281–290 of 459 posts
I read 57 books this year, a mix between fiction and non-fiction Top 5 fiction - A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles - Trust by Hernan Diaz - City of Thieves by David Benioff - Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders - Widow Basquiat by by Jennifer Clement Top 5 non-fiction - Boom Town by Sam Anderson - The Second Founding by Eric Foner - The Club by Jonathan Clegg and Joshua Robinson - The Mysterious Case of Rudolf…
Been a year of re-reads and some classics I never started b/c of thickness. Standouts for me were “A Tale of Two Cities” and “Norwegian Wood.” “Kafka on The Shore”, “Norwegian Wood” - Haruki Murakami “A Tale of Two Cities” - Dickens “Count of Monte Cristo” - Alexandre Dumas LotR, “Hobbit” - Tolkien “World Atlas of Coffee” - James Hoffmann “Anathem”, “Diamond Age”, “Termination Shock” - Neal Stephenson “A Timeless Way…
Curious about your view on The Count of Monte Cristo. It's one of my more disappointing reads of the year. I'm familiar with the story line from various film adaptations, but I wasn't prepared for the sheer amount of repetition and drawn out bullshit. That's when I learned it was originally published in a journal where Dumas was paid by the word over 18 parts. Then all the meandering bullshit and repetition made so m…
I read a handful of short stories from Exhalation by Ted Chiang. I liked one of them in particular, the others were okay. It is nice to read short stories since you invest very little time in each—in case it turns out the author is not really what you're in to. Begin the Begin: R.E.M.'s Early Years , Robert Dean Lurie. A band I read everything about. 1984 and the music that entered my life that year truly changed me.…
The Burnout Society Strangers in Paradise: How Families Adapt to Wealth Across Generations Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI The Year in Tech 2024 This Is Strategy Optimal Illusions Matrix Energetics Models The Value of Others The Essence of Bhagavad Gita From Barista to Billionaire Go On Alone 78 Days Practical Transurfing The New Game of Life and How to Play It Getting Real There Is No Such Thing as Busin…
My favourite SF book this year was "Translation State" by Ann Leckie. It is set in the Imperial Radch world so having read the Ancillary trilogy is useful but not essential. I like it because it contains the strangest aliens (the Presger) that I have come across. They are as far from humans in costumes as you could get. What the Presger do (and their proxies in the Human world the Translators) is totally unguessable.…
I can warmly recommend anything written by Leckie. Her scifi is great. But her attempt at fantasy (The Raven Tower) is also most excellent.
Very much enjoyed the Hyperion Cantos series by Dan Simmons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To each their own… but what’s the point? Just to know the plot / sequence of events?
There's a lot of fluff that can be compressed into a much smaller amount of tokens. I kinda hope modern authors start publishing prompts instead of entire novels - imagine a world where anyone can take a prompt and run it through an llm to create their own personalized novel. With their own customizations and preferences.
Winterplanet - Ursula K. LeGuin
Sci-fi nerd recommendations follow. I binged the entirety of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. The cover, & the fact that it was on Kindle Unlimited, made me think it was probably cheap crap, but I was impressed with how well-written it was, and how much I empathized with the characters. (I probably should have read it slower; by the last two books, I was just flowing with the text, not paying as much attention to the…
Back in the 1960s, when I was a tween- or teen-ager, I read every copy of Analog Science Fiction/ Science Fact I could put my hands on. You can now read lots of those stories on-line (like at https://www.freesfonline.net/Magazines2.html ). Some of them have stood the test of time, but some are really really bad. John Campbell, the editor of Analog back then, was racist, and also convinced that smoking tobacco was a G…
Everyone knew from the start smoking is unhealthy, or at least not healthy and addictive. Nicotine probably happened to help with the new kind of stress and frustration the higher tech world caused and so it kind of answered to a real need.
Now when pretty much nobody smokes anymore, at least nobody who don't belong to underclass, it is weird reading. I remember a film of some kind of an underwater station by Cousteau and people where smoking there! A place where air for breathing is sparse if anywhere.