I picked up Octavia Butler’s Dawn after years of wanting to read one of her books but never quite getting around to it. I picked a bad time to start reading it though. I had to force myself to put it down because otherwise I was going to be up all night reading it and I had work the next day. 
It’s going to be a lunch read for a few weeks.
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Going through a number of books of poetry by Ogden Nash. Some thoughts:
Pros: (no, it’s poetry! ha ha)
- Some are very funny.
- He uses misspellings of words in effective ways to make a rhyme.
- Some poem have conventional meter, while some have a line with say two feet followed by one with forty.
- Insightful thoughts on indignities of life.
Cons:
- Dated in many places.
- Sexist. Very much. Sigh. He was writing in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, which explains but doesn’t really excuse him.
But still enjoyable.
Edit: list format.
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This book looks interesting:
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Have you ever read much William Manchester? I’m currently midway through The Glory And The Dream. A little light reading there. Four decades of mid-20th Century US history in only 1400 pages! Seriously though, it isn’t boring, and it’s actually really eye-opening. It’s interesting how much things change, and how much they stay the same. Manchester is a guy who definitely saw Trump coming a mile away.
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No, I’ve not read him at all, much less heard of him. Any recommendations?
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If you read The Glory And The Dream, it might take you forever to get through it, but it will really tell you a lot about the factors that shaped the US as it is today. It was published sometime during the Nixon administration, but boy does it ever hold up. I would also recommend A World Lit Only By Fire about medieval Europe, but I haven’t read this book yet. It just happens to be one of his better-known works.
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Ah, a challenge! I devour books like the current POTUS tweets. Thanks!
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In that case here is one I am between half to three quarters through and have left on the shelf for a while.
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I still haven’t decided which of these I should read: Joyce, Mann, or Proust?
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at what point did you say-- “fuck this math, I’m going to skip to a chapter where I can read about Black Holes?”
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Thats generally the point where they fuck you with the tensors.
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Watching for this one’s release
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Just finished the last volume of the series.
“So was it worth it?” you might ask.
I suggest reading the first three books 
Wait a long time, like a year, and then read 4 and 5 if you want. Books 4 and 5 are sufficiently similar to 2 and 3 that the amount of redundancy and repetition will become tedious if you read all five in a row.
Either way, don’t bother with 6, the one I just finished. It’s not terrible, but it’s not necessary either. The end of book 5, Shelters of Stone, is probably the most satisfying conclusion of any of them.
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About 2/3 of the way through Keith Yatsuhashi’s Kojiki.
I bought it and its sequel together based on nicely designed covers (not the ones shown on Amazon) and blurbs and… well. It’s kind of a hot mess. A novel based on Japanese mythology that basically says “fuck the mythology, we made that up as a cover story for what really happened” and then runs off and does its own thing. And its own thing happens on a weird scale, sort of a Lucifer/Morgoth trope where mad science meets elemental magic, and a lot of it is told through flashbacks. It has its moments, though, so I’m sticking with it.
Keiko nudged a foot forward and stopped, intimidated. “I don’t think I can go in there.”
Yui smiled encouragingly. “Why not? Walk through. What could be easier than that?”
“But. There’s a god in there.”
“Really?” Yui blinked mockingly, peered about the room, and then pressed her lips to Keiko’s ear. “There’s one out here, too.”
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This series starts out normal, but slowly slides into porn as it goes on…
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Romance novel tropes will be in effect. There will be contrived misunderstandings. There will be excessively detailed sex scenes. The hero’s greatest flaw will be that he FEELS TOO MUCH.
Auel didn’t invent this stuff. Apparently there’s a market for it.
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I keep hearing this. This has been on my “to-read” pile (which is literally 200 books deep) so it might move off of it…
I just read the following (I had a week of vacation in New York City) and loved all three.
Ruin of Angels was Gladstone’s best book yet. Autonomous was phenomenal (as expected) and deserves its praise. Infomocracy was really good and different but not as good as I had expected based on its praise.
Currently, I’m reading:
Which is dull and very much a product of its time. I’m 10% from finishing it and basically bored of pretentious talking men and the women with little agency (or if they have it, they’re a “bitch”) that they revolve around. Less science fiction than there should be and too much arguing over drinks by fucked up men.
On the non-fiction front (I always read fiction and non-fiction together), I’m reading:
This is pretty good so far but then I’m a Buddhist of sorts.
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Having just completed watching The Expanse, season 2, (6 stars out of 5; i.e., best sf I’ve ever seen on TV), I’m rereading Leviathan’s Wake by James S.A. Corey, and hope to go through the sequels, to catch up (only read the first 2 last time, I think). I don’t think I grasped the full story the first time; it’s extremely complex (for me anyway). But excellent space opera. Consistent, characters are really interesting, and the plot is fascinating. And such a great (but grim) parallel to our own fucked-up world.
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After the first season I went and got all the books. I devoured 1&2, got bogged down in 3 but finally made it through. Ran through 4 and now I’m on 5, but I hate what’s going on so I put it down for a while.
So good.
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