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naraburns nihil supernum
2yr 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.
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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