The Voluptuous Horror of Tungsten Peerts's 2020 Reading Record

Enjoyed your Neil Stephenson rant. Welcome. Hope you hang around and figure out however it is this group works. You’re reading some fascinating stuff.

>3 dchaikin: Welcome! Hope you can find some others here in the group to converse with. I also enjoyed your Stephenson post. Back ages ago, sometime after Cryptonomicon was published, I was facilitating an SF book/discussion group and enough of the group (men & a few women) had read it for spontaneously a discussion to srmtsrt about whether or not it should be designated a “guy book” (answer: yes)

Come to think of it, I did read Stephenson's Diamond Age (so long ago!). I was going to ask you who you follow in the SF genre but I just checked out the books we "share" and consider that list an interesting mix. I don't read that much SF anymore, maybe only one or two a year. I did just read an Adam Roberts. Michael recently finished the latest William Gibson. Did you ever go to the literary SF/F convention that used to held each July in Burlington but now is in Quincy?

VanderMeer is one of those authors who rarely writes the same book twice, like Adam Roberts, China Mieville..etc. You might like his Borne....

>10 tungsten_peerts: We had Jeff and Ann up here in NH around 2005/6 when I was still booking the events for the bookstore. Both recommended—by way of restrained, but excited low voices (as if they were letting me in on a secret) asking me "Have you read...." Clare Dudman's One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead and her 98 Reasons for Being to me that day. I read both books (which are not SF/F) very soon after and loved both (the books).

Edited to fix title of book

>2 tungsten_peerts: Whatever you do, don't read Snow Crash. So many cool ideas but also big info dumps.

What a fascinating bunch of books you have read or are reading. I admire your breadth--not corporeal breadth, I hasten to add.

I am behind in SF, too. There is so much of it published now, who could keep up? I haven't caught the Gene Wolfe bug yet. I don't understand why Chryptonomicon is a guy's book. I loved it. The bicycle chain part had me LOL, and the part about the mine in WWII was completely entrancing.

Have you tried the author Jemisen? My best find of the last five years was K. J. Parker. Start with Devices and Desires, which is book one of the Engineer trilogy. I wish I could read that for the first time.

>2 tungsten_peerts: I started Anathem but found it oppressive

It is supposed to be :) . I tried to read it probably 10 times until it took - once you get into the story, it actually makes sense. But if it does not work for you, that's fine :) Welcome! :)

>Glenn, The Book of the New Sun menaces me too. And I agree with you about Heinlein (I have an unrepentant love for his work). I like Neal Stephenson more than you do--I made it through the Baroque Cycle, although it was a slog at times. I look forward to reading your comments.

Haha! Once you start reading the Church Fathers, and I say this as a middling Catholic with a useless advanced degree in Anglo-Saxon hagiography, the shame sets in. It stems from Augustine's making you feel bad about your preoccupation with the pleasures or even perceived obligations here in the Earthly City, to wit, to have a really cool social media presence when you'd really rather be reading a book.

I say bravo for taking on St. Augustine during a time of pestilence and unrest. No better time!

About that hair: I put the no. 8 guard in my husband's Wahl clippers, and buzzed it off. Had I known how freeing this would be, I would have done it years ago.

Ever upward!

Goodness, you’re going to get me reading St Augustine. I’m catching up because I lost track of everyone’s thread as we started panicking and lockdown. Really enjoyed your scattered thought pieces. Leads to to note: From what I understand, Cezanne and Zola go together...but I haven’t read Zola. And: but Snow Crash is quite brilliant from an information perspective And: since you mentioned it in the what are you reading thread, ‪Pessoa‬ has seemed to come up everywhere. Might have to hunt down that path. And: how was/is the Stephen Marshak? (I’m technically a geologist of sorts) And, finally: sorry about Ducks

Marshak - hmm. I could probably use an update as i learned a lot from Earth: An Intimate History by paleontologist Richard Fortey. LT reminds me I read it in 2007! I was always partial to John McPhee, as he focuses in on the people and so highlights the nature of where these ideas come from. He has four dated books on geology, all collected together in Annals of a Former World. (I compare McPhee and Fortey in my review of Fortey - if read one of their books, this might entertain.)

I'm not a geologist, nor do I play one on TV, but I think McPhee is a great geology explainer, and he somehow makes rock formations lively (in a very slowwww way).

Cool about your geology interest. I think you did good to dodge the oil industry. I briefly met McPhee when he interviewed my professor for the last chapter in Annals (not in the previous books). It was at geology field camp when I was a undergrad and I had just got lost because I was stupid, and had found bear while lost and was not in the best mood. I didn’t know who he was at the time and when he told me what was doing (in his own way), I asked quite rudely how he could he write about geology if he was not a geologist. He gave me a remarkably polite and considerate answer.

>37 lisapeet: I completely agree, Lisa.

>35 dchaikin: I'm still partial to Rough-Hewn Land for a more updated geologic reterospective or Marcia Bjornerud on just about anything she has to say. They are equally a bit more lively to boot. Although McPhee and Annals is forever treasured and loved.

>41 tungsten_peerts: 🙂 (Bob...) I don’t know anything about the Prothero and Dott. Dott was a Wisconsin geology expert, and wrote books on Wi geology for regular readers.

>42 tungsten_peerts: time for Dante!

>40 stretch: Rough-Hewn Land is now on my list of books to maybe read. Thanks!

I should add, Dante, of course, references Augustine.