I'm working on Ancillary Justice and James Joyce's Portrait of an Artist.
I'm about 200 pages in to the Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas. I read the Count of Monte Cristo last year and absolutely loved it (it has to rank up there in my top 5 reads), and so far I'm really enjoying the TMITIM, although it took me a fair few pages to really get in to it. I've not read The Three Musketeers; despite some of the same characters cropping up, I don't think I'm massively missing out on a lot of the story.
What would ya know? I'm reading Portrait of the Artist as well. I need a novel for a term paper I'll be really writing in November, but my teacher recommends we start reading now. I've been meaning to read it for a while, so this seems like good motivation. Plus, we are suppose to avoid over analyzed books (so no Harry Potter or Ulysses), and under analyzed books (nothing your great aunt wrote), so Portrait hits a good middle ground. I'm also working on King's On Writing (and taking notes on that), and I have Book 4 of Knausgaard's My Struggle for when I finish that.
Just finished Taiye Selsasi' "Ghana Must Go." Selasi worked for years under Toni Morrison, and this is her debut novel. While her writing is very different from Morrison's, it has a captivating, powerful life of its own. I thought the book was wonderfully written and a gripping portrait of what it is to struggle with a trans continental identity.
I have gone through Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman. It's a nice book on why your vision sucks, why your brain sucks at telling you what's happening and how little "you"' are really in control. I was expecting it to be longer, though. More than halfway through Alone Together by Sherry Turkle, and while I can't stand the narrator's impression of kids voices anymore, I do still like the book very much.
Last week I finished Stephen Baxter's Proxima and Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312. Proxima was a fun read. It relied on a good amount of "unobtanium" to drive the plot but was enjoyable nonetheless. I like Baxter's style of following characters or families through decades or centuries of time. 2312 was meh. The world building was great, but the characters were flat at best. Not sure what I'll start next.
Yeah I agree with your description of 2312. Not just flat, but really hard to like too. Something good might have come from the book after all! I was looking at it's goodreads page when I noticed this review: That sounds amazing! I'm going to try that this year. I definitely spend too much on scifi already.For the past three years, I’ve paid for the privilege of voting in the Hugo Awards. I do this not because I love voting in the Hugo Awards (though that’s cool) but because, for the past few years, they have made available a voter packet containing digital copies of most of the nominated works. All I need do is purchase a supporting membership at the year’s WorldCon, which is always cheaper than if I were to buy the various novels and anthologies in which these works might be found. (Also, all the digital copies are DRM-free, a philosophy I support.)
Survival: Species Imperative #1 It looks like a fun read.
Earth an Intimate History and You Are Not Smart Earth was a great book, I loved every chapter. YANS has started strong and so far seems interesting.
Black Earth Fascinating look at why the Jews of Western and Eastern Europe had such vastly different death rates in the Holocaust. This book is kind of blowing my mind. I've read a lot of 20th c European history, so having my mind blown by a text is rare at this point.
Not sure 'cool' is the word I'd use for it. Insightful, for sure, but cool...maybe not. It's a book about political theory. I can't really give a tl;dr version, because it's full of nuance and any attempt to cut it down to a few sentences would destroy what's so enlightening about it. I will, however, transcribe this passage, which I think captures the book's essence very well: What happened in the second half of 1941 was an accelerating campaign of murder that took a million Jewish lives and apparently convinced the German leadership that all Jews under their control could be eliminated. This calamity cannot be explained by stereotypes of passive or communist Jews, of orderly or preprogrammed Germans, or beastly or antisemitic locals, or indeed of any other cliche, no matter how powerful at the time, no matter how convenient today. This unprecedented mass murder would have been impossible without a special kind of politics.It is tempting to imagine that a simple idea in the minds of a simple people decades past and thousands of miles away can explain a complex event. The notion that local east European antisemitism killed the Jews of eastern Europe confers upon others a sense of superiority akin to that the Nazis once felt. These people are quite primitive, we can allow ourselves to think. Not only does this account fail as an explanation of the Holocaust; its racism prevents us from considering the possibility that not only Germans and Jews but also local peoples were individual human agents with complex goals that were reflected in politics. When we fall into the trap of ethnicization and collective responsibility, we collude with Nazi and Soviet propagandists in the abolition of political thought and lifting of individual agency.