What are you reading? Is it not bad?

ALB

Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun”. Devoured it in a couple of days. Very affecting.

Hypervox

I have to recommend anything by J.S. Morin, but especially the following audiobook series on audible...

Black Ocean
Black Ocean: Astral Prime
Black Ocean: Mercy For Hire

Imagine a sci-fi series that can successfully incorporate wizards and magic - superb!

MrStochastic

There’s a good article on the history of electronic music focusing on a new biography of Wendy Carlos in last October’s issue of Harper’s Mag:
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/10/the-well-tempered-synthesizer-wendy-carlos-amanda-swell/
(Sorry if it’s behind a paywall; maybe I can find a better link.).
It has some interesting factoids about the development of electronic music. Here are the beginning paragraphs:

Electronic music existed in the United States before the majority of Americans had access to electricity. The lineage can be disorienting that way. It is older than hip-hop or rock, certainly, but then it is also older than doo-wop, older than bluegrass or big-band jazz. It’s old enough to have predated futurism, which, with its call for a new music that could “conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds,” might otherwise seem to have conjured it into existence. It’s old enough, for that matter, to have made Mark Twain fear death.
This was in 1906. Twain was in Manhattan, sitting on a stage at the corner of 39th Street and Broadway, a few days before Christmas. The New York Times found him there admiring a new musical instrument called the telharmonium, which resembled an organ but one backed by, instead of pipes, a tall switchboard with hundreds of cords leading down into a concealed machine room beneath, full of the complicated whizzing interplay of metal shafts and dynamos. The contraption had been patented a decade earlier by a man named Thaddeus Cahill, who had designed it to produce a “scientifically perfect music,” the Times wrote, “capable of reproducing any sound produced by any musical instrument and many more that no musical instrument produces.” Twain had come to hear it and been awed by it. “The trouble about these beautiful, novel things is that they interfere so with one’s arrangements,” he said. He was moved to the degree that it made him want to live longer. “I couldn’t possibly leave the world,” he went on, “until I have heard this again and again.”
The Times reporter was similarly struck, and noted that playing the keyboard occasionally produced the “blue flash of an electric spark.” There was, he wrote, “a suggestion of magic in it all,” comparing it to an effect by the stage magician Harry Kellar, then famous for levitating female assistants and simulating his own decapitation. The “hidden chambers” of the machinery below were of particular fascination, their very inscrutability serving “to intensify the mystery.” Already, in this early encounter, we find all the hallmarks of speaking and writing about electronic music, the distinguishing tics that have pursued the medium well into its maturity. There is the promise of an uncanny precision, the possibility of overcoming human mediation and error. And, on the other hand, there is its fundamental secrecy or impossibility; this is a faceless, alien music, haunted by the notion that it is, at the end of the day, mere plastic reproduction.
When ­RCA introduced its Electronic Music Synthesizer in 1955—picture a sterile room lined with rows of circuits and knobs, solemnly operated by bureaucrats in identical suits, like something from a Cold War thriller—it provoked a similar kind of utopian curiosity tinged with dread. Describing the instrument that year in this magazine, Edward Tatnall Canby wrote that it “has a grotesquely inhuman quality.” He saw it as a remarkable but frightening triumph of engineering over nature. “There is, indeed, everything in this synthesized sound but life itself,” he wrote. Electronic music has always inspired this kind of neurosis over the status of the human, a fear of the cyborg. In this context, Twain’s preoccupation with his own death seems in accordance with the challenge this technology appeared to pose again and again in the twentieth century. There was the intimation of some terrifying new potential, as though we were suddenly made aware of an ongoing project we might not see to fruition—we could hear a future, or a range of possible futures.

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Montreal_Music

Nudge: The Final Edition

A must read for everyone I think.

I'm on pace for 80 books this year with my challenge, and this book will be on my top 5 for sure.

oat_phipps

I’m really into easy beach reads right now, after spending most of my life being devoted to working through all the classic fiction literature. Recommendations welcome (fiction only, just wanna breezy story)

oat_phipps

@Montreal_Music said:
Nudge: The Final Edition

A must read for everyone I think.

I'm on pace for 80 books this year with my challenge, and this book will be on my top 5 for sure.

I read almost 60 in 2 months last year at the beginning of lockdown. Made me so sick of books I quit for a solid 6-8 months, and only just recently got back to always having a book I’m reading.

