What are you reading in 2025?

Eyes of Nine said:

Hope your medical stuff goes ok, that sounds serious.

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I had one day and night of finding out out many times one person (in particular, me) can vomit and pee in one day and night. Then I got better. Autonomic nervous troubles are weird. I’m mending and already seeing some hoped-for improvements that should last for the long term.

These are cool!

Autumnal said:

I had one day and night of finding out out many times one person (in particular, me) can vomit and pee in one day and night. Then I got better. Autonomic nervous troubles are weird. I’m mending and already seeing some hoped-for improvements that should last for the long term.

These are cool!

Stent - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Is it drug-eluting? Those are pretty neat. Very glad to hear you’re feeling better.

No, stents are purely mechanical, physically propping arteries after they’ve gotten closed by congestion. A couple of mine turned out to be 80% congested. Bow just one is, and they’ll give it the business I. A couple-three weeks.

Autumnal said:

These are cool!

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My father got a stent in his 50s - he is 84 now and in really good shape and health. Stents are awesome. Perfect example of the wonders of modern medicine.

Read The Scarlet Alchemist by Kylie Lee Baker, a perfectly fine fantasy novel set in an alternate Tang dynasty China where alchemy is real and not entirely unlike, say, Full Metal Alchemist in its limits. So naturally our protagonist (no spoiler, it’s in the blurb) has an alchemical speciality, which is resurrection. The book plays with this and its consequences pretty well. I think it’s also a bit harsh in its presentation of Wu Zetian (all villain all the way) but this is weirdly possibly corrected at the end. Worth a read.

Also read Royal Mint, National Debt, out this year from Norman Baker, a former Liberal Democrat MP. His earlier book about the British royal family (And What Do You Do, 2019) was generally excellent but a little short on facts and figures, and this book corrects this and then some. It’s a good companion piece to Andrew Lownie’s book about Andrew and Fergie, and indeed RMND has a whole chapter devoted to just how corrupt Andrew is and has been, and continues to be (via Startupbootcamp, an international successor to Pitch@Palace).

There’s a lot there - how ruthless the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall are (William is, if anything, even more grasping than his father was as Prince of Wales, and that takes some doing), how poorly they treat their staff, the complete lack of transparency and accountability at every level, and above all their relentless and increasing greed and selfishness. Charles’ idea of a “slimmed down monarchy” is clearly just about doing even less work and answering even fewer questions while getting even more money (the Sovereign Grant has increased about 29% a year on average over the last 15 years).

Baker is explicitly not a republican - he just thinks the monarchy ought to be better regulated and more transparent - but I now have to disagree.

Interesting! I’ll want to read that.

I finished The First Heretic, by Aaron Dembski-Bowden, number 14 out of 6.02 x 10^23 volumes in the Horus Heresy series. I wasn’t up to anything requiring more effort, and enjoyed the story of what had been happening to the Word Bearers before everything else kicked off. Aaron does such a great job of making villains interesting and sympathetic without ever downplaying their actual evil.

Finally finished The Fifth Season, which may be the only five star unsatisfying book I've ever read.

The world-building is incredible, in part because Jemsin doesn't throw 10,000 things at us, but instead deploys a carefully curated list of elements about her world that paint a vivid picture and convey the impression that she has a rock-solid idea of how her world works and what's going on, rather than what I call the Grant Morrison technique of throwing out some cool terms without anything initially behind them. (Also known as my DMing style.)

Reading this at the same time as Tales From Earthsea, it's a shockingly different vision of how society relates to wizards. The cruelty starts almost immediately and turns out to be systemic and pervasive.

I caught early on the lack of references to the moon, but I can't put my finger on exactly why I believe certain things about some other elements of the setting, like the idea that the Stillness mega-continent is mostly Africa with parts of, I guess, Europe and maybe Antarctica attached. (It is noteworthy that they use the terms Arctic and Antarctic.) But I am pretty sure this is Earth, just far in the future, after a magical (?) catastrophe.

But it's unsatisfying because this was all a set up for the rest of the trilogy, and surprisingly little actually happens in this book.

That would normally be a dealbreaker for me, but the rest of this book is just so well done, and Jemsin is just such a confident writer, it feels liking whining to wish for more. What did I want, a six-star book?

Whizbang Dustyboots said:

Finally finished The Fifth Season, which may be the only five star unsatisfying book I've ever read.

The world-building is incredible, in part because Jemsin doesn't throw 10,000 things at us, but instead deploys a carefully curated list of elements about her world that paint a vivid picture and convey the impression that she has a rock-solid idea of how her world works and what's going on, rather than what I call the Grant Morrison technique of throwing out some cool terms without anything initially behind them. (Also known as my DMing style.)

Reading this at the same time as Tales From Earthsea, it's a shockingly different vision of how society relates to wizards. The cruelty starts almost immediately and turns out to be systemic and pervasive.

I caught early on the lack of references to the moon, but I can't put my finger on exactly why I believe some other elements of the setting, like the idea that the Stillness mega-continent is mostly Africa with parts of, I guess, Europe and maybe Antarctica attached. (It is noteworthy that they use the terms Arctic and Antarctic.) But I am pretty sure this is Earth, just far in the future, after a magical (?) catastrophe.

But it's unsatisfying because this was all a set up for the rest of the trilogy, and surprisingly little actually happens in this book.

That would normally be a dealbreaker for me, but the rest of this book is just so well done, and Jemsin is just such a confident writer, it feels liking whining to wish for more. What did I want, a six-star book?

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One of these days, I'll read that trilogy. It's on my shelves, I have no real excuse for not having done so.

I started Wheel of Time #2 and I am already 60% done with it, its a bit shorter than the first one. Unfortunately its a bit of a letdown. Its still an enjoyable read but the magic of the first book is a little bit gone and SHONEN-ANIME has entered the thread! No seriously, so many scenes read like from a mid shonen/anime. If some of the girls gooning for our harem hero Rand would utter a "senpai!" I would not be surprised. Girls who only met him in the first book for one scene are falling for him. Jordan is self-aware, because they think phrases like "Why am I falling for a boy that I only met so short" - months later after they met him and never see him again. Women seem to either completely fall for him or manipulate him. The only two women who were his friends in book 1 are now distanced (emotionally as physically) from him and have their own stuff to deal with.

But also our protagonist feels like a Shonen hero that can't deal with girls. In one scene he almost squeaks because a woman touches him. There even is a scene where he fells onto a woman and remiscense the feel of her body later. Like its just a touch away from an anime scene where the male protagonist stumbles and falls head first into a cleavage.

I know from this thread and from other articles in the internet that I will see more from the other characters and his old friends and honestly I can't wait for it because chosen one Rand is a bit annoying right now. Plus, I can't really see where the story is going to move, Rand stumbles through the scenes and I am missing a bit of a goalpost.