What Are You Reading?

[Pixilated]

I'm currently re-reading two books: Never Alone by Elizabeth Haynes, and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty.

The former is about a woman living alone on the North Yorkshire moors, when a long-ago friend (and once-or-twice lover) shows up, needing a place to stay. She has a cottage on her land and offers it to him, for free. He refuses the freebie and instead says he will pay her 800 pounds a month. The book is written interestingly because you get one chapter from her POV and one from his POV, alternately. You can tell he's up to something but of course you don't know what.

The second book ... well, the full title is Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory. (How can you not like a book that starts off with the line "A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves" ?) The author is herself a long-time crematory worker. It's not a book to read if you're high-strung or have a serious phobia about death and dying. It's probably also not a book to read while you're eating. She does give some descriptions of some of the bodies she's had to deal with and they ain't pretty. But she has a snarky and occasionally dark sense of humour, which has probably served her well in her job -- and it's a job that she deliberately aimed for, not something she just stumbled into. The author also has a YouTube channel that was originally titled "Ask a Mortician" but now seems to be running under just her name.

[Nunavut Pants]

Finished Gideon the Ninth, and read "We are Legion (We are Bob)". It's an isekai story, but in this case a software engineer signs up for one of those cryo-preservation companies, and wakes up in the future as a piece of software with no rights. He winds up "volunteering" to run a space probe, and things get better from there... It was a great read, and I'm considering picking up the sequels.

I'm on to Lester Del Rey's "Stars in my Pocket, Like Grains of Sand". Not sure what to think yet.

[Ceir]

I'm on a Star Wars craze at the moment ... but only novels encompassing one or more of the characters from the original trilogy. I think I'm running out of books, LOL, although it might just be the limitations of even the local Big Box Bookstore.

Might also suggest the From A Certain Point Of View short story collections! They're shorts all revolving around rando background characters; there are volumes for each of the OT movies out now, but the ROTJ one is still in hardback. I'm waiting for the softcover on that one, along with (still) Jim Butcher's The Olympian Affair.

Fiction-wise I'm over in the other Star universe, just picked up the Starfleet Corps of Engineers: Aftermath, and Rihannsu omnibuses.

Non fiction, just started in on The Locomotives That Baldwin Built, by Fred Westing.

[Ghel]

I am reading a manga trilogy called Night of the Living Cat. It’s a very silly spoof of a zombie apocalypse, except that anyone who makes physical contact with a cat becomes a cute, fluffy cat. I love that all the cats are cute and healthy and just want to cuddle with the remaining humans. And no human in the story wants to harm the cats, even to prevent becoming a cat themselves.

[Nunavut Pants]

Finished off "Me and Mr. Jones", and it was neat. I'm pretty sure Suzi left out quite a bit, but it was cool to read one perspective about what was going on behind all of the music.

More recently, I read Timothy Zahn's "Warhorse". Didn't care that much for it, the world-building (universe-building?) was pretty clunky.

I am currently about 2/3 of the way through Gideon the Ninth. It took me quite a while to start getting into it, largely because of the choice of language and the viewpoint of the narration. It's a third-person semi-omniscient view, but focuses pretty much exclusively on the main (and title!) character. The language is very modern and what I would expect to see on-line, and somehow reading it in a book that is set in a far future quasi-mystical multiplanet civilization keeps breaking me out of the story. But I'm getting better about it.

The main character is lots of fun, and there's definitely some murder-mystery to the story so far!

[Ironclad Alibi]

I have started reading "Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone" by Benjamin Stevenson.

I finished the above book and it is excellent. I highly recommend it.

I am about to start his next book, Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect, which features the same protagonist.

[Ironclad Alibi]

I have started reading "Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone" by Benjamin Stevenson.

[Nunavut Pants]

Read all the way through "The Murderbot Diaries", and am in the middle of System Collapse again.

Next up is "Me and Mr Jones" by Suzi Ronson. It's about the author's time with David Bowie (the stage name for David Jones) as a stylist/etc. The more observant of you might notice her last name is the same as Bowie's Ziggy-era guitarist, Mick Ronson. That's because she married said guitarist... Looking forward to this book!

[Ceir]

Just plowed through an old volume of Conan short stories, and I'm diving into Mobile Suit Gundam: Origin volume 2 on the comic front!

[Ghel]

My partner recommended Kurt Vonnegut. I’m reading Cat’s Cradle now, which is weird and absurd and I love it.

If I still like it at the end, I’m reading Breakfast of Champions next.

[Nunavut Pants]

I should pick up the "What If" books--I love XKCD!

I recently re-read "All Systems Red", the first Murderbot Diaries book, and have started on "System Collapse", the most recent one.

[mjr]

I'm currently reading "On A Sea of Glass, The Life and Loss of the RMS Titanic".

[Ceir]

Just picked up a couple of Brandon Sanderson books from my local library. Gonna read them while on vacation...

Haven't read them myself, but I've a friend who's a big fan.

Personally, I just plowed through Randall Munroe's What If? and What If? 2. Gods bless XKCD.

[Nunavut Pants]

Just picked up a couple of Brandon Sanderson books from my local library. Gonna read them while on vacation...

[Ironclad Alibi]

I have started reading "Robots Through The Ages." A collection of stories editted by Robert Silverberg and Bryan Thomas Schmidt.