What are you reading now?

[TMoney]

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the woman behind the 1619 Project, on the case for reparations for slavery. I think this piece is excellent.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/24/magazine/reparations-slavery.html

[recstar24]

Not necessarily reading, but some good stuff in there 

[HiWire]

Ars Technica made a video about the F-15 cockpit controls, which led to a sidebar by the author about Boeing in the 2000s:

https://arstechnica.com/features/2020/06/human-interface-come-on-a-tour-of-an-f-15c-fighter-jet-cockpit/?comments=1&start=80

Which led to an article about the McDonnell-Douglas / Boeing merger:

https://www.msn.com/en-za/money/news/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merger-led-to-the-737-max-crisis/ar-BBYzJXz

TL;DR mistakes were made. Another tragic story of corporate aggression, cost-cutting, and greed.

I'm against continually escalating airline ticket prices, but compromising safety to cut costs led to inevitable disasters.

Edited July 1, 2020 by HiWire

[HiWire]

The Mirror Thief by Martin Seay

Really fancy writing covering several time periods, from contemporary Las Vegas to Renaissance Venice... I can't remember having to reach for my dictionary so many times in recent memory.

[Dusty Chalk]

What in tarnation is this high falutin’ fancy shmancy pants trying to I said a trying to say?

[HiWire]

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

Started reading this one after blasting through Hammett's earlier novel, The Maltese Falcon (a bit of a disappointment). His writing style seems a lot clunkier than Raymond Chandler's or even Mickey Spillane's, but there is an energy and drama that keeps you going. Big points for being the first one, too.

[blessingx]

You eventually getting to Thompson? 

[HiWire]

Maybe this one (After Dark, My Sweet – 🥰 Rachel Ward) – I usually read the books before watching film versions:

And this one (The Grifters):

 

After reading The Maltese Falcon, I realized that a lot of the cheesy Sam Spade parodies are actually parodies of Spillane's Mike Hammer character (I guess a lot of screenwriters were too lazy to read the original material).

Edited August 7, 2020 by HiWire

[blessingx]

The film versions of those two were released the same year and the wrong one became famous. After Dark is still unknown and so good. 

Was in a different spot in my life when I read Thompson, but maaan did it resonate then. Like Bukowski/Fante-levels at the same time, but again I was in a different space (semi-emotionally trapped on a Great Lakes 1x1.5 mile island for several months). Just look at your image.  

The Killer Inside Me was probably his first great... and a pretty bad movie. 

From Wikipedia: The writer R.V. Cassill has suggested that of all crime fiction, Thompson's was the rawest and most harrowing; that neither Dashiell Hammett nor Raymond Chandler nor Horace McCoy ever "wrote a book within miles of Thompson". Similarly, in the introduction to Now and on Earth, Stephen King says he most admires Thompson's work because "The guy was over the top. The guy was absolutely over the top. Big Jim didn't know the meaning of the word stop. There are three brave lets inherent in the foregoing: He let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it."

 

[HiWire]

I'll read both of them, The Killer Inside Me and maybe Pop. 1280 too. It's being made into a movie again, but the pandemic probably pushed the release date back by a year or more.

Edited August 7, 2020 by HiWire

[HiWire]

Maybe a little redundant, but I finally received my copy of J.G. Ballard's High-Rise and I'm enjoying it immensely. The novel is clearly satirical and the film seems to have lost that feeling somewhere in translation.

I got the one with the movie cover on purpose, as the novel is supposed to be about a disaster and the movie was one, unintentionally. Looks like a slew of cover artists attempted to visualize the story with varying degrees of success.

It is a near-insurmountable challenge to make a condominium appear fascinating to the reading public.

https://www.4thestate.co.uk/2015/11/high-rise-40-years-of-cover-design/

Edited August 23, 2020 by HiWire

[Dusty Chalk]

Finally finished On the Steel Breeze.

Need to figure out what to start next, besides the obvious (Poseidon’s Wake).

[HiWire]

I'm going to attempt Neal Stephenson's Fall at some point.

Edited August 19, 2020 by HiWire

[Sherwood]

^^ Worth it.

[n_maher]

^^ The first five or so Audible reviews I read of that were not encouraging.

[Sherwood]

I'm a sucker for Stephenson stuff, even his more navel-gazey work really does it for me.  Fall is perhaps not the place to start if you're not already a fan, but I just find his thought process and world-building compelling.  I did not enjoy it as much as Seveneves, and Diamond Age remains my favorite of all his books.  I did prefer it to Reamde.

The reviews are a little harsher but similar in tone to those of Seveneves.  Normies don't like 600+ pages of exposition from a layman on fringe tech with their speculative fiction, maybe?  I just discard out of hand any review which mentions Snow Crash.

Edited August 23, 2020 by Sherwood

[HiWire]

I've enjoyed most of his books, but The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. was terrible. It had the outlines of Stephenson's usual obsessions, but the plot was terribly weak, the characterizations were cartoonish, and it went way too far in terms of self-indulgence and laziness. I took a hard pass on The Mongoliad.

I read half of Seveneves before my library loan expired – I'll get back to finishing it at some point. I loved Reamde, despite its flaws, and I'm looking forward to reading Fall.

Edited August 23, 2020 by HiWire

[grawk]

I really enjoyed Fall.  I should read DODO, I haven't yet.  I definitely only consume books via audio these days, I haven't ever gotten a set of reading glasses that work well enough for me, and my reading time is when I'm already tired.

[HiWire]

The Infinite Horizon by Gerry Duggan and Phil Noto

A retelling of Homer's Odyssey, set during the collapse of civilization in the near future... sadly prophetic

[blessingx]

Last Call for Gumshoes 

For nearly 50 years, a tight-knit group of San Francisco private eyes—intellectual, swashbuckling, anti-authority lefties—practiced their craft in the pursuit of truth and, hopefully, justice.

https://altaonline.com/private-investigators-san-francisco-phil-bronstein/ 

[HiWire]

Stand On Zanzibar – John Brunner

[blessingx]

In case others enjoy the annual Notable Books list, just released... 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/books/notable-books.html?referringSource=articleShare 
 

Picked up Earthlings last month and just did The End of Everything. 

[en480c4]

Enjoyed the hell out of these:

 

 

Just finished:

 

 

And now waffling between a few options to follow up...

 

 

And a few others...

[HiWire]

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

A genius book. I get the feeling that books as disparate as Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos (and Ilium / Olympos, of course), Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon trilogy, Walter Jon Williams' Aristoi, and even David Brin's Kiln People (and so many more), were directly inspired by Lord of Light.

[HiWire]

I started reading Neal Stephenson's Seveneves again. It has a different urgency now, partway through the pandemic.