Had a pretty busy week and didn’t get to read anything.
What about all of you? What have you all been reading or listening to lately?
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Busy week too. Read two chapters of Watership Down…that’s it. Work sucks.
S.A.T.A.N. vs C.H.R.I.S.T.: the War for the Human Mind
Here Goes Nothing by Steve Toltz for my boom club. Its ok so far, not a big fan of the protagonist.
Currently mostly focusing on The First Socialist Schism by Wolfgang Eckhardt and although I’m still not quite halfway through I would highly recommend it. It’s a primarily sourced based book about the ideological differences and figures that led to the breakup of the First International as well as the development of ideology’s like Marxism, Anarchism and Social Democracy emerging form it.
I’m halfway through Star Wars The Ambush at Corellia, its book 1 of the Corellia trilogy and centers around Hans home planet, which hasn’t been talked about much chronologically yet, like at all in legends.
After this, it’s Operation Bounce House by Matt Dinniman, my brother grabbed it after hearing about me reading Dungeon Crawler Carl. So we swapped books on the weekend, my 8 DCC for the one book. I have borrowed close to 70 of his Star Wars books by now though.
I rolled over a goal a couple weeks ago too, 53 books read for the year. I thought I was going slower than one a week, but I guess not. I did crush almost a dozen in January though.
That’s awesome, grats on the goal!
Thanks! It wasn’t a goal I was gonna stress myself with if I wasn’t going to make it, but it does feel good to read “a book a week”.
More than a handful of them were around 800 pages, those feel like they should be multiple books. But same time I also read a lot of anthologies, those are “one book” and not multiple stories or even novellas depending on their size.
I’m gonna read Murderbot next, and I got paired volumes for the novellas, so I’m debating if I treat those as one themselves or track the individual original novellas.
Oh wow, you went hard. I got through around 50 last year (which was way more than I’d planned, and not something I intend to try again), but only a few were over 400 pages, with maybe a dozen novellas.
Anything in the super-long range you read that you’d recommend? I’m always hesitant to pick up anything with a high page count b/c they often seem like they’re long just to be long, and slow pacing and me don’t mix.
DCC I just finished, earlier this year I read Ken lius translation of Cixin Lius Three Body problem, one of the books was up there. Silo was also good, the first book is a collection of short stories, and the other 2 books are decently long.
The Captive War series book 2 by James S.A Corey came out, it’s gonna be trilogy, so may want to wait if you like only going into done series.
Other than that, it’s just random Star Wars books that crest just over 5-600. And previously read the last couple years would be Dune, and some anthologies. I’m not a fan of the super long book myself.
All these books are ones I alternate between reading all of Star Wars Legends chronologically.
Congratulations on the reading goal, that’s mighty impressive! 💪🥳
Thanks! My optometrist gave me shit at the start of the year for reading “too much”, so now I’ve got some reading glasses and I’m supposed to be following the “20/20/20” rule.
Read for 20 minutes, than stare at something 20 feet away from 20 seconds to rest they eyes.
Those Silo novels were fantastic though >.>
Haha, the joys of getting older. Ohh glad to hear about the Silo series, on my tbr :3.
I haven’t started them, and it might be a while before I do so, but I did just get used copies of Donald Knuth’s books on TeX and typesetting.
Knuth is an elderly computer science better known for his more-general algorithms work, but I’ve been interested in pen plotting recently. Most modern font formats define areas to fill in, whuch doesn’t map well to plotting. I recently discovered that MetaFont, TeX’s native font format, is based on pen strokes and defining a variable width on those strokes, which is more similar to pen plotting.
Kinda dry and older books, but I’ve been pretty fascinated by some of the pen plotter art on Reddit, and have been looking into what the current limitations are.
Endless Blue Beneath - Shannon K. English
It was not good, unfortunately. Some cool mermaid vibes, but holy hell that ending. Imagine someone committing genocide telling someone who hadn’t done anything wrong to ‘be better.’ Not to mention, it’s mostly just miserable the entire time, the main character is insufferable and repeats her thoughts about her brother all the time, and then the love interest was a choice. For what little time was dedicated to her in the first place.
Not sure what I’ll read next.
Fiction: Nova by Samuel R Delaney
Non: Lies my teacher told me, forget the author but it’s great
Recently finished: dungeon crawler carl series
The Complete Chronicles of Conan. I am re-reading it actually.
I highly recommend it
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/828878.The_Complete_Chronicles_of_Conan
Almost finished Carl’s Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman. I’m intentionally dragging out the last few chapters because it’s so good.
Also, still working my way through Want Submitted by Anonymous Edited by Gillian Anderson. Fantastic book!
I am currently obsessed with DCC as well. It is impossible to put it down!
I’m about to finish the book, actually I did just have the bonus material to reads
It’s so good! But I want to savor its deliciousness.
Ooohh what bonus material? Is this outside the books? Or do you mean the epilogue?
I’ve been out of work sick, so it has been difficult to contain myself and not read all day.
It’s outside of the Epilogue. The versions of the first 2 books I read have parts of a bonus story called “Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret”.
I totally get you! If I was sick, I’d probably do the same lol
Oh cool! What version of the book do you have? I have to looks for those.
