Just finished it, what a ****ing experience. Loved the self reference and the footnote labyrinth in chapter nine as well as all of the word puzzles and red herrings that probably weren't red herrings. I want to read it again to try to decode it some more, really figure out if there's any meaning to those lists, find all of the connotations of k and x, dig into the Whalestone letters more, and see if there's a way to find the content of the burned pages based on the index or if there's some kind of other message tucked away there. Pretty late in the book, one of the footnotes referenced the community college that I went to and that made me feel like I was losing myself to the book like Johnny was, but I think that mostly came from how well this book puts you in the shoes of all of its narrators in both direct and indirect ways.

Up next: Contact by Carl Sagan

https://i.postimg.cc/MKVd3GFx/31-F0-...-D6-BAABC5.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/Z5mjGhGN/B81-A1...1-A7-CA3-A.jpg

Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati by Robert Anton Wilson

Took me a while since I read it piecemeal

I’d say a lot of counterculture mythology started here.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...tangmanual.jpg


The Wu-Tang Manual by RZA

This is a great book. Much better than I expected. Lots of cool facts and philosophy

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...ost-light.jpeg

Lost Light by Michael Connelly

A pretty solid whodunnit if you’re in the mood for one.

Recently finished reading a semi-autobiographical novel called Cherry by Nico Walker. It's about a soldier who becomes a drug addict after he comes home from the war in Iraq and eventually becomes a criminal to support his habit.

My latest literary treasures have arrived!

Published 30 years ago, these two volumes remain the largest and most exhaustive collections of Asimov's science fiction ever printed. Comprising 86 of his best short stories, AsimovReviews calls them the definitive collection.

Delighted to have these join my Jules Verne and Ray Bradbury omnibus hardcovers. I'm going to need a larger coffee table.

https://i.imgur.com/1ypZyQ6l.jpg

Not a recommendation, but an achievement: just finished reading Foucault's Pendulum for the second time.

https://live.staticflickr.com/214/47...eb6cf21a_z.jpg

^ Bought this edition in 1990, because the book was much talked about on its release, but now, 30 years later, I have a much less charitable opinion of this over-long, over-indulgent and over-rated novel.

It's my theory that some novels survived because in the bad old pre-internet days people didn't have access to the instant entertainment that's available today. They had to "make do" with what they could find - rather like the way Victorians used to listen to each other playing the piano at home of an evening or, going furthur back, enjoying four-hours of eye-watering embroidery work while they waited for bedtime to come round. If so, I'd put this book in that category: imo it doesn't deliver much reward given the effort needed to work through its 650-odd pages.

Talk about long (winded) novels. Have you ever read Sarum? (aka Sarum: The Novel of England by Edward Rutherford) I was wondering if you did then what were your thoughts on it. Perhaps it's in the same category as Foucault's Pendulum. It's a book my friend brings up from time to time, and I was curious how good/bad it is.

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/com...48._SY475_.jpg

TFW you get paid by the word.

^ LOL. Yeah, that often seems to be an author's main motivation.

Sorry, Neapolitan, I've never heard of this book, but based solely on the comment on the cover, I would probably leave it on the shelf if I saw it in a bookshop.

:soapbox:

Novels about the old days are almost impossible to get right, imo. I'd much sooner read a genuine researched history or biography to help me imagine, or to give me an insight into, a period of the past.

Novels almost always have chunks of conversation in them, and in historical novels, this is the Achilles heel that shows what a stretch the whole historical re-creation is. Writers usually betray themselves by commiting one of two errors:-

i) they forget about the vocabulary of the period. For example Isabel Allende, who wrote a book set in the Victorian era. To her credit, she didn't have her characters saying, "Wow, that's cool", but she transplanted plenty of modern diction into her book.
ii) conversely, writers try so heard to sound "old-timey" that all their characters speak in a similar mock-biblical tone. Watch out, for instance , for the pregnant woman, who, in a historical novel, will announce, "I am with child." In a modern novel, there are so many ways to say this, which can reflect humour, despair, class, education, etc, but the novelist who has made the mistake of writing a historical novel just has the one clunky expression to work with.

Bottom Line : don't read historical novels. Make the effort and read something less artificial.