Books - What are you reading?

I loved Treacle Walker, it made me want to go back and read all his other stuff again.

Seconding EB's recommendation for WHH's House on the Borderland

Got a copy of this now, so will read soon. Got distracted by the Slow Horses books. On Spook Street now. Will prob give them a rest after this one for a while.

I'll give Treacle Walker a look too! Thanks

Treacle Walker is a great name! Cheers for the recommendation

I grew up reading Alan Garner's children's books, but didn't realise for a while he'd moved on to writing more adult-accessible things. But even back when he was labelled as "just" a children's author, he was writing some psychologically hefty stories. He was making the Welsh countryside scary nearly 60 years ago with "The Owl Service", but for sheer emotional depth I'd recommend "The Stone Book Quartet" from that era of his writing.

A few weeks in Spain gave me some solid reading time last month, I got through

You may never see us again - interesting Succession-esque unauthorised biography

Ulysses - thought it was about time I read it, found it hard going but was interesting reading about places my dad told me stories about in Dublin and Dún Laoghaire

Will - Will Smith autobiography, good fun in parts, interesting in others but covered with a big dollop of Hollywood celeb bullshit

Demon Copperhead - story about life struggles in Lee County America, can’t recommend highly enough

A Confederacy of Dunces - about the life and times of Ignatius J. Reilly of New Orleans, good fun

Finally finished The Dancers at the End of Time. Took a lot more to get through than I was expecting - very much unlike the rest of Moorcock’s stuff, which is big on ideas but also scant on details and big on plot. This was big on ideas but short on the adventure. I’m glad I read it, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it except to the most committed Moorcock fan. Best to stick with Elric and Corum.

On to Hyperion next, I think. Or possibly Vurt. Hoping for a bit more of an easy read tbh.

I think Hyperion is next on my reading list. Although I should probably try and read something other than sci-fi after blasting through Abaddon's Gate (absolute trash but very entertaining trash).

Just finished 'Yellowface' by R. F. Kuang. Stops short of being truly good, but funny and insightful enough to be worth a read. I reckon I learned quite a bit about how the publishing industry works.

Hah, whereas my aim for the year is to only read sci fi and fantasy. Just leaning in to what I like the most in the hopes of restarting previous good reading habits.

Can anyone recommend a good holocaust survivor or similar book. Doesn’t have to be holocaust though.

My wife needs a book for holiday and she finds these types of books really interesting.

Viktor Frankl - man's search for meaning
Primo Levi - if this is a man

If she just likes survivor stories then Endurance by Alfred Lansing and The Tiger by. John Vaillant are both fantastic

I read The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz To Warn The World by Jonathan Freedland last summer. It's an incredible story and very well written.

Madhouse At The End Of The Earth by Julian Sancton is an interesting read. About the crew of the Belgica, a ship trying to make it to the South Pole in 1897 which got stuck in the ice for years on end. Pretty harrowing stuff! Non fiction if that's what she's after.

I think it’s more the survivor story than anything else. Human interest overcoming

+1 for Primo Levi. If This Is a Man / The Truce. Probably the best writing about the holocaust from the survivor’s perspective. The Drowned and the Saved for a more theoretical approach to his experiences.

As far as my feet will carry me by Josef M. Bauer. It's not a holocaust survivor story but it is the true story of a German soldier sentenced to 25 years in a Siberian labour camp who escaped and walked 8,000 miles across Siberia. Really good read.

Just finished this.

It makes a compelling case that Neanderthals were fundamentally a divergent intelligence / consciousness from Sapiens, primarily observed in their Mousterian technology. It also argues strongly that Sapiens eliminated Neanderthals on contact. Quite remarkably it documents that Neanderthals survived in the Arctic circle until ~ 28k years ago, having disappeared from most of Eurasia ~45k years ago. I also learnt that there have only been 40 Neanderthal skeletons discovered, which seems an incredibly small number.

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Not sure Hyperion is that easy of a read. I very much enjoyed Vurt, although it was a long time ago I read it...

it's all fun & games until the Shrike turns up :(

Is anything by Douglas Copeland post 'Microserfs' worth reading?
Picked up 'Generation A' and 'J-Pod' at my local freebie place, but not sure they're worth the investment in terms of time spent reading them.

makes a compelling case that Neanderthals were ...

