Books

I have been working a ton lately so I am still reading Shadows Upon Time the last book in the sun eater series.

Maybe I can finish it soon. I really would like to get back to the Dungeon Crawler Carl series.

Made the choice of trying out infinite jest, boy is it tough yet so interesting. Like the parts a lot with some incredible descriptions yet some words are just so incredibly niche I have to stop and look it up.

I have been slogging through The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and while it’s extremely interesting it is so dense. I am undecided between a Neal Stephenson or Philip K Dick or Kurt Vonnegut novel next ¯_(ツ)_/¯

The friend of the family by dean koontz. A really slow start but halfway in and i am hooked!

Finished Project Hail Mary a few days ago, wanted to get it read before watching the movie tonight. It was such a great read, Rocky was amaze! Started Player One by Douglas Coupland afterwards/now, as I wanted a genre change up, been quite a non-stop thrill when comparing to the length of Project Hail Mary.

On the nonfiction side, reading Metaphors We Live By (by Johnson & Lakoff) currently. Taking it slow as it gets me thinking about experiencing experience itself. Real meta stuff.

I'm new to this and it seems interesting. I use https://bookwyrm.social/ to track my books. I'm unemployed right now and my priorities is to get a job, which means most books are related to that future job where I'm a billionaire. The best so far are:

• Head First Design Patterns : it's a good software development book, and most "Head First" books are nice to read, and won't give you headaches.
• Designing Your New Work Life : it's a bit different from the other motivational books I have read so far, and it gives you an alternate point of view of work and the workplace. This book is not preachy and shows interesting advice on how you can experience (or "reframe" as they say) your daily job.

I stopped reading the "Bullet Journal Method" because it was filled with useless motivational quotes, the kind you can read on Instagram, while giving absolutely no useful advice or method.

I wanted to read a classic that I've never read before. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. I'm reading it on Libby. It's good so far. Different from what a lot of movie and TV adaptations have been.

I have been re-listening to the Battle Of Midway.

The story is the stuff of legends and the narrator is excellent.

I have two in progress.

• Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue: English and how it got that way. Some of it more dated than I expected (The opening page mentions a sign in Yugoslavia.) Some of it I already knew (or at least had already been told, even if I'd forgotten the details). But linguistical trivia can be interesting and informative, so it's worth the read.

• Louis Sachar's The Cardturner. This is a blatant propaganda novel. The author is a bridge player and hopes to popularize the game among younger audiences (perhaps inspired by the million weaboos who took up Go inspired by Hikaru no Go.) At least it's a nobler cause than some of the propaganda I've been exposed to. The old, rich, blind bridge expert hires a kid to escort him to tournaments, look at his cards, tell him his hand and play it as he directs. The previous kid fucked up and got fired for learning enough bridge to question his decisions, but this new cardturner knows nothing. The book is intended for YA audiences and has the usual scenes of teenagers acting like teenagers, often while their parents act like toddlers, neither of which appeal to me, but they can be skimmed to get back to bridge scenes more comprehensive than I'd expected.

The Cardturner would be a great fit for the 4E (Game, Gamble, Contest) bingo square. This would also break a beautiful symmetry on my card. Not counting the central square, all 12 of my my scoring lines have an odd number of books completed. (2 lines are 1/5 completed, 8 are 3/5, and 2 are 5/5.) I don't think that specifies a unique arrangement (even up to rotational and reflectional symmetry), but it was surprising.

I just finished 1Q84, Book 2 by Haruki Murakami over the weekend. I’m excited to finish, but I’ve decided I needed a bit of a break before getting into Book 3.

In the meantime I’ve started There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm. Tonally very different, but the intro was so intriguing I had to learn more!

I just finished my second reread of Starship Troopers. I've read it in three very different parts of my life and every time I read it, I come away with something new.

I'm currently reading Salt: A World History and listening to The Final Empire.

• The Works of Vermin, by Hiron Ennes—just starting, but so far it’s reminiscent of Perdido Street Station.

• On the Origin of the Human Mind, by Andrey Vyshedskiy—interested in how he relates his work on prefrontal synthesis to cognitive evolution.

• Spring Summer, Asteroid, Bird by Henry Lien—compares eastern and western narrative traditions, but so far seems to take a rather superficial approach to both.

Kind of in a reading slump/ not active reading because of new work.

I was busy with The Revenge of Odessa and its quite interesting. Also was reading from time to time Chainsaw Man Volume 13 (I’m still sad what the author did to one of my most favorite characters…).

Was also busy with a more educative book but either MacOS or IOS decided to screw me over and deleted it from Apple Books app (by itself…). So all my notes on the PDF file is gone as well. So quit reading it and don’t think I’ll ever get back to it.

Forgot to mention, also reading a.. ahem Doujinshi which to my surprise is more wholesome than I thought lol.

Reading The Shadow of the Gods by John Gwynne. Its OK so far, about half way through. Don't really like how the story jumps between characters as much.

I just finished a manga called "Gyo: The Death Stench Creeps" by Junji Ito. The art was fantastic.