Wanna chit chat but not do a full post? Do it here!
You must log in or register to comment.
Hey, just wanted to say / suggest, if you or anyone else here is looking for fun content to post in this community, you should check out reductress.com, it’s basically an Onion / Hard Times style website but particularly focused on women.
Edit: apologies for the deleted comment, it was a double. Either my network or this new instance that I’m on have been awful the last two days.
Mate that’s a great website idea thanks 😊
I love Reductress, lol - good rec!
Anyone have some books (or audiobooks) they recommend?
What kind of thing do you like to read?
ah, that’s a good question but I’m not sure how to answer - I just finished China Miéville’s The City and the City which was great (he’s a great writer, I had previously enjoyed October), weird lit in general is good but I’m not a fan of VanderMeer.
Other recent reads:
- Bunny, by Mona Awad, which was strangely impactful and sticks in my mind but isn’t a book I would recommend necessarily, nor did I particularly enjoy or think was well written (or maybe I just didn’t enjoy the style?)
- Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, which was very well written and was all-consuming but not enjoyable necessarily - I loved this book, I hated this book, this book was like rotting in the best way.
- Little Fish by Casey Plett, a trans novel - I’ll read pretty much any trans novel, but this one was good, sometimes I felt like I needed to read Casey Plett like I needed to breathe oxygen, it’s really hard to describe that feeling but her writing captures a lot of mundane trans moments that made me feel less monstrous in my existence
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, which was a wonderful book (rather short, though)
- The Gate to Women’s Country by Sheri S. Tepper, I admittedly only read this book for personal reasons related to my past - Tepper’s perspective comes across as horribly homophobic, transphobic, and eugenicist … but for someone like me who grew up with strongly opinionated (even if problematic) women in their lives, this book helped me revisit and process some of that past.
- Post Office by Charles Bukowski, the misogyny aside, I enjoyed reading the entirety of a book complaining about bureaucracy while sitting for several hours waiting for an opening at the DMV to renew my driver’s license.
Books on my list to read sometime:
- The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
- I need to finish reading The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien
- was thinking about trying out China Miéville’s Embassytown once The City and the City has aged in my mind to the point where his voice becomes a novelty again and it’s like reading him for the first time
- I keep hearing Han Kang’s The Vegetarian coming up in relationship to Bunny so I thought I might try it out sometime, but I might need more time away from Bunny first
- likewise with more time passed I want to read anything else Ottessa Moshfegh has written
- I started reading Samantha Harvey’s Orbital - that might actually make a decent audiobook read, I just didn’t ever feel particularly motivated to stick with it to the end.
- I keep starting and stopping Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built, probably another good audiobook option I should revisit
- I started an audiobook of Orlando by Virginia Wolf, and while I have aspirations to stick with these things, it feels like the book has to come at the right time and this just isn’t the right time
In particular audiobooks I’m looking to listen to during recovery:
- The Outsider by Stephen King
- Fairy Tale by Stephen King
- Replay by Ken Grimwood
- Thursday Murder Club series by Richard Osman
- Jodi Taylor’s St Mary’s Chronicles
- A Gentleman in Moscow by Armor Towles
- Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Ahhh I don’t know if you’ll like the stuff I read sorry. Might be best doing a full post about it so you get a range of ideas
I like a pretty broad range, tbh - it’s hard to predict what I’ll like or capture my interests.
I guess I mostly enjoy:
- horror (e.g. House of Leaves, Tender is the Flesh)
- sci fi (Asimov, Ted Chiang, Octavia Butler),
- cozy reads (All Creatures Great and Small, The House in the Cerulean Sea),
- literature …
Trying to rack my brain I’m realizing I haven’t really read much fiction until recently, I usually just read non-fiction books on a topic I’m obsessing over. A lot of the fiction I have read in the past tends to have some kind of connection to something important to me. I often feel guilty when I read fiction, like I’m wasting my time or being indulgent.
All that said, I’m pretty open and want to try new things, so I’d be happy with just trying out what you like to read and seeing how it goes.
Since you have Turn of the Screw on here, can I suggest The Haunting of Hill House? I read both of these because of the Netflix adaptations of them (which were bad), and so they’re pretty tied together in my head. I loved Haunting of Hill House (again, the book, not the Netflix series, which was, uh, not good). I’d definitely suggest it!
oo, thanks! I’ll definitely add it to my list 📝
I started just reading whatever books were showing up when watching episodes of Lost, I remember Turn of the Screw was one of the books Desmond Hume was reading in the bunker, along with The Third Policeman. The latter book reminds me of Pynchon and other postmodern literature, it’s quite surreal and I quite enjoy the way that book is simultaneously extremely detailed and realistic but entirely fantastical, as if describing a new impossible physics through mundane experiences in a radically different world (all while capturing kind of psychological realism that simulates psychosis or something). Anyway, I like books like that.
EDIT: oh oh oh, btw I love your username and I feel compelled to share in case you happen to not already know, the person who popularized Spivak pronouns was a mathematician emself who wrote an excellent text on calculus.
Oh, yeah, I actually already knew about the Spivak pronouns! That’s partly why I chose them for myself on here. And also because I like them.
But yeah, Spivak is great! My geometry/topology course my first year of grad school had us working out of Spivak’s “A Comprehensive Introduction to Differential Geometry”. In hindsight, a very tough book to learn from, rather old-fashioned, but my professor was like a billion years old, so it makes sense he would choose an old book!
that makes sense, I just had to share on the improbability that you didn’t already know 😅
and that’s awesome - I’m so jealous, I would have loved to have taken a topology course let alone a graduate level topology course 😭
I do remember Spivak’s writing being poor pedagogy but succinct and elegant, it does seem like some kinds of mathematicians are like this but it’s inaccessible and leaves too much work for the reader, esp. students. I always felt like an outsider that way in math, like my brain just didn’t work the way everyone else’s did. I really enjoyed Morris Kline’s Mathematics for the Nonmathematician, placing math in its larger humanistic context was really compelling and I found it made me much more invested in learning and understanding the math.
And Paul Lockhart’s Mathematician’s Lament, Measurement, and Arithmetic have radically changed the way I view and interact with mathematics and has been really helpful for me.
Oh, here’s a question! Have you ever read any Phillip K Dick? He’s weird and surreal in a way I really enjoy. The one thing I do not like about Dick, however, is he’s a misogynist. It’s not terrible, in the sense that he’s not writing books that revolve around gender conflicts, but there’s that underlying misogyny that’s so, so pervasive in older works by male authors.
If you want to give him a try, I’d start with Ubik and then probably Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Those are probably my favorite Phillip K Dick books.
Misogyny is rather common unfortunately (I mentioned in another comment reading Bukowski who is almost proudly misogynistic), but I’ve read American Psycho (one of the few books I really don’t think I should have read) and probably too much of de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, so let’s just say my brain is probably rotted enough for anything at this point.
I did start Dick’s Man in the High Castle and while I really want to like Philip K. Dick because he fits my interests thematically, I’ve never been able to get into any of his writing (so far anyway), so I probably do need a little encouragement - I’ve long wanted to read Ubik, thank you.
Haha, it’s nowhere near as bad as American Psycho or de Sade, more on the level of Asimov, who I see you enjoy in another comment, so you should be good, misogyny-wise. I just like to say it, you know? Especially in a women’s space like this, it feels worth pointing out when books have that background-radiation misogyny that so many of them do.
I’d try Ubik, if I were you, it’s really, really good. I found it a complete page-turner, I literally couldn’t put it down.
deleted by creator