I don't have a scientifically based rebuttal, but on the whole I am extremely skeptical of anyone ascribing positive traits to Neaderthals. Seeing as only European whiteys seem to carry their genes, their supposed superiority in northern climates bla bla.. could become just another rallying point for racist knuckleheads.

EDIT: I am not saying the person making interesting claims about Neanderthals is racist, but I am saying they should thread extremely carefully.

It makes a compelling case that Neanderthals were fundamentally a divergent intelligence / consciousness from Sapiens, primarily observed in their Mousterian technology. It also argues strongly that Sapiens eliminated Neanderthals on contact. Quite remarkably it documents that Neanderthals survived in the Arctic circle until ~ 28k years ago, having disappeared from most of Eurasia ~45k years ago. I also learnt that there have only been 40 Neanderthal skeletons discovered, which seems an incredibly small number.

I have every sympathy for his overall approach, which is to try and make conclusions he draws relevant to present times. However, I think he is wrong on some of his conclusions (in particular the idea of a 'divergent intelligence', which is absolute and utter nonsense), and that many of them are rather underdetermined by the evidence, no matter how enthusiastically and persuasively he argues. I think that there is nothing of difference between 'Neanderthals' (descendants of humans who migrated from Africa much earlier before there was, for some reason, a long gap in migration) and later arrivals that can't be explained by two factors--numbers and culture. He denies the latter by claiming the consistency of finds shows that it can't be culture, but I think that's wrong.

'Neanderthals' didn't go 'extinct'--no doubt many were murdered in conflict, as it's humans we're talking about--, but many were simply subsumed into the new, much larger, populations that arrived. There were never many of these early Europeans, and their presence is a small trace in the modern genetic record, but it's there, wherever the relations were on the spectrum from marriage to rape. There will have been areas where the land could support both the old and the new populations, and where relations will have been predominantly civil rather than unfriendly, so that intermingling occurred.

Europe was, at that time, a much more hostile environment for humans than Africa, where humans had made their presence felt for much longer, and the numbers of early Europeans remained very low. This meant less cultural centralisation, lack of contact, lack of travel, and lack of cultural exchange compared to Africa, which I believe saw a human population explosion that caused greatly increased levels of migration owing to people not knowing how to use the land well to support so many, and because of the inevitable environmental damage and wars that will have resulted from this.

'Mousterian' technology wasn't limited to 'Neanderthals', but is found in all sorts of strata over a long period of time. I think that it persisted in Europe for longer is merely evidence of earlier migration.

The evidence as to 'Neanderthal' skin colour is inconclusive at best:

Neandertal genes have little to do with the variation that we see among people today.

https://johnhawks.net/weblog/what-color-were-neandertals/

I have no doubt that some people try to construct racist theories from it all, but I think the main way in which they have been used in the past has been as 'primitive' compared to us incredibly sophisticated (not) modern humans. That's not to deny that archaeology has been used to make racist points in the past, e.g. the supposed lack of major realms in sub-Saharan Africa in the past, which supposedly pointed to European superiority (both bollocks, of course). The best way of characterising these past 'scientific' points of view on Africa is as ignorance. :)

By the way, 'Neanderthal' genes do have traces in African populations, just not as strongly as in Europe, pointing to more outward than return migration.

Recently read Dune about 20 years after everyone else. I now understand why it's so beloved and it's nice to see that Hollywood did a good job with it.

Currently reading Where We Come From: Rap, Home and Hope in Modern Britain by Aniefiok Ekpoudom. It's an incredibly moving book about forgotten corners of Britain and the music that's thrived in adversity there even if, like me, you're not a huge Grime/Drill/UK Rap head.

Currently on the lookout for novel recommendations if anyone's got anything?

Based on paleogenetics Simak argues that the presence of Neanderthal DNA in Sapiens genes happened mainly due to genetic exchanges in Asia around 100k years ago, rather than in Europe around 45k years ago.