What Book Are You Currently Reading? (2.0.)

[Beet]

Wings of the Dove - Henry James.

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

Heinrich Mann's Young Henry of Navarre.

[President of the great nation of 🏳️‍⚧️]

April Daniels - Dreadnought (Nemesis #1, 2017)

This woman is a genius.

Finally got into the part of this book I didn't read two years ago because Google wouldn't let me and holy sh**t I am fuming for reasons I won't explain here out of respect for those who may want to read this book.

[President of the great nation of 🏳️‍⚧️]

April Daniels - Dreadnought (Nemesis #1, 2017)

This woman is a genius.

Finally got into the part of this book I didn't read two years ago because Google wouldn't let me and holy sh**t I am fuming for reasons I won't explain here out of respect for those who may want to read this book.

Finished the book today and the ending was brilliant. As I said earlier, April Daniels is a genius.

[President of the great nation of 🏳️‍⚧️]

April Daniels - Sovereign (Nemesis #2, 2017)

Going through this book way faster than I am the first, probably because I'm going in about as blind as I can, as opposed to having eighteen-and-a-half chapters' worth of foreknowledge like I did with Dreadnought.

[diptheriadan]

Now onto Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. Hopefully my brain doesn't short-circuit trying to read Scots.

Done. The Scots was easier as time passed, and the use of dialect was actually rather useful for identifying characters if it wasn't explicitly said (and there are more than a few occasions where it isn't).

I don't want to spoil too much of the book, but the drug addiction aspect of it is really secondary. If it is anything, its a set of tales about a f**ked up circle of friends in Leith, and it's quite enlightening in regards to how people like them think. It's quite a bit to chew on, and I'm gonna go do so for a few days.

Here's the link for the book on Internet Archive.

[diptheriadan]

Now to work my way through the ~8 unread books I have sitting on my bookshelf. Think I'm gonna do The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris.

EDIT: Actually, nope. I think I'm just gonna read a few more of Welsh's works. Teddy can wait.

[President of the great nation of 🏳️‍⚧️]

April Daniels - Sovereign (Nemesis #2, 2017)

Going through this book way faster than I am the first, probably because I'm going in about as blind as I can, as opposed to having eighteen-and-a-half chapters' worth of foreknowledge like I did with Dreadnought.

Finished on Tuesday, and the fact remains that this woman is a genius. So psyched for Nemesis 3.

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

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Also, considering the twist at the end of Sovereign, I can't think of a single line in literature that compares to "You reify the holocaust of gender" in how well it aged. Outside of it, maybe something in BoJack Horseman.

[diptheriadan]

I'm finishing up Welsh's Glue. Good sh!t man. Good sh!t.

EDIT: Finished. I read this on the Internet Archive, but I think i'm gonna stop here. My poor eyes can't take it no more. So, Teddy's turn is up.

EDIT 2: Nope. Gonna be listening to Audible's free audiobooks for the next few months. Now reading Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights

[1978 New Wave skinny trousers]

The Mirror and the Light, the third installment of the Cromwell trilogy by Hilary Mantel that was just released earlier this month.

[parochial boy]

After a long period of working my way through Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books and distinctly middle brow detective novels, I have now got in to Zola’s Germinal and Une histoire populaire de la France by Gérard Noiriel (A people’s history of France), which, rather unusually for a French academic, is actually quite readable

[diptheriadan]

Hey, Audible's got a bunch of audiobooks free for the pandemic.

[President Johnson]

None, I'm writing one.

[PSOL]

Male Fantasies by Theweleit Klaus. Basically a psychoanalysis or the Freikorps. The juxtaposition of the images and quotations to create a narrative of the male fantasy of war, structure, and perverse unity is something that is timeless considering how much this imagery is present in what imagery and rhetoric is present on /pol/, Stormfront, and even those posters on Atlas. A long read, but timeless given what we are now going through.

[Grassroots]

The Death of the West by Patrick J. Buchanan.

[diptheriadan]

Finished Wuthering Heights. Fantastic novel. A part of me really hopes that some screenwriter here in the states will adapt it for the screen.

A note to any prospective reader: Don't let yourself get bogged down in its lack of realism; its necessary for the story for it to be like that. This is one of those novels that you have to let yourself be sucked into. I would advise memorizing the family tree though, just to remove any confusion. Several names are recycled.

Now reading C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters.

EDIT: And by 'lack of realism', I mean that the world that exists in Wuthering Heights is almost completely different from our own. Normal people in our world do not behave like normal people in this novel. Relationships rarely work like they do in this novel. All of this helps create a general sort of mood in the novel, which is pretty similar with most Gothic Fiction.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

EDIT: And by 'lack of realism', I mean that the world that exists in Wuthering Heights is almost completely different from our own. Normal people in our world do not behave like normal people in this novel. Relationships rarely work like they do in this novel. All of this helps create a general sort of mood in the novel, which is pretty similar with most Gothic Fiction.

But it is a fiend of a book — an incredible monster, combining all the stronger female tendencies from Mrs. Browning to Mrs. Brownrigg. The action is laid in hell, — only it seems places and people have English names there.

(For the record, I love it too.)

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I've just started reading The Leopard; rather surprisingly I've not actually read it before. That's pleasure. For work, well, an awful lot of things. Though reading them is quite pleasurable as well.

[Middle-aged Europe]

The lockdown enabled be to start a Philip K. Dick re-reading marathon. I'm through with Time Out of Joint and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch now and I have begun Martian Time-Slip this evening.

[Middle-aged Europe]

The lockdown enabled be to start a Philip K. Dick re-reading marathon. I'm through with Time Out of Joint and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch now and I have begun Martian Time-Slip this evening.

Started on Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said now, PKD's dystopian Watergate-era fantasy.

[diptheriadan]

Finishing up White Fang and I swear to god this is the cutest sh!t i've ever read.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

About to start The Big Sleep.

Finishing up White Fang and I swear to god this is the cutest sh!t i've ever read.

Speaking of schoolroom standbys, I'm also reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder "Little House" books. It's an...interesting series. The books are deeply racist and written in the service of a political project that's glaringly obvious as an adult reader, but you can also see why generations of children and parents have found them so endearing.

[Middle-aged Europe]

The lockdown enabled be to start a Philip K. Dick re-reading marathon. I'm through with Time Out of Joint and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch now and I have begun Martian Time-Slip this evening.

Started on Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said now, PKD's dystopian Watergate-era fantasy.

Finished A Maze of Death, started on A Scanner Darkly.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Work (and Talking about Elections™️) is making my progress very slow but I'm a little less than half way through Daniel Markovits's "The Meritocracy Trap"

Really outstanding and (for my level) novel book. Highly recommend that anybody with a professional degree read this book or at least familiarize him/herself with the arguments therein.

[GoTfan]

I'm currently reading through the first omnibus of Gaunt's Ghosts by Dan Abnett. It's essentially the first trilogy combined into one and consisting of First and Only, Ghostmaker and Necropolis. They're genuinely enthralling books and I would highly recommend them to anyone interested in science fiction. I would advise doing some background research into Warhammer 40,000 before you start, or you might be a little lost. Or you could do it as you go, either works.

Not that long ago, I finished The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather. An amazing book about an even more amazing story that most people would assume would be straight fiction if it came out of a movie. While it is about hope and resistance in the face ob tyranny, it also has an incredibly tragic ending. Who's the hero? None other than the legendary Pole, Witold Pilecki.