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

[Smellincoffee]

Sid Meier's Memoir. Civ has just been released and he's contemplating taking on Bach. I'm enjoying this memoir enormously so far. I've always enjoyed Sid's personality in interviews and the like, so this is like listening to a buddy talk about their work (which I happen to love) for a while.

Finished The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, Global Grey Ebooks PDF of the 1906 edition. It tells the tale of the Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus' harrowing experiences in the slaughterhouses of Chicago. Sordid scenes of unsanitary and unsafe conditions, outright fraud, and brazen corruption in the face of unrestrained business interests frame the strong socialist message of the novel. Mr. Sinclair has a way with descriptions that brings alive ordinary scenes such as the start of a workday. The main viewpoint character is Jurgis, and receives the lion's share of development as other characters like his family are more part of the background. While Jurgis' experience is exaggerated for dramatic effect, the essential truth of how dreadful early-20th century America's meat packing plants were would lead to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, paving the way for the modern Food and Drug Administration with its stringent overview of food and pharmaceutical production and a mandate to uphold current good manufacturing practices.

I enjoyed that one far more than I expected to, at least until the end where Jurgis disappears except as someone listening to a lot of political lectures.

 

[Josu]

Ended The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Vicente Blasco Ibañez.
Good depiction of horrors of war. However, expected more about the relationship between Desnoyers and Hartrott families.

Starting The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

 

[EgonSpengler]

I got Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection for my e-reader for $3. I think I might've read The Butcher of Anderson Station already, but the rest are all new to me.

 

[Takhisis]

Acquired another one of Fontanarrosa's anthologies, ‘Una lección de vida y otros cuentos’ (A life lesson and other stories), which is as idiosyncratic as his works always have been. Still remains one of the greatest Argentine authors I've ever read.

 

[Kaitzilla]

I'm not sure how many people have read Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, but in the 90's the fantasy power trip blew my mind.

No, not the one about fighting aliens, but the 2 kids who posted anonymously on the internet. (Locke and Demosthenes)
They were super smart, debated in a lot of great posts, and gradually dominated Earth's politics by the superiority of their arguments.

I hopped onto AOL and found out such posting online was a thing, so I couldn't wait to see if some kind of super-blogger would seize power.


The internet ended up turning out differently than I thought it would.

 

[Narz]

Read King's The Dead Zone over a few days while sick.

Good middle, disappointing ending. The antagonist was not as fleshed out as I kept hoping he'd be.

B book. Almost B+. By comparison Firestarter (from around same time period) was an A

 

[Synobun]

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson (4/5)

Spoiler :

This was a strong book. The information contained within aligned closely with my own observations and conclusions. It was validating to see that my parents fit within a very specific archetype (albeit on the extreme end of the spectrum) that's been observed and studied over the past century. It was equally validating to see that I made it out relatively okay—broken, very broken, but not as bad as I could be, and equipped with the internal tools necessary to continue changing for the better.

It also helped me view a broken relationship in my life in a more detached, assessing manner. I'm an internalizer who relies on self-blame in most conflicts and failures in my life, and that applied twice as much in this. It was... nice? to be able to recognize that it was the other party who lacked the necessary tools to repair the broken pieces, and that I have been doing my part to make that possible.

The reason this doesn't get five stars is because the "here's how you can help yourself" section of the book is designed for a very specific person with a specific kind of experience. Almost none of the self-exercises were applicable for me, so my path forward remains the same as it was before reading this book. That's fine, of course, but since the book purports to be a resource for self-improvement... it doesn't quite reach that.

In particular, the most glaring weakness of the self-improvement module is that it assumes there is a "before" to the individual's neglect. To embrace your true self, think of the before. Except... there is no before. The neglect, the abuse, has been present since before conscious thought was even possible. There has never been a moment in my life where there was a me that was then suppressed. Suppression, manipulation, neglect, and abuse have been lifelong hallmarks. I imagine this is the case for many other readers. So there is an innate weakness to the self-help portion of the book: it relies on a fairy-tale circumstance in order to be possible.

Still, the book can be quite validating, so it has value in that sense. It's especially useful if you haven't done very much self-study or observing quite yet; it will do a lot of the legwork for you in assessing the emotional maturity of a relationship in your life, and how you yourself navigate relationships in light of how you were raised.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Acquired another one of Fontanarrosa's anthologies, ‘Una lección de vida y otros cuentos’ (A life lesson and other stories), which is as idiosyncratic as his works always have been. Still remains one of the greatest Argentine authors I've ever read.

