Sunday Morning Book Thread - 11-24-2024 ["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

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

I am very thankful for each and every one of you Morons that stops by this scruffy corner of a smart, military blog to comment on books and reading. It's been a truly wonderful experience these past couple years.

HOW TIKTOK RUINED BOOKS

The YouTuber above raises some interesting points about how social media has changed the ways in which people read books. According to his research, people on TikTok can feel enormous social pressure to conform to the latest trends in book reading in order to conform to the current zeitgeist. So you see many, many TikTok videos that cover the same book again and again and again. I think you can see this to a lesser extent among BookTubers who always seem to talk about the same books that have been published in recent years.

The idea that BookTokkers feel compelled to buy tens of books per month is disturbing, as it means the industry is cultivating hording behavior among readers. Now, I like to collect books as much as the next person, and I have hundreds of books in my TBR pile. But in recent years, the vast majority of those books have been from library books sales or used bookstores as much as anything. I also find it a bit weird that people will buy books just so they can produce a "book haul" video. I see a bunch of these in my YouTube feed as well, but I generally ignore them because I don't care. I'll post a picture of my own book hauls on this here website (see below!) but that's as far as it goes.

It will be interesting to see how the changes wrought by social media on reading habits plays out in the next few years. AI-written books are certainly going to become a thing. I remember last year after the Maui wildfire, I suddenly saw a book written about the wildfire that was published on Amazon only a few days after the start of the wildfire. Investigating the author revealed "he" was writing a book a month, which seems very unlikely. My conclusion was someone was experimenting with AI-produced books to push the boundaries of AI's capabilities in that area. Oh, and all of the books had several 5-star ratings on Amazon, of course.

READ WHAT YOU OWN CHALLENGE

Last week we talked about "gamification" in reading. One gamification strategy is the read-what-you-own challenge, where the goal is to read a set number of books before you buy any more. Dutch Greybeard accepted this challenge and now shares the results. Although he didn't quite meet his original goal of reading 50 books before buying any new ones, he did accomplish a deeper goal of reflecting on his reading habits and motivations. Before the challenge, he was buying dozens of books a month, but didn't know when--or if--he'd ever get around to reading them. Now, he has a much better understanding of how much he reads in a given year. He also sees the wisdom is putting off books that you may NOT actually read, but only purchased because of the FOMO--the fear of missing out. Everyone else was reading these books, so he felt like he was falling behind if he didn't at least own them himself with the intent to read them.

After going through this experience, Dutch Greybeard can now pace himself better and moderate his reading habits. Much of what he talks about is touched upon in the first video I posted above about TikTok ruining reading. Dutch Greybeard was trying to keep up with the cool kids instead of focusing in on his own motivations for reading good books. Sounds like he will have more enriching reading experiences going forward.

BOOKS BY MORONS

"Max Cossack" has a new book out in his Wilder Bunch series:

High Jingo begins with a young couple in love "spelunking" in a cave that isn't really a cave, but an abandoned mineshaft, a relic of a Gold Rush that wasn't really a "rush" but more of a Gold Kerfuffle that never materialized. The couple is assisted by a beer-loving husky dog which eschews the normal protocols of an archaeological dig and willy-nilly unearths an artifact with Hebrew letters on it. And the reader thinks, "This is not your every-day story!"

And that reader is correct. Once again, three generations of the Wilder Bunch take us on an historical, occasionally hysterical, adventure. The story is as old as pogroms in Eastern Europe and as new as Jewish students being abused by pro-terrorist elements paying full tuition even at 4th rate diploma mills. A ripping yarn, full of love, courage and righteous anger, it careens from Medieval Hungary to Israel to a small rural town in Minnesota and up the road to St. Paul. As the old movie line goes, "Fasten your seatbelts; You're in for a bumpy ride."

Available in eBook or Paperback or Audiobook at Amazon.com

Or only in paperback directly from the author on the author's own store, VWAM Books

PLUS: There is a 15% discount at VWAM Books for ACE people, good for all Max Cossack novels and all Ammo Grrrll collections as well. Just enter ACEDISCOUNT (one word, all CAPS) at checkout.

PROPER USE OF BOOKMARKS

Biden's Dog sent me an email recently asking me if he was the only one who used a bookmark to not only mark the page where he last stopped, but also indicated where on the page he stopped. He uses a simple post-it-note with arrows indicating his place on that page.

Me, I'll stick with repurposing land cards from Magic: The Gathering as I have thousands of them. They are also cheap (about $0.10 from your local game store) and sturdy enough to last through several books.

MORON RECOMMENDATIONS

I continue to dip into George MacDonald (in this case The Princess and the Goblin) and GK Chesterton. They were both prolific so I'll be doing this for years. Chesterton for his insight, wit and humor and superb writing which is a pleasure of its own. MacDonald for his ability to create worlds and characters that a small child can follow and enjoy but also appeal to adults. His imagination is as creative as any in literature and his ability to express that imagination is beyond my ability to praise sufficiently. It is easy to understand his influence on Lewis, Tolkien and others. If Shakespeare had written prose he might have approached MacDonald's level. Think of A Midsummer Night's Dream as a novel.

I find it interesting that there seem to be a lot of new editions of MacDonald's works. Apparently, there is a demand.
Posted by: JTB at November 17, 2024 09:26 AM (yTvNw)

Comment: As a lover of fantasy literature, I really, really need to read some George MacDonald. I keep hearing how he influenced great authors like Tolkien and Lewis. I like to read the stories that inspired others. I think it's great that there's an apparent demand--makes the author more accessible to modern readers.

