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What book(s) are you currently reading or listening? May 6

I'm finishing up The Golden Enclaves, the last of the Scholomance Series by Naomi Novik. It fulfills The Jerk with a Heart of Gold square, but in getting in to it, it also fits the LGBTQIA+ representation square. I've gotten started on so many great series in the last few years doing reading challenges and this year I'm going to try and get caught up with a bunch of them. I'm super excited!

What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening to lately?

For details on the c/Books bingo challenge that just restarted for the year, you can checkout the initial Book Bingo, and its Recommendation Post. Links are also present in our community sidebar.

50 comments

  • I'm currently reading Sword and Citadel, which is an omnibus of two books by Gene Wolfe; The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch. They are the 3rd and 4th books in his series the Book of the New Sun.

    It tells the odyssey of a man named Severian, traveling a world which is very old, very new, and utterly strange, on an evolving spiritual quest surrounding a mythical figure called the Conciliator. It's a dense book, and the way Gene Wolfe writes makes you feel like the text is undulating in your hands while you read it, so a passage you read a moment ago may have shifted since you last read it. Not unlike the way you can feel a snake move when you hold it. It's steeped in biblical and historical references, has wildly imaginative fantasy and strange-technology elements, and while I have needed to regularly look up a lot of new words, it's been a fascinating adventure.

  • The Immune Mind by Dr Marty Lymon, about how the nervous system and Immune system work in concert to keep us healthy.

    What Moves the Dead by T Kingfisher. Just started, so no opinion yet, but I loved The Hollow Places.

    When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania. What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves. Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.

    And I needed a physical book to read on the beach, so I've also just started All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld, and I'm really impressed by the prose so far.

    Jake Whyte is living on her own in an old farmhouse on a craggy British island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. Her disobedient collie, Dog, and a flock of sheep are her sole companions, which is how she wanted it to be. But every few nights something—or someone—picks off one of the sheep and sets off a new deep pulse of terror. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumors of an obscure, formidable beast. But there is also Jake's past—hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, held in the silences about her family and the scars that stripe her back—a past that threatens to break into the present.

    • Though I tend to skew more towards her fantasy than her horror, T. Kingfisher is one of my favorite authors that I've just discovered more recently

  • Just finished a re-“read” of Neuromancer by William Gibson, audiobook form this time. I hated the way the reader performed, especially his shitty attempt at a Jamaican dialect for the Zionite characters. Book still rules though.

    Now I’m onto How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, read by the author. Picked it up in physical form last month but never got to it. The audiobook is based on the paperback version, with edits and notes that are helpful and further enlightening. Great stuff.

    • I once tried listening to Iain Banks himself reading one of his Culture novels. Boy it's bad. Nothing as stereotypical as "Jamaican accent", just ... weird. Little or counter-intuitive inflection, weird rhythm, and when he does an accent it's ... weird. It's kinda cool to listen to though. I mean the man was a genius and somehow it still reflects in his reading style.

    • Weird attempts at character voices can tend to take me out of audiobooks too. I think there's a good balance somewhere between one reader doing all voices and the audio play-style ones for some books where in the future one could have effectively studio artists like the ones they used to sit in on albums to handle parts like that in books without the entire thing having to be a different person for each character.

      • I just wish somebody had pulled this guy aside and been like, “Dude, he’s a Rasta space trucker, not fuckin Tonto.”

  • I'm continuing on Let This Radicalize You which is full of great hands-on practical "right now" tales and advice on creating the change you want to see in the world. It's so recent yet still reads like a million years away before the second Trump term and such. But it's solid although very detailed in its recounts of mutual aid stories, sometimes a bit needlessly I thought, but I'm already radicalized in a way so I guess some people might still need these horror stories of state abuse in such realistic grim detail.

  • Still reading Josiah Bancroft's Tower Of Babel tetralogy, just started the third book "The Hod King". It's so fucking good. There was a nice interview in the last one, let's see... ah yes, here it is:

    The original idea for Senlin Ascends came from reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which is a beautifully written travelogue of fantastic, unreal destinations. It is a perfect specimen of literary accomplishment. So, naturally, I decided to rip it off.

    At the time, I was trying to become a professional poet, which is sort of like trying to become a unicorn. The Books of Babel was going to be a collection of prose poems. The collection was going to be a fabulist pastiche, an impressionistic olio, a book of surreal psalms. In short, it was going to be dreadful, and no one was going to read it.

    Then I woke up one morning and realized it was over. I was living a lie. I didn’t love poetry anymore. We had to break up. It wasn’t an amicable split. I called poetry some awful names, and poetry changed the locks. Lonely and bereft, I started hitting up my old flames— Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson— just to see what they were up to. Turns out, they were saying awful things about women and minorities. But once I got past their startling bigotry, I remembered what it was that I had loved so much about those musty old scribblers. I remembered why I had begun writing in the first place: because I liked adventure and mystery and romance. I wrote because I liked to be surprised and delighted, liked to gasp and laugh, and wanted to share the whole mad experience with someone else.

    The plot came later. The story began with disillusionment.

  • I recently finished the book "To our Friends" of the Invisible Committee. Right now, I'm reading "The Housing Monster," a pdf that can be downloaded in "http://www.prole.info/" and that reviews the key concepts of Marx's economic theory in a very simple way.

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