What did you just read?

Just finished The City We Became a week or so ago. I don't think I'd recommend it for most here. If you're already a fan of Jemison or whatever, sure. If you love Lovecraft, it's a must. It's basically a modern day Lovecraft story. But, it's just part 1 of the story, I believe she is doing a trilogy. The "living city" thing has been done a few times, and most strikingly the book reminds me of Neverwhere. However, Lovecraft himself is a major topic in the book, and his stories, and his views. It isn't controversial to say that Lovecraft was openly racist as fuck, even for his time. And that shit was baked into his ethos. And that he is undoubtedly one of the fathers of modern horror. The author did an interview where she talked about that, here's this guy who writes these beautiful books, amazing horror, so much of our culture stems from him, and he was just over the top crazy ass racist, and you can't even divorce that from his art because he incorporated it into his art and we built the concept of modern horror on many of his ideas. Anyway, I liked it, I enjoy it, and I like the author. There's one character that kind of gets shit on, but I have faith that will be fixed in later books, Jemison has a style. If you're the type who will be triggered by the ideas I have mentioned being in a book, I'd invite you to read one of her other series first maybe, she's good and you'd be missing out if you give her a pass. But yeah, the book is about the city of New York "being born", where New York is represented by an avatar of each burrough that takes over a person. There's a predator though, waiting in the darkness between worlds for cities to be born, it eats them, takes them, etc.

I went ahead and picked up Heart Shaped box, which is a damn good book, cool ghost story, halfway done already. Also got Ocean at the End of the Lane and Lovecraft Country and NOS4A2.

Finished up Alistair Reynolds revenger trilogy.

I like the age-of-sail sunjammer type setting with the treasure hunting and pirates and such. The protags are interesting and likeable.

The story itself was kind of not that great though. Seemed a bit current event influenced.

If you like Jack Reacher/Lee Child, try The Gray Man series by Mark Greaney. I stumbled on them recently and they are fun.

TJT said:

Started reading Blessed Time on Royal Road. I like the premise and it might be an interesting character journey.

However, the main character is a soy boy little bitch and he's also annoying. Almost like a shitty main character of an anime series. I hope he improves significantly as the series seems to indicate he will. But right now he's just annoying and the worst character of his group. The author might have a problem with making the inevitable time jumps coherent too. I think he may have messed up on the scope of it.

EDIT: Okay holy fuck this got unbelievably grimdark right quick.

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I just got current on it, really enjoyed it so far. Yeah the MC starts off kind of a bitch, but I think that’s intended. The second arc definitely got dark pretty fast, and shows the MC throwing away any morality he has by essentially rationalizing that everything and everyone around him isn’t actually real.

TJT said:

Vaudevillain is great shit. Do recommend.

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Looking for something to read so started this, got about 5 paragraphs in before I was rolling my eyes. Of course it’s only the evil fundamentalists complaining about the mark of the demon that would object to implanting shit into your brain to play better video games.

I listened "The Possessed" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky recently while repainting my office/doing home renovation. It's a long book set in the 19th century Russia among the wealthy aristocratic types at a time of social / political change. 27+ hours via Audible. The narrator is very good, he uses different intonations with good to great acting without going over the top for all the different characters. It has a lot of characters and by far the hardest part was understanding who was being referred to, thanks to Dostoyevsky's proclivity for referring to the same person by multiple names, sometimes using their middle name, sometimes their last, sometimes a nickname, etc. It's a russian thing, I think.

By the end of the first act you'll enjoy the book a lot more if your really familiar with the names of the various main characters. It can be a bit of a slog at times as he goes into what can often seem like inane details about various things but the best parts of the book make it worth it, IMO.


Most notably: Stepan Trofimovitch Verhovensky, Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch Stavrogin, Pyotr Stepanovitch Verhovensky (sometimes called Petrusha), Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin, Marya Timofyevna Lebyadkin but there are a lot of other characters that come and go.

It's not even really considered one of Dostoyevsky's best novels either, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. There's a "censored" chapter at the very end of the audio book that didn't get published originally in Russian. It was cut by the publisher because of it's subject matter, but it's a shame because that chapter sheds essential light one of the main and most interesting characters, Nikolai Stavrogin. This chapter should have appeared as Chapter 9 of Part II and I highly recommend reading it then.

Food of the Gods by Terrence McKenna.

While I found the first half of this book entertaining, it is a disappointment at the end of the day.

McKenna has woven together two halves of two different stories to create a Frankenstein narrative. In the first half of the book he claims there used to be a utopian society where people cooperated and ate mushrooms all the time. Clearly this is a fantasy, as a utopia is impossible for human beings to achieve.

The second story is all the negative parts of human history, which culminates in a complete write off of Western Civilization. History is certainly a slaughterhouse, but to claim that some utopian society of the past was decimated and conquered by 'Dominators' is silly.

Silly transforms into ludicrous ramblings in the second half of the book. McKenna goes off the rails and gives a history of sugar, chocolate and tobacco. The point of such a tangent is made clear; such drugs have been approved by the Dominators in order to exploit the underclass in the extreme.

No one doubts that history is filled with powermongers, but to apply this blanket term 'Dominator' to chariot-riding Indo-Europeans and (seemingly) every upper echelon of every society that has ever been a part of Western Civilization is painting with too broad a brush. It also fails to be thorough in its analysis by only looking at the bad. Western Civilization has certainly brought the world positive things, and it certainly was not solely built through the manipulation and violence of 'Dominators.'

This book is a Marxist reading of history, and it feels tacked on to what I think could have been a very entertaining history of psychedelics.

> Silly transforms into ludicrous ramblings in the second half of the book. McKenna goes off the rails and gives a history of sugar, chocolate and tobacco. The point of such a tangent is made clear; such drugs have been approved by the Dominators in order to exploit the underclass in the extreme.

I listened to "Sacred Knowledge" recently and it was insufferable. One of the worst forms of mental torture I can think of is being subjected to the philosophical ramblings of a new age enthusiast or someone who takes large quantities of LSD and then waxes philosophical about what they experienced. If you sat some actual scitzophrenics around a circle and asked them to describe their dreams and let one another interpret them, you would get something very close to a Terrance McKenna talking about psychedelics.

While waiting for power to be restored to my area here in Iowa after last weeks storm, I decided to go to a local Barnes & Noble, since reading on my phone is unpleasant and drains power. The local one had too much damage from the storm and is closed for awhile, so I drove about 45min south to a another B&N. I was looking through the Fantasy/Sci-Fi section and had no idea who most of the authors were, then realized that in the past 20yrs or so, I've only read books by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. Was a shock.

Ended up buy a copy of Memories of Light by Jordan (which I had read before digitally, but didn't own, and had just finished Towers of Midnight which I did have in hardback). Searched this forum for some of the authors that sounded familar, but B&N didn't have a complete series of any of the books I was curious about, or they were all pretty short (under 500 pages). So I bought book 1 of a new series by Django Wexler, who seems to be fairly well regarded here for their previous works (which B&N didn't have complete).

The book is Ashes of the Sun. Has anyone read it?

wormie said:

Why not get an ereader?

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I've thought about it, but never got around to it, not sure how long a full battery would last.