Ask Lemmy

Currently I'm not reading anything but listening to the Magnus protocol podcast (which I highly recommend, but you should start with the Magnus Archives). It's a horror podcast, where each episode a character is reading a horror story that happened to someone, and in the long run stuff starts to happen with the characters who are reading.

Before starting that I read some of the Dexter books, honestly? The TV show is WAAAAY better, the first book is very similar to the first season, but then it goes off the rails, to the point where there are supernatural entities in the books, not to mention the absolutely horrible Spanish from the author, in one book he a character realizes someone knows he's there because he gets a happy birthday card, except the card says "Feliz Navidad" (Merry Christmas).

Last book: Perfume: The story of a murderer by Patrick Süskind. I ravaged through it quite fast and enjoyed the descriptive writing style immensely. It's supposedly a book with many intresting layers, but I loved as a novel about world of smell.

Currently: Though I tend to read several at the time depending on my mood, my main book is Breaking together: A freedom-loving response to collapse by Jem Bendell. I work with environmental stuff and I feel like we are past the point where ecological modernisation is a answer to all of our woes. It is well-written book and you can download it for free.

Last book: The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook. It's book three in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which I'm enjoying a lot. Sometimes the game mechanic details get a little tiring, but they're typically meaningful to the larger story, or at least the action scenes. The human drama of it is where it really shines, tons of righteous indignation and coming together against adversity. Lots of humor sprinkled in. It can be a little crude and definitely very violent, I'd recommend it as long as those aren't deal breakers.

Current book: Citadel of the Autarch, fourth book in the New Sun series. It's good so far, building on the story of the first three books, interested to see how it reaches the situation foreshadowed in the first book via the framing device of this being a memoir written by the main character. The meandering plot with occasional tangent story-within-a-story have made it a slower read for me, but the surreality of it keeps it intriguing during the slower moments. I'd definitely recommend it, it's clear why this is a well regarded series, very different from my usual read.

last: All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai

Could not finish it. The story would not start, eventually I stopped caring.

Current: James Acaster's Classic Scrapes

Funny collection of stories that happened to him over the years. Very entertaining and funny.

Last book: "Last Call" by Tim Powers. It's great. Poker and archetypes. Big inspiration for Unknown Armies, which I loved.

Current: Medusa's web, also by Powers. Not sure if I'm into it yet but it's got some of his signature weirdness

Last book: Human Phoenix, current one Human Man, both from an author with the handle "Refusenik". Human Man is basically the second part of Human Phoenix, kind of "coming of age" with a bit of mystery and scifi.

Last: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Current: A Short History of Nearly Everything

Lest you think I'm bragging, the one before that was Omegaverse fanfic.

Last book was "The Catcher in the Rye" (yes i'm late..) Can't really recommend but i'll definitely never forget that one. Currently: Looking for Alaska. So many memories of my youth overwhelmed me. (banned in the US!?!?) 🤦

I was reading the He Who Fights With Monsters and that is lots of fun. I finished book 12 so I have to wait. But its a great story arch of how a nobody could become a god like powerful character by defiance and resistance to what what is the normal.

I went back to the Hell Divers books series by Nicholas Sansbury Smith. Its totally pulp fiction but the big picture story is great. Some of the in-between can get stale.

Currently working my way through the He Who Fights With Monsters audiobook series. It’s a LitRPG, so it comes with all of the trappings that entails. The main character can be a little insufferable at times, but it’s at least self-aware enough to recognize that and call it out. There have been several laugh-out-loud moments from references that I wasn’t expecting. It’s clear the writer is a big nerd with a fetish for bad 80’s films and philosophy. The narrator (Heath Miller) is fantastic.

My biggest complaint is more about the audiobook format; The series frequently rehashes character abilities. In a regular book, this wouldn’t be a problem. You could just turn the page and skip reading it. But for an audiobook, you can try skipping ahead but you’ll still inevitably end up listening to the same ability description that you have heard twenty times before. It also frequently rehashes things that just happened. That’s more a symptom of it gradually being released on the writer’s Patreon, before it is compiled into a full book. Rehash at the start of a chapter makes sense when you’re only reading a chapter per week. But when you’re listening to the entire book, the rehashes can get redundant.

Overall, I’d suggest it if you enjoy the genre. Even with the complaints, those are relatively minor and I have thoroughly enjoyed it so far.

Last book: Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa

Current book: not really reading anything right now but I should be, not sure what it will be, maybe this nice list will help

I definitely recommend Musashi.