JohnnyGoodyear

Harold Evans autiobiography, bit self-serving at the end as regards Murdoch, but the first two thirds of growing up in the North of England and journalism as it was is splendid.

cramdog

White Jazz / James Ellroy
Permutation City / Greg Egan
House of Leaves / Mark Z. Danielewski

Of all these books, the last one I read was House of Leaves, but it was either this year or last year. I haven't read any books lately.
Quite broadly speaking, these three books fall into the same category for me. They're all great books. I'm partial to them.
(But seeing three of them in a row makes me feel like I'm being forced to stand in front of a nerd's bookshelf)

celtic_elk

Books from the 33 1/3 series on Bitches Brew and Dummy. Got an edited collection on dancehall and Reina’s Applying Karnatic rhythmical techniques to Western music on deck.

barabajagal

Anyone heard of the late Octavia E. Butler? A black womans take on the science fiction genre.
Just discovered her thru kindle daily book deals. Anyone with a kindle please download for free her short story Bloodchild.
Thirty pages long &it just about blew my socks off. Can’t wait to start the novel of hers I bought - Parable of the Sower

Krupa

I’m just coming to the end of the Ibis trilogy by Amitav Ghosh; Sea of poppies, River of smoke, and Flood of fire. They’re set around the first opium war period of the late 1830s, with a really diverse set of character perspectives, from illegitimate sons of Indian opium traders, an orphaned french daughter of a botanist to a freed slave from the USA. The language is initially really tricky to get into, but let it float over you and it soon becomes just a lovely reading experience with an incredibly rich and detailed view into a world that’s spoken about but rarely exposed, and still resonates today both in historical repercussions and in how current events play out… They definitely don’t suck

cian

@celtic_elk said:
Reina’s Applying Karnatic rhythmical techniques to Western music on deck.

That's a good one, though it's less of a read and more of a book you work through.

celtic_elk

@cian said:

@celtic_elk said:
Reina’s Applying Karnatic rhythmical techniques to Western music on deck.

That's a good one, though it's less of a read and more of a book you work through.

Looking forward to it! I'm sure my wife will appreciate my having more reasons to randomly air-drum.

Montreal_Music

I have SOOO many books on my whish list. I like iOS apps as much as I like books and I (also) have a B-A-S (Books Acquisition Syndrome).

New book on my WL:

JeffChasteen

@oat_phipps said:
I’m really into easy beach reads right now, after spending most of my life being devoted to working through all the classic fiction literature. Recommendations welcome (fiction only, just wanna breezy story)

Platinum Logic by Tony Parsons

Greatest music business trash novel ever written.

Poppadocrock

Do magazines count.. now that my library has Computer Music, Music tech, and Beat Magazine Free from their digital app I’ve been reading some of those past and new issues. Always wanted to have access to these.

Sawiton

After 40 years, rereading Dune.

Poppadocrock

@audiblevideo said:
I knew you people were of like minds.

Oryx and Crake ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Black Hole Wars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

For those in the US and want library audiobooks

Libby, by OverDrive, Inc.

that’s what I use. Libby and Hoopla. They Freaking rule. As long as your library participates your in like Flynt.

wim

I stumbled across the Murderbot Series by Martha Wells. Without a doubt, the most entertaining and masterfully written science fiction books I've read in a long time. I can't say I actually "read" them. I listened to the audiobooks, which are truly well performed.

Gavinski

@Stochastically said:
There’s a good article on the history of electronic music focusing on a new biography of Wendy Carlos in last October’s issue of Harper’s Mag:
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/10/the-well-tempered-synthesizer-wendy-carlos-amanda-swell/
(Sorry if it’s behind a paywall; maybe I can find a better link.).
It has some interesting factoids about the development of electronic music. Here are the beginning paragraphs:

