informal mid-week book club post

Submitted by mallaidh in just_post

what i'm more actively reading:

  • the foxfire book, ed. eliot wigginton (1972): really interesting book about appalachian culture and the skills needed to live out in the sticks
  • reinhold messner, free spirit: an autobiography by free-climbing pioneer (as i understand things) reinhold messner, focused on his climbing career. i would wager that i'm about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way through. quite interesting so far, though not quite as captivating as lionel terray's conquistadors of the useless.

feel free to post about what you're reading, even if you don't feel like writing long summaries or anything! i forget who used to post these threads, but i liked them too much to not keep the practice going for the new site.

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voxpoplar wrote

I've been super stressed over stuff and have been finding it difficult to get my head calm enough to read but today I got back to reading an unabridged translation of Journey to the West. So far I haven't gotten to any chapters that were left out of the original translation I read (I just finished the first block of chapters that focuses on the Monkey King up until his imprisonment) but it's still interesting to go back over those parts of the story again with a more accurate translation.

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musou wrote

i've been reading Javascript Allongé for work, it's a great book if you like functional programming but don't like javascript but have to use javascript even though you don't like it, which is me.

you can read it for free online even, but the person who made it is cool so i bought it anyway, also i wanted to be able to read it offline

https://leanpub.com/javascriptallongesix/read

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oolong wrote

i'm not actively reading anything because cross stitching is taking up most of my attention right now, but of the books i have on hand, the art of death by edwidge danticat is the one i got farthest in

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toasthaste wrote (edited )

im sort of in a lull on Too Like The Lightning! I got it for christmas (2 copies actually lol oops) and I'm liking it a lot but the way it's paced is not the type of pacing that makes me Need to finish it Now Now Now. I'm enjoying hitting it a bit at a time.

It's a cool sci-fi story with an earth society that is super different from our own but in a lot of interesting ways that are well-justified and well-explained. No one in-universe uses gendered pronouns, but the narrator does when narrating, and then points out that it's weird for them to do that. I like to think that a lot of the genders the narrator assigns are not in-line with our current conceptions of gender, and in fact there's been some evidence that this is the case. I'm not too far in yet though.

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rice wrote

:O i was wondering why that series title sounded familiar! ada palmer is doing an ama on the bad site. she seems to be giving comparatively lengthy responses, which is cool!

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eep wrote (edited )

I'm doing a reading challenge that seems realistic and not at all stressful. Got two books out of 24 down already, so I’m pretty happy. I’ve been reading a bunch of essays and poems since last December-- the most recent one is John Berger’s Confabulations mostly cause I used to read John Berger back at uni and I am nostalgic. There’s also Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey, which I don’t particularly like. I don't want to sound like a snob but it's very... basic. Motivational poster blandness and I was a bit disappointed.

Fiction-wise, I’m back to my fantasy stuff. I’ve also recently finished Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, and The Princess in the Tower. I loved both equally. They mix Russian folklore with a historical background back when Russia was ruled by flighty princes, religion and the Mongol horde. I am now starting Renee Andieh's The Wrath and the Dawn. I don't know much about it except it's cover is really pretty!

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