Books

I'm reading The Wager as well!

Ilium by Dan Simmons. Haven’t got to the end yet but already boggled my mind.

The MANIAC

Peter Watts' Blindsight for the second time. It's pretty dense. I'm catching more this time around. It's a fantastic read with some of the most alien aliens ever put to page. It was a meme how often it used to get recommended back on r/printsf which I miss a lot since its replacement here is essentially dead.

This is an excellent story. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I think I saw another comment mention it but after you finish this, you must read (or listen to) "Endurance" by Alfred Lansing. The narration was excellent. I borrowed the audiobook from libby and it was such an amazing story!

Slightly off topic but can anyone recommend a good android based ereader?

Edit: I mean a device, not an app.

Your pick reminds me I really should get into some naval fiction. I used to love it on the screen (Hornblower, Master and Commander, etc), I'm a big fan of it's sci-fi equivalents, I was into sailing as a kid and I am a total sucker for command drama stuff. Frankly, I'm shocked I've never read any naval fiction as far as I can remember.

Slugging through book 6 of A Practical Guide to Evil. Still have about 4000 pages to get to the end of the series

Currently switching between Prequel by Rachel Maddow and Naked Empire (book 8 of the Sword of Truth series) by Terry Goodkind.

Currently reading A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine. There's also a first book called A Memory Called Empire and both are very good.

My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Red

Trying to capture the nuances of writing in first person.

Just finished The Breach. Poor Jacob

I'm one of those people who reads several books at once, swapping between them depending on my mood and engagement. Currently the great mortality by John Kerry, the salted earth by Jeff Somers, woken furies by Richard Morgan, a journal of the plague year by Daniel Defoe, velocity weapon by Megan O'Keefe, and a couple of others that I may not finish.

Just started reading Erich Maria Remarque - Three Comrades. I'm really liking it so far.

Berserk

Just finished Persepolis Rising and eagerly awaiting to get my hands on Tiamath's Wrath from my library. Fiction has always been my goto in such times and never once has it disappointed me.

I'm most of the way through Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. Same guy that wrote The Martian (the book that got very faithfully adapted into a movie with Matt Damon) and this book is jam-packed with just as much real-world science.

If you've never read (or seen) The Martian, here's the basic premise: the year is 2040-something and NASA has started manned missions to Mars. Our hero Mark Watney is one of six crew aboard Ares 5, which is planned to spend 30 sols (Martian days -- 37 minutes longer than an Earth day) on the planet and do research. On Sol 6 of those 30, there's a massive dust storm with winds strong enough that they threaten to make the rocket for the return journey tip over, leaving them stranded on Mars, if they don't abort now. Just one problem: Mark is nowhere to be seen. The dust storm is too thick to see through, and the last thing his team saw just before his radio went dead was all his vital signs drop to zero. The captain searches for him for as long as she can, but eventually she's forced to call it off and return home with only five of the six crew.

Eight hours later, Mark wakes up, says "ow, my everything", figures out that the main communications antenna that the storm ripped off the HAB (astronaut house), punctured his suit, and grazed his side poked a hole straight through his suit's bio monitor as it did so (hence why his team saw his vitals drop), looks over at the empty launch pad, and realizes he is now the only human on Mars and the first one to be stranded there. The rest of the book is him using every scientific trick in the book to keep himself alive until he can reach the Ares 6 landing site where there's another rocket set up. As a not-too-spoilery example, Thanksgiving was going to happen while the team was there, so NASA sent them with whole, uncooked potatoes among other things with which to prepare a Thanksgiving feast. He combines Martian dirt with some natural fertilizer (read: his own poop) to make fertile soil, and gets water by recombining hydrazine (leftover rocket fuel the return rocket didn't need) with oxygen in a rather terrifying method that involves small amounts of fire, then covers the floor of the HAB in soil and plants the potatoes. It's a very cool book. My one gripe with it is that the protagonist is a bit of a jerk. He's very full of himself and he swears a lot.

The protagonist of Andy Weir's next book, Project Hail Mary, is neither of those things. He wakes up, amnesiac, on board a spacecraft, and quicklu discovers that its other two crewmembers did not survive the medically induced coma they were placed in for the journey. He has a flashback and remembers why he is here: some extraterrestrial bacterium-esque life form dubbed "astrophage" that feeds off of stars has started feeding off the Sun, and at the rate it's getting dimmer, within 20 years the Earth will get cold enough that humans are looking at extinction. Additional astronomy revealed all the stars in our stellar neighborhood were infected with astrophage, and all but one were getting dimmer. Project Hail Mary, the spacecraft he's on, is (as the name implies) humanity's last-ditch effort to save themselves: take three of their best astronauts, yeet them at that star, and pray they find out why it's not getting dimmer and report back to Earth in time to save the human race. I don't want to spoil this book too much, because it's super good, but they go super in depth about the alien life form (which it turns out is DNA-based and uses truly staggering amounts of infrared light to propel itself between the Earth and Venus, whose carbon dioxide filled atmosphere is necessary for it to breed, and stores the solar energy it collects by directly converting it to mass (E=mc²) in the form of neutrinos).

There's also a huge surprise waiting for him at his destination star which I flatly refuse to spoil. You're just going to have to read it for yourself, although I can practically guarantee you'll be just as excited as I was.

Children of Ruin, by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

It's the sequel to Children of Time that won the Hugo award a few years ago.

Children of time may be the best science fiction book I've ever read (out of hundreds), and I've been devouring everything else by Tchaikovsky ever since.

The dude has range, and has been incredibly prolific over his career.

And the writing style is incredible. He makes incredibly complex concepts/plots very very easy to understand and follow.

Just starting "The Time Regulation Institute," by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (translated).

Sorting the Beef from the Bull: The Science of Food Fraud Forensics. I saw it mentioned in one of the threads about the recent apple sauce food poisoning, and it's very interesting (whoever that was, if you are reading it, thank you!).

I just finished reading Leech, by Hiron Ennes. Very strange book, some described as Gothic horror science fiction. Thought provoking, but weird.

Gnomon. A massive disappointment.

Half way through the fourth book in the Shopocalypse Series -

Buy Mort: 30,000 Leagues: How I Merged And Became New Earth Affiliated by Joseph Phelps and Damien Hanson