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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9652306" data-attributes="member: 7026594">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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_In_Systems:_A_Primer" target="_blank">Thinking in Systems</a>: 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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem" target="_blank">Eichmann in Jerusalem</a>: 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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(Asimov_novel)" target="_blank">Foundation</a>, 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 near-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 href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz" target="_blank">A Canticle for Leibowitz</a> 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.</blockquote>

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