Electronic music existed in the United States before the majority of Americans had access to electricity. The lineage can be disorienting that way. It is older than hip-hop or rock, certainly, but then it is also older than doo-wop, older than bluegrass or big-band jazz. It’s old enough to have predated futurism, which, with its call for a new music that could “conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds,” might otherwise seem to have conjured it into existence. It’s old enough, for that matter, to have made Mark Twain fear death.
This was in 1906. Twain was in Manhattan, sitting on a stage at the corner of 39th Street and Broadway, a few days before Christmas. The New York Times found him there admiring a new musical instrument called the telharmonium, which resembled an organ but one backed by, instead of pipes, a tall switchboard with hundreds of cords leading down into a concealed machine room beneath, full of the complicated whizzing interplay of metal shafts and dynamos. The contraption had been patented a decade earlier by a man named Thaddeus Cahill, who had designed it to produce a “scientifically perfect music,” the Times wrote, “capable of reproducing any sound produced by any musical instrument and many more that no musical instrument produces.” Twain had come to hear it and been awed by it. “The trouble about these beautiful, novel things is that they interfere so with one’s arrangements,” he said. He was moved to the degree that it made him want to live longer. “I couldn’t possibly leave the world,” he went on, “until I have heard this again and again.”
The Times reporter was similarly struck, and noted that playing the keyboard occasionally produced the “blue flash of an electric spark.” There was, he wrote, “a suggestion of magic in it all,” comparing it to an effect by the stage magician Harry Kellar, then famous for levitating female assistants and simulating his own decapitation. The “hidden chambers” of the machinery below were of particular fascination, their very inscrutability serving “to intensify the mystery.” Already, in this early encounter, we find all the hallmarks of speaking and writing about electronic music, the distinguishing tics that have pursued the medium well into its maturity. There is the promise of an uncanny precision, the possibility of overcoming human mediation and error. And, on the other hand, there is its fundamental secrecy or impossibility; this is a faceless, alien music, haunted by the notion that it is, at the end of the day, mere plastic reproduction.
When ­RCA introduced its Electronic Music Synthesizer in 1955—picture a sterile room lined with rows of circuits and knobs, solemnly operated by bureaucrats in identical suits, like something from a Cold War thriller—it provoked a similar kind of utopian curiosity tinged with dread. Describing the instrument that year in this magazine, Edward Tatnall Canby wrote that it “has a grotesquely inhuman quality.” He saw it as a remarkable but frightening triumph of engineering over nature. “There is, indeed, everything in this synthesized sound but life itself,” he wrote. Electronic music has always inspired this kind of neurosis over the status of the human, a fear of the cyborg. In this context, Twain’s preoccupation with his own death seems in accordance with the challenge this technology appeared to pose again and again in the twentieth century. There was the intimation of some terrifying new potential, as though we were suddenly made aware of an ongoing project we might not see to fruition—we could hear a future, or a range of possible futures.

I'm going to read that, sounds fascinating. Have you watched Sisters with Transistors yet? If not, you must!

Gavinski

Reading this:

Top stuff. Accessible and thought-provoking German philosopher.

waka_x

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity/dp/0374157359

it is essential reading!

Svetlovska

Stereotypically, my current read is a cheery little number.

These guys had the job I would have killed for.

Err, that is, um…

Gavinski

@waka_x said:
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity/dp/0374157359

it is essential reading!

That sounds fantastic, one for the Sapiens fans. Some heavyweight endorsements! Will read this, totally up my street

MrStochastic

@Gavinski said:
Reading this:

Top stuff. Accessible and thought-provoking German philosopher.

This does sound interesting. Hoping I can find it in a library. His Korean name threw me for a minute.

michael_m

The Silmarillion. I bought it a year or two after it was first published, having already read Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. It’s one of those books that I read every few years (probably read it a decade ago last time).

It’s a great book for providing some background that makes Tolkien’s other works a much richer experience to read.

Might re-read the Hobbit soon.

Gavinski

Debt by David Graeber. Absolutely mind-blowing, and will be of interest to any who participated in any of the (mostly sunk) political threads here.

Debt: The First 5000 Years https://g.co/kgs/ZvS4eP

jonmoore

I’m reading Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe. It seemed an apt read whilst watching Dopesick on Disney+. It's the story of the Sackler family-run pharmaceuticals business - Purdue, and what a corrupt bunch they turn out to be. We're lucky here in Europe that the regulators didn't allow Purdue to create the same level of despair with Oxycontin as they have in the US. When you get into the detail of how Purdue went about their business, it's truly horrifying.

This long read in the New Yorker, by the same writer covers the essence of the book but skims on much of the detail. Both book and article are great reads. And a timely read too, seeing as the Sacklers have been in the news again this week as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art has finally removed the Sackler name from their building (the Sacklers have been massive donators to the museum over the years).

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-pain

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