Sunday Morning Book Thread - 01-14-2024 ["Perfessor" Squirrel]

Welcome to the prestigious, internationally acclaimed, stately, and illustrious Sunday Morning Book Thread! The place where all readers are welcome, regardless of whatever guilty pleasure we feel like reading. Here is where we can discuss, argue, bicker, quibble, consider, debate, confabulate, converse, and jaw about our latest fancy in reading material. As always, pants are required, unless you are wearing these pants...

So relax, find yourself a warm kitty (or warm puppy--I won't judge) to curl up in your lap, and dive into a new book. What are YOU reading this fine morning?

PIC NOTE

Washington University in St. Louis has a number of interesting collections. One of them is the "Julian and Hope Edison Collection of Miniature Books." The image above is "a set of 40 volumes in a revolving case containing Shakespeare's plays." I'm not sure if the entire text is contained in those books or not, though I suspect they do contain key quotes and phrases from the plays.

THE MIRACLE OF READING

Do you ever wonder how it is that human beings, alone of all creatures on earth, have the ability to look at black and white squiggles on a piece of paper and then create remarkable visions in their heads based solely on what they see on that page? It baffles me how we humans can write down these squiggles and then another human can interpret those squiggles into meaningful context. It doesn't matter if it's directions on how to make a peanut butter sandwich or the technical specifications for one of the Elon Musk's SpaceX rocket ships. It's just amazing how active our brains become when we read. We see far more on the page than we think we do and our brains are constantly going back and forth around the page to determine how we are supposed to make sense of the words that we find there. This may be why Large Language Models struggle to compete with human-created content. LLMs simply don't have the capacity to interpret words in the same way that humans do, so they are unable to process *context* in a way that really makes sense to humans. Sure, they can approximate it to some degree--even enough to fool people. But at their core, they are not *creative* entities, just extremely advanced regurgitators.

WRITING GUIDES

I don't put a whole lot of faith in "top ten" lists when it comes to books. They are all highly subjective and dependent on the opinions of the creators of those lists. I may or may not agree with their choices, and I often disagree with the order in which they present their lists. I do like the list featured below, though, because it includes subject-specific writing guides. If you are going to be an author and want to include technical information, but do not have a technical background, you are going to need to learn some key ways in which you can fake it. I'm not a medical doctor, so I would be very hesitant to include a tense scene where a character is wounded and has to go to a hospital for treatment. I don't know how medicine works. However, if I have a writing guide on the subject, I might be able to fake it well enough to create a plausible scenario for the reader, even if they have a medical background and can tell that I've made a few mistakes. The same holds true for science, engineering, or any other subject with which I do not have deep familiarity. Within my own meager collection of "writing guides" I do have a few on how to write science fiction stories as well as how to create believable worlds based on actual scientific principles. I might take some creative liberties for the sake of a story, though.

FEATURED MORON REVIEW

Moron Candidus sent in the following review of "prescient fiction:"

For many SMB Threadists, physical books are a necessity, since we know that digital content can so easily be altered or eliminated altogether. But even for physical books, it can be difficult to buy books that do not conform to today's DIE standards. Three books of prescient fiction come to mind: The Camp of the Saints; The Mandibles: A Family, 2020-2047; and Shelley's Heart. This is a combined review of the latter two books; The Camp of the Saints correctly predicts a European problem and is beyond the scope of this exercise.

Prescient fiction is a work of any genre that smuggles non-politically correct predictions into print. In some cases it can be eerie (and sad) to see how well some of these predictions bear out. The first book, The Mandibles: A Family, 2020-2047, was published in 2016 by Lionel Shriver. There are two main themes: the Balkanization of American society through unchecked illegal immigration and demographic changes, and financial collapse. The most prescient part of The Mandibles is the gradualist nature of American dissolution--we aren't going out with a bang, but a whimper. Debt and inflation and the decay of a high-trust society eventually lead to the day we all know is coming: what happens when the US Government holds a debt auction and no one shows up to buy our debt?

The second book, Shelley's Heart, is a thriller written by Charles McCarry and published in 1995. It is a page-turner, with all of the elements of a traditional thriller, with one exception: all the real components of the 2020 election are incorporated into this work as fiction: election fraud, last-minute battles over who the true President is, ubiquitous surveillance, and most of all the incestuous relationship between the hard Left politicians and the NGO complex, the media, the AWFLs, and the guilt-ridden, 'well-intentioned' East Coast WASPs. Eerie. It is really, really eerie. There are a few false notes, but I'll hold them back as spoilers.

What's your most-prescient out-of-print prescient fiction?

MORON RECOMMENDATIONS

Also, I've started Tress of the Emerald Isles by Brandon Sanderson. Brandon seems to be channeling Terry Pratchett in this one. It's undoubtedly the shortest book in his Cosmere series at 365 pages. No, really, it reads like Pratchett. I stayed up until 2am reading it, it's that good.

