What are you reading this week?

The Gulag Archipelago, A Court of Thorns and Roses, and Sword of Destiny!!!!

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rdrama.net

i can't read

This will be giga neurodivergent but I'm currently trying to read Volume 46 of the Sanguo Zhi (Records of the Three Kingdoms). This is a historical text covering events and people of the late Han dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period. Some chunks of this massive record have already been translated into English, but there is no complete translation. Each volume has a focus on specific people of that period and some of the titles of the volumes are very informative such as Biographies of concubines and sons of the two Lords. Volume 46, the one I'm currently reading is called Biographies of Sun Who Destroys Barbarians, and Sun Who Attacks Rebels and it focuses on Sun Jian and Sun Ce. Sadly, the translation done by the infamous Rafe de Crespigny, who is perhaps the source of knowledge of this time period in the western world, only goes to the end of Sun Jian's life and its called : The Biography of Sun Chien: Being an Annotated Translation of Pages 1 to 8a of Chüan 46 of the San-kuo Chih of Ch'en Shou in the Po-na Edition. It's very hard to read because you have to cross reference a lot of information to fully understand its content and at the same time it's also very dry and really not that interesting if I'm honest. Also the different possibilities of Chinese romanization makes it really annoying to grasp some content, for example San-kuo chih is the same as Sanguo Zhi and while this isn't really an issue here, it gets incredibly annoying when you have to search the same terms over and over again. I genuinely believe it's better to just read the google translated version of the summary of each volume (e.g. the summary of volume 46) on the Chinese wikipedia. You may miss some crucial information but in the end it really doesn't matter if someone was the General Who Destroys Barbarians or if he was the General Who Chases Rebels.

bank statements

Usually i listen to audiobooks as i travel around/sit in the office not working.

However, recently I have been listening to Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast. It's from years ago but it's still great.

Whole thing here:

I'm still getting through Homage to Catalonia.

reading is queer

Art of the Deal

Reading The Hobbit to my 2 year old at night before bed.

Serotonin by Houllebecq. About halfway through, I read extension of the domain of the struggle first and I'm kinda annoyed the main characters are so similar in both books

The End and the Death: Volume I because I'm a 40k lorecel. I've been reading this neverending, money-milking series for 17 years, and I can't give up with only two books left.

You and your little "drama" buddies are too busy staring at men's bussies to know an attractive woman if she swam up to you in anthropomorphic-shark form and let you frick her on a cold, windy cape cod beach.

Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.

"Treatise on the Gods" by HL Mencken.

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.58135/mode/2up

Tomie and Heat 2

Working on Lawrence In Arabia right now, really interesting read since slogging my way through Seven Pillars of Wisdom (though it was fascinating and often deeply profound)

Steel rising seriesz or A Land Fit for Heroes

It's basically gay Conan the Barbarian and a Mongol twink skull fricking the Hyperborean slave industry

Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature - Deleuze and Guattari

Dimension X, a book of Sci-Fi short stories from the 70's

A Peace to End All Peace - History of the Middle East from 1910-1922 or so, detailing the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and how the French and British set up the terrible system in place there today.

someone recommended me harassment architecture, copy came last week. gonna start it once I'm done with class

Roman Lives by Brian Harvey

If you didnt read it in the original tongue you didnt read it

still Mysteries of Udolpho.

Good example of a book where the plot and characters aren't too interesting, but the prose elevates it far above. This will be my go-to when explaining to people why prose is the most important quality of a novel. Should be obvious but apparently booktubers didn't get the memo.

i have this hefty tome called The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk that i’m about to start. idk if it will be good or not.

i just dug up an old iPad from 2008(!) and got it working so i can try to download PDFs and read them on it. pls gib suggestions for websites i can steal books from without having to use any extra apps. the iPad is too old to update and will not let me connect to the app store.

Les Mis. Probably take me a while to get through. I saw the movie when I was like 8 or so and I don’t really remember much from it except Cosette and one bar of a song. So far it’s been very good but I have a hard time remembering the French names compared to Russian names.

Im still reading Anna Karenina (70% done) and it’s been great so far. Maybe I’ll read War & Peace next or diversify with other pieces of Russian literature not Dostoevsky (maybe Heart of a Dog?) because I’ve liked the limited selection that I’ve read so far (Dosto and now Tolstoy).

@dim, do you recommend La Peste to someone who’s already read The Stranger but wasn’t that interested in Camus’ philosophy?

A textbook

2nd witcher book, s'ok! kinda slow