The homophobia is almost comical in how anachronistically offensive it is. You can see how the idea went around, you even hear it in right wing circles today, that one of the Nazis main problems is that they were all perverts got its imprimatur of fact.
I just read Hyperion and am two-thirds of the way through FoH, not having read them for 20 years. I had forgotten, or maybe never fully appreciated, how insanely great these books are. Itās just astonishing.
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Iāve read this twice, one of my favorites. By far the most important part is the lead-up to the Nazis taking over the government.
Finished this (Tokyo Underworld) last night. It was good and I learned a whole bunch of stuff I didnāt even know I didnāt know. But I thought the narrative was very dry and wanted to be told this story by somebody like Nicholas Pileggi instead.
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Just caught up with the last ~9 months of this thread and added a bunch of stuff to my list, even though I havenāt been reading that much lately. I get most of my recs from here so I donāt have a ton to add except for The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie. Itās a relatively short standalone fantasy novel written in the first person from one of the characters; Iām hard pressed to remember the details at this time but it was recommended by a friend who is a voracious reader and said this was his favorite book of the last xx years.
I also read The Name of the Wind and The Wise Manās Fear; as someone who typically hates starting an unfinished series, I didnāt mind that this one isnāt completed yet and might never get there. Others here have read these so they can support or deny my assertion but I feel like Rothfuss is a fantastic writer and a poor editor, as these books (especially the second one) managed to be breezy reads that are still way too long. Apparently the issue with the third book is that he wrote it years ago but they are having trouble editing it down or something along those lines.
About half way though this. Pretty interesting so far.
Just finished Ilium/Olympos. Definitely worse than Hyperion and better than Endymion.
Internet is kind of letting me down on explaining WTF was actually going on though. I have theories, but it seems like the sort of thing someone should already have laid out on a corkboard with red string for me.
I read where the crawdads sing, lol what a terrible book
Anyone have any good non-fiction recs similar to Erik Larson or John Krakauer books?
Blood and Thunder - history of the American West, most similar to Larson of these.
A Voyage for Madmen - race to be the first person to sail solo around the globe.
Lost in Shangri-La - WW2 plane crashes in an area that hadnāt made contact with white men.
Undaunted Courage - this is about Lewis and Clarkās trip.
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Pulled out the grapes of wrath. Havenāt read it since high school, I think. Randomly opened it during a house cleaning to see the highlights and underlines I did then. Sat and read the whole thing an enjoyed in 100x more than last time.
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Also recently re read this. JS is very good at what he does.
I have been reading some of his other works this year as well. Canary Row and the sequel were fun. Love the characters.
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by Anna Kavan
Great surreal āsci fiā novel if you can call it that. More of a dream novel. A man is searching for a woman he once loved (or so he says) while an worldwide catastrophe slowly encases the world in ice. The language is so surreal, dreamy and absurd that it really does bring you into a dream world. The metaphors are a lot, but for me itās the one off chilling sentences that really jumped out at me.
by Lucia Berlin
Bit more of the same from Berlin, but in a good way. More short stories of middle age and old age, divorces, love affairs, death, and mundane life. The magic come in combining them in ways that bring out the poignancy.
by Edward L. Greenstein
Greenstein does a new translation of Job. It operates on two levels. At the higher level he explains how his slightly different choices for translation and rearraigning of the text leads to a different conclusions. Not radical conclusions just more accusatory of the powers that be than pious. At the lower level the footnotes explain the different translation choices and highlights the different puns and poetic aspects in the original language that donāt quite carry across.
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About to dig into The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, which Keith Law (baseball and board game writer who reads a ton of books) rates as his favorite novel ever. Worried it might be too dense/abstract for me but with that endorsement I need to at least give it a shot.
Also finishing up Things Fall Apart; synopsis from the Internet:
Things Fall Apart is the debut novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, first published in 1958. It depicts pre-colonial life in the southeastern part of Nigeria and the invasion by Europeans during the late 19th century.
Itās a relatively short novel but Iāve been lazy about reading so probably only 3/4 of the way through a book that could be read in 1-2 nights by a dedicated reader. I found the first half to be on the boring side albeit fine thanks to the setting being something outside of novels I usually read but itās really picked up in the last few chapters.
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I read The Master and Margarita on a similar recommendation. Someone or otherās favorite novel. Itās worth reading but didnāt blow me away.
I have a theory that somebody elseās āFavoriteā novel is usually based on it connecting with them on a very personal level. So if you take their āfavoriteā recommendation as ābest novel everā you will usually be disappointed since youāre likely a completely different person. Iāve fallen for this many times before.
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My fav novel is the things they carried
Itās also the best novel :)
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bulgakov in general is great. master and margarita is a mix of comedy, soviet commentary, and grandiosity. i used to call it my favorite novel ever, but iām not well read, so itās meaningless, except to say it is a very popular answer to āfavorite book everā. i also havenāt reread it in thirty years.
i recommended it to my english teacher, and i thought she considered it very light reading. i remember her saying āitās soooo funnyā for some reason. i gotta say it irked me she didnāt say anything how deep it was
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Just started reading The DICE MAN
1971 novel that tells the story of a psychiatrist who makes daily decisions based on the casting of a diŃe.
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So far not enjoying it much, if Iām being honest. That said itās surprisingly easy to read, I justā¦donāt really care about whatās happening, maybe?
Someone mentioned The Westing Game to me the other day, which is a classic YA mystery Iād never read or even heard of before, so I decided to give it a read. Iām kind of floored; this is one of the most intricately crafted Agatha Christie-style mystery puzzle things Iāve ever read anywhere, and Iāve read a lot of that crap. Also it manages to be a great Knives Out-style genre parody. It slaps, the characters pop, donāt know why Iāve never heard of this one before. Strong rec if you like Agatha Christie stuff. Nevermind that itās a YA novel.
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Obviously this is niche but Iām reading a technical work that was translated to English only somewhat recently. These are the collected research findings of a German physics professor which are dense and in excess of 1,300 pages.
https://www.gitec-forum-eng.de/the-book/
At GITEC, we have translated the book āPhysik der Elektrogitarreā (Physics of the Electric Guitar) into English language. The individual chapters are made available free of charge. The CONTENT LISTING BELOW indicates the chapters as a double entry with a direct link to the respective translation as the respective second entry.
There has been much written (scientifically) about the acoustic violin, for example, and you might assume that a similar level of interest exists for the electric guitar given its modern popularity. Youād be mistaken though, and much of what we think we know about how it works, e.g., that the woods used in electric guitar construction significantly affect the tone of the instrument, are wrong. In fact, the electric guitar operates more as an anti-acoustic instrument, and everything seems backward and upside down to musicians whoāve developed intuition that runs counter to these findings. The writing itself is rather colorful as he suffers no fools (and believe me, there are plenty of them in this space).
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