Amph What book are you reading right now?

I find myself putting down A Storm of Swords every time I get to a Dany chapter. I like her fine, but obviously I have little interest in her story at this point if it’s putting an end to every session. It’s so far away and disconnected from everything. I’ve thought about skipping her chapters, but I’m not the type to do that.

 

I get that. On my first read-through, I skimmed the following characters’ chapters, especially after the first book: Dany, Jon, Arya, Bran, and, to some extent, Sam.

Then as I got more and more interested in the series, I went back and read their chapters more thoroughly on rereads.

 

I do sorta feel the same about Bran. I’m not interested in his superpower, or the introduction of magic in general. I kinda feel like magic trivializes the game they’re playing. No spoilers, please.

Arya is, or was, one of my favorite characters, but her plot has meandered over the course of like two thousand pages now. I’ve long since lost interest and just want it to end.

 

Ghosts & Three Other Plays: A Doll’s House/An Enemy of the People/Rosmersholm (1966) – Henrik Ibsen

This book collects translations of four of Ibsen’s plays by Michael Meyer. They’re all, no surprise, quite dark. I’ve talked about An Enemy of the People already and I think I’ve reviewed A Doll’s House before, back when I was fortunate enough to be able to perform in a production of it at a local theater. The other two plays here, Ghosts & Rosmersholm, are similar in a lot of ways; they both revolve around these kind of claustrophobic old houses where the inhabitants are, in all the good old existential ways, trapped. Relationships are both the source of a lot of the existential suffering, but they also hold a faint promise of escape. This is Ibsen, so I don’t really think it’s a spoiler to say that those promises of escape don’t really pan out. Those two plays are much less theatrical than An Enemy of the People or A Doll’s House; there’s just less action and you get the feeling that the sets and the stage should just kind of be shrouded in darkness for productions of these plays. I really like Ibsen as a playwright. He understands things about staging that a lot of idea-driven playwrights don’t; A Doll’s House, of course, ends on a sound effect, one of the most devastating sound effects in the history of theater. But the writing is rich and multi-layered as well. He’s talking about ideas, but also about people, and, to a large degree, everyone is really trapped in their roles in his plays, often by societal expectations, sometimes by their own moral misjudgments and failings. But he often refuses to provide the catharsis you might expect. Ghosts in particular just has a devastating kind of slow-fade ending where you just feel the lights dropping and the stage being slowly plunged into the blackness of despair. These are often challenging plays, but they’re undeniably masterpieces and they’re still haunting to this day. 4 stars.

tl;dr – collection of Ibsen’s plays is dark, grim, strong medicine; rich, layered writing explores both characters and ideas in challenging and powerful ways. 4 stars.

 

Started Fire and Blood by George R.R. Martin. It's like reading a fun history book with dragons.

 

Thrawn: Alliances

About 20% the way through and so far it is very enjoyable.

Spoiler: Spoiler

Was pleasantly surprised to see the chapters alternating between past and present. The past containing a chance encounter between Thrawn and Anakin during the Clone Wars, where Anakin is on an unsanctioned rescue mission to save Padme, and so they join forces. Which is great as I love the prequel era!

 

So You Want To Talk About Race (2018) – Ijeoma Oluo

In this bracing, straight-forward, pragmatic book, Oluo has created something like the ultimate race-relations primer. First and foremost, Oluo’s writing is the real star here, by which I don’t mean to say that it’s intrusive or overly stylized. It’s the very conversational, but blunt, tone that makes you keep turning pages in this book. Oluo isn’t writing for an academic audience; she’s writing for a mainstream audience, but she’s also not treating the mainstream audience like they’re idiots. She introduces concepts in a very straight-forward way and then explains and explores them, building on them as she goes to create a book that explores some very complex issues in some very complex ways that I am still quite confident could be read by most people and be understood. I like that Oluo doesn’t mince words, but neither is she aggressive or offensive for the sake of those things. You don’t feel like she’s pulling punches in order to spare the reader’s feelings, but you do feel that she’s genuinely trying to connect to the reader on a human level and communicate with them in a practical way, not attack them or belittle them. The book is also very smartly structured. It is a book that is best read in order because Oluo does introduce concepts and then build on them, as I said, but each chapter title is also a question. For example, chapter four is Why Am I Always Being Told to “Check My Privilege?” Chapter nine is Why Can’t I Say the N-Word? Chapter fifteen is But What If I Hate Al Sharpton? This allows the reader, if they have a particularly burning question when they pick up the book, to do a little targeted investigation. I think this is super-super-smart on Oluo’s part and it makes entry into the book super-easy. I hate calling books like this “important,” but I think this one genuinely is. I think the reader, whatever their opinions already, will come away from this book thinking about things in a new way and ready to talk about things in a new way. And, unless you’re just spoiling for a fight, you won’t find anything here to make you mad. That makes the book accessible to a lot of people that some books of this type just aren’t. Threading that needle of being blunt and plain-spoken without being aggressive or angry isn’t easy and God knows we also need books that are aggressive and angry. But for what this book is, it’s the best of its kind, at least that I’ve read. Pick it up; have the conversation. 3 ½ stars.

