). For me, that means I realise I’m not that far away from American slavery*. But I don’t think my son can grasp that.
I think it was too subtle for me in high school. I just wish we could have required reading for adults instead of high school when you’re too young to understand certain things. But it’s certainly been interesting re-visiting the book.
I sometimes have to do a reality check that the land of Huck Finn – the country of my birth is now so far away – and most of the places in Wolf Hall I can take a bus to.
_____
*and of course there’s modern slavery, too – which we ignore too much – I’m probably much closer than I think to modern slaves.
I just finished Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. It’s speculative fiction set in the near-ish future and it’s gorgeous. Plays with gender and society in a very clever way, but has lots and lots of layers. I bought it after seeing raves from Jo Walton on the cover.
It will be on the top of my Hugo nominations list this year for sure.