What are you currently reading?

[Garlichead]

On 7/28/2022 at 1:24 PM, joepallai said:

Started reading this:

Playing at the World from the same author is fantastic. It goes back to the very early days of DnD and it has a plethora of interesting historic bits.

 

I want to read Elusive Shift, but have not taken the time to start yet. Let me know how it is.

[joepallai]

Playing at the World was fantastic, I couldn't put it down.  Will do.

[Arrowhead]

:)

[Daytime Waitress]

8 hours ago, Garlichead said:

I started reading The Woman in the Dunes today for a Book Club we have at work. I saw the movie 5 years ago on a japanese movie festival and enjoyed it a lot. Have great expectations for it. 

 

Haven't read anything by Abe in a long, long time, despite enjoying Box Man years ago - thanks for... reminding me he exists, I guess!

 

7 hours ago, Arrowhead said:

Spoiler

:)

 

"Corn syrup advertisements featuring hockey players, but only from a thirty year period."

 

That has got to be the most obscure thing in this thread.

[Thelokk]

 

The kind of horror you don't realize it's horror until the very last page. 

[LadyMistDragon]

Imajica

[ducon]

It’s about Pythagoras and "his" famous theorem. According to this book, he and his cult knew the theorem (not only pythagorean triples), even if it was know long before them.

In fact, we don’t know much about him and the book taught me two or three things (for example, the visual proof I thought from Liu Hui was from Scott Loomis [see below]).

 

Now, this one:

 

I read the Bromeliad trilogy:

If you look closely at the cover, you will see a lot of about 10 cm gnomes on a lorry.

The three book are about how they survived on Earth, then how they found the way to come back home.

Why bromeliad? Read the books.

They were written in the beginning of the Discworld series, and a few things will remind you the Nac Mac Feegle if you already know them. Of course, the classical Pratchett themes are here: science, feminism, religion, sociology…

 

And now, something completely different:

Edited August 11, 2022 by ducon

[ducon]

I read this one:

 

It’s about the fourth dimension in mathematics and elsewhere (art, religion…) and its first chapter is about, of course, Flatland.

I did not know that a crook like Blavatski was in this craze at the end of the XIX^th century.

The last chapter is about how can we represent projections of the tesseract (the fourth dimension hypercube) in our three dimension world.

Oh, the set of integers ℕ contains 0.

 

Now, this:

[DrWho42]

[Thelokk]

Unofficial fan translation of Yuuya Satou's Flicker Style -  postmoderm mystery in the vein of Seiryouin, NisioIsin and Maijo Otaro. Sadly I realized my japanese is way too rusty to tackle the original. 

 

[Arrowhead]

On 8/3/2022 at 3:51 AM, Thelokk said:

The kind of horror you don't realize it's horror until the very last page. 

Damn, didn't think I'd see someone else who's read this.

 

Great book. Very dark.

[ducon]

I read the first book of The dark tower series.

I already read it a long time ago with #2 and #3 but I wanted to read them all.

Roland, the gunslinger, someone between a pistolero and a knight, lives in a dying world, in a changing world. He wants to kill a magician who is involved in the end of his world. The first book tells the story of this tracking in a desert.

 

Now, the next one:

[DrWho42]

Edited August 19, 2022 by DrWho42
not formatted correctly

[Biodegradable]

I discovered David Thorne about a few months ago and have been on a quest to read every single one of his books. His stuff is hilarious.

 

 

This is the collection thus far.

Edited September 26, 2022 by Biodegradable

[ducon]

I read this book:

 

How France lost an economic war.

The book interviews a lot of CEO, two trade-unionists, a handful of economists and others.

In a nutshell: according to most of them, in France the wages are too high, the social security is too high, the taxes are too high, the trade-unions and the laws are not business-friendly. Oh yeah?

My wage is not following the increasing prices, my social security is being weakened each year, my taxes are increasing, trade-unions are weakened too and I can’t put my money in a Bahamas bank. They are flying high but they don’t know what’s the life of a worker; they want the butter, the money and the farmer’s daughter’s ass (except one economist and the two trade-unionists). They preferred saving money in the Bahamas instead of investing and two centuries after the socialists, they are discovering now that cooperation is more effective than competition. Hooray, in two centuries they will drop capitalism.

Oh, only two women are interviewed.

 

I finished this book:

 

It’s about π: its history (approximations, even an American guy who tried to set its value legally), its craze (t-shirts, π-day…), various formulas to calculate π and its 10,000 first decimal digits.

I did not see big flaws in this one.

 

Now:

 

That I finished too.

It’s about game theory, from the prisoner’s dilemma to chess.

 

And now:

Edited August 25, 2022 by ducon

[Garlichead]

Just finished the The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe, and David Copperfield by Dickens.

I was reading the first one for a book club, and on monday we will have the discussion and decide what to read next. I had seen the movie some years ago, and now that i have read the book it feels like a very good adaptation but a little more pessimistic in tone.  Overall, both the original and the adaptation are equally worth checking. 

