What are you reading in 2026?

Nothing fancy for me. I've finally picked up Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldtree.

Mannahnin said:

"retrieves by"; did you mean receives from, or something else?

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Yes, receiving. Sorry, English isn't my native language, sometimes I use weird or plain wrong phrases and grammar. Receiving reverence was the term I meant.

Finished Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I took it slow. A chapter or two a day while reading other stuff.

The idea of the story came from Dick reading about psychopaths and empathy. It really shows.

Despite having read it multiple times already, the empathy theme really stuck out this time around. The way you can spot an android is they completely lack empathy. Empathy is the one trait that separates the human from the non-human.

I love that there’s effectively a religion focused on the empathic bond between people and their shared experience (Mercerism) and that caring for animals is central to that religion.

The ability of humans to empathize with others and other kinds of creatures (animals and androids) is both a blessing and a curse.

Maybe there’s something in the air. Empathy seems like it’s really important.

One thing that bugs me about the adaptation, Blade Runner, is that the movie did one of the characters dirty. In the movie we have Zhora, the stripper with the snake act. But in the book we have Luba, an opera singer with an angelic voice. Tgis is further compounded by the fact that in the movie some androids are designed as pleasure models, wheras in the book it’s illegal for humans to sleep with androids.

Another thing I wished they’d carried over was that Rachel and Pris were the same model in the book, so physically identical.

It’s a great book. A classic. Well worth the read. If you like sci-fi and haven’t read this one, what are you even doing.

Retros_x said:

Yes, receiving. Sorry, English isn't my native language, sometimes I use weird or plain wrong phrases and grammar. Receiving reverence was the term I meant.

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Your written English seems mostly excellent to me. Thanks for clarifying!

The River Has Roots is the first standalone book (novella) by Canadian author Amal El-Mohtar, previously known for This is How You Lose the Time War (co-written with Max Gladstone), and it’s a doozy. It’s fairytale and poetic and satisfying in a way that reminds me of Neil Gaiman at his best. It’s based on the folk song The Bonny Swans, and I’d definitely recommend it.

I’m rereading Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun.

“We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate wafers of white jade, ivory, and shell; books too whose leaves are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings on a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here—though I can no longer tell you where—no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books than the library itself does. Though a harlot might dangle it from one ear for an ornament, there are not volumes enough in the world to counterweight the other. All these I came to know, and I made safeguarding them my life’s devotion.”

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Nobody did it like Wolfe.