>>7798

Tell me that you don't understand the concept of collective cabinet responsibility without telling me that you don't understand the concept of collective cabinet responsibility.

>>7796

There are various rumours, which obviously wouldn't be confirmed by anyone if they were true. The recruitment pool for the diplomatic service and the intelligence services are incredibly similar, so undoubtedly he has been approached.

>>7812
Agreed. If you want some decent contemporary SF I'd recommend The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi although the schtick is quite tired by the second in the trilogy and I've never attempted the third. It's reminiscent of Feersum Endjinn in some ways.

Makes Cambodia in the 90s sound like how I imagine Thailand in the 90s (ala The
Beach), except way more fucked up.

Not a deep book, little more than a journal. A fun trip though.

This book is absolutely fascinating.

I picked up Gardens of the Moon because The Malazan Book of the Fallen series regularly pops in books suggested for those who enjoyed The Black Company.

This was approximately 300 pages of setting the scene followed by ~400 pages where it clicks and finally starts to come together. It'd probably benefit from a re-read because you're thrown into this world with little in the way of introduction or hand-holding and there's a myriad of things to keep track of, most of which have silly fantasy names.

The Black Company is very character driven whereas this was more concerned with telling a story on an epic scale, where the characters aren't too fleshed out, so it's not something that'd immediately jump to mind if I was to suggest something to a fan of Glen Cook's writing. I might give the second book a try at some point, but that's not far off 1,000 pages and I think they keep getting longer as it goes on.

Help me out, lads. I've got myself into a real Christmas pickle.

I bought my mum 'The Five People You Meet in Heaven' which is a book that basically reads like one of the heart-warming episodes of the Twilight Zone. The premise is that you meet 5 people from your passed life when you die and yeah there's no surprises on the direction but it's emotional and I enjoyed reading it a few years back despite it being the type of book I'd have no interest in.

It was something I got for my mum this year along with a nice blanket because I thought she might enjoy it. She likes heaven stuff and dramas. It arrived early and she read the whole thing in one day before messaging me:
>I read the book. I hope your upbringing didn't affect your life to badly.

What the fuck have I done, the details blur with the sequel and I fear she's read too much into something and applied it to me.

>>7833

>I hope your upbringing didn't affect your life too badly.

My mum tells me that several times a year.

I've only read the synopsis, but I don't see anything to suggest that your gift would be taken as a thinly-veiled barb.

>>7833
I've read it (but again, 15-20 years ago) and my opinion of it was exactly the same as yours. I think there is a sad child bit, but I can't remember what it is, plus I have absolutely no idea what your childhood consisted of at any point. If you're looking for life advice, just have this exact conversation with your mum: "I just remember reading it and I thought you'd like it; it wasn't intended to send a message at all." "Okay, son. There's a bit where a child stabs his parents while yelling Rage Against the Machine lyrics." "Oh, I forgot that was in there." "Oh, but it relates to your childhood because XYZ." And so on. Have yourself a family moment talking about it.

Holy hell, this wasn't very good.

I'm not going to review them here but I've read 9 books this past fortnight, 6 of which were in the past week and 3 of which were in the past thirty-six hours. Not trying to show off, just making a note to myself.

Re-read The Wasp Factory. It wasn't anywhere near as good as I remembered.

The regular poster in this thread who reads a lot of science fiction would probably love Altered Carbon. It's fantastic in several ways, but it does have a couple of massive downsides that I didn't really enjoy. For example, multiple parts feel like they were written by a 13-year-old boy. Ooh, our grizzled futuristic detective is such a badass! Watch him kill people with awesome violence! Gnarly. Then he has sex with women, even though it's completely out of character and adds nothing to the plot! Radical. Nevertheless, it flows excellently, and its depiction of the future is outstanding, with numerous inventions depicted that didn't exist when the book was published in 2002, but which already exist now and work exactly as the book describes them.

The reason I read this book was because I had seen a fantastic quote, and I thought that if the whole book was that good, then it would be my favourite book of all time. The quote, as it turns out, does not feature in the storyline at all, but is merely quoted as something some activist figure said, decades before the story even began. It is attributed to a character who isn't even really a character; they are discussed but they never appear. That was disappointing, although there are other quotes from this character which are also very good.

The quote is below, if you don't want to read the whole book:
“The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference - the only difference in their eyes - between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.”

>>7839
>The regular poster in this thread who reads a lot of science fiction would probably love Altered Carbon.
I think there are two of us. I remember reading it some years ago and enjoying it at the time but even having also seen the TV series I can't remember anything about the plot.

