What are you reading?

Simon Scarrow, Eagles of Empire, Book 23 of the Rome series on Audible (as soon as it comes out next week) 16 hours long, listening to an audio book when driving to customers makes traffic jams bareable.

Just finished Eric Schlosser’s book about the history of nuclear weapons, their control and lack of safety, woven around the Damascus Titan II silo explosion.
From a US point of view, obviously.

Forever Free by Joe Haldemann, a SF novel published in 1999 as a successor to his classic 1974 novel Forever War.
In his future, the majority will be homosexual and Hets are encouraged to have treatment, the treatments last an hour and one can be switched either way.
A good contrast to the alright anti-drumbeat.

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Cool. I will be a lesbian then.

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How can a new book be a multi-million-copy bestseller?

It actually says, and this is probably misleading but true, “multi-million-copy bestseller John Grisham”.

Many book cover inside pages have quotes saying how good it is but then you realise they are talking about other books the author has written.

Oh! Shame me once shame on me.

They publish the planned publication date (see Amazon) and then take orders so a book can be sold in millions before publication.
No doubt there are cosy arrangements between book publishers and major retail bookseller chains to promote some books.

Me too :slight_smile:
Changing sex is a common theme in science fiction.
If you compare the male and female bodies then they are over 90% the same; the number and location of bones, organs, teeth, etc, not much needs to be changed.
Overall it is agreed the male body is better suited for urination.

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Unless woman gets herself a shewee then the world is her urinal.

Almost done with “Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death”, mindbogglingly insightful, witty, deep. We studied Krebs as a one-directional cycle and he goes on to show that it can go either way and can start at any point. The implications are huge and Nick Lane being the humble erudite that he is doesn’t even tell you everything, but he tells you just enough to make you “aha…wow…WOW…”

Btw, he makes a beautifully understated kudos to the English science during WWII with a few lovely jokes about German Jewish scientists moving to England.

A bit heavy on the chemistry and biology, so maybe a tough read if one is not very comfortable with the natural sciences, but still well worth read the read.

Among my all time favorite books and I’m not even finished.

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Just read Dune.

What, all (looks it up) 26 books of it? That’s some marathon.

Assuming not, I’d recommend continuing at least a little bit, They were quite good up to a certain point and gave a lot of the missing (in the first book) background to interstellar travel, Spice and the Bene Geserit, among other things, as well as the inter-family feuds.

I think I got through them all, many years ago now, although maybe not some of the later collections and certainly not the graphic novel versions, so perhaps up to 20 in total, but never went back to reread them, but there’s a lot more to them than you might at first assume.

On the original topic, I recently read Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy, a very different and enlightening view of the background to the end of the Roman Republic and the rise of Julius Caesar. Definitely recommend.

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Just the first one. I want to read some of the others as I wanted to read about the space travel and the Butlerian Jihad, but this wasn’t touched on in the book I read.

Looking at the list again e.g. here https://eu.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2024/11/15/dune-books-in-order/76116817007/ It’s likely that I only ever read the first eight - I do recall a couple of those co-written by his son, but I think that the first six will pretty much cover all that you feel the need to know.

I presume this was prompted by the recent film, which I haven’t seen, and probably won’t bother with. Every other adaptation has had major flaws, so I suspect this one will as well.

I read a lot SF using the Amazon Kindle Unlimited option where one can download a whole book series.

Newer and not so well-known authors, mostly good but some are crap.

Yes. I’d heard of the books a long time ago and played the computer game, but only when I watched the film, I realised there was a lot more depth to the story than I had assumed, so decided to try one of the books.

The film did change some aspects, but it was a beautifully made film and worth a watch.