Still ongoing with my real-time readthrough of Dracula, with a book club over at !vampires@lemmy.zip.
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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Oh that's a fun idea!
LOTR : Fellowship in Hungarian. It’s a nice challenge.
Are you currently learning Hungarian and that's why it's a challenge? Or are you fluent but it's just that the book itself is quite heavy?
Picked up Dungeon Crawler Carl on a whim recently and it's been one of the reasons I haven't got enough sleep this past week. I'm on book 5.
Hey a friend of mine recommended that to me last Wednesday. I need to get on it
A friend loaned that to me last week. It's next on my TBR pile!
I just started the Zones of Thought series by Vernor Vinge last Friday. I've been binging another author's work (Greg Egan) for the last several months, but finally finished his last novel, so reading something by a new author has been refreshing and exciting! The story immediately fell into a trope that I haven't been a fan of in the past (High-tech race meets low-tech feudal race), but it is already way way more interesting and deep than the last novel like that which left a sour taste in my mouth (Fire Time by Poul Anderson) and I'm enjoying it a lot!
How to ADHD:
Ebook only available from mega-corporate storefronts :(
Ohh noo, pleas tell that to her, she has a YouTube channel.
I have started to read the book out of paper, which my girlfriend ordered thinking about me (she is a “heart”)
Flashman
He's a cad, a bounder, but he does suffer awfully and fuck me if I didn't learn an awful lot about the disastrous British retreat from Kabul in 1842
i've been reading a lot of manga the last few years. yesterday i picked up a good old fashioned book for the first time in a while. i'm about a hundred pages in to Shadow of the Torturer and it's incredibly good so far - i can see why some people hold Wolfe in such high esteem.
i can also see why his works are less accessible than other scifi greats.
The place I was staying last week had the first "Empyrean" book by Rebecca Yarros, Fourth Wing. It's my first romantasy novel. It was fine. Some fun world building but I'm generally uninterested in the magical school stuff.
"Written On The Dark" by Guy Gavriel Kay. He's one of my favorite writers and this one doesn't disappoint. A tavern poet is strong armed into helping the provost investigate the murder of a noble. Events snowball, and the poet finds himself dealing with assassins and psychics.
Action, humor, romance, and real emotions. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants a good story.
Hungarian was my first language but I haven’t had to use it much over the past 15-20 years. When I read English I move pretty quickly because there’s no mental step between “see word” and “recognize meaning/context,” but I find myself “reading out loud on mute” I Hungarian now, if that makes sense. So, getting my reading performance up to what it is for English is the challenge.
but I find myself “reading out loud on mute”
The proper term for this, if I'm understanding you correctly, is "subvocalising". And it's something a lot of people (myself included) always do when reading, even in a language they're fluent in.
But it sounds like when you're reading Magyar you might have a little more of a third step beyond just subvocalising, which is mentally needing to translate the word. Does that sound correct?
Yes, that sounds correct. I’ll have to remember that term. All of the English reading, whether fiction, technical, academic, etc., has made Hungarian take a back seat and I find myself translating it to English.
I finished Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik. I liked her standalones, and decided to try one of her series. (Her new standalone The Summer War is coming out in September!). It’s an interesting second book, because it pulls back on a he military focus/stakes of the first book and becomes a diplomatic intrigue with personal stakes while still keeping the fish-out-of-water/curiosity themes. And it still manages to slip in a few dragon fights and action scenes as gripping, if not more so, than in first.
Then I picked up Wild Seed by Octavia Butler. Very different vibe. Good so far.
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. For a book club. Not my usual cup of tea. Not bad though.