>>7841
The plot is: in the future, you can download your personality onto a computer and then install it in a new body if you die. This helps people to keep living, in multiple bodies (but only one at a time, and with the memories of when you last uploaded yourself). A very rich man is killed, and comes back in a new body, and hires a grizzled ex-soldier to investigate his death, believing that he must have been murdered. The grizzled ex-soldier then runs the gamut of detective cliches while he speaks to various people who insist it must have just been a suicide so the rich man could get a new body.

Tchaikovsky has a gift for writing from the perspective of other forms of intelligence. In this case a service robot in a world after the apocalypse. The ending is a little trite but it does a great job of taking you on the journey of a robot obsessed with task lists, serving humans and who may or may not be a murderer but is convinced that statistically a small risk of death is fine.

Now I've started an Autocracy, Inc. and it's great even if one-year after publication you have to wonder if autocracy has already won.

I read that Marquis Sade book, 120 Nights of Sodom. It was shit. Like, absolutely shit. It was only about half way through that I remembered the book was barely finished and what I'd been reading was mostly authors notes. Still, the first two thirds of the book are about nothing but farting, smelling and eating feces. It's a fucking joke. To think the cunt of an author sent this to the Emporor of France? Napolean was right to throw thim in a stockade for fuck sake.
The only reason this book has any visibility is for its historic value, which I have minimal apreciation of to begin with.
Toward the end there were some fantastical and imaginative tortures but they seemed entirely removed from reality - vague memory recalls an entire house built into a maze with heated floors, death pits and all sorts of bollocks.

Maybe Juliete or whatever the fuck the third book is called will actually have some narative, but it's been over a month now and I'm not bothered to touch them.

>>7844
There were only seven prisoners left in the Bastille at the time of the storming. It's often said that he was one of them, and the revolutionaries found him so repulsive that they left him behind. He was transferred to a different institution about a week beforehand.

>>7844
>Maybe Juliete or whatever the fuck the third book is called will actually have some narative,
Not really, those books are important more for their historical context rather than the writing.

I've just finished Qualityland, which I think both of you lads have already read. It was rather good.

The writing style reminded me a fair bit of Look Who's Back, so maybe that's common with modern German fiction (or at least the translations into English).

>>6354
>Diary of an Oxygen Thief
Toward the last third this read like a skit from Blue Jam, particularly the schizophrenic character with connections to the middling creative classes. The central concept of an ignorant character for others to publicly belittle must be a reality among some, but it's hard to imagine people would actually do that.

I couldn't tell whether it was based on a true story or not.
Apparently there're 2 more in the series - I won't be bothering with them.

>>7850
See >>6425
Also I'm fairly sure Oxygen Thief is just a retelling of Walking on Glass that the author drunkenly forgot he read.

I thought I'd give one of Glen Cook's standalone novels a try.

It took a while to get going but it had pretty much everything I'd expect from one of his fantasy stories. Swords. Sorcery. Intrigue. Betrayal. Various shades of grey, with no side objectively being the "goodies. Showing how life at the bottom doesn't really charge regardless of who's in charge because they'll be grinding out their existence either way. All deftly written.

Tony Blair's new book was surprisingly good. It's ostensibly a book for leadership but mostly contains him opining on the state of the world and anecdotes on his long career both as PM but also in his interactions with figures like Aung San Suu Kyi and various people who have to remain anonymous because they're still in power.

There are more than a few bits that would send some of you into an absolute meltdown that I'm saving for later but I think I missed the boat on defending the events of Partygate. I did get a chuckle when he said a lack of democracy led Putin into the Ukraine disaster and that such things are avoided in free countries.

The Dragon Never Sleeps is a standalone space opera by Glen Cook. I've read that this was originally intended to be a series but there were issues with the publisher, so the story was crammed into one book; this would explain why the writing wasn't up to his usual standards, which felt rushed, convoluted and the characters have very little to make them distinguishable from one another.

The setting is Canon space, an empire where order is kept thanks to the fleet of self-contained guardships who've been patrolling the web of space for thousands of years; these are seen as immortal not only due to their size and power but because the crew and personality of the ships are regularly uploaded in case something happens and they need to be replicated.

