Ask HN: What Are You Reading?
I've gotten many great literary recommendations in random HN comments.
Wondering what the community at large is currently interested in! I mostly read science fiction and fantasy, and I’ve just started Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It follows a scientist sentenced to a prison camp on a planet teeming with bizarre lifeforms. So far, it hasn’t drawn me in the way Children of Time did, though I’m only about a quarter of the way through. Oh and also listening to an audiobook - Mythos by Stephen Fry. Liking it so far. I loved some of his fiction, but haven't got past the first chapter of that book. I read The Whispering Mountain by Joan Aiken and was struck by similarities to Pratchett, for instance the part where the main character heroically defeats monsters in a wood by using knowledge gleaned from an old encyclopedia that he carries everywhere, and how he ſpeakſ like thiſ when reading aloud from it, and the part about underground camels in Wales. It references The Far-Distant Oxus at one point, which I want to read (a pony adventure story written in 1937 by teenagers). (I know the long s wasn't really used at the ends of words, that was just a hurried example.) For some reason I've been really enjoying stories with endless and well described repeating rooms. Borges' Library of Babel got me started, I have just finished Susanna Clarke's Piranesi - which was so wonderfully described, I don't know if I'll find anything to beat it. I'm now on A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck, which outright mentions Borges' novel. If anyone has any similar recommendations I'd love to hear them. Rereading Bliss by Peter Carey after opening a 45 year old box o' books from a back shelf in the shed. It's a red pill fable for marketing directors (and other threads are pulled). Later adapted for film, it saw 400 viewers walk out on it when screened at Cannes... most likely when the fish hit the floor. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifR7tsVT_-Y Civilisations by kenneth clark - an art critic tries to understand western civilization through the "book" of its art. I'm always reading a few books across a categories. Fiction: Reaper's Gale, book #7 of the fantasy series Malazan Book of the Fallen. Non-fiction(history): Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy And then I'm dabbling in a few books around the math behind and practical hands-on machine learning/deep learning. Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy. As with some of his other work, the punctuation can be a challenge and the prose can sometimes border on the ponderous, but I'm enjoying it. Currently about half way through. Listen to the audiobooks. They help distinguish which characters are speaking. I have a Random House audiobook version of the trilogy read by Brad Pitt. His Spanish pronunciation isn't great (although better than mine) but I enjoy his quiet voice and slightly careworn delivery. It's abridged, though, and I wanted to read the whole work. The Recorded Books recordings of The Road and No Country for Old Men narrated by Tom Stechschulte are very good too. reading Blood Meridian now, honestly it just flows for me. I grew up reading arabic and sentences are just feel longer so maybe thats why Im not struggling with it. Fiction: It by Stephen King Non-Fiction: The Spy and the Traitor by Ben MacIntyre. It's about the KGB spy-turned-MI6 agent Oleg Gordievsky and reads like a thriller. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre (1923) How do you like it? I'm 3/4 through it. It's been quite entertaining to read how he went from picking off bucket shops to going bust on Wall Street and how he proceeded from there. Old-fashioned writing that goes straight to the point. His art-like approach to speculation is refreshing after spending time on /r/quant. I cannot say if any of his high-level speculation wisdom hold water anymore, though. Would recommend! Post Soviet Britain by Abby Innes. Excellent so far (70 pages in). Crossing the Unknown Sea by David Whyte. Also excellent. Nearly finished it. A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit by Quentin Lauer Augustine's Confessions Last fiction: Nice Job by David Lodge Just finished Casino Royale by Ian Fleming How did you like the book (compared to the movie)? I like the old world charm The book was written in the 50s, its way slower than the movie (though still a short read). Some things from the movie plot are the same I love details like how difficult it was to get something communicated across a border only 75 years ago Have you read any of John le Carré's books? Yes, I’ve read the spy who came in from the cold, and i tried to read a perfect spy I liked the first one but its very raw and dark, no glitter and glamour I quit the second one, part of the book are flashback scenes and I had a hard time staying concentrated, i forgot why exactly i didnt like those scenes Currently: Moby-Dick and Termination Shock. (That the former gets brought up a lot in the latter is a coincidence.) "Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History", about our first civilisations. Just finished Dreadnought and started Castles of steel by the same author, Robert K. Massie. I'm reading The Inner Citadel by Pierre Hadot for the second time. It's full of gems. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy D. Snyder Simmons, Dan. The Terror I'm about 50 pages in, and am entranced with the prose. Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters, by Jeremy Utley The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson. Designing data intensive applications Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Me too! I'm about 40% through. War and peace - third attempt It's really good. A story that still pops into my mind occasionally today. As a Brit I'd never really thought about Napoleon's invasion of Russia. The retreat in the book is evocative and really left an impression. But I read it when I had far more free time than now. Getting past 200 pages is the tough part. Hope I’ll get through. Also, getting used to so many characters with unfamiliar Russian names is slowing things down. Let's see. Any tips and tricks for reading the magnum opus? Would help! Now that you mention it, I also struggled with that to begin with. My penguin edition had a dramatis personae list at the start that I ended up referring to a few times. Rare for me to use them. So, a crib sheet if your edition doesn't. There's a sequence with the boys out on the town which helped me cement each of the main male protagonists images in my head. Fairly early on I think. Pierre + Andrei being main characters, Nikolai (the younger) and Antole being the rest of that group. I also I ended up classifying the characters into three generations, the young men/woman, the older parents, and the younger children. Thanks for the tip. “How Can I Help” by Linda Hand How to get along I'm favoriting this for later.