Books - What are you reading?

I look forward to reading your book.

That sound amazing. I might even read that

Yeah I really enjoyed it! Think it was turned into a film a few years ago, not sure it was any good though

I thought that sounds like a film from a few years ago but the film I was thinking of was a true story of a gulag escapee who walked to India
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1023114/

Apparently based on this book with great reviews The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom by Slavomir Rawicz

Slavomir Rawicz was a young Polish cavalry officer. On 19 November 1939 he was arrested by the Russians and after brutal interrogation he was sentenced to twenty-five years in a gulag.

After a three-month journey in the dead of winter to Siberia, life in a Soviet labour camp meant enduring hunger, extreme cold, untreated wounds and illnesses and facing the daily risk of arbitrary execution. Realising that to remain meant almost certain death, Rawicz, along with six companions, escaped. In June 1941, they crossed the trans-Siberian railway and headed south, climbing into Tibet and freedom in British India nine months later, in March 1942, having travelled over four thousand miles on foot through some of the harshest regions in the world, including the Gobi Desert, Tibet and the Himalayas.

First published in 1956, this is one of the greatest true stories of escape, adventure and survival against all odds.

J-pod is pretty good. Not sure how it resonates now everyone WFH

I’m 100 pages in already, it’s v readable so far!

Gobbled up Hyperion. It's a fucking banger, a stone cold sci fi classic. Works so well on every level, as a story and as a story about stories. I would recommend Chapter 4 - Sol Weintraub's chapter - to anyone - sci fi fan or not - as a self-contained short, and a masterclass in what you can achieve in genre fiction when you've got yourself a solid conceit to work with. I sobbed my way through the latter parts of that chapter.

Deliberating whether it's a good idea to read the sequel, or whether I just let this stand alone.

Onto Vurt now. Not sure where I'll go after that. Maybe some Ursula Le Guin.

I have no doubt that some people try to construct racist theories from it all

They do; I've seen this increasingly showing up online. The theory seems to be that the earlier migrants were smarter and evolved more when separate from the bulk of humanity. Since there's been more Neanderthal DNA found in populations outside Africa, this is then used to argue for African inferiority.

I look forward to reading your book.

@t-v Von Daniken wrote books. People don't have to write their own books to refute the arguments.

About to reread “House of Leaves “ by Mark Danielewski .
It’s very immersive and really unsettling. It even affected my sleep when I read it for the first time during the covid lockdown.

I've always wanted to read that.

I'll (re)add it to the list.

Read more Dan Simmons?
Carrion Comfort or Drood

Oh for sure, Hyperion is the first of his books that I’ve read and my interest is extremely piqued. I’ll be heading back for more.

Not sure where I'll go after that.

Maybe Pierce Brown's Red Rising? I read the first three books recently (which are a self-contained trilogy in their own right), and while the series has been widely compared to GoT and Hunger Games, the novel that kept coming to mind when I read the first Red Rising was Alfred Bester's "The stars my destination". Not saying it's ever going to be a genre-shaking classic on the same scale, but it has a lot of the same energy. Rage and the struggle to control it, mostly.

I had not heard of these books before, but a cursory google put them on my ‘to read’ list, tyvm

I have a vague recollection that the Hyperion books get less good after the first, but I also remember just really enjoying the further fleshing out of the universe, regardless. It's a great mix of hard-sci fi work building and the more poetic weirdness he scatters through it all.

I'm currently reading Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Really enjoying it so far (about 60% through I think). The penal colony setting is bleak, as is the wider political context. The alien planet and associated flora and fauna is fascinating. Interestingly, it reminds me of the Scavengers Reign series I watched recently on Netflix, which I would also recommend to any sci-fi nerds who've not seen it yet.

Adrian Tchaikovsky

I've enjoyed quite a lot of his stuff.

Danny the Champion of the World. Albeit at bedtime.

Forgot how good it was.

Likewise - I've read the Children of Time series and the Architecture series and I'm exploring his other stuff now.

I would say the remaining 3 Hyperion books are well worth reading. they aren't quite as satisfying as the first, but they definitely don't detract from it and the overall story is quite something. The ending of the last book left me somewhat emotional.

The other masterpiece of his is The Terror. I refused to watch the TV show because I love that book so much. Again a very emotional ending.

I just finished the audio book of Children of Time. Wasn't massive fan to be honest. It was almost interesting but the political commentary felt quite shallow and clunky. Are the rest of the series any good or of the first one wasn't for me should I avoid?

Oh, another recommendation just came to mine. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It documents....one day in the life.... of a prisoner in a Siberian gulag. It's pretty compact, I think I read it one sitting. I remember liking it a lot.

People don't have to write their own books to refute the arguments.

Thank you, I am aware. I think you are also aware that effective refutation usually involves some reference to research, or secondary sources? I think anyone who has read a bit in this space knows there is an active debate among expert practitioners over whether Neanderthal populations were replaced or assimilated by Homo Sapiens. I also think Slimak's contribution deserves respect, not least because he has spent countless difficult hours digging to try and enrich our understanding. Not to say that makes his view definitive.

Oh what an amazing book that was when I was about 10

I think you are also aware that effective refutation usually involves some reference to research, or secondary sources?

Well, that would have been a more reasonable response to Oliver than "You didn't write a book", but intellectual arguments against the book, such as Oliver made, aren't unreasonable. If they're not present, people are just playing a "the books I read are better than the book you read" dick-sizing game. "These aren't arguments you can confidently make about the way Neanderthals thought, given the lack of evidence" is a reasonable argument. "Here's the evidence you missed that does validate the argument and this is why it's important" would be a reasonable response. "You didn't write a book" isn't.