What are we reading lately?

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I've been listening to audiobooks during my early morning gym sessions. I'm a few chapters into "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" bu Michael Moss and it's fascinating.
 
I just started William Gibson's new works including The Peripheral and Agency, presumably there will be a third or fourth book. These are good but I much preferred the immediately prior Blue Ant books: Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History. IMO few writers can rival Gibson's capacity to conjure the psychic gestalt of the present and near future.
 
Just finished listening to The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency and it was pretty interesting stuff.

Starting In Defense of Food next
 
Just finished CONFESSIONS OF A GREENPEACE DROPOUT

The Making Of a Sensible Environmentalist

Patrick Moore
 
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Atul Gawande is worth reading every time (as is Siddhartha Mukherjee). Checklist is eye opening if you've ever been in the hospital or know someone who's a pilot. Quick read.

The Coddling is one I'd recommend if you're interested in how people learn in college and how they get prepared and toughened up for the world.
 
I read a lot, here are some highlights of about the last year in books, ones that stand out.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders - a very unique way to tell a story

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson - an older book, excellent writing

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson - you won't feel good after reading this about the improprieties of the US justice system, but you should know about it if you live in the US

Anxious People by Frederik Backman - an amusing read

Burial Rites by Hanna Kent - based on real events in 1828, this novel is a fascinating look at Iceland in those times

Underland by Bobert McFarlane - nonfiction, a cool compilation of what lies below the surface of the Earth

Dark Mirror - Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State by Barton Gelman - also nonfiction, I almost didn't include this one, can be a bit of a slog at times, could have been shorter, but it was pretty interesting

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin - this great sci fi set the standard for so many authors that came after. Beyond that, what a feat of the imagination to envision a whole different world and such a different culture as she does here, amazing.

The Woman Who Smashed Codes by Elizabeth Smith Friedman nonfiction biography, great story

I'm currently reading Aperigon by Collum McCann, still too early to tell
 
i dont actually read anything since i cant actually read. but lately i've been listening to the "gray man" books on youtube. Mark Greaney.
the whole series is on youtube. i've kinda depleted all my stream sites and youtube on truly good material about 2 years ago. so now i'm here.

there are 2 genres of books that seems to have an infinite amount of new material written. the zombie/survivor genre, and then the fantasy/dragons genre. i just cant handle it for more than 5 minutes.
 
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Very glad to have discovered this thread! I'm a constant reader - I can't remember a time when I didn't have at least one book on the go, and my favourite way of easing the pains of the day is by spending an hour with a good book.

Currently reading through all of my Graham Greene novels and Jeeves and Wooster novels to decide which ones I'll keep and which can be donated to the charity shop. I'm on The Mating Season by Wodehouse at the moment, and this one is definitely staying. :)
 
Looks like you're in for some good reading, going by the names on the cover of that book! 👍

I've finished The Mating Season and have begun Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. This is the seventh or eight Greene novel I've read this year and I enjoyed them all, but this is the first great one - it reminds me why I loved Greene so much, many years ago...
 
I read Bill Buford's Dirt recently. I liked it even more than Heat which is also very good. I followed that with Eve Babitz's Eve's Hollywood and Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and LA as well as some Joan Didion for a brief dive into '60s and '70s Southern California. I'm currently reading The Genius of Dogs and I'm always kind of casually looking at cookbooks - sometimes the idea of a dish is better than the dish itself. Next I'll start Benjamin Lorr's The Secret Life of Groceries - food in North America is such a mess all the way from industrial agriculture to the retail shelves.
 
Interesting book that goes over Reconstruction and the backlash to it. Most interesting for primary images of propaganda that aren't commonly seen, especially not assembled together in such a large collection.
 

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Ring for Jeeves, by P. G. Wodehouse. Every Wodehouse novel I read this year seems to be better than the one before, and this is no exception. The master of the comic novel turns them out so beautifully they feel effortless - which is a sure sign that they are the result of some Herculean labour...
 
Ring for Jeeves, by P. G. Wodehouse. Every Wodehouse novel I read this year seems to be better than the one before, and this is no exception. The master of the comic novel turns them out so beautifully they feel effortless - which is a sure sign that they are the result of some Herculean labour...

Maybe, his gift for the language is undeniable but his insanely high output (I can't remember the total number including his work for the stage but at his peak he was cranking out more than two books a year) doesn't suggest to me a laborious series of drafts.
The early Leave it to Psmith has always been a personal favorite. Very, very few writers can make me laugh out loud but Wodehouse is in that small company.
 
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