On my e-reader I have one novel:
The Long Utopia (The Long Earth 4)
by Terry Pratchett and Steven Baxter.
My online reading list:
aosabook.org/en/index.html software design articles
sivatherium.narod.ru/library … /02_en.htm long fantasy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Fomenko
deepdive.stanford.edu/inference
What are you reading? (Thanks to Andrew Schultz for the idea of this thread.)
There’s a PI who claims to have conclusively identified Jack the Ripper. He presents his case in “Sherlock Holmes And The Autumn of Terror” where he has Mr Holmes solve the murders in Whitechapel.
I’m currently dipping in and out of Mark Twain’s Autobiographical Writings (the Penguin Classics edition).
I’m dipping into All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders.
Recently I’ve been reading Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow and Middleton Murray’s Problem of Style lectures.
I’ve also finally got round to reading Twisty Little Passages: technically I won a copy of it in the 2007 comp for The Chinese Room, but Harry had first read of it an he lives some 400 miles away, so I never got round to popping round for it.
I’m in the middle of Endymion, in The Hyperion Omnibus. Only 521 pages to go!
I finished Malafrena a little while ago and have recently been browsing My Ears Are Bent by Joseph Mitchell.
Currently reading Radiance (Catherynne Valente) which is a hoot. What steampunk would be if it were set in the 1920s in Hollywood instead.
Highlights of recent reading before that:
A City Dreaming (Daniel Polanksy), Brooklyn-centered urban fantasy for people who wished Zielinski had written anything after Bad Magic.
The Entropy of Bones (Ayize Jama-Everett), also urban fantasy (Bay area), teenager with scary martial arts skills. The voice is instantly grabby, no pun intended. (Apparently part of a series but you don’t have to read the earlier books first. At least, I didn’t.)
The lastest Elantra (Cast In… series), Michelle Sagara. I like these although it’s an extremely open-ended series.
Writing Interactive Fiction with Twine. Gotta keep up, right? I generally agree with Emily’s blogged review. It is an odd hybrid between a Twine tutorial and a general introduction to IF game design. Both of these are valuable, but the book wants to treat Twine as a general-purpose IF tool. It doesn’t address the fact that different IF tools are used for different kinds of games, for reasons both of technical affordance and community focus.
I got that one as well. Not finished it yet but finding it broadly useful in the explanations (of macros etc.), even if it’s aimed at a younger audience. I admire the conviction in her unashamedly gamist, pro-autonomy position.
Finally got around to buying and reading ‘House of Leaves’. It’s…interestingly structured.
Rereading NK Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy. Currently on book 3, The Kingdom of Gods.
Just starting The Name of the Wind, by my brother’s recommendation.
That reminds me that I still haven’t read my prize from the 2011 comp, Blindness by José Saramago. I will remember to read it next! Currently slogging my way through Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World; I’ve been reading the Baroque Trilogy off and on for over a decade (!), and I’m finally on the last third of the last book.
I’m also a couple essays into the IF Theory Reader, but that’s on hold until I can play some more of the classics…
I’m about a third of the way through A Deepness in the Sky, since it just became available as a library ebook and I loved A Fire Upon the Deep.
Carolyn, I’m one book into the Inheritance trilogy, too. The first one didn’t totally impress me – felt kind of flat and predictable – but I like her blog and the short fiction of hers that I’ve read, so I’ll probably try the second one as well. (It doesn’t hurt that it’s also available as an ebook from my library.)
A lot of my friends rave about that series, and I read both books that are out but I came away dissatisfied with it for reasons we can discuss after you’ve finished reading it.
Contemporary fantasy that I do rate: Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, and The Year of Our War by Steph Swainston.
I was a bit dissatisfied after reading The Name of the Wind, but after reading The Wise Man’s Fear I re-evaluated it and now I think highly of both books and am really looking forward to the third book. I also enjoyed Jo Walton’s in-depth analysis series here: tor.com/series/patrick-rothfuss-reread/
Joey, any interest in starting a new spoiler-ok thread about your thoughts?
I should also mention that Rothfuss’s novella The Slow Regard of Silent Things reads very much like a novelization of an IF playthrough!
We can start a new thread on it definitely, though fair warning, I haven’t read it in over a year so my view of it isn’t fresh.
Okay here we go: thread on it here.
Love the Scott Lynch series. Left entirely cold by _ The Year of Our War_. What did you like about it?
I could take or leave the setup with the immortal paragons and the endless bug war, what I really liked was the new weird plane in the protagonist’s drug visions and
The conceit that he was the only one who could survive overdosing on this drug and, naturally, that no one else believed him about the true source of the bugs. Addiction to a drug that others believe is hallucinogenic but isn’t actually, was such a novel idea.
I remember wanting to read more political fantasy and while it didn’t fully scratch that itch, I ended up reading the whole series but I guess none of them was as distinct in my mind as the first.
Actually what I really like about Scott Lynch’s books is that while there’s a meta-plot and things develop from book to book, each book is a distinct and self contained story (in a way that neither of the main Kingkiller books are).