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What are you reading?

Just started reading Walking to Aldebaran and its giving me goosebumps, its that good. I hope the middle and the end hold up.
 
Walkng to Aldebaran tickled my brain more intensely than any book I have read in recent history, perhaps ever. My only complaint is that it was too short, and perhaps, the ending was slightly anticlimactic. The premise of the story is fantastic, but also very real and plausible, and the story is told just right. This would make an excellent movie!

Thanks to @bilby for the recommendation and to @spikepipsqueak for introducing me to AT. Starting Alien Clay next. And if you know another book with a story similar to Aldebaran, I would appreciate a recommendation.
 
The Ides of March by Thornton Wilder (1948)
An epistolary novel on the year leading up to the assassination of Caesar. The various letter writers gossip, pontificate, and plot. It's a vivid book throughout but, I think, a largely forgotten book, and that's a pity. Here are a few excerpts from Caesar's writings, in letters to an old comrade from the campaigns:
"I can now appraise at a glance those who have not yet foreseen their death. I know them for the children they are. They think that by evading its contemplation they are enhancing the savor of life. The reverse is true: only those who have grasped their non-being are capable of praising the sunlight."
"Life has no meaning save that which we may confer upon it. It neither supports man nor humiliates him. Agony of mind and uttermost joy we cannot escape, but those states have, of themselves, nothing to say to us; those heavens and hells await the sense we give to them...I dare to ask that from my good Calpunia a child may arise to say: On the Meaningless I choose to press a meaning and in the wastes of the Unknowable I choose to be known."
 
Alien Clay was a fever dream and very hard to put down. I loved it.

Cage of Souls was a fever dream of another sort and just as engaging.

Took a break from AT to read some Jules Verne. I had read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in high school, and remembered it fondly. Reading it again 60 years later felt different - some of the magic was missing. I think as children we have open minds receptive to magic and fantastic ideas, a sense of wonder with the world that dies as we age and become more informed and more cynical.

Read Children of Time which was magnificent. I don't know how Mr. Tchaikovsky does it, but he can weave magic with words. Space-faring spiders - who would have thought? The scale of the book is breathtaking in both space and time, and it builds this world from the perspective of the spiders that is so authentic. Reading Children of Ruin now, about a quarter of the way through. More AT to come, and I think he has a new book coming out in December, the third part of the series that started it all for me.
 
bilby said:
EricH said:
I think he has a new book coming out in December
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I bought it months ago; Amazon promise to deliver it to my Kindle on December 8th.
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As did I! That will likely be my next read.

Have you read any of the Warhammer books by AT? Can they be read on their own or do you need to read the books by the other authors first to get full immersion? I am not familiar with the series so wanted to ask before buying them.
 
I've been reading some Sabatini, Scaramouche and Captain Blood, and I think I found the book that made Patrick O'Brian go "Yeah, that was fun, but hold my beer."
 
When I was young and nearly destitute buying a book was a big event for me! But now I've got some sort of mental illness: I've got 15 books I've not read, and keep buying more. (I'd have time to read them were it not for my duties as a poster here! 8-) )

What do we do to prepare for the Dystopia? When there's no Internet, no gasoline for sale, and all the stores are closed? To prepare some people buy canned food, some buy bullets, some worry about toilet paper. But I'll have ... books to read!

And rather than racing through the other 14 books quickly, I read Loren Eiseley's The Unexpected Universe slowly, savoring his delicious prose. He also often quotes delicious prose by others, e.g. Heraclitus and R.W. Emerson.

If you do not expect it, you will not find the unexpected, for it is hard to find and difficult.
-- Heraclitus​
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“It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped,” Emerson had noted in his journal, “the discovery we have made that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly.” Wisdom interfused with compassion should be the consequence of that discovery, for at the same moment one aspect of the unexpected universe will have been genuinely revealed. It lies deep-hidden in the human heart, and not at the peripheries of space. Both the light we seek and the shadows we fear are projected from within. It is through ourselves that the organic procession pauses, hesitates, or renews its journey. “We have learned to ask terrible questions,” exclaimed that same thinker in the dawn of Victorian science. Perhaps it is just for this that the Unseen Player in the void has rolled his equally terrible dice. Out of the self-knowledge gained by putting dreadful questions man achieves his final dignity.
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I'm reading James, by Percival Everett. It's a retelling of Twain's Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, Huck's black slave companion on his travels. So far (I'm really just starting) it's very clever and humorous. I'm enjoying it.
 
The Abyss and Other Stories by Leonid Andreyev
Andreyev (1871-1919) was one of the leading lights of the so-called Silver Age of Russian lit. He wrote plays, which I have not read, and fiction. After the Communist revolution, he emigrated to Finland, failed to find an audience for his work, and died in obscurity.
I learned about him after his name was used in a NYT crossword, and I subsequently read a few of his novels (The Red Laugh and The Seven Who Were Hanged) and several short story anthologies.
Andreyev uses realism in some stories and fantastic elements in others, and in some stories you'll find both. His central theme is despair, so if you're looking for uplift or a lot of comic touches, look elsewhere.
The Abyss collects 16 stories, including some of his earliest work. The title story has two young lovers walking through the woods, only to encounter a trio of debauched vagrants, who subject them to the most brutal assault conceivable. It's a story from 1902, but it could be the work of a contemporary writer, in that nothing is sweetened.
I found the story 'Lazarus' to be the most original item in the collection. Here, Andreyev imagines the life of Lazarus after his resurrection. Having been days in the tomb, encountering death, he comes back with black, fathomless eyes, which people cannot bear to look into. Those who lock eyes with him lose their zest for life and become obsessed with the futility of existence. The story combines several economical episodes of Lazarus meeting various people (commoners, a sculptor, and finally the Roman emperor) and transforming their lives.
Most readers of Andreyev are probably taking courses in Russian literature, but he is an accessible stylist and his narratives are, besides being dark, dramatic and characterized by distortions of reader expectations.
 
Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Auschwitz #34207: The Joe Rubinstein Story by Nancy Sprowell Geise

All Systems Red (Murderbot Diaries)

LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring
 
I’m starting on “Living on Earth” by Peter Godfrey Smith, an Aussie bloke who’s a professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. It purports to be a history of life on earth, showing how the planet’s environment has shaped life, and how living things have in turn re-shaped the environment. He talks about the different mechanisms of photosynthesis that have evolved and re-evolved, which is where I am now, at the beginning (of the book and of life on earth).
 
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