The ships are all named after Roman legions and there is a bit of a feel of the decline of the Roman empire to Canon space. They're spreading themselves thinly due to expansion. They're having to consider extending citizenship rights to aliens and artifacts because there's not enough humans to fill Canon. The guardships are crewed by people who've been aboard for thousands of years, so they're out of touch with what life is actually like on the planets; they don't really care too much about what goes on there as long as they toe the line and order is maintained.

Power on the planetary systems is concentrated in various feudalistic 'houses', with the main plot of the book concerned with a house who have been plotting with an alien race, methane-breathing 'Outsiders', to try and take down the guardships. There's quite a few parallels with Consider Phlebas, which came out about the same time.

>>7784
I have now bought and read this (I think I was also >>7802 so I'm sorry for lying to you both) and it's a pretty decent book. It's extremely boring at the start, but it picks up and it's an easy read.

Speaking of easy reads, I have just finished Gary Stevenson's book. I read them one after the other so I could compare them. Gary Stevenson's is more fun, but less educational. The overarching feeling I got from it was that it was a rush job, even though it's brilliant in many ways. It's full of Americanisms, there's an egregious spelling mistake where it's still a word but not the intended word (someone "lent on a wall" multiple times, rather than "leant on a wall"), and I even had to cut the paper on a chapter near the end because the publishers seemingly hadn't bothered. I was hoping it would turn out to be a special fold-out section or something, like how lots of celebrity autobiographies have those white photo pages in the middle with pictures of the celebrity, but no, the pages really were just stuck together. Two out of three of these issues could have been fixed by getting an editor to read the book just once, and they could probably do it in a day. They might also have sorted out the grammar, which is more reminiscent of posts here than of published literature - not terrible, but technically very wrong very often.

Gary Stevenson is an excellent raconteur, which I wasn't expecting, and the book is full of fun stories and even teaches you some tricks about the banking industry. It barely even touches on his campaigning against inequality that he is now famous for, although this is mentioned a few times near the end.

All in all, I'd say I enjoyed The Trading Game more than Politics on the Edge, but they're both the sort of book that would be an excellent bargain if you got them for 99p in The Works. Unless you are as rich as a successful banker or Conservative MP, you might well miss the tenner that you'd spend on these books full-price.

Someone should write a book about the ethics of statistics. I'd read that - preferably fiction.

Got any reccomendations?

>>7859

The only thing I can think of that's written for a general audience is Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust. It's non-fiction, but very readable.

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

If you're looking for a deeper dive, I'd suggest reading up on Ronald Fisher, Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. They were all hugely influential statisticians (Fisher is often referred to as the "father of statistics") and ardent eugenicists. Gemini Deep Research can probably write you a very good book-length summary, if the idea of using a massive statistical model to write you a book about the ethics of statistics doesn't send you into an existential panic.

I read a book recently
It's called 'The Donkey Dogshit Brigade'
It's about an army of robots that have giant inflatable penises that they use as floats to cross rivers
This all takes place in Roman Tunisia
The difficulties and nuances of a changing culture, once Carthaginian, then shifting to Roman, and how this transformation affects the personal lives of the citizens is really portrayed with a great deal of depth, and it makes you understand historic events in a new way
The robots have hands that are attached in reverse so they pick things up with the back side of their hands
50 whole pages of the book are just high quality photos of ants

>>7861

>>7862
Are you threatening me?

This was a really satisfying read is the best way I can put it. The narration through a series of notes captures the internal monologue of a solitary man scurrying about in a seemingly enormous and decorated mansion surrounded by ocean.

>>7864
I thought it fell apart a bit once the 'plot' started to kick in, but beyond that all the allusions to Borges and Narnia were nicely done.

This was crap.

>>7865
Yeah I couldn't be arsed with the murder-mystery stuff and the ending seemed completely contrived. I just want that 500 million year button but made into a full length story to explore living in such a world.

I enjoy Philippa Perry's agony aunt column in the Guardian so I thought I'd try this.

This is a very empathetic book, concerned with emotional and mental wellbeing rather than the hands-on practicalities of parenting. The main message of the book is: this is someone you'll want to have a positive relationship throughout the rest of your life, so treat them like an individual from the start rather than another household chore to deal with. Listen to them, communicate with them, soothe them when they are distressed and create a safe environment in which they can thrive and grow as a person. If your children are causing certain reactions within you reflect on what is causing this, which may be from your own childhood, and take steps to counter this if it's a negative reaction.

The only parts I didn't necessarily agree with where when it seemed to deviate from professional to personal opinions. I guess it's a bit easy to be preachy when you've had quite the privileged life and only had to bring up the one child.

