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naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
A couple of Fridays ago there was a comment thread on what the best series you watched in 2022 was/were. In honor of @EdenicFaithful's weekly Sunday reading question, what were your best reads of 2022? What did you enjoy or find interesting? Anything of note you didn't finish?
For me:
God Emperor of Dune. Such a good book. Well, Idk how to qualify it in terms of goodness. Such a unique book. How many have a near-omnipotent, centuries old, giant worm-man with voices in his head as the main character? My favorite bit: Leto is so wrapped up in his own ancient internal monologue about the voices of his ancestors inside him and the future he can see that he almost misses getting a gun that he knows is going to be pulled on him pulled on him.
I read a bit of horror later in the year. Ghost Story by Peter Straub would probably be my favorite of the bunch. It loses some steam near the end, but I think that's a flaw intrinsic to the horror genre. Or maybe that's all the Stephen King I've read talking. Speaking of, Revival would be my runner-up. It's the only post-car accident King I've read that's not The Dark Tower, and I wasn't disappointed. He maybe could have used a little trimming in the second quarter of the book to shorten the gap between the inciting incident and the next big plot movement, but other than that I think he even stuck the landing.
Books I did not finish:
I didn't read a lot of books this year. Sometime around March I attempted to do what I thought of as a "liberal arts" read: reading world history, art history, music history, philosophy history, and literature concurrently, going through sections that aligned with the same time period. A bit ambitious. Couple of problems with it, besides coming up with the "curriculum" on my own based on what we already had in our home library: I started with human pre-history, which kept me hopping between just a couple of books at first; a couple, particularly the philosophy book, were Western focus, whereas I wanted to be more comprehensive; the literature portion (the first volume of Norton's world lit anthology) covered a lot I had already read; for world history, I picked a book that's like the notes to a world history encyclopedia - very dense and dry, and I wasn't trying to skip any of it; finally, the sections just didn't line up that well for jumping between things and keeping it "fresh". My goal was to get to 0 AD. I barely got to the Greeks. After a couple months or so of spending my bedtime reading time on this, I was worn out and needed a narrative I could start and finish without interruption and moved on to a fiction splurge. I'd like to go back and read some more of the individual books on their own. Except that encyclopedic notes one. It's literally organized in a ABC, 123 subnote style. Very dense and dry. Overall, and interesting experiment.
I read for the first time in 2022 the Three Body problem trilogy as well as the fanfiction Redemption of Time, the Inhibitors trilogy, the Hyperion Cantos, and the first two Ian Banks' Culture novels. I've also been very slowly working through my omnibus of the Princes of Amber series (serial?), which is enjoyable but a bit too pulpy for my taste.
Me and my close circle of friends also started a book club to help motivate us to cover works of literature and quality fiction that our schooling or upbringing had never shown us, so we read King Lear, and Child of God by the inimitable Cormac McCarthy amongst others. I was the one to tap out ultimately however, Frankenstein broke me. I cannot possibly envision a realistic future where I can power past the first 50 pages or so, it's some of the most eye-strainingly tedious writing I've ever slogged through, and I read most of Galt's screed in Atlas Shrugged. Maybe I just got filtered.
ETA: I also did a substantial bit of rereading but that was mostly retreading things I've read many times before, primarily Blindsight twice last year, once in January and again in September. I also read Worm for the 10th time.
Fuck, I loved blindsight so much. What did you think of Three Body Problem?
I also read Three Body for the first time recently. I would say that overall the series is good, but there's a distinct downward trend in quality over the three books. The first book is top tier stuff that could stand alongside any of the classics, the second book is quite good though not as good, and the third book is decent but not particularly great. And, amusingly enough, the third book itself starts out stronger and gets weaker (the ending is really bad imo).
Worth reading if you haven't read them, but I doubt I'll be going back and rereading the trilogy any time soon if ever.
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Easily some of the best scifi I've ever read, and if you're referring to the trilogy as a whole then the third books journey throughthe fourth dimension was some of the most surreal, in a good way, writing I have ever read. I agree wrt to Blindsight, after reading it the first time I felt the same way I felt after reading (the og) meditations on moloch, like a paradigm shift.
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It wasn't the most "enjoyable" read - those usually involve more intellectual pursuits - but my "best" read this year in terms of impact has to be Jason Fung's The Complete Guide to Fasting.
Unless you already have an disordered relationship to food it might not be that useful, but it did help me take up fasting and lose 40 pounds. At least for now. Going through the last three years of books...it might be the only one that's had a meaningful impact on daily life rather than my thought processes.
Other than that, this actually wasn't a good year for insightful reads:
I did enjoy finally reading Island in the Sea of Time to see where the "ISOT" genre came from. It does hold up quite well and is still one of the top works in the niche.
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now was good but obviously practically ineffective :P I guess you could say I don't disagree with anything it laid out but I haven't started agreeing yet.
