Books!

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Jocephus
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Re: Books!

Post by Jocephus »

i remember really enjoying the hatchet

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ghostrunner
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Re: Books!

Post by ghostrunner »

I've got to plug this book. I just read it over 4 days and I don't know the last time that happened with a piece of fiction. I'm a pretty slow reader, mostly because if I don't find the plot compelling I tend to drift on thought tangents on whatever aspect of it does interest me and then I have to re-read what I just read. Same thing happens for non-ficton too, which I read more often.

Anway, basic plot is that in the future through a series of terraforming and evolutionary experiments, spiders on one of the few terraformed planets are mistakenly infected with a nanovirus that enables accelerated learning. The story is told over centuries. Half the book is periodic check-ins with the spiders as they develop their society and culture, the other half is about an ark-ship of humans who in the wake of Earth being ruined by war and environmental collapse go in and out of cryo-sleep to deal with various problems and challenges over those centuries, intending to find one of the terraformed planets. Eventually they find a couple including this spider planet.

The spider stuff, and how that's all developed, is faaaaascinating. The human parts were only intermittently interesting but it pays off. Highly highly recommend.

Just going to add - it's not at all cheesy like the spiders becoming spider people and developing speech and inventing toasters. You can tell there's been a lot of thought and research put into it.

There's a second book which I'll get to reading eventually. Just want to sit on this one for a while first.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/ ... en-of-time

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Superorganism
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Re: Books!

Post by Superorganism »

Sounds great.

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Famous Mortimer
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Re: Books!

Post by Famous Mortimer »

That sounds pretty damn good.

I just finished reading "Gideon the Ninth" by Tamsyn Muir, which was great. Memorably described as "lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space", if that thumbnail interests you, the book will definitely entertain.

And now I've started on "The Luminous Dead" by Caitlin Starling (I think I got both these books from a "best sci-fi of recent years" list on some site). It's about a woman who lies her way into a super-hazardous solo caving mission on some [expletive] far-off planet, trying to save up the money to get off it, and so far, about 100 pages in, is really good too.

I started and abandoned a lot of non-fiction before I started on these two, and...I don't know. The world is awful and quite a lot of non-fiction is just "here's how someone nearly made the world better, but then it ended up being worse" and I'm not sure I have the energy any more.

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sighyoung
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Re: Books!

Post by sighyoung »

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I just wanted to recommend this book, which I've just reviewed for the publication Sea History, which is an excellent example of historians writing clearly and accessibly for a general audience while producing cutting-edge scholarship.

The historians in this book argue persuasively that the sea was a common route for slave escapes in the 18th and 19th centuries, and likely THE prinicipal avenue for escape in coastal states in the Deep South. In addition, most escapes were not planned by an organization: many people escaped via their own initiative, maritime experience and geographical knowledge, and social networks that they developed in their home ports and in other places. There are separate, short chapters devoted to individual coastal states (such as South Carolina) and important ports along the Atlantic seaboard (New York City and New Bedford, Massachusetts--the center of the nation's whaling industry).

It's beautifully written with lots of anecdotes, illustrations, and maps to help readers make sense of all the geographical reference. This is top-notch historical research from excellent writers.

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sighyoung
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Re: Books!

Post by sighyoung »

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I just bought and began reading this book, which is a recently published biography of my great-grandfather, which is cool: https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/T/ ... c-Anderson. I knew some of the information, but the scholar is really thorough, especially since a lot of the historical record is silent and required an lot of educated conjecture.

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Radbird
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Re: Books!

Post by Radbird »

Finished Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead. Interesting look at the life of a Harlem furniture dealer in the ‘50s & ‘60s. Reading coincided with binge watching Mrs. Maisel which is based in Manhattan in the same time frame. Enjoyed both showing two very different views of vintage NYC.

Next is Daniel Silva’s The Order. Sometimes I put books that look interesting into our Amazon cart for checking out later. Well, Mrs. Rad ordered it before I was able to do that. Turns out this book is part of a series featuring the same protagonist, and it’s the 20th novel in that series. Looks like you can read them out of sequence but there are recurring characters so you wouldn’t understand the full context of those relationships. Oh well, maybe it’ll be so good that I’ll go back to the beginning and read them all.

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Richie Allen
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Re: Books!

Post by Richie Allen »

Just starting Thomas Pynchon's V.

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BottenFieldofDreams
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Re: Books!

Post by BottenFieldofDreams »

Prince Harry has a book now. I'm interested. Not the least bit in reading it. But I have questions.

Step I: Be born unfathomably fortunate.

I wonder how many chapters he uses to try and apologize or at least square to his readers the tremendous position he came into the world in. After a long day of breaking rocks and wondering how they’ll pay for their kids healthcare needs and fix the house, I’m sure people can’t wait to read what Prince Harry has to say.

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IMADreamer
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Re: Books!

Post by IMADreamer »

I'm admittedly not an avid reader, but I do occasionally pick up a book or two. I'm working through some John Muir books now. Just started "My First Time in the Sierras."

I have zero interest in Prince Harry, I wouldn't mind if he fell off a damn cliff.

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