I preferred this to Dawn but it fell into a similar trap as the final third, which was mostly building towards a sequel, wasn't as good as the rest of the book.

This was the least gripping book in the trilogy but it also felt the most rounded.

I've failed to get into Octavia Butler. Possibly a case of what was new and inventive at the time no longer being so, so I find them a bit uninspired. Not a fair way to judge them but I can't change my context.

I'm making an effort to get into Salman Rushdie. Struggled with The Satanic Verses years ago so thought I'd start at the beginning with Grimus. Good prose and characterisation but hard to give a fuck about what's actually going on with these people. I know what the Simurg is but possibly a deeper appreciation of less mainstream myth and religion is necessary to get the most out of it. I'll give Midnight's Children a go anyway.

Picked up Autocracy, Inc by Anne Applebaum it's (non-fiction) depressing but engrossing.

>>7870
I don't know if the Exogenesis series was meant to be new and inventive, other than it being sci-fi written by a black female author and mainly featuring black characters.

The subtext is clearly colonialism and I'm not sure if rape is the right word to use but I can't think of a more apt one off the top of my head, so rape.

Diet, Drugs and Dopamine is a pretty comprehensive account of the modern science of obesity. In a way it feels like 3 books:

1. Something akin to Easy Way to Stop Smoking where he goes into the science of addiction and how to look after yourself from a more holistic perspective with correct diets that have real evidence behind them. He suffers from periodic bouts of obesity himself so he talks a lot from his own experiance of his weight and how he reaches for the fridge as a coping mechanism when he was doing stuff like leading the US covid taskforce because he needed to keep himself going.
2. A kind of policy how-to guide for the new weight loss drugs that sees them as an amazing tool for dealing with disability but won't ever solve the obesity epidemic as to stay thin using them alone you will have to take them forever and their regulation and use is a wild west. Also you're not likely to see them ever become affordable sorry.
3. The modern nutrition debate around processed foods, formulation and the corrupt ecosystem around today's food that is literally killing people and bombards us all constantly with messages to trigger addiction. He's not out to make any friends with this and points out that things like traffic lights are bullshit but also seems quite humane with how he looks at obesity itself and the implosion of the fat positivity movement in the wake of the new drugs.

It can at times become dense and academic, particular once he gets into the history of obesity medicine but I've lost weight while reading it and he's convinced me to look into getting a blood glucose monitor even though I'm not diabetic because of how useful it is to see how my body reacts to the foods I eat.

>>7870
>Picked up Autocracy, Inc by Anne Applebaum it's (non-fiction) depressing but engrossing.

It's a good book that explains why people across the third world are the way they are online but it's begging for her to do a sequel called Democracy, Inc which covers the nature of the free world as a corporation - things like the financiers, consultants and even international law being ostensibly written and shaped to secure western outcomes to advance the corporate body.

I imagine there's enough of a book you could write from broken officials in the World Bank and UN to point out how it's all bullshit. Tie it all into Autocracy Inc. with shell companies and tax islands and you have a cohesive whole of investigative journalism that runs from boardrooms in the corporate America to state industry boardrooms in Beijing.

>>7873
Thanks for the writeup. I heard today that Mounjaro and other weight loss jabs may be assosiated with Pancreatitis. I'll probably buy this to read with my sister, who recently started buying from an 'online pharmacy'.

>>7874

The data we've got so far suggests that GLP-1RAs increase the risk of developing pancreatitis from 0.1% to 0.2% per year. That data is taken from patients with Type 2 diabetes, who are already at elevated risk of pancreatitis; the risk in non-diabetic patients with no history of pancreatitis is likely to be lower. I would advise caution for anyone with a history of gallstones or autoimmune disorder, although the benefits are still very clearly greater than the risks for anyone with a BMI over 30.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11818918/

https://www.diabetes.co.uk/conditions/pancreatitis.html

This was a fun bit of light reading.

>>7876
I'd forgotten I read it earlier this year and even looking at the cover now I'm struggling to remember anything about it. Sexy not-Spaniards with magic bird tattoos? A rosy palm tattoo? That's about it.

Corps Commander is a pretty good read. It's certainly a very easy one because it's fairly light on detail, but obviously that's a problem as well. Brian Horrocks, who commanded XXX Corps in North West Europe, doesn't even explain what the injuries were that would occasionally render him feverishly unwell and all but bed ridden. Nevertheless, it's a solid, brief history of what the 21st Army Group got up to (many parts not directly related to XXX Corps are written by Eversley Belfield), and a good insight into the personality of Brian Horrocks himself, even when it doesn't mean to be. The primary caveat being that he is writing about himself and his forces, and as such he shouldn't be taken as the final word on any of it, no matter how gregarious and level-headed "Jorrocks", as Montgomery called him, appears.