Did Not Finish:
God: An Anatomy by Francesca Stavrakopoulou - It's just not an audio-friendly book, so other books (fiction took priority. And my interest in Biblical studies ebbs and flows. Especially when I doubt Stavrakopoulou is going to go crazy and recommend something really novel in a popular audience-facing book.
The City, by Adrian Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy is one of the few historians that can write, so his fiction series about a tough-skinned Roman centurion is pretty good on both basic craft and history. I just...wish he wrote different things. The earlier books were good, but they also had some cliched plot points (an example being the standard cross-class, forbidden love plot - it feels like Goldsworthy is writing to be easily adaptable when Hollywood comes calling) and I just didn't want to hike up another hill to get to the cool battle scenes.
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Off the top of my head, the highlights are:
a) The Great Gatsby - technically I read this right around Christmas of 2021, but I'll include it here. Gatsby's a total simp. Daisy, so far as we can tell from the text, probably isn't even that hot. You know who's cool and who I want to read a book about? Meyer Wolfsheim. How did he claw his way up the ranks of organized crime? Did he kill a dude and make his teeth into cufflinks? I think he did.
b) The Maltese Falcon, Dashiel Hammett. I'd tried some Hammett before - the Glass Key and Red Harvest - but I just didn't get that into them. I liked this one a lot more for some reason. I think it just seemed more tightly written than those two, though I'm not sure if that's the explanation
c) Francis Fukuyama - Political Order and Political Decay. This one was on audiobook so without an actual copy in front of me, I have a hard time remembering what I thought about it. The main impression I retained is that Fukuyama is clearly a smart guy who's read and thought a lot about his topic, but is hamstrung by his commitment to an orthodox-western-liberal view of "progress" and state formation. His analysis would probably have been more interesting if he'd been willing to consider more heterodox ideas.
d) The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster. Famously gloomy and violent Jacobean revenge drama. Probably one of the best works of fiction I read this year. The anti-heroic Bosola gets all the best lines, even though he's largely tangential to the plot until the last few scenes. Surprised I haven't seen a film adaptation of this sometime in the last ten years.
e) The Folk of the Air, Peter S. Beagle. Beagle is probably best known for The Last Unicorn. This is a sort of early urban-fantasy story about an itinerant musician who returns to a thinly-veiled Berkeley after ten years of wandering. He finds that all his old friends are now part of a thinly-veiled Society For Creative Anachronism and that some of them get way into character and sometimes their re-enactments get just a little too real. Started off slowly but hit it's strides at the two-thirds mark and wrapped up with a satisfy albeit ambiguous conclusion.
f) The Ballad of the White Horse, GK Chesterton - Sometimes hailed as the last epic narrative poem in the English language. A fictionalized depiction of King Alfred's defeat of the Danes at the Battle of Ethandune. Short, with a pretty simple and straightforward plot, but a lot of great quotable lines. A few choice morsels
A gloomy Norseman: "You sing of the young gods easily/In the days when you are young/But I go smelling yew and sods/And I know there are gods behind the gods/Gods that are best unsung."
The narrator: "The Great Gaels of Ireland/Are the men that God made Mad/For all their wars are merry/And all their songs are sad".
Alfred, rebuking the Norse kings pseudo-Nietszchean worldview: "What have the strong gods given?/Where have the glad gods led?/When Guthrun sits on a hero's throne/And asks if he is dead?"
I'm told that Tolkien didn't like it on account of how he felt the Norse were misrepresented. Nonetheless, its well worth your tim."
TL; DR - The Autobiography of Benevenuto Cellini. He was probably a pretty interesting dude to hang around but the writing didn't hook me.
TL; DR - The Divine Comedy. Tried it, couldn't get into it.
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Too many.
Most impactful: Levy's Hackers. Clarifies a lot about the world we're living in.
Most important: Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, H. A. J. Munro's translation. Still not finished, but I'll be mulling this one for a long, long time.
Most useful: Ellis' Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy. It led me to E-Prime (I don't think it was actually mentioned in the book), which has had much use in my life. Also, Ellis' thoroughly calm viewpoint was an example to all. The book itself could have been better, but was not bad as far as I got.
Best written: Chandler's The Big Sleep. "Masterful" doesn't even begin to describe it. This is a man's book. I'll add Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited. It's the kind of book which reminds you why preachers exist.
Most memorable: Freinacht's The Listening Society. Something didn't work in his conclusions, but the structure of his thoughts follows me.
Glad I forced myself: More's Utopia. The creeping conformity and obedience which I saw in the beginning went full circle by the end, and it became odd, charming and disturbingly striking. There's an ethos there.
Most reread: DaystarEld's Pokemon: The Origin of Species. This man ought to be famous, rich and have an anime. Still ongoing.
#1 Should finish: Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. The conversation with the trees about AI risk has remained in my mind, as someone who doesn't usually get anxious about those things. Very unsettling. Feels like a source for unconsciously absorbing best practices.
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