I picked it up at Barnes and Noble. ISBN is 978-0-593-82026-1
The story is Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret, maybe it’s online somewhere too.
Thanks!
I just finished Moss’d In Space by Rebecca Thorne. Picked because it had a happy cover and the ebook was available immediately while I waited for another TBR book to be available from my library.
The lightness of the cover carries through the book. There’s dangerous space travel, smugglers, conflicts between alien species, but overall the challenges never seem insurmountable (at least not for more than a couple sentences). It’s light without being pure bubblegum. Even the romance part is light with more of the focus on familial relationship and friendships. Sequel slated for next summer and I have added it to my TBR.
Currently reading The Godfather’s Revenge by Mark Winegardner
I read the first book when I was a teen and finally got my hands on the second one last week. Think I read the first one like 5 times at least lmao.
This one is proving to be quite good as well, really sucks you in that world and I think it does the Mario Puzo novel justice, definitely would recommend it to anyone who loves The Godfather book/movies.
I am about half way through book 10 of He Who Fights With Monsters, still can’t stop listening to it!
I had a brief beak from it with “Radical Remission - Surviving Cancer Through All Odds” which was an interesting read to prepare me for what is going to come in the future.
to prepare me for what is going to come in the future.
Are you alright? 🥺
Thanks for asking. My wife beat cancer 15 years ago before we met but we have just found out the same cancer is back. I have no experience of anything like this so it is going to be a learning experience for me that I’d rather not have but there we go :)
Oh my, I’m sorry to hear that :(, fuck cancer! Sounds like you’re quite the partner for her, I wish you and her well. May she punch it back into remission, thanks for sharing your stuff with this internet stranger, I hope you know you and her aren’t alone in this. ❤️🫂💪
Didn’t book 13 drop a day ago or something?
Yup, was released yesterday I believe.
I finished Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns, which was a nice encapsulation of some ideas on how to make things more equal for all of us. Unfortunately unlikely to be implemented, but great thought experiments. Also continuing my Culture re-read. Look to Windward this week, and wow what a ride this one is. Loved it.
I’m partway through the mainstream published version of There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm. The original was one of my favorite reads from 2024 bingo, so this kinda-reread is really comfy. I can’t say I’ve noticed any big changes, outside of removing all mentions of SCP and reordering some chapters, but I also don’t usually remember stuff in detail, so it’s hard to say. I did flip back and forth between the two versions briefly at the start, and the part I was reading had definitely been rewritten, but it seemed to be mostly superficial differences rather than content.
(If your interest has been piqued by seeing other people in here read it, the original is still available here for free; just read the qntm-authored stories in order, including all of Five Five Five Five Five.)
I strongly suggest the other books by him, especially Ra is quite a trip (in a good way), very weird but enjoyable :)
I read the first series from that on the wiki a while ago, and recently went back and read Five Five Five Five Five. I absolutely love the ideas behind antimemetics, this kind of eldritch horror and how to deal with it. I was slightly disappointed towards the end,
ending spoiler
the SCP seems to be portrayed as existing in conceptual space, an antimeme that prevents information about it existing while somehow being a self-sustaining idea? It’s referred to as a “meme complex” on the 3125 page. But at the end it’s portrayed more like a god acting in mysterious way, talking to the protagonist, existing in a way where it can be harmed with a gun. Not killed, but actually permanently injured?
Still a great story either way, and a good read for free, I had no idea it was published independently, have look into it!
Just finished the new edition, and had a flip through the original to compare that section.
spoiler
Since 3125 is just a collection of ideas, it’s possible that as it corrupted humanity, human ideas also became part of its memeplex, fundamentally altering it to include a sense of self-preservation and understanding of communication. (The rewrite goes into more detail about ideatic space and how everyone and everything exists in it as concepts, grouped together in various ways.) Alternatively, Red voluntarily embracing 3125 pre-“Ojai” could have been the only thing that instilled human-like qualities into it. Hard to say.
Regardless, Red certainly seemed like a unique part of 3125, especially since he’s described as “the piece of SCP-3125 which was capable of communication”, and killing him removed that part of 3125. Maybe joining voluntarily was the difference, or maybe he had some sort of antimemetic-blocking property like Adam did, idk. He also seemed to retain more autonomy than other corrupted humans, but maybe 3125’s concepts just filtered through him into something that sounded human (holding a grudge against Marion for shooting him at the lake, talking about “Us” and “Them”, etc). Either way, I don’t think Adam killing Red harmed 3125, per se, just changed the composition of the memeplex slightly.
(Does any of that make sense? My brain hurts now.)
Also, the gun Adam shoots Red with is changed in the rewrite to be SCP-7381, the ray gun that deletes matter, if that helps. Can’t shake off a bullet to the head if you no longer have a mind to conceptualize away the harm (or whatever was keeping him alive after the lake).
Edit: Maybe the unique quality Red brought was the idea of using communication to spread 3125; maybe 3125 included the concept of “communication”, but not “communicate 3125 to other things”.
Thanks for sharing the OG version, that’s really cool. Looking forward to reading it based on all the recommendations here!