tl;dr – nuanced, thoughtful, blunt, pragmatic book is as good a book on modern race issues as I’ve read; aimed squarely at a mainstream audience, this book is important and compelling. 3 ½ stars.

 

Foundation by Isaac Asimov.

 

Started Icebound by Andrea Pitzer earlier as my non-fiction book. It's the story of William Barents and his exploration of the Arctic in the 1590s. (The Barents Sea is named after him). It got a good write-up in one of the papers here and is pretty good so far.

 

Foundation & Empire is even better; and Second Foundation is even better than that. Great trilogy with a lot of great ideas and characters and, surprisingly, it's not even that long really.

 

What a coincidence, I just started reading Foundation again. I agree that the later books are better. That said, I must admit that I like Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation even more, simply because the endless lineup of powerful, scheming men gets tiresome. I really enjoy Dors Venabili as a character.

 

Been a long time since I read any of them so it’s mostly fresh for me. Good stuff and not a huge time commitment!

 

Reading:
A Scrap of Time and Other Stories by Ida Fink
A bunch of very short stories about life as a Jew during in Nazi Germany and I want to sob. Even the two-page stories are emotionally jarring.

Listening to:
One of the Good Ones by Maika Moulite
What happens when it's suddenly your family member for whom people are protesting? Who died at the hands of police officers? Who was arrested in the first place simply for being black?
And what does it mean to be "one of the good ones," anyway?

 

Currently reading Great Expectations.

 

I just finished Dune.

 

Judd Apatow Sick In The Head

 

Just started Revelation by C.J. Sansome. It's the fourth in his lawyer Matthew Shardlake series. This one takes place in 1543. Henry VIII has disposed of wife Katherine Howard and is looking to wed Katherine Parr. I'm about 100 pages in and it's pretty good so far. Thanks to Amazon UK I have the next three books in the reading pile. At 600+ pages each I won't be lacking reading material.

 

that reminds me to reread it before the movie comes out

 

I never read a book right before I see the movie. I used to, but then I'd spend the whole movie going "Hey, that's not right! Why did they change that?! They're ruining the story!" Better to go in with a clean slate and let the film tell its own story.

 

Finished Gray Man Relentless. Let's see, trade craft..check. Gunfire, tactics..check. Lead dude broods about life in general and his also-is-off-the-books-black ops girlfriend..check. And it's all good like usual. And the end, now that is betrayal.

It is not in my possession yet but will be when I make the trip to B&N today to pick up my order being held:

Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton. Appears we have wormholes, space opera, post-cyberpunk, transhumanism of some sort, can't wait. Reviews on this run the spectrum. If I like it I'll get the 2nd book. This was not in any stores but one copy of the 2nd book is on the shelf but I'm not gonna buy it until I pass judgement on this one.

 

While I grow increasingly frustrated that Patrick Rothfuss is pulling a George RR Martin in not finishing the third book in the Kingkiller Chronicle, which is just fan frickin tastic, I'm on Brandon Sanderson's second book of The Stormlight Archive, Words of Radiance.

 

To each their own, I found it so so.

 

I'm just not even bothering to see if I like Kingkiller until he's done. Life's too short and other authors are too good at actually getting books out in a reasonable amount of time for me to get invested in these endless delay situations anymore.

 

Its not like the best books I've ever read, but they are keeping my attention.

But yes, to each their own. For example, I read the first book in the Wheel of Time series and quit. I just didnt care for the characters or the story, and I know most people love it. Same with Dune. Read the first book, then quit because I didnt like it that much.