What are you currently reading?

[Merry Widow]

Gummy Bears From Hell. Very funny book,  but do not read if you have the flu.

[Astar]

Made in Abyss.

Cool shit, ngl

[Arrowhead]

 

:)

[ChaseC7527]

this question

[ducon]

Read:

 

Wow, I knew that he was involved in the French Revolution (École polytechnique) and that he invented some kind of technical drawing but I did not know that he also worked on calculus, for example.

 

Now:

 

Read:

 

I love when Stephen King writes horror books with only a few horror in them.

 

And now:

Edited January 16 by ducon

[Taw Tu'lki]

Ebook

[Garlichead]

Wrapping up Men at Arms. Thinking of reading Swords against death by Fritz Leiber next.

[ducon]

One day I’ll buy them (and read them) in English.

[aloysiusfreeman]

4 hours ago, Garlichead said:

Wrapping up Men at Arms. Thinking of reading Swords against death by Fritz Leiber next.

Funny enough, I'm reading my first Discworld book right now. The Color of Magic. 

[Garlichead]

1 hour ago, aloysiusfreeman said:

Funny enough, I'm reading my first Discworld book right now. The Color of Magic. 

Nice, this is my second Discworld book. I started with the City Watch novels.

 

This is the second book in the series,  both of them have been very good. The first one is slightly funnier, but both have been worth reading. I love how he can tell a noir-esque story while retaining fantasy and comedy elements and succeed in all genres. 

[Daytime Waitress]

12 hours ago, Garlichead said:

Nice, this is my second Discworld book. I started with the City Watch novels.

 

This is the second book in the series,  both of them have been very good. The first one is slightly funnier, but both have been worth reading. I love how he can tell a noir-esque story while retaining fantasy and comedy elements and succeed in all genres. 

 

Wondering where to start amongst the sheer volume of Pratchett's work has kind of paralysed me from getting acquainted with him. I started slapping the audiobooks on recently at bedtime and tend to fall asleep a chapter or two in, but I found Mort really endearing and I'mm gonna give the print version a run as soon as I can pick up a copy.

[aloysiusfreeman]

3 hours ago, Daytime Waitress said:

 

Wondering where to start amongst the sheer volume of Pratchett's work has kind of paralysed me from getting acquainted with him. I started slapping the audiobooks on recently at bedtime and tend to fall asleep a chapter or two in, but I found Mort really endearing and I'mm gonna give the print version a run as soon as I can pick up a copy.

Have you seen this reading order? 

 

 

It had bugged me as well to how to approach this, but typically I am someone that likes to experience things as they were chronologically released, so that is my approach for now

[Misty]

Easy to pick up and read it, harder to apply drawing lessons, hehe. 

[ducon]

My reading order (of the Discworld series) was the publishing order.

Edited January 25 by ducon

[The Royal We]

The Cloven Viscount, by Italo Calvino, and selected poems from Mia Couto:

 

Age

 

Mind time:

my age is
only measured by infinities.

 

Because I don’t live in full.

 

I just went to Life
in a flash of incense.

When I lit up, it
was in the abbreviations of the immense. 

[NecrumWarrior]

I read a lot of books at the same time. I have a harder time sticking with just one book for very long. I like variety. 

• Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
• The Necessity of Atheism by Percy Shelly
• The Republic by Plato
• A History of France by John Norwich
• I am America (and so can you) by Stephen Colbert
• Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular by Lawrence Hills
• Wild Swans by Jung Chang

But the book I am trying to finish up now is this dreadful novel called The Last of the Dog Team by William Johnstone. I went in expecting a military thriller, and instead the main character has sex with every woman he meets because he is such a cold killing machine and that's obviously what all women are attracted to. There's also a lot of liberal stereotypes in the book, which I think was meant to be satire but the book ends up reading like a satire of what conservatives think liberals are like. The book is not good but it is unintentionally hilarious. 

 

EDIT: Correction! I am reading The Necessity of Atheism by David Marshall Brooks. I'm listening to it as an audiobook on YouTube and they used a thumbnail of the work by Percy Shelly which is how I got confused. 

Edited January 26 by NecrumWarrior
Correction

[ducon]

Finished:

 

Everybody knows his book about laws of thought and its posterity but it’s less known that he was an unitarian (like Newton) English teacher in Cork (Ireland) who also worked on differential equations.

 

Then:

 

I was not sure that he existed. Actually, he existed and founded a cult whose influence is still visible today.

 

Then:

 

Finished:

 

Lots of examples of shits that happen in France. Teachers who can’t teach, bullied mayors, very low wages jobs, healthcare going wrong…

I’m not sure that it’s better in other countries (in the USA for example).

 

Now:

 

Finished:

 

Four small essays about capitalism and slavery, fetishism and money, hierarchy and anarchism.

Excellent as usual.

