Here’s what I’ve been reading in the past few weeks.
- Lionel Shriver, ‘The Post-Birthday World’ – Think: Sliding Doors. From the author of We Need to Talk About Kevin (which I prefer).
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, ‘The Black Swan’ – Interesting. If you’ve ever thought about risk management this could be a challenging thought provoking read.
- Gary Shteyngart, ‘Absurdistan’ – I found this rather slow to get started, but it did have a few laugh-out-loud moments.
- Charles Stross, ‘Halting State’ – A loan from Andy SC. Quite remarkably good. Realistic near future sci-fi. Perhaps does for Augmented Reality and ARGs what Snow Crash did for the Metaverse. Read it now. (I read Singularity Sky and The Glasshouse last year, and said then that ‘Stross may be my new favourite scifi author‘. Still true. And he blogs.
- Joseph Heller, ‘Catch 22’ – A classic, of course. 2nd re-reading, and I enjoy it more each time.
- Clay Shirky, ‘Here Comes Everybody’ – Gareth lent me this today. I’m enjoying it already.
I’m up for the first and last ones there. I loved …Kevin (if love is the word, I think ‘was traumatised by’ sums it up better) so I’m intrigued by that. And Clay Shirky seems like an interesting guy – glad that it seems good so far!
(btw, I do really like these bits of your blog!)
Thanks minifig. I’m glad it’s interesting. I’ve found it quite a helpful thing to track. My memory is so poor that I’d probably have forgotten Charles Stross wrote two books I loved last year unless I’d written it down. I’m also interested in how variable my reading rate is. The past few weeks have been relatively slow (for me), though I was pleased to read all of Halting State and half of Catch 22 while I was away this weekend.
I read Iain M’s Inversions recently. All good stuff as always, but he’s such a slow writer, and the books are always much bigger than they deserve to be.