I have been reading Copperfield since this college quarter started, today I turned in the last exam for the period and finished the book. I find the victorian period fascinating and on this particular book I really enjoyed how the plot focuses on a little set of characters during their lifetime and their interactions with the protagonist. This is my 4th Dickens book and have enjoyed most of them so far, albeit The christmas novellas felt very melodramatic at times. Will probably wait a some months before starting Great Expectations which is next on the backlog.

About to start a novel from a local writer (Las armas de la psique by Javier Ignacio Guevara) which won a literature award from my university in 2018.  Not sure what the plot is about, but looks to be a crime novel.

Edited August 28, 2022 by Garlichead

[ducon]

I read the second book of The man without qualities:

 

This book is in two parts: the first one has been published, it’s the real second book (about 450 pages). The last part (about 650 pages) is a collection of fragments, of drafts or finished paragraphs of the two last books. Musil didn’t finish them, maybe it was too much work in too harsh conditions (he moved from Austria to Switzerland and died in 1942).

Ulrich’s father died and we meet his sister: Agathe. We lose track of most of the first book’s characters (wee see them sometimes).

What is striking: the followed characters are going mad, like the world just before World War II.

 

And now:

Fuck you, I’ll leave the link here: http://www.lecavalierbleu.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/anarchisme_3ed-234x400.jpg

[pilottobombadier]

Currently reading Nothing Lasts Forever, which Die Hard as based on.  Interesting story. 

 

Quite a few differences between the book and movie (though they both take place at Christmas).

[ducon]

Phew, it’s quickly read:

 

About Fermat’s last theorem, proven by Wiles.

But it’s also about the x²+y²=z² equation (x, y, z are integers), Fermat’s and Diophantus’ lives and the proof’s history… but nearly nothing about the proof itself. Too bad.

 

Now:

Edited August 31, 2022 by ducon

[Thelokk]

[HorseJockey]

Need to sit down and finish this, it's not long I just always find something else that distracts me from it.

 

[Ludi]

Re-reading my favorite book! To those who have only seen the movie, your humble narrator is so much less sympathetic in the books. I think it's more interesting narratively for it, though 

[Daytime Waitress]

2 hours ago, Sr_Ludicolo said:

Re-reading my favorite book! To those who have only seen the movie, your humble narrator is so much less sympathetic in the books. I think it's more interesting narratively for it, though

 

McDowell's charm made Alex so insidiously endearing, despite him being a murderous rapist (Alex, not Malcolm!). I can't recall a book and movie combo that I loved equally for entirely different reasons, but they're both amazing: Kubrick's effort for the visual flair and ability to ground the violence in the absurd; and Burgess' for the linguistic playfulness.

[beast]

Recently I finished Treasure Island, by R.L. Stevenson, and I loved it. It got me on a Pirate kick. Now I am busy with The Pirates of Panama, by A. O. Exquemelin,

Quote

... a True Account of the Famous Adventures and Daring Deeds of Sir Henry Morgan and Other Notorious Freebooters of the Spanish Main

 

In tandem, I am also reading The Lost World, by Arthur Conan Doyle.

 

All of these are available on The Project Gutenberg.

[LadyMistDragon]

The Discworld book "Unseen Academicals."

[ducon]

https://www.doomworld.com/25years/

 

I finished this book:

 

A few errors as usual but a good book anyway, with no new age bullshit.

It talks about fractal dimensions, how to draw fractals (IFS, recursive functions, and so on) and their history.

 

Now:

 

Finished:

 

Roland draws the three cards promised by the man in black from our Earth: Eddie the junkie, (O)Detta the lady of shadows and the pusher.

Who will survive?

 

Now:

Edited September 13, 2022 by ducon

[Garlichead]

Ecuadorian "psychological horror" novel from 2018. A group of teenagers start a cult based on internet creepy-pastas, at the same time one of their teachers start loosing her mind due to high school cruelty and her own personal demons. The book focuses on the dark side of human relationships such as parent/children tension, sexual repression and guilt. Very good so far.

 

Costa Rican novel about the distribution of land during the late 1800. I have been trying to go over the author complete works for the last two years. Some of his novels have been great (Ese que llaman pueblo), while some other felt a little boring (Aguas turbias); he writes short fiction better than novels IMO. I am halfway through this one, and it appears to be one of his best works so far.

[ducon]

Finished:

 

Interesting one but there is nothing about Dijkstra’s algorithm (shortest path finding). It might have been a good idea to show how to run it by hand.

Nothing also about probabilist graphs (where vertices are states and edges are probabilities) nor graphs in linguistics (for example to test a syntax).

 

Now:

 

And I read this book:

 

False ideas about anarchism and anarchists, for example: "They are terrorists." or "They are leftists." or "It’s an Occidental political theory."

All these false ideas are debunked with historical examples, sometimes they are partly true but globally false.

A very good book, refreshing.

 

Now:

Edited September 18, 2022 by ducon

[hybridial]

Well, I was reading Angel's Inferno by William Hjortsberg, the very belated sequel to Falling Angel, the source of the film Angel Heart. 

 

I was really curious about what the intent for doing this was and after reading it I have no clue. It's bad sequelitis in every sense.

[HorseJockey]

Just started reading a book my Grandmother gave me, never heard of it but she said I would like it and I trust her opinion. So far I have been, although there is no way that this book has a happy ending.