What Book Are You Reading XV - The Pile Keeps Growing!

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Yeah, those alt-right weirdoes love that sort of kitsch.

oh wait you meant the other one never mind
:) My grandmother was a Guthrie, MacGregor, Donaldson and instilled in me the important differences between her ancestry and that of her English husband. Oh and we cannot forget the bagpipes! :)
 
Basically every country in Europe but the English seems to have some sort of bagpipes.
 
I know! I've recently started re-reading my entire Discworld collection, wherein the Morris dancing features prominently.
 
John Derbyshire's (third attempt, possibly the best one to read it all) nice book about

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Roughly 1/5 through, which means now the cases for s being complex will start to be presented.

However, already one can find a few things of interest, for some cases where s is still a positive integer. For example, the sum doesn't have a known closed form, when s is odd [unlike for even, with Euler's work, (π^2)/6 etc]. So if you are looking for some extra (millions) money, maybe try to find one of those cases :)

Derbyshire presents also the relevant biographical information, since the series has its start for integers (such as the harmonic series, 1+1/2+1/3+...) and then is related to the discovery of the natural logarithm. But the book is about its adaptation by Riemann in his quest to allocate primes.
 
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Sadly Porn by Edward Teach, M.D.

it’s a wild, wild manic ride :D
 
Edward Teach? Like the pirate?
 
2/5 into the book (200 out of roughly 500 pages) and the Riemann function will now start being presented - complex numbers appear at last.
Another positive is that Gauss finally died.
 
January 2022

Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko (2/5)
Age of Myth by Michael J. Sullivan (5/5)
The Last Watch by J.S. Dewes (2/5)
Sins of Empire by Brian McClellan (5/5)
The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang (5/5)

On Writing and Worldbuilding, Volume I by Timothy Hickson (3/5)
On Writing and Worldbuilding, Volume II by Timothy Hickson (1/5)
Creating Character Arcs by K.M. Weiland (5/5)
 
What made Hickson's second volume so much worse for you?
 
What made Hickson's second volume so much worse for you?
They are just transcripts of his videos, basically. They are "expanded," but the books lack focus and are close to useless for anyone who isn't already a fan of his visual media. That was forgivable for the first volume, but he doubled down in the second—and the material he chose to highlight grew more niche and less applicable in the second as well. They are novelties for a fan but largely irrelevant for an unaware bystander who just wants to be better at writing. (I rate these as a professional, i.e., how likely I am to recommend the book to a client and how useful I think it would be for an author.) The contents aren't objectionable; I didn't really see anything to disagree with. I just also didn't see the point for the reader besides "I like Hickson's videos and now I have his books too." They are essentially just short essays about discordant topics with no overarching goal or purpose.
 
I know! I've recently started re-reading my entire Discworld collection, wherein the Morris dancing features prominently.
I must say that reading it with the actual printed fold-out map of Ankh-Morpork makes it a new experience. I must read all books set in the Great City itself again.
 
Termination Shock by Neil Stephenson. Excellent novel rooted in near future climate change and dealing with it. Featuring the future Queen of the Netherlands!
 
Rimrunners by C.J. Cherryh. I've re-read this book I don't know how many times since I bought it. My copy is a hardcover one, and Cherryh autographed it at one of the conventions I attended where she was the Guest of Honor.

This is actually the second time I was able to get books signed. The first time was in Calgary, in the early '80s, and the book was Downbelow Station. The second time, I asked her to autograph both Rimrunners and Angel With the Sword (the novel that introduces her shared-world series Merovingen Nights).

If I ever have a third opportunity, I'd get her to sign Cyteen and its sequel Regenesis. Downbelow Station may be what she's best known for, but I think Cyteen is her masterwork. It's a marvelous mix of hard science, space opera, interstellar politics, economics, social engineering, the ethics and psychology of cloning of both bodies and personalities (she outdoes Frank Herbert in this department; her method is far superior to the concept of gholas), and so on. Now if she'd ever get around to writing the sequel Regenesis demands, I'd be ecstatic (she starts a plotline about the discovery of a planet called Eversnow, and introduces a debate over the ethics of terraforming vs. the long-term economic and social benefits of creating a planet that humans can live on openly, since those are in short supply in Cherryh's Alliance-Union setting; both Downbelow and Cyteen have atmospheres that will kill humans if they breathe it unfiltered).
 
Started Zima Blue, Sci-Fi short stories by the Welsh Author Alastair Reynolds.

Just finished the first one "The Real Story" about fame and tat and multiple personalities in a colonised Mars.
 
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