What are you reading?

[rousseau]

Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire translated by John Hunwick. A history written in 17th century West Africa, dealing with the previous few centuries:

The principal text translated in this volume is the Ta'rīkh Al-sūdān of the seventeenth-century Timbuktu scholar 'Abd al-Raḥmān al-Sa'dī. Thirty chapters are included, dealing with the history of Timbuktu and Jenne, their scholars, and the political history of the Songhay empire from the reign of Sunni 'Alī (1464-1492) through Moroccan conquest of Songhay in 1591 and down to the year 1613 when the Pashalik of Timbuktu became an autonomous ruling institution in the Middle Niger region. The year 1613 also marked the effective end of Songhay resistance. The other contemporary documents included are a new English translation of Leo Africanus's description of West Africa, some letters relating to Sa'dīan diplomacy and conquests in the Sahara and Sahel, al-Ifrānī's account of Sa'dīan conquest of Songhay, and an account of this expedition by an anonymous Spaniard.

It's an interesting read so far, but not overly thrilling.

 

[spikepipsqueak]

I've just finished Alien Clay and I think I am within 2 books of exhausting Tchaikovsky's output.

Bracing for impact.

 

[EricH]

I've just finished Alien Clay and I think I am within 2 books of exhausting Tchaikovsky's output.

Bracing for impact.

You poor thing. I am 2/3rd of the way through Doors Of Eden and I have only scratched the AT surface. All those books waiting for me on my Kindle.

Sorry, was that cruel?

 

[bilby]

I've just finished Alien Clay and I think I am within 2 books of exhausting Tchaikovsky's output.

Bracing for impact.

You poor thing. I am 2/3rd of the way through Doors Of Eden and I have only scratched the AT surface. All those books waiting for me on my Kindle.

Sorry, was that cruel?

Yes.

Yes it was.

 

[EricH]

I've just finished Alien Clay and I think I am within 2 books of exhausting Tchaikovsky's output.

Bracing for impact.

You poor thing. I am 2/3rd of the way through Doors Of Eden and I have only scratched the AT surface. All those books waiting for me on my Kindle.

Sorry, was that cruel?

Yes.

Yes it was.

My sincere apologies to spikeysqueak. By way of atonement, tomorrow I shall read at least 200 pages of an AT story that I have not read before, while flagellating myself with a stalk of green beans. Fresh, not cooked, to maximize the desired effect of producing an appropriate pain response.

 

[spikepipsqueak]

Not necessary.. I know you feel my pain without that.

 

[Tharmas]

I am reading David Grann’s The Wager, a ripping yarn from the days of sail and ships of the line, involving typhoons, wrecks, mutiny, murder, you name it. The thing is, it’s a true story, very lightly fictionalized by Grann, who did an enormous amount of meticulous research into his subject. His descriptions of what it took to repair and re-fit a man-of-war after she had completed a voyage are fascinating. The voyage around Cape Horn in winter is harrowing. The psychological insights are thoughtful, and the sociology of shipboard life rings true. I’m finding it to be a real page turner.

 

[ideologyhunter]

I'm reading Evolution for John Doe by Henshaw Ward (1925) in a first edition copy. This is what I call a 'curiosity read'; it's not a distinguished work but has some interest for me, for what it is: an attempt at a popularized explanation of evolution for 1920s readers. It came out the same year as the Scopes trial, which is not mentioned in the book.
The style is irritating. He seems to imagine his reader as a guileless follower of the penny press, with a head full of false notions, and he makes it clear that he's here to set you straight. With that aside, some of his descriptions of nature are thought-provoking. He spends several pages on how a single clover leaf produces simple sugars, and his descriptions, although lacking in exact terminology, are quite good.

 

[rousseau]

A House Called Tomorrow: 50 Years of Poetry - Copper Canyon Press

A Poet's Glossary - Edward Hirsch

Collected Poems - Philip Larkin

 

[DBT]

The Expanse. I enjoyed the tv series, but I seem to be having trouble getting into the novels.

 

[rousseau]

Bought a few new ones yesterday..

