Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
It's a comic that breaks down and analyzes comics as a medium, from how it manages closure, to the abstractions it presents, to how time is depicted spatially.
Very good so far, gives me a window into the deeper artistic world of a medium I care for. Would heartily recommend if you care to assess comics and manga mechanically.
I used to assign segments of this book to students when I taught a Graphic Novel class. McCloud does a great job of explaining the medium using it as a vehicle throughout.
If you like books in a similar vein, "How to Read Literature Like a Professor" by Thomas Foster is a solid book to check out as well.
Fantastic, I'll check it out! I do want to learn to engage more with entertainment media of all forms on a more mechanical level, so this might be just for me
Great book. I do love the world he creates, it still holds up even now. His other books are just as good. I wish there were more cyberpunk books, I do love that genre.
Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor. A friend of mine turned me onto the book, Tharoor does a really good job of laying out how exactly the British Empire decimated in the indian region's economy through its brutal rule
Currently reading "The Kaiju Preservation Society" by John Scalzi. Lightweight, humorous sci-fi. Just recently finished "The Gentleman of Moscow" by Amor Towles, which is lovely storytelling if you enjoy character building. KPS is definitely a much different feel.
Depending on what you like to read, I would recommend both - but for different reasons.
I just finished KPS and loved it! It was fun in a "this entire thing is fucking ridiculous" sort of way that Scalzi (and the book itself) fully acknowledges.
"I lift things" started infiltrating my spoken phrases without me realizing it and I was like "wtf‽" when I realized.
Have you checked out "Fuzzy Nation", "Red Shirts", or the "Lock In" series? All fun stories by Scalzi in similar veins (Lock In is a bit more serious, but not like The Interdependency).
I really enjoyed Scalzi's Interdependency series. Definitely light compared to some (and there were arcs/characters I would have liked to see develop a bit more), but it's a decent enough ride.
Yeah The Interdependency felt like it really needs a few short stories in the same universe to cover a few of the characters and another novel at least for what happens after the ending!
Currently reading "The Kaiju Preservation Society" by John Scalzi.
This was a fun read. I enjoyed it enough to put Red Shirts on my reading list, just have not gotten around to it yet. If you want to stick with the Kaiju genre, Project Nemesis by Jeremy Robinson had a similar vibe.
About to finish The word for world is forest, by Ursula K. LeGuin
It's sci-fi, about the clash between Earth colonizers on a world covered by a forest and the people already living there.
Beautifully written and super short. She's able to show a lot in basically 100 pages
So I cannot recommend it enough! She's just so good at depicting other societies and putting and anthropological point of view
Check The left hand of darkness too if this caught your interest
Listening to To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf while I do chores. It's literature so I have to listen to it since there's no plot, really, and it's all thoughts inside people's heads, so far all on the same day.
Just finished book 2 in the Seraphina series, Shadow Scale, by Rachel Hartman. I almost didn't finish it because for most of the book the main character didn't have anything going in her favor and the relentless piling on of bad news made me anxious.
I've got to finish the other stories in Stories of Your Life and Others, by Ted Chiang, because I got it to read "Story of Your Life" after reading a thread on Kbin about the movie Arrival (which I had really enjoyed by apparently hadn't understood fully).
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. I'm maybe a quarter or a third of the way through it and I quite like it! It's been a slow-go mostly just because I'm not good at dedicating time to read. I recently got the audio book to make more progress while driving.
Patrick did a short cameo on the twitch show "Critical Role" which is a D&D campaign that is led and played by voice actors. It's incredible if you've never watched it. Patrick's role was a paladin and he was a little awkward with the format, but his character was very good and some of the notes left behind by him were incredible for building the story up even more even after he left.
I'm finishing up "Summer Reading" by Jenn McKinlay, about an out of work chef who visits family on Martha's Vineyard to chaperone her 14 year old half brother while the parents are away for the summer. She is dyslexic and ends up falling for a local librarian. Very much a summer "beach read" type book and so far really entertaining. I love Jenn's cozy mysteries and just started reading her stand-alone contemporaries. I love her characters and the humor she adds to all her books.
Next up is The 5 Years Before You Retire by Emily Guy Birken, a retirement planning book. Have to get my ducks in a row for retirement in a few years!
Currently Heaven & Hell by Bart Ehrman about where the concepts of heaven and hell actually came from - surprisingly, they're not really mentioned in the Bible.
Some stuff about Greek and Roman philosophy and I'm imagining later in the book it'll get into his the Church retconned Hell into Christianity which is what I'm looking forward to finding out!
Leviathan Falls James S. A. Corey / Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck
Science Fiction / Space Opera
I'm about half way in and enjoying it so far.
As for recommending it ... well, it's book 9 in a series that also includes a ton of short stories. I'd definitely recommend the series, but wouldn't recommend starting here!
I'd also highly recommend the show since it was a fantastic bit of story telling and thee authors (mostly Ty from what I gather) were involved and had writing input on.
Quick series summary stolen from Wikipedia and edited to not give overall spoilers:
The Expanse is set in a future in which humanity has colonized much of the Solar System, but does not have interstellar travel. The G-force exerted during acceleration when travelling across the Solar System is debilitating without the use of special drugs. In the asteroid belt and beyond, tensions are rising between Earth's United Nations, Mars, and the outer planets. The residents of the outer planets have developed a creole language due to their physical isolation from Earth and Mars. The series initially takes place in the Solar System, using many real locations such as Ceres and Eros in the asteroid belt, several moons of Jupiter, with Ganymede and Europa the most developed, and small science bases as far out as Phoebe around Saturn and Titania around Uranus, as well as well-established domed and underground settlements on Mars and the Moon.
Also - as a sidenote: Not really sold on Bookwyrm being a replacement for Goodreads, but I hope it becomes one!
Still trudging ever so slowly through Crossroads of Twilight. I've barely been reading lately, hopefully I can find the willpower to finish it out so I can move on to the next books which I've heard get more interesting.
Just started the last Witcher book (The Lady of the Lake) by Andrzej Sapkowski. Far better than the show, although I do think I enjoyed the earlier books more than the later ones.
Hyperion is my next in line to read. I caught a thread on reddit before leaving about best scifi books to read aside from the classics and Hyperion was way up there in recommendations. I'm pretty excited for it.
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