Ask Lemmy

Last book : the wheel of time (#5) by R. Jordan. I don't really recommend. I mean the story's great but the way the characters are written is dull and sexist (men saying that women are mysteries, women complaining about how men are dumb and other ridiculous clichés), it feels like following people that are somewhat the worse of both teens and boomers, it takes me out of the book every single time. I prefer the king killer chronicles (P. Rothfuss) although we're still waiting for the last book.

Current book : Trapped (C. Lackberg and H Fexeus) it is a great polar, with nice twists, I recommend!

Last book: This is How You Lose the Time War - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_How_You_Lose_the_Time_War
It was good. I don't normally like love-stories, but this was poetically written. A lot of fun sci-fi and beautiful imagery.

Current book: Little Brother - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Doctorow_novel)
Lots of fun hacking and rebellion against an increasingly authoritarian government, very much inspired by 9-11. It's a fun Young Adult Novel so far.

Last book: Perfume: The story of a murderer by Patrick Süskind. I ravaged through it quite fast and enjoyed the descriptive writing style immensely. It's supposedly a book with many intresting layers, but I loved as a novel about world of smell.

Currently: Though I tend to read several at the time depending on my mood, my main book is Breaking together: A freedom-loving response to collapse by Jem Bendell. I work with environmental stuff and I feel like we are past the point where ecological modernisation is a answer to all of our woes. It is well-written book and you can download it for free.

Currently working my way through the He Who Fights With Monsters audiobook series. It’s a LitRPG, so it comes with all of the trappings that entails. The main character can be a little insufferable at times, but it’s at least self-aware enough to recognize that and call it out. There have been several laugh-out-loud moments from references that I wasn’t expecting. It’s clear the writer is a big nerd with a fetish for bad 80’s films and philosophy. The narrator (Heath Miller) is fantastic.

My biggest complaint is more about the audiobook format; The series frequently rehashes character abilities. In a regular book, this wouldn’t be a problem. You could just turn the page and skip reading it. But for an audiobook, you can try skipping ahead but you’ll still inevitably end up listening to the same ability description that you have heard twenty times before. It also frequently rehashes things that just happened. That’s more a symptom of it gradually being released on the writer’s Patreon, before it is compiled into a full book. Rehash at the start of a chapter makes sense when you’re only reading a chapter per week. But when you’re listening to the entire book, the rehashes can get redundant.

Overall, I’d suggest it if you enjoy the genre. Even with the complaints, those are relatively minor and I have thoroughly enjoyed it so far.

Last book: "Last Call" by Tim Powers. It's great. Poker and archetypes. Big inspiration for Unknown Armies, which I loved.

Current: Medusa's web, also by Powers. Not sure if I'm into it yet but it's got some of his signature weirdness

Last book: Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa

Current book: not really reading anything right now but I should be, not sure what it will be, maybe this nice list will help

I definitely recommend Musashi.

Last: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Current: A Short History of Nearly Everything

Lest you think I'm bragging, the one before that was Omegaverse fanfic.

last: All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai

Could not finish it. The story would not start, eventually I stopped caring.

Current: James Acaster's Classic Scrapes

Funny collection of stories that happened to him over the years. Very entertaining and funny.

I was reading the He Who Fights With Monsters and that is lots of fun. I finished book 12 so I have to wait. But its a great story arch of how a nobody could become a god like powerful character by defiance and resistance to what what is the normal.

I went back to the Hell Divers books series by Nicholas Sansbury Smith. Its totally pulp fiction but the big picture story is great. Some of the in-between can get stale.

Last book: Human Phoenix, current one Human Man, both from an author with the handle "Refusenik". Human Man is basically the second part of Human Phoenix, kind of "coming of age" with a bit of mystery and scifi.

Last book: The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook. It's book three in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which I'm enjoying a lot. Sometimes the game mechanic details get a little tiring, but they're typically meaningful to the larger story, or at least the action scenes. The human drama of it is where it really shines, tons of righteous indignation and coming together against adversity. Lots of humor sprinkled in. It can be a little crude and definitely very violent, I'd recommend it as long as those aren't deal breakers.

Current book: Citadel of the Autarch, fourth book in the New Sun series. It's good so far, building on the story of the first three books, interested to see how it reaches the situation foreshadowed in the first book via the framing device of this being a memoir written by the main character. The meandering plot with occasional tangent story-within-a-story have made it a slower read for me, but the surreality of it keeps it intriguing during the slower moments. I'd definitely recommend it, it's clear why this is a well regarded series, very different from my usual read.