What are you reading in 2025?

[gnarlygninja]

A friend gave me a copy because they thought I'd like it, and it's well written but I came to it with some baggage in the form of all the obnoxious douches I've known who idolized and modeled themselves after the version of Anthony in that book. He has a vibe that grated on me and made the book a struggle at times. I've not read anything else he wrote, but I know he made a conscious decision to be less...like that after his daughter was born.

I'm not sure how much I can say about Who Is Government? without violating the site's politics rules, but overall it was a good read. If it had come out a few years ago it would have made me feel good about my government, but circumstances have made it depressing knowing all the people the book celebrates are having to fight for their jobs. I had planned on starting The Day After Judgement today but I have a neighbor doing renovations for the next few hours and it'll be a nightmare trying to focus through all that.

 

[Retros_x]

I am continuing my Cosmere run after a winter break and read "Warbreaker" by Brandon Sanderson. I was surprised, because this book seemed on reddit and other communities to be treated as one of the better entries in the Cosmere, but for me personally it was the weakest entry up until now. After the super slow buildup with tons of typical repetitions without the action scenes that made Mistborn exciting and without the strong characters that made Elantris interesting comes a climax that falls flat with mosts twists untypically boring for Sanderson. Sandersons strongest suit are IMO action scenes and this book has almost none.

I also just disliked the setting, it felt once again too videogamey to me with video game like visualizations of powers and artificial worldbuilding.

The realization came to me that each book has female main characters that are a trick and are just a narrative perspective on the real main characters that are usually male. Some sort of male character ascends to divinity or super power or whatever. Vin of the first mistborn trilogy was the closes to have actual relevance to the plot - until the ending happens. Another insight about his novels I had his how he hides his plottwists: He has characters inner monologues repeating ad nauseam. "WHAT IF A HAPPENS, WHAT IS WRONG ABOUT A, WHAT DO I DO WITH A" and than B happens.

Seems to me his books are like many JRPGs: Interesting concepts, funky plots with plottwists, bloated to massive proportions with clunky exposition, boring repititions and dialogues written by a 17 year old but you still fight through it to get to the massive spectacle and multiple plottwists in the last third.

I already started his magnum opus "The way of kings" and I am very curious. The first chapters are intriguing (besides once again the clunky expositition in the middle of a combat). Up until now my very first full length Cosmere book was the best (Mistborn #1) and I hope this one will break the mold.

 

[Mannahnin]

I joined a book club recently, where we're doing about a book a month. Which has been nice for working to re-establish my reading habit.

First we did Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows, which is a lovely intro to systems theory. Which I will definitely revisit and is great for perspective and understanding better ways to make lasting changes in oneself and in external systems. One of our discussion questions was about how reading it changed our perspectives on a system in our lives, and most of us saw immediate applicability to our jobs.

Second we read Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, by Hannah Arendt. This is really great for its perspective on the holocaust and everything that led up to it in Germany, for the reflections on how it was worse or better in different countries which resisted (like Denmark, Bulgaria, and Italy, surprisingly) or enabled it (Romania was even worse than/ahead of Germany in many ways). And for its insights into the shirking of blame and responsibility, the ways evil can be done through stupidity and selfishness and incompetence with whole populations telling themselves excuses and behaving monstrously despite not being "monsters". Not to delve into politics, but a TON of this book is relevant to today.

Right now we're in the middle of Foundation, by Asimov. Which is a comparatively light/quick read. It's got a number of the amusing foibles of Golden Age SF (all the smoking, for example, and the total lack of female characters), but its large influence on the genre is clear. 40k getting the tech priests from here seems obvious, as well as the sheer scale and concept of the galactic imperium. I feel like A Canticle for Leibowitz does the time skip thing better, but it's also later and I imagine Miller probably drew some inspiration from Asimov's example and improved on that element. It's interesting that they're both assembled from short stories originally published in serial form.

I'm also close to finally finishing Strictly Fantasy: The Cultural Roots of Tabletop Role-Playing Games, by Gerald Nachtwey. I had put this on hold for a while but it's a great book. Lots of fascinating insights into cultural precursors of RPGs. The excerpts from Robert Louis Stevenson's 1882 essay A Gossip on Romance gave me thrills of recognition.