Literature

Just finished Children of time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Absolutely amazing uplift-scifi, but you better stay away from it if you have arachnophobia

Though I'm not much of a reader anymore, my wife has been absolutely obsessed with Sarah J Maas' Throne of Glass series. I enjoy listening to her talk about it and sum up the stories, wouldn't be surprised if it ended up on Netflix soon.

Any recommendations for audiobooks to listen to at work? I'm big on science/science fiction and philosophy, anything that challenges my way of thinking really.

Since November I'm slowly working through the The Witcher books. Just finished the 5th book recently and currently looking for a book I can read before I continue with the 6th book. Normally I read mostly in german but I'm thinking about picking a english book as my next book.

The Expanse, the whole book trilogy!

Well, I'm using Bookwyrm to keep track of that.

I just finished up reading The Return of the King for the first time since childhood. I like it a lot more than I remember. I think two things stuck out at me most: how dense it was compared to modern fantasy and how great the hobbits were portrayed. Fantasy tends to portray great heroes that came from nothing (ex. the chosen one/orphan trope). However, the hobbits were solely because they were common that they were able to do things the great heroes of their age couldn't.

Since then I've started reading Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. I kept hearing Pynchon's name come up for about a month at random and figured I should pick up one of his books. He has a very frenetic style that can be a bit difficult to parse but I'm loving his sense of humor.

Currently I'm finishing the fifth book of the Wheel Of Time by Robert Jordan. Next will be the sixth book of the Wheel Of Time by Robert Jordan :)

I'd highly recommend We are legion we are Bob and off to be the wizard to any fellow tech nerds

We are legion we are bob is about a guy whose brain is uploaded as an AI into a Von Neumann probe and sent into space to explore the universe.

Off to be the wizard is about a guy who finds out the world is some kind of simulation, and there's essentially one big file detailing absolutely everything that can be edited, uses it to go back in time and live as a wizard and make spells with his programming skills

Both of them have plenty of nerdy references and humour

I usually keep a couple books going so I can switch between them. I'm currently reading The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland and Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea by Rita Chang-Eppig.

Currently reading "Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West," by Calder Walton.

A historic description of the life of Finnish executioners. Pretty dope stuff!

I really enjoyed the Expanse books, so just started one of the Author's other series, the Long Price Quartet

Kim Harrison’s Demons of Good and Evil that just came out yesterday :)

My partner is almost done with it already and is dying to talk about it but I’m taking my time xD

I just started reading 'The Name of the Wind' by Patrick Rothfuss.

Read Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami, and liked the dreamy atmosphere. Currently reading Kafka on the Shore by same author. Many people recommended Norwegian Wood so that is also on the reading list.

H.P. Lovecraft - Tales of Horror

I've been blown away by all of this, up until the one I'm currently powering my way through (Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath). It isn't terrible, though. It just feels very out of place after the overall tone and flow of all his other stories within the volume.

I just read Uprooted, by Naomi Novik, simply because it was available with no wait time on Libby. What a great find! I devoured it in two days. It has a really nice take on folkloric fantasy and magic, and a nice satisfying arc that explains enough, while leaving a good amount of mystery.

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. Great read so far.

I'm reading the savage detectives by Bolaño. I read it about 6 months ago and haven't stopped thinking about it. Re-reading it now in Spanish to help practice the language and it's great. He writes pretty simply and i can't put it down!

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. I love reading science fiction from people with engineering and science backgrounds. Another good book I finished recently was Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.

Currently Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

Finally almost finished with Neuromancer.

Then I'll be flipping to work mode and reading "The Grammar of Systems: From Order to Chaos & Back".

Almost done with Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight. Had a few friends and family members talk about how great the Dragonlance books are, but I grew up reading The Legend of Drizzt books. So far I absolutely love it, and if you play DnD I suggest you get a copy.

Dune: Messiah, second one in the series. Way better than I thought, and honestly don't get the criticism

Notes from a Dead House by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Very interesting so far. I'm about a third of the way through it.

I'm finally reading The Expanse series, currently on book 2 and really loving it!

While I was waiting for book 2 to become available on Libby I read The Spare Man which I also enjoyed. It was a pretty goofy but fun light read (solving a murder on a cruise to Mars).

I'm reading The Anglo-Saxons by Marc Morris. It's non-fiction. Morris' books have a good narrative, but they are scholarly works. I haven't gotten very far into The Anglo-Saxons yet, but one bit I greatly enjoyed was the author drawing parallels between Beowulf and Tolkien's Rohirrim, all while discussing the archaeological evidence for feasting halls and the zeitgeist of the people who'd built those halls.

• The guns of August - Barbara W. Tuchman : An engaging and narrative-driven recounting of WWI
• The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies - Clark Ashton Smith : A collection of Lovecraftian short stories and poetry. CAS is what you get when a poet writes Lovecraft stories
• German Philosophy 1760-1860 : The Legacy of Idealism : A book about Kant, Fichte, German Romanticism, Schilling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, etc

I just picked up a copy of house of leaves. Saw it referenced a few times in some other media I liked and figured I may as well check out the book itself.

Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor. As usual, I'm also slowly making my way through Joyce's Finnegans Wake in parallel to whatever else I'm reading.

A random question: is anybody aware of active modern writers with mastery of style comparable to Nabokov's?

I'm working my way through Thinking, Fast and Slow at a chapter a day. It took me a minute to get his point (well near the 30% mark, that is) but it's illuminating about how people think.