How is your quest for Dragonlance books coming along?

 

[Takhisis]

Well, now that I've just finished reading all the recent acquisitions I'll finish reading other also recent acquisitions and then start stockpiling again, I suppose.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Just finished The Old Man's Boy Grows Older, a collection of childhood reminisciences and hunting stories from big game hunter Robert Ruark, who reflects on the lessons his grandfather (the Old Man) taught him about life and nature. The Old Man is the star, of course. He's a funny old codger who can dispense folk wisdom and ruminations about de Montaigne over the same bottle of whisky. Currently reading Postcards from Ed, a collection of letters from activist-anarchist Ed Abbey. Cactus Ed is entertaining to spend time with, and I was delighted to see he'd written Wendell Berry. A conversation between those two would be alllll kinds of interesting.

 

[EgonSpengler]

A veritable avalanche of sci-fi on sale for my e-reader, in addition to the above-mentioned Memory's Legion...

Upgrade (2022) by Blake Crouch
Centers of Gravity (Frontlines Book 8, 2022) by Marko Kloos
Tiamat's Wrath (The Expanse Book 8, 2019) and Leviathan Falls (The Expanse Book 9, 2021) by James S.A. Corey
and The World We Make (The Great Cities Book 2, 2022) by N.K. Jemisin

 

[DaggerDigwillow]

Read a number of books since I was last on

Reading Beyond Good & Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche 11/21
The Will to Power by Nietzsche, Friedrich 11/28
The Gay Science by Nietzsche, Friedrich 12/4
The Antichrist by Nietzsche, Friedrich 12/6
The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould 12/11

Currently Reading

The Authority Gap: Why Women Are Taken Less Seriously Than Men and What We Can Do About It by Mary Ann Sieghart

 

[EnglishEdward]

Yesterday I finished reading "Out of the Ruins" edited by 'Preston Grassman'.

It is a collection of 22 mainly new (e.g. copyright 2021)
sci-fi short stories about life in post apocalyptic worlds.

My favourite was "As Good as New" by 'Charlie Jane Anders' because it casts
an interesting light on the genie in the bottle and the three wishes genre.

 

[Birdjaguar]

A lovely take on reading books.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Tiamat's Wrath (The Expanse Book 8, 2019) and Leviathan Falls (The Expanse Book 9, 2021) by James S.A. Corey

I'm rereading Persepolis Rising (book 7) now. I went to the Wiki page for book 7, just to jog my memory, 'cause it's been so long, and I realized that I don't remember hardly any of it. About the only thing I do remember is the enormous time-jump, and that book 7 is pretty much the beginning of a whole new story, so I don't need to go back to book 6.

 

[Kyriakos]

Started reading a book about explaining how logarithms developed.

Look at this most excellent formula:

In a natural language, it says: "the exponent to which b should be raised, to give (as power of b) x, is the exponent of b when you get x as its power".
I am not being sarcastic, I actually love it. Things multiply when they are repeated (which, btw, might as well have been another description of a self-referencial formula )

 

[EgonSpengler]

You lost me after "it says."

 

[Kyriakos]

You lost me after "it says."

It's not as difficult as it may seem if you don't know the symbols log of something simply means the exponent that something is raised to. Eg, if you multiply the number 2 with itself, three times: 2(2)(2), that is 2 raised to an exponent 3, which gives you 8. So the log with base 2 (that which was multiplied) to some exponent (the number of times it was multiplied) gives that other number, 8 in the case of 2^3.
So the awesome (I mean it) formula above defines a mathematical action by self-reference, since it says: when b is raised to the exponent which when b is raised to gives x, gives x

@Grendeldef It's as if someone said to you: if you open the door in the way that if you opened the door it would lead you to that room, it will lead you to that room. Come on, that's beautiful ^^

 

[Josu]

Ended The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.
I don't know how accurate is this book, if only the 1% of the book is truth, this is the best horror book I have read. Frightening and frustrating. 5/5

Starting Q, by Luther Blisset

 

[Hygro]

Never read it, but when parts have been told to me it matches a lot of things I've learned in the ivory tower.