Getting Back Into Reading (Books)

[justbeast]

I was talking with @zaboots a few months ago, about the fact that we've both slowed way down, in terms of reading printed books (ebooks included). Meaning, we weren't reading much lately, or at all, really

Comments

[thewronghands]

Interesting -- I just read "The White Queen" and was unimpressed. (I'm on a campaign to read the Tiptree award winners.) I think it was because there was no character I could really relate to. So it was a little noodly, but none of the ideas were new and none of the characters became beloved, which pretty much made it hard for me to think of it as more than "eh". I doubt I'll read books two and three, so I don't mind spoilers... what was your longer post? [grins, enables]

Also, I'll totally have to try "Souls in the Machine"!

[justbeast]

You know, that's interesting. That's the second time I've heard that recently - "couldn't find a character I could relate to" about a book. (Not that particular one, just in general). And I find it startling - do most people require (or prefer, let's say) characters they can identify with

[thewronghands]

Aaaaah I am in the middle of "Souls in the Great Machine" now and you were totally right, I love it! There will be a book post about it in the next couple of weeks. Thank you so much for recommending it to me; I ordered the second book in the trilogy today.

[justbeast]

Yesss! I'm so glad! :)

[justbeast]

The concept that I really liked in and took away from White Queen, was its treatment of telepathy. How the aliens seem to possess telepathy, but in reality it's a combination of good body language reading and internal modeling of the other person. (And how they're frequently wrong about their internal model, and use spoken word speech to synch up their assumptions, collapse the wave function. And how they're ok with being wrong, the ambiguity of it.)

I think about that stuff a lot (it's frequently on my mind), in the sense of, how much of that we try to do in our day to day lives.