Also, the version pictured probably has the thickest paper I've handled in a book. I was halfway through before I stopped trying to tease apart multiple pages, that were in reality just one board-like sheet.

I didn't enjoy this as much as The Blacktongue Thief.

Widely hailed as one of the funniest novels ever written, A Confederacy of Dunces is indeed quite funny. But in my experience, books are never all that funny, compared to other media. And many other funny books I've read had much more of a story than this did. The author, John Kennedy Toole, committed suicide in 1969 after failing to get it published, and his mother took over and successfully got it published in 1980 as the ultimate tribute to her son's memory. I must say, the grammar is terrible and there are multiple spelling mistakes, plus the aforementioned extremely threadbare plot, and the fact that every character is so revoltingly unsympathetic, are all downsides that allow me to understand why a lot of publishers turned this down.

However, one thing that really impressed me was how incredibly prophetic it has turned out to be. The book is over 50 years old, and the "self-important hikikomori is forced to find a job" tale might have been fairly outlandish in the 1960s. But now, the infuriating and offensive adventures of Ignatius J. Reilly are extremely resonant with anyone who spends a lot of time online. He's 30 years old, morbidly obese, and he thinks he's too good for those around him (and to be fair, they're all ghastly too), and in many ways he is a proto-netizen, reminding modern readers of the sort of friendless deadbeat weirdos that fill any online community now. He embraces extreme political viewpoints and is often powered entirely by hate, like many of the alt-right but predating them multiple decades. Ignatius Reilly is a misogynist, a racist, and a homophobe, but he also rails against degeneracy and even has a fascination with Ancient Roman philosophers. There's no denying he would have a YouTube channel today, lamenting the fall of the West to immigrant invasions and leftist cuckoldry, even though in the book he is actually meant to be objectionably left-wing rather than right-wing.

As an exciting story with likable people, A Confederacy of Dunces leaves a lot to be desired. As a hilarious farce, it's certainly up there. As a prophecy of current society, like a 20th-century Book of Revelation, it can't be beat.

>>7880
I think you have read too much into it with a modern culture war lens. Which a lot of people struggle with these days because you can easily label Ignatius as an chronic masturbator and discard him. It's clearly someone's first novel I'll agree but it's just not the kind of book that you think it is and John Kennedy Toole wasn't writing in or about 2025. I'd also add that unless you have a bad print it's not written with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors unless you're confusing the adoption of dead vernaculars like Jive talk as errors.

Ignatius follows a classic lovable dunce trope like Don Quixote only instead of reading about chivalry in the 1600s he read Boethius in 1960s New Orleans. It's a picaresque novel, Ignatius is disgusting but he's a relatable Homer Simpson-esque failure who has adopted the wheel of fortuna as his perception of life and goes on whimsical adventures that are based on New Orleans culture of the time with some of elements of John Kennedy Toole's own life. Yes everyone around him is a dumb idiot and they tire the protagonist with their grasping ways like some kind of Confederacy of Dunces, but they're just fuck-ups rather than outright evil like any good slice of Americana. Ignatius isn't really evil either even if he is a pompous child, I mean he was perfectly happy to try to bring about world peace in the most unorthodox way possible wasn't he and when confronted with objective reality he just doesn't give a fuck.

>in the book he is actually meant to be objectionably left-wing rather than right-wing

No he's a medievalist, he might spark rebellions but he does it for attention and to be contrarian. I don't know why you would try to project modern left/right political divide from the enlightenment on a man who explicitly rejects the enlightenment as a core philosophy.

I'd recommend rereading it another time when your life isn't working out. Preferably with a bottle of coke with some peanuts dropped in for the closest approximation to Dr Nut. It's escapism.

It's seven or eight years since I read it, but didn't he have a wank while thinking about his dog? All I can really remember other than that is him using his soiled sheets as a banner and calling other people degenerates.

>>7882
He does indeed do that, but only in passing. And he really loved that dog, as explained near the end. Clearly >>7881 and I have different attitudes to it, but the visit from Mr Levy at the end (where the neighbour tells him about the family) does work quite well because he is arguably the most normal person in the book, offering the only objective perspective on all the grisly lives the reader had been learning about.