What Are You Reading?

[Jay 2K Winger]

My FLGS maintains a shelf of weird and indie RPG stuff, and I'm certainly not above buying games just for reading material; if it's interesting enough, never actually playing it is a non-factor. I really enjoyed the Thief games back in the day, so one called Blades In The Dark caught my eye with a back-cover blurb about "...scoundrels seeking their fortunes on the haunted streets of an industrial fantasy city. There are heists, chases, occult mysteries, dangerous bargains, bloody skirmishes, and, above all, riches to be had".

Blades in the Dark is among the collection of TTRPG sourcebooks that I have accumulated and have never actually gotten around to playing. I do like the concept and worldbuilding in it. (Which is one of the main reasons I get a lot of said TTRPG books in my collection.)

[Ceir]

My FLGS maintains a shelf of weird and indie RPG stuff, and I'm certainly not above buying games just for reading material; if it's interesting enough, never actually playing it is a non-factor. I really enjoyed the Thief games back in the day, so one called Blades In The Dark caught my eye with a back-cover blurb about "...scoundrels seeking their fortunes on the haunted streets of an industrial fantasy city. There are heists, chases, occult mysteries, dangerous bargains, bloody skirmishes, and, above all, riches to be had".

[Nunavut Pants]

Currently partway through "The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet". It's OK so far but I haven't yet seen whatever it is that makes it such a classic.

[Ironclad Alibi]

I am rereading "Ocean: A History of the Atlantic Before Columbus" by John Haywood.

A magisterial cultural history of the Atlantic Ocean before Columbus, ranging from the early shaping of the continents and the emergence of homo sapiens to the story of shipbuilding, navigation, maritime exploration, slavery, and nascent European imperialism.

[Ceir]

Haven't started it yet, but I finally got my copy of Jim Butcher's The Olympian Affair in! Been looking forward to it for a long time.

[Eireann]

I'm reading The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton. I recently read The Appeal, a pretty good mystery told in epistolary style.

[Nunavut Pants]

Recently finished Martha Wells' "The Witch King". Pretty decent read, with parallel past-and-present timelines that switch back and forth in the narrative, chapter by chapter. Not as good (IMHO) as her well-loved "Murderbot" books, but still pretty good.

Picked up David Brin's "Sundiver" for a re-read. Been quite a while since I have read it, so while I know at least partly "who dun it", I don't remember a lot of the details. Though there are quotes from it that have lingered in my memory and had gotten them attached to other books somehow, so a couple of times I have read something and thought, "Oh, that's where this is from instead of that other book!" Anyway, there's a reason that Brin is a highly-regarded author, and this book is one example. It's part of his "Uplift" series, where basically all of the oxygen-breathing civilizations in the galaxy participate in the "uplift" of sentient creatures into sapience, making client races out of them for a long time. Except for humans, we seem to have evolved on our own (probably?) and the only reason the Galactics grudgingly accept us is because we had already bred and modified chimps and dolphins to full sapience by the time we were discovered.

[Pixilated]

My wife was a huge fan of that show. I guess she watched a fair amount of it when she was a little girl? She bought the entire set on DVD a few years ago, and binged it.

For a while it was being rerun at midnight on a channel that we got at the time (pre-cable!) and I remember watching a few episodes and thinking "OMG DID I REALLY GO BONKERS OVER THIS?!?"

Somewhere in my collection of "stuff" I still have Josette's music box! And last time I tried it ... it still worked! (Well, it's a wind-up item, no batteries needed, so maybe that's why.)

[Ironclad Alibi]

I am reading "The Ark Before Noah" by Irving Finkel. It is another book giving insight to the ancient Sumerian, Akkadian and Babylonian cultures 2000 years B.C.E. as well discussing all the flood stories that predate the Noah's Ark story.

[Deserted]

Today's reading: "A Course In Error-Correcting Codes, Second Edition" by Jørn Justesen and Tom Høholdt. Now that I'm once again a hacker professional programmer I find that I have a need for ECC in my day-to-day work life. I understand Hamming codes, and in fact use Hamming(11,4) in one of my personal projects, but I'm working on an embedded 386 and need something... better.

[Pixilated]

I'm a little young for the original serial, did find the early 1990s revival reasonably enjoyable, rather liked the movie that came out in 2012 (I do have that in my collection).

I intended to go see the movie but ... never got around to it.

[Pixilated]

My wife was a huge fan of that show. I guess she watched a fair amount of it when she was a little girl? She bought the entire set on DVD a few years ago, and binged it.

I came in quite late to that party. The most famous character (the vampire) wasn't in the show for the first year or so, and the show was just having "meh" response from the public. By the time I found it he was a longstanding character.
I read somewhere that it was one of the first (if not THE first) TV show to play around with things like time travel and alternate universes. Don't know if that's true.

[Seanette]

My wife was a huge fan of that show. I guess she watched a fair amount of it when she was a little girl? She bought the entire set on DVD a few years ago, and binged it.

I'm a little young for the original serial, did find the early 1990s revival reasonably enjoyable, rather liked the movie that came out in 2012 (I do have that in my collection).

[Nunavut Pants]

.. an extremely cheesy 1960s gothic soap opera titled "Dark Shadows" ...

My wife was a huge fan of that show. I guess she watched a fair amount of it when she was a little girl? She bought the entire set on DVD a few years ago, and binged it.

[Pixilated]

Nice score! (And the answer is to rebuild your furniture out of books.)

Thank you! I was extremely pleased. There's a ton of TNG and DS9 and who-knows-what-else there as well but right now I'm focusing almost entirely on TOS books.

The guy manning the register says they have a regular who comes in often looking for Star Trek books ... he grinned and said "You might have beat him to it this time." That does depend on what he's looking for; if it's TNG and/or DS9 there's still plenty there.

So now I have roughly 2 dozen Star Trek books -- some non-fiction -- and am more than happy to keep adding to that.

As for making furniture out of books ... That might turn out to be my only solution!