Books

Just starting "The Time Regulation Institute," by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (translated).

I'm most of the way through Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. Same guy that wrote The Martian (the book that got very faithfully adapted into a movie with Matt Damon) and this book is jam-packed with just as much real-world science.

If you've never read (or seen) The Martian, here's the basic premise: the year is 2040-something and NASA has started manned missions to Mars. Our hero Mark Watney is one of six crew aboard Ares 5, which is planned to spend 30 sols (Martian days -- 37 minutes longer than an Earth day) on the planet and do research. On Sol 6 of those 30, there's a massive dust storm with winds strong enough that they threaten to make the rocket for the return journey tip over, leaving them stranded on Mars, if they don't abort now. Just one problem: Mark is nowhere to be seen. The dust storm is too thick to see through, and the last thing his team saw just before his radio went dead was all his vital signs drop to zero. The captain searches for him for as long as she can, but eventually she's forced to call it off and return home with only five of the six crew.

Eight hours later, Mark wakes up, says "ow, my everything", figures out that the main communications antenna that the storm ripped off the HAB (astronaut house), punctured his suit, and grazed his side poked a hole straight through his suit's bio monitor as it did so (hence why his team saw his vitals drop), looks over at the empty launch pad, and realizes he is now the only human on Mars and the first one to be stranded there. The rest of the book is him using every scientific trick in the book to keep himself alive until he can reach the Ares 6 landing site where there's another rocket set up. As a not-too-spoilery example, Thanksgiving was going to happen while the team was there, so NASA sent them with whole, uncooked potatoes among other things with which to prepare a Thanksgiving feast. He combines Martian dirt with some natural fertilizer (read: his own poop) to make fertile soil, and gets water by recombining hydrazine (leftover rocket fuel the return rocket didn't need) with oxygen in a rather terrifying method that involves small amounts of fire, then covers the floor of the HAB in soil and plants the potatoes. It's a very cool book. My one gripe with it is that the protagonist is a bit of a jerk. He's very full of himself and he swears a lot.

The protagonist of Andy Weir's next book, Project Hail Mary, is neither of those things. He wakes up, amnesiac, on board a spacecraft, and quicklu discovers that its other two crewmembers did not survive the medically induced coma they were placed in for the journey. He has a flashback and remembers why he is here: some extraterrestrial bacterium-esque life form dubbed "astrophage" that feeds off of stars has started feeding off the Sun, and at the rate it's getting dimmer, within 20 years the Earth will get cold enough that humans are looking at extinction. Additional astronomy revealed all the stars in our stellar neighborhood were infected with astrophage, and all but one were getting dimmer. Project Hail Mary, the spacecraft he's on, is (as the name implies) humanity's last-ditch effort to save themselves: take three of their best astronauts, yeet them at that star, and pray they find out why it's not getting dimmer and report back to Earth in time to save the human race. I don't want to spoil this book too much, because it's super good, but they go super in depth about the alien life form (which it turns out is DNA-based and uses truly staggering amounts of infrared light to propel itself between the Earth and Venus, whose carbon dioxide filled atmosphere is necessary for it to breed, and stores the solar energy it collects by directly converting it to mass (E=mc²) in the form of neutrinos).

There's also a huge surprise waiting for him at his destination star which I flatly refuse to spoil. You're just going to have to read it for yourself, although I can practically guarantee you'll be just as excited as I was.

Just finished Persepolis Rising and eagerly awaiting to get my hands on Tiamath's Wrath from my library. Fiction has always been my goto in such times and never once has it disappointed me.

Sorting the Beef from the Bull: The Science of Food Fraud Forensics. I saw it mentioned in one of the threads about the recent apple sauce food poisoning, and it's very interesting (whoever that was, if you are reading it, thank you!).

The One Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by NK Jemisin.

It's basically this:

I just finished reading Leech, by Hiron Ennes. Very strange book, some described as Gothic horror science fiction. Thought provoking, but weird.

My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Red

Trying to capture the nuances of writing in first person.

Exile

Book 2 in the chronological order of The Legend of Drizzt series

Not sure what happened but I used to knock back 50-80 books a year, now I barely read anymore. I'm trying to get back into it with all the books being on every electronic device so I can read wherever, and I have two physical copies of the books from different releases. Yet I'm still dragging my feet getting through it.

The frustrating thing is once I get into the book I don't want to put it down, but once I stop reading it's hard to start again.

I miss reading.

Incidentally, I was looking at the Kobo readers recently and they look pretty neat!

"My Heart Is A Chainsaw" by Steven Graham Jones

Currently reading A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine. There's also a first book called A Memory Called Empire and both are very good.

Just started reading Erich Maria Remarque - Three Comrades. I'm really liking it so far.

I'm doing a beta-read. Well written, great ideas, etc. Unfortunately, the book is turning out to be much darker than I'm comfortable with. I'll probably try to get to the halfway point before deciding to give up.

Gnomon. A massive disappointment.

Berserk

Children of Ruin, by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

It's the sequel to Children of Time that won the Hugo award a few years ago.

Children of time may be the best science fiction book I've ever read (out of hundreds), and I've been devouring everything else by Tchaikovsky ever since.

The dude has range, and has been incredibly prolific over his career.

And the writing style is incredible. He makes incredibly complex concepts/plots very very easy to understand and follow.

What device is that?

Hey I have The Wager in my list, but right now I'm reading The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, it's excellent. Going really slow because it contains so much information, I read a few pages and that sends me in a research spiral for an hour and a thoughts spirals for the day.

I'm currently reading Fool's Fate, the third in the Tawny Man trilogy, which itself is the 3rd trilogy in the Realm of the Elderlings sequence by Robin Hobb. I've loved every book so far and this is no exception although

Poor Fitz has had a shit life so far. I'm hoping he gets some sort of happiness before the end of this one.

Dungeon Crawler Carl and Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Sanderson

It's fucking great!

Just started raft by Stephen Baxter, little concerned when I found out there are a dozen more books, roughly.

Digging the first though, so...

Currently about a third of the way through "Babel: Or, The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Translator's Rebellion" by R.F. Kuang.

It's pretty good so far, but also I'm really still waiting for the plot to kick into gear, lots of wonderful world building has been taking place so far.

Also, you and I have the same Kobo! I'm a fan of this device, and haven't read a physical book since last June.