Persuasion by Jane Austen is my latest foray into early 19th century English society. The story is a good one, featuring the middle child of a titled spendthrift widower who has no male heirs but does have an ego as big as Dallas (as we say). This middle child was nearly engaged but family objected to the young naval officer who proposed so the relationship was called off. Fortunately, love abides and the young couple meets after several years apart and each discovers their feelings have not changed. Boy gets girl in the end. The society is tightly structured and I found myself wondering how these people were able to endure it.

Posted by: Legally Sufficient at November 17, 2024 10:32 AM (rxCpr)

Comment: Jane Austen seems to have timeless appeal. I read Mansfield Park in college and was pleasantly surprised at how engaging the story was for me. As I get older, perhaps I shall revisit Austen's other works...

Last week I read for escapism and Christopher Taylor's Life Unworthy delivered. It opens with a scene from a Nazi death camp. The soldiers assigned to operate the gas chamber sense that something did not go right with their last group execution. When they open the door to the chamber, they're attacked and killed by a werewolf which escapes into Nazi-occupied Warsaw. This beast is then hunted by the Nazis, a doctor who wants to learn how to reproduce the beast, and a spiritualist whose motives are a mystery for most of the book. The man who has been cursed, is doing his best to keep the beast inside him under control while running from the Nazis and then becomes involved with a young Gypsy widow. Lots of interesting characters whose stories are woven together to create a very entertaining story.

Posted by: KatieFloyd at November 17, 2024 11:01 AM (FkuFp)

Comment: As usual, I like to highlight recommendations of Moron-authored books. Christopher R. Taylor took a long hiatus from the blog, but he's been posting regularly now, and it's good to have him back. I, too, enjoyed Life Unworthy. It gave us a sympathetic, if cursed, protagonist who knows he contains a terrible rage inside him, but he uses it for good by killing Nazis. Who can argue with that?

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

WHAT I'VE ACQUIRED THIS PAST WEEK:

Well, I went to my local library's book sale this week. I saw several folks I know, as usual. And I made out like a bandit, as usual.

• Star Wars - Han Solor at Stars' End by Brian Daley - This is one of the earliest novels in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, before there *was* such a thing as an EU.
• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois
• The Jesus Incident by Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom
• The City by Dean Koontz
• Demon Seed by Dean Koontz
• Midnight by Dean Koontz
• Brother Odd by Dean Koontz
• Odd Apocalypse by Dean Koontz
• Deeply Odd by Dean Koontz
• Saint Odd by Dean Koontz
• The Forbidden Door by Dean Koontz
• Seize the Night by Dean Koontz
• Strange Highways edited by Dean Koontz
• Tyrannosaur Canyon by Douglas Preston
• Blasphemy by Douglas Preston
• The Majipoor Chronicles by Robert Silverberg
• The Unwilling Warlord by Lawrence Watt-Evans
• Lords of the Sky by Angus Wells
• This Is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams
• The Select by F. Paul Wilson
• A Dictionary of Euphemisms & Other Doubletalk: Being a Compilation of Linguistic Fig Leaves and Verbal Flourishes for Artful Uses of the English Language by Hugh Rawson

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.

Saga of the Forgotten Warrior Book 4 - Tower of Silence by Larry Correia

As Correia reveals details about his world, we find out that there's a lot of hidden backstory, but Larry is pretty good about slowly doling out the exposition over time. We can now see that the history between humans and demons is vast and complicated. Much of what the humans believe has turned out to be lies and misinformation as the current ruling caste uses its power to remain in power. To acknowledge the claims of the casteless as the true heirs of the hero Ramorowan would overthrow society, though it's already teetering on the brink.

Saga of the Forgotten Warrior Book 5 - Graveyard of Demons by Larry Correia

Now that the demons believe the casteless have all been eliminated through the Great Extermination orchestrated by Grand Inquisitor Ormand, they are launching a major offensive operation against the humans, striking at the very heart of civilization deep in the middle of the continent, as far away from the hellish oceans as possible. Meanwhile, Ormand seeks to claim godhood by finding the source of the demons' power. Ashok and his allies continue to fight both the demons and the oppressive society that has led to the slaughter of countless innocents.

Weirdly, this series reminds me of both the Wizardry and Might and Magic computer games. I wonder if Larry every played those...

The Last King of Osten Ard Book 4 - The Navigator's Children by Tad Williams

One thing I really like about Tad Williams' epic series is that he always includes a synopsis of the previous books in the series so I don't feel like I have to re-read them in order to know what's going on. This means I can dive right into his last book in the series and feel like I'm all caught up. This books reveals the hidden history of the Tinukeda'ya, the mysterious changelings that traveled to Osten Ard countless aeons ago enslaved to the Sithi and Norns, who were all one people back then. The Norn Queen Utuk'ku wages war on both the mortals and Sithi to reach the Valley of Mists, where she hopes to accomplish her ultimate act of vengeance.

True to form, Williams provides plenty of exposition in the final book in the series, explaining just exactly what's been going on throughout the entire series up until this point. He still leaves plenty of mysteries for the characters, though, as there is so much background knowledge required, the main human characters are often befuddled and confused by events far beyond their understanding.

PREVIOUS SUNDAY MORNING BOOK THREAD - 11-17-2024 (NOTE: Do NOT comment on old threads!)

Tips, suggestions, recommendations, etc., can all be directed to perfessor -dot- squirrel -at- gmail -dot- com.

Disclaimer: No Morons were physically harmed in the making of this Sunday Morning Book Thread. It's a lot easier to hunt for books than it is for deer.

posted by Open Blogger at 09:00 AM

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