A friend mentioned some plot points to me that sounded very amusing, besides it being basically the perfect combination of tech inspired fantasy and realistic science fiction.

Got mostly amusement, but also a sense of finally finding a genre I love and reflects to me together the entire culture of little tech communities. It also managed to break my problem with not reading enough for fun, since I've just been perusing documentation and manuals for the last few years.

I basically recommend it to all my closer friends, since I mention a few things and they've always been amused and it's up to them to decide if they're amused enough to read it.

~tffb wrote:

Oh my,

I think it was "Letters From The Dead", which was "by" Pelle "Dead" Ohlin, but compiled by his penpal, Old Nick. It was a series of letters *to* Old Nick, but Old Nick did not put his responses in the book. In it, Dead spoke of occultism, album lyrics, band direction, and life in Norway. These letters continued up until Dead's death in 1991. At the time he was the lead singer of Mayhem, and made it to Rolling Stone's "Top 200 Best Frontmen of All Time", post-mortum (despite Mayhem having never released an official album with him on it, other than a live bootleg).

Prior to that, I think it was three years since I had read a book. "Man, The State, and War" by Kenneth N Waltz. International Relations. Neat book.

~ralfwause wrote (thread):

The last book i read was "In Stahlgewittern" by Ernst Jünger. His memoirs of being an officer in the german army in WW1. It is often said that - compared to "Im Westen nichts neues" ("All quiet on the western front") - it would glorify war, but after reading it i absolutely can not confirm that. He describes the horrors of war very clearly but he had another perspective on the war than Remarque.

Would i recommend it? Well... i don't know if it is available in an english translation, but if you can read german i would give it a try.

~ns wrote (thread):

I finished The Martian last week. It was my second time reading it. I wanted something gripping to read, but easy. When I read, I don't want to think. I want to read. Absorb me into the world. The less I have to think, the better.

~ew wrote:

I just reread a small book by João Guimarães Rosa: "Mi tío, el jaguareté" in a German translation. I have no idea, whether it was translated to other languages from the original. It's a monologue of one person talking to one other. As such, why read it? Well, it does inspire my imagination, having traveled Latin America quite a bit. Very easy to see a remote place full of wild life in your head.

~tskaalgard wrote:

The last book I finished was Jackson Crawford's Wanderer's Havamal. I would recommend it to anyone, really. Currently working my way slowly through Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and Thus Spake Zarathustra.

~winter wrote (thread):

Present tense, but I'm currently working through "The Sound and the Fury" and I've promised myself I'll finish it today, so this doesn't feel so much like cheating. I usually have 2-3 books on the go (a novel or two in different genres, some poetry, maybe some non-fiction.

I chose it because I found it at a local big charity book sale (literally thousands, maybe tens of thousands of books) for $1.50. I'd never read it, Faulkner's important, so I thought I'd give it a go.

I'd recommend it to others if they're into modernist literature that's "weird": there's four narrators, each with their own style, the novel jumps forward and backwards in time, etc. It's difficult to get into. I can see why it's considered by people who like unusual/hard novels to be great. But I've had trouble getting into it myself, and I'm looking forward to finishing it and moving on to something else.

~kavehorvanya wrote:

shriek: an afterword, by jeff vandermeer. does/tries to do a lot of things (underground fungal race; sister's afterword on brother's book with annotations by brother, leading to whole meta-analytical style of convolution; postcolonialism and historical revisionism; existential horror)

liked most of it. think it's more about animal epistemology than some race metaphor, which might've been the better choice. think the writing style is decadent (Derogatory) but i'd probably write like that, too. still, liked most of it: the machine, the afterword to the afterword, fungal technology). only recommend if anybody's looking for more jeff vandermeer stuff.

but books i would recommend: this is how you lose the time war by amal el-mohtar and max gladstone, skin room by sara tilley, the city and the city by china mieville.