What are you reading in 2026?

[Umbran]

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

 

[Retros_x]

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

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.

 

[overgeeked]

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.

 

[Mannahnin]

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.

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

 

[jian]

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.

 

[Autumnal]

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.”

Nobody did it like Wolfe.

 

[Autumnal]

A bit more Wolfe:

“Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real. What is the Autarch but a man who believes himself Autarch and makes others believe by the strength of it?”

And even better:

It is said that it is the peculiar quality of time to conserve fact, and that it does so by rendering our past falsehoods true. So it was with me.

 

[jian]

A bit more Wolfe:

That’s really not an ideal I’d care to live by.

Read Joan Aiken’s The Five Minute Marriage, which is like Jane Austen or Georgette Heyer if the author decided there needed to be some actual plot and a whole selection of interesting NPCs who love wandering off and having their own adventures - was more than halfway to Dickens, in other words - and I must say it made for a cracking read. Aiken’s skill at observations, characters, storyline, and early 19th century slang (I had to look up loo-parties and loo-masks*) which is so evident in her Wolves books for children is just as fun here in books for grown-ups. Highly recommended if you like that sort of thing.

*Loo-parties were fashionable parties at which the gambling card game called Lanterloo (probably based on a French nonsense word for lullaby) was played. Loo-masks were half-masks covering the lower face held with a button between the teeth; the derivation is from loup (as in French for wolf). The more common slang for a washroom is probably from the French (again) exhortation of “gardez l’eau” (watch out for the water) when emptying one’s chamber pot out of a window.