Weekly "what are you reading" Thread #77

Tom Clancy's Zigger killer 9000 novel

This week I read The Crowd by Gustave Le Bon. It's about the psychology of crowds and how different crowds behave. The text inspired Hitler and Mussolini. Overall, a reasonably interesting text though it is racist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crowd:_A_Study_of_the_Popular_Mind

Stephen Mitford Goodson - Inside the South African Reserve Bank: Its Origins and Secrets Exposed

Pretty dry read. But still fun regardless

Finished HP 1, now reading chamber of secrets. I love how whimsical and stupid everything is in the early books. Just a bit of dumb fun. Very british. Too bad JK got super srs and decided that akshually everything was meant to fit together from the beginning and it's a super srs world she built lol

Children of Time. So many spiders!

I'm reading Cryptonomicon (halfway through) and I really don't like it. And more importantly, I genuinely am starting to hate the guys who think this is some kind of genre defining book.

Shit characters. Shit storytelling. Shit plot. Shit book.

Men should not write historical fiction. Particularly if it is geared towards men and based on ww2. The author should know we are all neurodivergent and already possess more knowledge than him regarding anything ww2. Dear lord.

I finished reading Roadside Picnic this week. It's a Russian sci-fi book written in the 70s that would go on to be the inspiration for the Stalker movie and game series. The premise is that aliens landed at six locations on Earth (later called Zones), hung out for a bit, and then left, leaving a lot of strange phenomena, items, and trinkets behind. It is now 20 years since the Visit and the story takes place in a small town bordering one of the Zones, implied to be in Canada. The protagonist, Redrick "Red" Schuhart, is a stalker, one of the brave people who illegally break into the Zone, which by this point is walled off and guarded by various military/mercenary forces, and retrieve items that they later sell for high profit.

Overall, it was solid. Relatively short and brought up some interesting concepts but there weren't enough scenes that actually took place in the Zone. Translation was a little rough in some areas too.

3.5/5

I quit reading The Croning by Laird Barron. I didn't care about any of the characters and I wasn't interested in anything happening so I decided it wasn't worth it to keep going.

Started reading Silence of the Lambs, finished Red Dragon a few months ago and really liked it, this has been really good so far too.

Norm Mac-donal's "Based on a True Story: A Memoir"

Louis ck wrote the forward and he's spent the entire two-pages sucking Norms peepee calling him a savant and the only comedian comparable to Mark Twain

I decided to re-read The Sword of Shannara after many decades, and what a steaming pile of crap, not to mention a blatant LOTR rip-off.

Wind and Truth cause i'm a nerd

Reading Quo Vadis. I really like Petronius and 25% through with it. Not what I was expecting from a Christian book (I"ve barely read Christian novels). I also have two other books of Sienkiewicz' s The Trilogy after someone here posted a video of Potop. Got Kuniczak's translation as I've read that it's better.

Currently: this thread

Bleak House

I posted this in the previous bait thread with the PAWG video, but I started "Dominion" by Tom Holland. So far it is very interesting, though I'm still making my way through the ancient history section, which details the differences in Greek/Roman morals/beliefs, as well as those of ancient Jews/Canaanites.

Very interesting so far, can't wait to get to the meat n potatoes of the central point of the book

Finally started reading Neuromancer. Genuinely pretty good. Can't tell if this is actually the origin of all the cyberpunk slang or if it was just riding a preesixting wave.

I don't know how to read yet but I'm hoping to learn soon

Merry Christmas you filthy animal