Just finished this little book - sir Pratchetts “shaking hands with death” a speech he gave

I’m partway through Red Rising per a recommendation from a friend. Taking a break from my charge through all of Brandon Sanderson’s works to appreciate some different writing styles.

Seems like a small thing, but I really like Pierce Brown’s use of the true first person perspective. It gives the book an almost poetic feel and its not something I’ve seen used very often in fiction.

Currently I am reading The Monk by Matthew Lewis, which is a gothic horror book. I guess the biggest themes are temptation, love and the concept of sin, but I have read only the first book out of three. Still light on the horror side of things, but all the elements are in their places for plot to start to unravel quite menacingly.

Other book is Mirabilis by Anni Kytömäki. I am struggling through, because it was loaned to my by a friend to discuss about.

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I just finished “Into Thin Air” by Jon Krakauer. Makes me NEVER want to get into mountain climbing as going up Everest sounds insane. Even if you remove the storm and the deaths, I don’t want to spend weeks getting acclimatized to an environment where humans don’t belong just so I can freeze my buns off.

I just started reading Killing in War by Jeff McMahan, and while it’s a really difficult read, his views on liability to be attacked in a war are really interesting. I’d recommend if you’re interested in ethics and morality to check it out!

Just about to finish Blindsight by Peter Watts. I’m ambivalent, since I love the big ideas it’s built around, but the characters and their interactions are stunted and sometimes nonsensical. Plot isn’t really very good either. It’s the ideas that carry this book. I think I’m most impressed with Peter writing in a main character who has gone through hemispherectomy - a very real and dramatic medical procedure - as a child, since I never thought I’d see that. It’s cool. But I struggle to call this book “hard sci-fi”, even if a lot of the concepts are very real. Maybe it’s the vampire character that feels like a total contrivance.

Was on holiday for the last three weeks, and didn’t read anything in that time. Finished the latest DCC book “a parade of horribles” by Matt Dinniman. In my opinion it’s one of the weaker books in the series (together with “the Butcher’s Masquerade”), the races were kind of distracting from the overall story. Still an okay book though. I’ve now finally started reading “the wandering inn”, I had been postponing it due to the sheer size of the book. So far I’m about 10-15% (eg. the size of a normal book) through, and I like it a lot. It will probably take some weeks to finish though.

Becoming the Pastor’s Wife by Beth Allison Barr.

Last week I started and finished Exiles by Mason Coile. Short and engaging. I haven’t read a ton of stuff in the sci-fi genre to know how derivative it is, but familiar themes abound (I don’t think this is automatically a bad thing btw, and it didn’t bug me in this book). That said, the twistS and ending were pretty good – aw heck, the whole story was pretty good.

I’d give it 3/5 Fudgy Points (I’d give it a four, but it really could have been longer by burning slower and building suspense throughout… Just too short and lacking some explanations of Why).

I also started A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0 by Bill Bryson. So far a fun read.

I’m on vol. 3 of “Y the last man”. Pretty good so far, though some of the commentary is a little dated

I just binged the entire Hitchhikers Guide series, so I took a couple of weeks off after finishing “And Another Thing” to digest everything.

This week I started listening to New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson.

This is the first audio book I’ve listened to with a cast of people each doing characters, and it’s a bit different, so I’ll see how I feel about it in the long run.

My desk book (for when I take small breaks and want a short story) is still The Martians by KSR, although I realized I never finished Asimov’s The Complete Stories Vol 1 that used to be on my desk, so I think I may pull it back out next.

On chapter 50/77 of DCC book #5, The Butcher’s Masquerade.

Had a few months break from DCC to re-listen (3rd time) to Project Hail Mary before the movie came out and a few others. Back at it and loving it again.

Currently reading Want Submitted by anonymous. Collected by Gillian Anderson.

I don’t read a lot of nonfiction but this one has been fantastic so far. The section On Fantasies was very interesting, I enjoyed seeing different women’s perspectives on what they fantasize about. I’m on the section Rough and Ready and it’s helped me feel like my thoughts are more normal than I realized. A line written by Gillian Anderson in the intro of the section made me feel like my perimenopausal brain is definitely normal “I’ve read that someone going through menopause, for instance - when their minds and bodies are sometimes experiencing terrifying upheaval - is more likely to fantasize about BDSM than pretty much anything else”. Some of the letters are like they took thoughts directly from my brain, which is incredibly refreshing.

I recommend this to any woman out there who was taught women should be ashamed of being sexual or sometimes feels her thoughts are abnormal, because they definitely are not. Or honestly, just any woman should read this book!

Was reading Humankind by Rutger Bregman but left it at home and replaced it with The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan.