What are you reading at the moment?

[Petitioner's City]

MODS - if this isn't suitable for this section, does it fit in Amicus Aedes? 

 

Hey all, it's a bit of a downtime for me with BL books (waiting on certain releases, I guess), so instead main focusing on other things. I just wanted to ask all you voracious readers what you are reading at the moment - fiction, non-fiction, any genre or book type. I'm always on the lookout for new books! I don't know if people want to talk about why, but it's more a way to list things which might catch other fraters' eyes and spread our literary loves, as well as learn more about one another and our likes. 

 

Currently I'm reading a mix - but the main ones for fun are Diarmaid McCulloch's Thomas Cromwell book, James SA Corey's Abaddon's Gate, and Pratchett's final novel, The Shepard's Crown, plus an on-and-off read of Darren McGarvey's Poverty Safari.

 

As a warning, essential to this thread is no judgement or criticism of one another, nor any personal attacks! 

[m0nolith]

Jaghatai Khan: Warhawk of Chogoris by Chirs Wraight.

So far, like all of Wraight's writing, its awesome!

[Wulfburk]

Reading Legacy of Dorn, Mike Lee. Im enjoying it, a different perspective on the war for rynn's world. Though i would also like to read a novel on the aftermath of the war for the crimson fists, their following campaigns after recovering from the battle.

[N1SB]

Thanks for letting me know about Pratchett's latest book, I missed it.

 

I have but 1 recommendation, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.  It was written by a historian, looking at the course of human history and just forecasting where it will go based on its current trajectory.  It is the most sci-fi non-fiction book I've ever read and I recommend it because it really helps me contextualise things like Space Marines and the Adeptus Mechanicus.

 

I'll give a few examples of what the historian talks about.

 

More people today die from suicide than war - war never changes, even unto the year 40,000, but in recent years we got to a point that more people kill themselves than each other.  On a related note, more people die from obesity than famine.  How did we get to this point, and what does it mean going forward?

 

Death isn't thought of in the same way as previously in human history, it's just an engineering problem now - the flesh is weak, we know that, but we've gotten to a point where we don't even conceptualise death in the same way anymore.  It's more like a terms of lease that we can extend by throwing money at it in the form of medical research and then the resulting drugs.  Death is more like a bug rather than a feature of life.  But things like life-extending health services have always been expensive, does it mean that the end of life isn't so much how we think of death even today, but a lack of wealth to continue life?

 

Organisms are algorithms - this was my absolute favourite section/theme/concept.  We used to write code for computers (I started out as a website designer, back when we still coded in Notepad rather than use pre-made templates to make them), and computers did what we coded them to do.  Now, with predictive Google searches, recommendations based on previous purchases or Likes, computers are programming us to do things they think we want to do.  So who's the master now?

 

Disclaimer - it's not at all political (if for no other reason than the historian looks at things so macroscopically he doesn't care about any one country/party/politician/etc.), in fact it was written in 2015, but he already predicted the problem of how people are being provided news based on previous reading habits and Likes.

 

I did not expect to like this book.  It was given to me by a PhD who was probably showing off the fact she has a PhD, but like an algorithm I get given book, I read it.  It was the most 40k-ish non-40k book I ever read and you could literally take every chapter of this book and each writes a sci-fi short story in your head.  I don't recommend it to just anyone, but because all our brains are tuned to the year 40,000 (or 30,000 at least), this book actually thinks in that scope.  It's a hefty, high brow read, but surprisingly relevant to Our Hobby.

[Kelborn]

Read Spear of the Emperor, then Corax: Lord of the Shadows and now Kingsblade.

 

What to say?

SotE was amazing!

Corax was very good!

 

Kingsblade is something different as it focuses on Imperial Knights for a change. Bit of a adventure/ fantasy story mixed with 40K. Enjoying it quite a lot thus far. Read the short Becoming beforehand and this was a great addition to Kingsblade. And it is even more enjoyable with the latest Knight codex as a background-ish reference book.