Weekend Reading Roundup (30 May 2017)

[nanila]

How did your weekend reading go? If you planned on anything specifically, did you read it?

Comments

[nanila]

Unexpectedly, I did have a bit of time to myself to read this weekend. I got about halfway through Utopia for Realists, which makes a pretty compelling case for a basic universal income.

[nou]

Since last report, I have read:

• Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville. I read this bit-by-bit over the past several months and have now reached the end. I found it a mixed bag. I’ve enjoyed several of his novels and wanted to try out his short stories too. Some of these I liked a lot, while others I felt I wasn’t quite clever enough to grasp the point of. The title story is also the first story, and didn’t work at all for me, so it took me ages to actually get any further (in retrospect I should have just skipped it). One of the stories was way too far towards horror for me — I’ve successfully blanked it from my mind now, but this does mean I’m unlikely to re-read this collection because I don’t want to risk that one getting inside my head again (I can’t remember which one it was, so I can’t just skip it). Which is a massive shame!
• The Interior Life by Dorothy J Heydt. Not bad — a very interesting premise, and the earlier parts were good, but it had A Great Big Climactic Battle, and I find those very boring, so I ended up skipping bits, which is not how I want to remember a novel.
• The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C Clarke. Space elevators in Sri Lanka, though sadly as a product of colonialism rather than Sri Lankan science.
• The Violinist’s Thumb by Sam Kean. Popular science book about DNA and related things. I found it annoyingly perky, and in places colloquial to the point of incomprehensibility. It uses “he” as a generic pronoun, and erases Rosalind Franklin entirely. Kindle says I made it 16% of the way through, which I see is exactly as far as I got through the last book I didn’t finish.
• Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time, edited by Hope Nicholson. Recommend, will read again, am hoping for a second volume.
• Binti and Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor. First and second in a series of novellas; the first was a re-read in preparation for my first read of the second. I liked the first one but found the second a bit disappointing. I also found it really weird that Binti’s university-level maths study appeared to be all about numbers. (I didn’t get on with the author’s novel Who Fears Death either; I found myself skipping great swathes of it from about two-thirds of the way through).

[ayebydan]

I sat down with Brendan O'Carroll's book 'the real Mrs Brown' (think comedy plays, tv shows ecs) thinking it would be an 'easier' read and I might get a few chapters in. I ended up reading the whole book yesterday?

So I am proud of that but at the same time afraid I have just burnt myself out again. I have another comedy biography to read for now (Kevin Bridges) and I am hoping that if I can challenge myself to a chapter every two days I can stop myself falling off the wagon again.

[alexseanchai]

The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment turns out to be an anthology of excerpts of historical works. I skimmed the parts to do with ancient Greece and skipped the rest—I have The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation for when I want this sort of thing.

The Druid Magic Handbook by John Michael Greer, judging by the first three chapters, has a worldview that's kind of slantwise to what I'm familiar with.

The Spiral Dance by Starhawk, judging by the first four chapters, is...very Wiccan.

[kitcatwoman]

I started reading Concealed in Death by J.D. Robb and Cthulhu 2000 by Jim Turner. I had a busy weekend, so I didn't get to do a lot of reading. If nothing else comes up, I should have them finished by the end of the week.

[heliopausa]

I know I'm late, but:

On the weekend, I read the first essay in Ruskin's Unto This Last, which is his 1862 critique of the science (as it was then seen) of economics. There was much in there to ponder - some to disagree with, some to wish was more widely influential. The other three essays will follow in due course.

[bonnefois]

I finished Dante and Aristotle Discover The Secrets of the Universe recently.

[singloom]

Didn't finish reading it, but I started The Fall of the House of Murdoch by Peter Jukes. It's a Non-Fiction about the phone hacking scandal that I borrowed from a work colleague because we talk a lot about politics and the media.