Selected Poetry - W.H. Auden

Selected Poems, 1957 - 1981 - Ted Hughes

Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose - Walt Whitman

Osip Mandelstam: Poems Chosen and Translated by James Greene

I seem to be back in a poetry phase these days. Also found a 40 year old receipt from 1983 in the Hughes title.

 

[spikepipsqueak]

There'll be some good curl-up-by-the-fire in that lot.

I'm within a very short distance of finishing Adrian Tschaikovsky 's Service Model.

I thought I was going to hate it at the start but at this point I want to take the author by the ears and smother his face with kisses for saying some things that needed to be said.

 

[Politesse]

I've been on a fiction kick lately, don't know why? The two I just finished were Sierra Greer's Annie Bot, which I cannot recommend highly enough, and Mai Mochizuki's The Full Moon Coffee Shop, which I wouldn't recommend at all though I can see why it caught on in its country of origin. I suspect it lost a lot of charm in translation.

Annie Bot is about a sex bot who starts to develop sentience and ultimately the desire to escape her abusive owner's control, on the face of it a standard pygmalion plotline. But the glory of the book is in the details, not the plot summary. Annie is convincingly written -you're empathetic to her but it is impossible to forget that you're reading the "thoughts" of a not quite human machine, and the men in her life aren't written as villains. They are villains to her, but not to themselves, "nice guys" of the tech bro sort with an interesting toy. Altogether more terrifying, if you've ever survived abuse yourself. It's never the ones everyone is afraid of on sight that are in a position to abuse someone for a long time...

So I went back to the bookshop and picked up:

The Anthropologists, by Aysegul Savas
Catch the Rabbit, by Lana Bastasic

and one non-fiction title, Nur Masalha's Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History.

 

[Tharmas]

I am reading Andrea Wulf's non-fiction The Brother Gardners. It doesn't do it any justice to call it a history of 18th century English horticulture, because it's much more than that. Very well-written, I wouldn't say it's for everybody, but you don't have to be interested in gardening to enjoy it. It's fascinating to see the Age of Reason intrude in what had been the realms of superstition and religion. The first man to deliberately create a hybrid feared he would go to hell for violating God's plan. So he set up a trust that funded in perpetuity an annual church service to declare that God created the species immutable and unchangeable. The English being, well, the English, still to this day perform the annual rite.

 

[EricH]

I'm within a very short distance of finishing Adrian Tschaikovsky 's Service Model.

Service Model was the third AT book I read. It was slow at the start, and got interesting in the middle. Elder Race started with a most excellent premise, on the other hand, but kind of fizzled out after the first third of the book. It underdelivered.

I am reading a book by Stephen Baxter right now, The Light of Other Days. Very good start, but also starting to underdeliver starting from Quarter 3.

 

[spikepipsqueak]

I usually like Stephen Baxter. I might give that a try now that I am bereft of AT.

Currently reading Vortex by Rodney Hall. Still at the start and not sure what to make of it.

 

[Politesse]

Service Model sounds very similar to the book I just finished, maybe I should give it a go.

 

[EricH]

I usually like Stephen Baxter. I might give that a try now that I am bereft of AT.

Currently reading Vortex by Rodney Hall. Still at the start and not sure what to make of it.

I am in agony. I have read five AT books so far, and the rest of his catalog is waiting for me, but I can't make up my mind. I simply can't. Can anyone sympathize with my position?

I know what Bilby is going to say:

Spoiler

No.
No, we can't.

 

[spikepipsqueak]

Chronological order . Removes the decisions.

 

[ideologyhunter]

God of the Mind (2024) by Rob Haskell is a good, short read that discusses the basis of religious belief and why he, a former pastor, abandoned it. Hell figured in his deconversion, and there's a good discussion of it. Toward the end of the book he explains why Trumpism was a perfect channel for right wing Christianity. He's agnostic -- my unbelief is more assertive -- but fully gets the absurdity of the Christian narrative and states things with concision:
"It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that religion is a kind of mind virus, finely evolved to take advantage of a set of psychological defects that are baked into the human mind -- because there is almost nothing outside the human mind to suggest any of these claims are factual."