What are you reading in 2024?

[Parmandur]

Finished the Mistborn trilogy, and boy, does Hero of Ages escalate and deescalate very, very rapidly at the end there.

So, the structure of the trilogy ends up being three heists:

Spoiler: Spoiler

1.) The protagonists Heist a God

2.) A God heists the protagonists

3.) Another God heists the second God using the first God and the protags

 

[prabe]

Last three books: Winter's Child by Margaret Coel, a series mystery with characters and setting clearly well-loved by the author and a clever well-drawn parallel between historical events and the conflicts of the novel; The Serialist by David Gordon, a neatly meta-ish novel about a writer making then regretting a deal with a serial killer with all kinds of smart half-references and takes on books and genre and publishing, gripping and witty by turns; No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull, a fantasy novel with hints of an SF veneer that has the deep misfortune to have come out so soon after Jemisin's The City We Became and The World We Make and cover the same thematic and political ground, and also be book one of unfinished "saga," read Jemisin's books, not this.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Finished The Hobbit last night. I enjoyed it, but mostly I enjoyed the spaces between the big set pieces. I could live inside the sequence with Beorn or the lacuna between the death of Smaug and the Battle of Five Armies.

 

[Zaukrie]

There is a humble bundle with 38 of the discworld books. Only available in the US and the books are only on kobo..... I'm undecided, but it's a great deal.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

There is a humble bundle with 38 of the discworld books. Only available in the US and the books are only on kobo..... I'm undecided, but it's a great deal.

I was looking at that earlier. Is Kobo a proprietary format, or could I jump through some hoops and read them on Kindle? I gather they're DMR-free, although if they're a proprietary format, that really limits how useful the files are.

 

[overgeeked]

I was looking at that earlier. Is Kobo a proprietary format, or could I jump through some hoops and read them on Kindle? I gather they're DMR-free, although if they're a proprietary format, that really limits how useful the files are.

Kobo is an eReader company. Like a Kindle, only more open, generally. I have one of their eReaders and it works like a dream.

The setup is weird for the deal (and previous ones they’ve done). You sign into your Kobo account (required), install Adobe Digital Editions (required), and read it on a compatible device. Whether a device you own is compatible with ADE or not is another matter.

On a completely unrelated note, Calibre is a free ebook conversion program that has lots of neat tools, add ons, and customization options. I use it almost daily to fix formatting problems with ebooks, convert to epub, etc.

 

[overgeeked]

I’ve been reading some Conan shorts again. Jumped back into the Conquering Sword of Conan and am almost done reading Beyond the Black River. It’s a story very literally about colonization. The white Aquilonians are pushing into the “wild frontier” and pushing back the black Picts. The story has Conan running around spouting off varying levels of racist garbage while helping the colonizers.

Finished reading the Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday. Doing that one chapter a day, as recommended, has helped me establish more of a habit of reading than I thought.

Just started ADHD: A Hunter in a Farmer’s World by Thom Hartmann. It’s certainly…interesting. It’s a collection of rather loose vignettes that are all supposed to point towards Thom’s thesis: ADHD has to be good for something. His extended and often tortured metaphor comes down to this: people with ADHD are adapted for hunter-gatherer society but the modern world is heavily based on and evolved from agricultural society.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Finished a graphic novel I won in a raffle - Mathieu Bablet's Shangri-la

Gorgeous art, reminiscent of Moebius (no surprise, originally a bande-desinee translated to English by Magnetic)
Story was ok but not great. Sci Fi graphic novel about revolution in a corporate space station out near Titan. I'd give it 2 stars for story, 4 stars for art - 3 stars I guess...

Shangri-La - Magnetic Press

www.magnetic-press.com

 

[thullgrim]

Dresden re-read and catch up. I’m more than a few books out of date.

After that I’ll try and finish the Wheel of Timr on audiobook.

 

[Parmandur]

Finished Stone if Farewell. Mixed feelings of "this is a good book" and "I deserve a medal for making it all the way." Also, somehow managed to block tge rape elements from my mind, so that was not fun to rediscover.