re: What are you reading?

I just finished Write Your Heart Out by Rebecca McClahan. Good book on writing for us amateur and even professional writers. More conversational but does contain recommendations.

I've also been sampling from The Oxford Book of English Short Stories edited by A.S. Byatt and Calling The Wind - 20th Century African American Short Stories, edited by Clarence Major. Both contain some good stories taken from a long range of time.

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It's defintiely not a topic I'd generally seek out but I'm really enjoying it so far abotu a quarter of the way through.

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Same here.. I usually check Amazon and see what books are trending there and it was a top book of 2022… almost impossible to get through my library as the demand was so high.. 40,000 reviews on Amazon

So I finally got it and I like it.. the author is definitely slow playing some details about the characters and trickling info out about them

Curious to see how it goes

Blindsight, Peter Watts.

Halfway through. Went in thinking the book might crumble under the weight of all the ideas crammed in here. but so far it's pretty great hard sci fi.

Finished Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow this morning. It was a good book and I enjoyed it. I do not have regrets about my time reading it and it was overall a nice pleasant read. Not sure if it truly was the best book of 2022 like it has been awarded but whatever. I will say, it was almost distracting the amount of wokeness that was interspersed throughout which kind of took me out of the book a few times. I know that for an author who looks like this person does, who has spent their life mostly in New York and LA, who wrote a book in 2022, that there would likely be some of that in there. And I mean it's THEIR work of art so I'm not saying she's wrong or anythnig like that. But man it seemed to beat the reader over the head iwht it often times for no reason at all. Two or three times ok sure, whatever, but it became so frequent that I started jotting down a running list.

This will have SPOIILERS for the book if you do not want to read further:

-Their video game character Ichigo is orginally genderless. This one is pretty harmless and minor since it's a video game afterall, but it's not like it's a monster or a creature or something that wouldn't hav ea gender. It's a human child wearing clothing so it stands to reason it'd be a boy or girl. They eventaully call him a boy but orgiianlly want the player to let them decide for theirself
-Sam is a shy loner crippled person that is not very experiernced in the ways of sex. But we learn that he's had 4 sexual partners in his life, one of which was another male.
-Sadie and her friend Zoe end up kissing and being attracted to each other
-Two programmers anthony and I can't remember hte other one are gay.
-We get a full chapter on how awesome it is that the aforementioned gay programmers go to SF to get married, but then the disaster of it being ripped away from them, so they let gays get married in their game.
-Once they let gays marry in their game, the right wing gun nuts come out and shoot up the office. Of course, it was VERY specifically stated that boht the shooters were white. That's not relevant to the plot or storyline in any way but we were told multiple time sthey were both white boys. One of htem says somethign along the lines of "what's with all the gay shite in your games?" We get a few sentences on senseless gun violence. This part was just truly eye-rolling and made me think of jussie smollet and the hundreds of other real life examples of the straight white conservative male being demonized.
-There's a sentece talking about Shakespeare and referes to him as a "them" I think, or at the very least doesnt' assume his gender. We're talking about a real life human man, named William, but apparently we dont' know what he'd want to pronoun himself.
-There's a character in a game called alabaster brown that is a man and is played by a man but again the author goes out of her way to call him "they"
-Yet another gay marriage in this new game
-Towards the end one of the main charactres is now a teacher and remakrs that nearly half the class is female, "or at least presents themselves as such". That was another super eye roll moment that exists simply to get liberal backpats and serves no actual puropse. I mean honestly....if the "or presents themselves as such" part of the sentence wasn' included would anything in the book change at all? Woudl anyone be offended by pointing out the class was half female? It was shoehorned in there just because.


I know I'm rambling and will probably get comments about how I'm overreacting and those are dumb opinions or whatever. But it's just another instance of not being able to turn anywhere in 2023 without being beat over hte head with this dumb shite. And again, despite all of the above, I did enjoy the book! It just would have been even MORE enjoyable if the gay pronounless shite wasn't unnecessairly forced into it.

Tripwire by Lee Child currently. Half way done and starting to get good, finally