 

Then:

Edited February 3 by ducon

[ReX]

Kindred

 

An unusual combination of the following: A female Black protagonist, set in two timelines (aka a central sci-fi theme), that deals with a dark past of US history.

 

Speaking of female Black protagonists in a sci-fi theme, here's something I wrote a couple of decades ago:

 

Tower of Babel

[ducon]

Read:

 

He was a bit ahead of his time on science, calculus and probabilities but not on algebra.

 

Then:

[LadyMistDragon]

Nod By Adrian Barnes

 

So you've heard what happens when we're deprived of sleep, right? What would happen if most of the world felt unable to sleep?

 

[Panzermann11]

Where Did All the Modmakers Go, by @Kinsie. It's a very interesting essay on the shortage of moddable AAA games and the contributing factors.

[ducon]

Finished:

 

Wow. I don’t own a smartphone, I won’t install TikTok if even I buy one but now I know why. I also won’t buy a Huawei phone, I’ll instead install Linux.

I also know why Russia, Iran, China and North Korea are called rogue states. USA, France, UK or Israel are also spying and sometimes remotely damaging machines but they are not bullying, not supporting ransomware maffias, not organizing fake news campaigns (it’s an industry in these dictatorships): they have limits.

 

Now:

Edited February 20 by ducon

[Kinsie]

4 hours ago, Panzermann11 said:

Where Did All the Modmakers Go, by @Kinsie. It's a very interesting essay on the shortage of moddable AAA games and the contributing factors.

Thanks for the kind words! I need to write more and have a lot to say, I just find it physically painful to do so.

[apichatpong]

Inspired by a friend of mine, I've tried The Dawn of Everything : a new History of humanity by Graeber and Wengrow... In matter of style*, lack of humor** and poetry, this book and Fukuyama's End of History are six of one and half a dozen of the other. I forgot that I'm not really fond of that kind of anglo-saxon, down to earth, "know-it-all", "now we know" essays... and I guess i'm not the core target since, even considering the horrors and liberalism (in the european understanding of that word), i'm still deep-rooted to the "old world".

 

* might be the translation, but... not sure.

** might just be a kind of humor i'm stranger to...

 

 

Now, came back to Noncommutative geometry by Alain Connes : even if i've touched in a somewhat "advanced" way some parts of this book fifteen years ago, I still think I might need another life to embrace it all.

In a lively and powerful style, Connes gives ideas to approach shapes, measure, geometry, infinitesimals from a quantum point of view, with deeply conceptual notions and some poetic evocations (like his famous understanding of type III von Neumann algebras as generators of their own time) leading to a deeply satisfying harmonious landscape modeled around and inside the Hilbert space.

Problem : I know some maths (a bit) but i'm a zero in physics so I miss some ideas to understand the whole (but sometimes, I also think that this help me to develop other kind of mental images for the concepts...).

Anyway, went back to it because of a dream project I have related to Doom, but i'm afraid it might stay at the dream level...

 

Edited February 21 by apichatpong

[apichatpong]

On 8/31/2022 at 8:17 PM, ducon said:

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.

 

Wow, I thought I've bought mostly  all the books from this (pretty good) collection but going through your posts I realized I've missed a lot of it...

I  especially will try  to find "La mystification des sens" who looks interesting !

 

Don't have the one on Fermat, I'll just guess that popularizing Wiles proof is, more or less, impossible. Prerequisites are too technical and conceptual.

There is a book by Yves Hellegouarch : Invitation aux mathématiques de Fermat-Wiles  that introduces the landscape in a "classical" way (meaning, pré-Bourbaki to say things quickly)(elliptic curves, modular forms etc) but that also can't approach the proof.

From what  I understand (i'm not a specialist), to get to the proof, you'll need at one point or another to walk on Grothendieck's road : fascinating but really hard to popularize, and when I say popularize I don't mean to people who don't know maths, I mean to people who are not already deep into the problem.

But  I might be wrong, if you have some references, I'll take it !

 

 

[ducon]

This collection can still be bought, it periodically comes back.

The series of books on mathematical geniuses tells the story of the guy (what’s known) and his works.

[apichatpong]

1 hour ago, ducon said:

This collection can still be bought, it periodically comes back.

 

Didn't know about that, will look forward on it.

 

1 hour ago, ducon said:

The series of books on mathematical geniuses tells the story of the guy (what’s known) and his works. 

 

I  wasn't clear on that, I was speaking about the book on Fermat last theorem, not the person, and answering to your remark about the lack of evocation of the proof.

Anyway, this second collection also appeals to me.

[ReX]

@ducon: You certainly have a scholastic bent. Kudos.

[ducon]

It’s my job.

[namsan]

Well, I'll be honest. I haven't read books for years.

...but I love reading many online dictionaries to learn new words or the origin of the words I already know.