What are you reading in 2025?

Mannahnin said:
Right now I'm in the middle of David Ewalt's Of Dice and Men. It's a bit better than I had heard; readable but not amazing. Though I think the Taskerland review makes some excellent points about the unfortunate shallowness of Ewalt's delve, and it's difficult to argue with any of it. From the perspective of twelve years later, the short quotes Ewalt has from speaking with Lorraine Williams feel even more like a wasted opportunity for more depth and answers.
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Mannahnin said:
Ewalt's might not be as bad as Barrowcliffe's, but this book is absolutely ran through with shame and self-consciousness over gamer geekery. That Taskerland review aptly skewers it.
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Finished this over lunch today. The copy I have is the 2024 reissue, and am pleased to report that the ten years after 35 page Afterword chapter that's been added is better in this regard. Seems like Ewalt's either gotten over his issues or gotten better at writing so as not to put them on display.

Alzrius said:
In that sense, I'd recommend Flint Dille's The Gamesmaster instead. Leaving aside its lack of any sort of table of contents, it's a much more insightful take into various aspects of D&D's development (albeit largely restricted to peripheral things like the comic books and the failed attempts to make a Hollywood film in the 80s). It helps that Dille also has a much stronger personal voice, one which is incredibly evocative in the tapestry he weaves.
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Thanks for the post. :) I'm thinking of reading this next.
 

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When I read Of Dice and Men about a year ago, I took it as more a book for non-TRPGers about why people TRPG. Most of the history of the hobby stuff in it was stuff I'd already come across elsewhere. It didn't seem to me to have quite the attitude that "I play TRPGs" puts you in a plague circle as it did to some of y'all. I did note that some of the people he interviewed have to varying extents shown their asses in the intervening decade-ish, but I wouldn't lay the blame for that on Ewalt at all.
 


pukunui said:
I’m halfway through my latest re-read of Foundation. Toran and Bayta are just about to leave Kalgan with Magnifico.

It’s quirky and dated but I still love it!
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The message that people who are willing to cooperate at the hard work of understanding a situation and working out how to respond to it can do better than violence is always timely.
 

Just finished When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi, which I enjoyed more than his last two books, which were fun but light reading. Moon is rather more interesting because it’s a series of vignettes, about what would happen if our moon was replaced by cheese* one day, and some of the episodes are quite moving and honest. You can see a lot of Scalzi in there if you squint. The vignettes about the rock star, the would-be writer, and the pastor are particularly touching.

*Main points: it gets larger, brighter, and much more unstable as the cheese compresses under its own weight.
 

Started Flint Dille's The Gamesmaster last night, and it's a breezy read so far. Very conversational.

pukunui said:
I’m halfway through my latest re-read of Foundation. Toran and Bayta are just about to leave Kalgan with Magnifico.

It’s quirky and dated but I still love it!
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Which book is that? I read Foundation recently (the first book) and will probably go on and read the second and third volumes, at least.
 

Mannahnin said:
Which book is that? I read Foundation recently (the first book) and will probably go on and read the second and third volumes, at least.
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That was near the start of the second half of Foundation and Empire.

I have the trilogy collected in a single volume.

I’m now at the start of Second Foundation.



As an aside, I do not recommend the prequels / sequels that Asimov wrote much later. They are rubbish and only serve to tie Foundation and the Robot series together. (“It was a robot all along!”)
 

Just finished Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland. The book doesn’t really live up to the banger title, for the simple and predictable reason that Freeland loves billionaires. You can tell when she’s being quite personal and admiring about yet another billionaire’s meteoric rise and their insecurities (so much about Carlos Slim, by the way) but isn’t really engaged on a personal level when she’s talking about the harm inflicted on everyone else by the new gilded age. I suppose it’s what you’d expect from a Canadian finance journalist who went on to be minister of finance (she wrote the book in 2012) but I’m still disappointed.
 

jian said:
Just finished Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland. The book doesn’t really live up to the banger title, for the simple and predictable reason that Freeland loves billionaires. You can tell when she’s being quite personal and admiring about yet another billionaire’s meteoric rise and their insecurities (so much about Carlos Slim, by the way) but isn’t really engaged on a personal level when she’s talking about the harm inflicted on everyone else by the new gilded age. I suppose it’s what you’d expect from a Canadian finance journalist who went on to be minister of finance (she wrote the book in 2012) but I’m still disappointed.
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To get anything even approaching actual criticism of billionaires or capitalism you have to go a bit further afield than the mainstream. Despite it being purely economics, anything I would recommend could be read as political.
 

overgeeked said:
To get anything even approaching actual criticism of billionaires or capitalism you have to go a bit further afield than the mainstream. Despite it being purely economics, anything I would recommend could be read as political.
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She has some pretty useful insights, such as about how this gilded age is different from the last one (it’s international rather than mainly in the US and many of the factors which curtailed the last one may not ever apply; also a reminder that the last one lasted about 80 years, it basically took WW2 to finish it off, and this one has only been going for 20-30 years) and that gilded ages are not guaranteed to end in any way.

I’ve read plenty of books that are more critical and analytical (Ha Joon Chang is a good start) but I’d hoped to find that Freeland had some actual concerns and a plan for when she entered politics, but I don’t think she did. There is an early bit of Carney admiration, which is probably deserved.
 

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