Posted by: p0indexterous at January 07, 2024 09:52 AM (QBwMV)

Comment: I have yet to this or any of Sanderson's other standalone works set in the Cosmere, though I am familiar with the two main series he's been writing (Stormlight Archive and Mistborn/Wax & Wayne.) For those who don't know, the Cosmere is a pretty audacious bit of worldbuilding connecting worlds that seem wildly disparate but have an underlying cosmology that links them all together. Occasionally there will be cross-over characters showing up in other books. It's been a long time since I've enjoyed a book that kept me up until 2 a.m. On a side note, a friend of mine mentioned how much he enjoyed this book and so I decided I needed to go ahead and order it, along with the other books in Sanderson's "Secret Projects" series.

Quick question for the Horde...How many recommendations or "data points" does it usually take for you to read a recommended book?

My recommendation for this week is The Flight by Dan Hampton. Hampton is a decorated fighter pilot turned writer, and who better to grasp the audacity that led Charles Lindbergh to fly a small plane solo across the Atlantic in 1927? The Spirit of St Louis was built to his specifications, held 500 gallons of fuel, and had a single window in the door; it had no forward visibility other than a periscope. Think of the single mindedness that it took to borrow money, have this plane built, and attempt a solo crossing of the Atlantic only 20 odd years after the Wright Brothers first flight. Hampton uses the pilot's memoirs, contemporary accounts, and his own experience to put the reader into the cockpit to get a feel for this groundbreaking journey. In an age when Elon Musk's rockets are being launched weekly, it is hard to imagine the enormity of what Lindbergh dared and accomplished. Lindbergh had no radio, and only the crudest charts to guide him from the US to Ireland and on to France. His overweight plane barely cleared the trees at takeoff. The exhaustion, fog, ice, and fuel consumption made this a harrowing journey, and Hampton captures this experience in a very compelling manner.

Posted by: Thomas Paine at January 07, 2024 09:15 AM (biNg8)

Comment: It is pretty incredible that a century or so after the Wright Brothers managed to fly their ramshackle plane at Kitty Hawk (held together with baling wire, chewing gum, and a prayer), we now have advanced aircraft that can fly and land themselves with little to no human intervention. But the path towards that was laid down by insane geniuses willing to put their own lives at risk in order to advance aviation technology. I don't know much about Charles Lindbergh, but no question he had a pair if he was willing to fly a plane that *might* make it across the Atlantic without even a prayer of being rescued if something goes wrong.

More Moron-recommended reading material can be found HERE! (1000+ Moron-recommended books!)

WHAT I'VE BEEN READING THIS PAST WEEK:

After reviewing some of OregonMuse's old Book Threads, I thought I'd try something a bit different. Instead of just listing WHAT I'm reading, I'll include commentary as well. Unless otherwise specified, you can interpret this as an implied recommendation, though as always your mileage may vary.

Malazan Book of the Fallen 3 - Memories of Ice by Steven Erickson

Status -- COMPLETE

The third book in the Malazan series returns us to the subcontinent of Genabackis. High Fist Drujek Onearm and his army are now on the run from the Empire, so they team up with their old foes Calladan Brood and Anomander Rake (a main antagonist from Book 1) to take on the mysterious religious zealots of the Pannion Domin. In the meantime, the Crippled God is threatening to tear the world asunder as he's finally breaking free of his prison. As is usual for this series, there are quite a few whacky scenes of incredibly weird magic, though I think my favorite subplot involves a table that somehow acquired a magical face of one of the characters, who is now marked by Fate(?). His companions basically all know he's now screwed. It's difficult to identify any one main protagonist, or even a small group of protagonists, as the characters tend to be multidimensional with their own motivations for acting. Most of the "good" characters are shown to have some noble characteristics, such as Whiskeyjack's outright refusal to allow the murder of a fell child that is declared an abomination by High King Kallor, even though the child may end up causing an Apocalypse of her own someday. It's been a pretty wild series so far and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of it. They are LONG books, so it will take me at least a week or two to get through each one. I just sit back and enjoy the ride. WARNING: Some of the scenes in this series are extremely *intense* and are probably NOT suitable for younger readers. Savage warfare is HORRIFIC in the extreme.

WHAT I'VE ACQUIRED THIS PAST WEEK:

I do have a couple of books added to my library this week:

• Kharkanas Trilogy Book 2 - Fall of Light by Steven Erikson -- After Erikson completed the Malazan series, he started writing more books in the setting to flesh it out a bit. At the moment, there are only two books in the Kharkanas series, though the third and final book will hopefully be released in 2024 (or 2025). The first two books did not sell as well as he'd hoped, so he's been working on other projects. I get the sense that he does want to finish the Kharkanas series, though, if only to check it off his list of things to do. Fingers crossed!
• The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction by Justin Whitmel Early -- My pastor at church highly recommended this book during his most recent sermons. It's one of those books that offers a simple set of rules for changing one's behavior for the better. The challenge, of course, is to turn those behaviors into regular habits.

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Disclaimer: No Morons were harmed in the making of this Sunday Morning Book Thread. Beware of flying tables bearing the face of one of your comrades.

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