I'll skim over a few.

As for fiction: Proust is amazing but not really comparable to other fiction. I might recommend but see my other comment for caveats. Definitely try some Ursula K. Leguin if you get the chance. Confessions of Frannie Langton is a wild ride if you want all the evils of 19th century plus a very forbidden lesbian romance. Iron Widow is a great new YA fantasy book set in a fictionalized China, if that's up your alley. My Brilliant Friend is just solid - interesting characters and a very human-feeling story that starts in mid-century Italy - and I'm excited to continue. Origin in Death is the trashiest thing I've ever read.

As for non-fiction: Theft is Property! is actually a great read and a solid philosophical exploration of the question: "if Indigenous people didn't have a Western conception of property rights, how can it be said that the land was stolen from them?" Chaos is great and a bit unnerving, answering a few questions about Manson and that time period but prompting many more. W.E.B. Du Bois is one of the most elegant writers on my list here for sure and really elucidates the failures of the reconstruction era. Killing Hope is a leftist classic if you want an itinerary of everywhere the long arm of US imperialism fucked shit up. Wisdom Sits in Places, a look at how knowledge is stored among the Western Apache (among many other things), was fascinating but I'm always a sucker for anthropology that breaks open my brain a little. Probably 60% of Every Thing Must Go went over my head but it's a philosophical position (ontic structural realism) that I feel in the deepest depths of my soul so it was nice to have validated. Canada in the World is :kkkanada: in book form if you know anyone who's a little too patriotic.

Long-ass public transit commutes, logging off harder, no job for the first few months of the year, and I'm a fast reader.

seriously, i have to make myself do 12 a year, and sometimes I'll count a pamphlet.

Do you feel anxiety when you try to start a book, or is the act of opening one just too much?

For me I never read fiction for a long time because I wanted to learn things, and learn things that were directly relevant to life or at least to the history that got us to this point. If I couldn't see where it connected it felt like a waste of time.

My takeaway is that Hegel is personally an asswipe but I do have a soft spot for his philosophy. Dialectical reasoning is very old but his dialectics are novel and eye-opening. I find a peculiar connection between them and Douglas Hofstadter's reasoning on consciousness and life patterns as strange, self-referential loops that crosses levels of meaning or planes of action. I don't know if the book I read was the greatest introduction but it did well enough. I always have to recommend this comment (warning: :reddit-logo: ) as a great primer.

Some of it takes a bit of translating maybe - e.g. when he says the state is the highest expression of freedom, it comes off as a bit strange to someone on the other side of the 19th and 20th centuries, but my understanding is that perspective sees the state as a mechanism for the Geist to finally be able to express itself intentionally.

As for The Deficit Myth, it was a good book that I think is largely accurate about how money works in a modern economy. At times it was a bit too painfully simplistic and repetitive, but she did nail down the point well. If you have no exposure to MMT it's not a bad read - if you do, you probably don't need to read it unless you think MMT means printing money.

Fuck me, I should have done more Dr. Seuss.

The Proust I have on here is all volumes of one work, In Search of Lost Time. It's an incredible read and I can't recommend it enough but it's very long, and if you're not game for lots of mini-essays on art, life, experience, etc. it's probably going to be a tough read, especially if you need enough plot to keep you engaged. Some of his sentences are a bit tortuous but if you take it with a bit of speed, surprisingly, I find it's easy enough to follow. The best way I could describe it is like watching someone hand-paint a movie frame by frame. Give the first chapter a try and see how you feel.

I've never touched ancient fiction before the Iliad, so it was a unique read for me. My partner and I read it aloud to each other and the verse is very well-suited to that. It's very action-oriented, very bodily, very honour-driven, and drops you right in the thick of ancient heroic close quarters combat with all the death and homoeroticism that comes with it.

The Found and the Lost is excellent. I'm very impressed with how wildly real her sci-fi worlds feel, and the way she plays with relationships and gender roles is fantastic. It makes a lot of other sci-fi, even that with strong female characters, feel like it's missing a feminist's imagination. The last novella in that collection has a brilliantly chilling existential emptiness to it. I've actually never read one of her full novels so I'm going to do that this year.

Cixin Liu's stuff is good, in a reddit tech nerd kinda way. Compared to some of the other stuff I read the writing maybe feels a bit more cheap, and gets away with easy corny action-movie dialog and some heavy-handedness by making up for it with a knack for technically driven plot. I find it very entertaining and look forward to the third book (idk where the story can go from here) but I will say the actual dark forest "cosmic sociology" as its laid out near the end of the second book gave me a good shiver.

Yeah Capital was a bit of a slog, though not as much as the second volume. It's looser, a bit more chaotic, and less sure of itself than the previous work, and as a result I think there are more interesting ideas in it. A lot of the economics are legitimately archaic and crude in my opinion, but there's a lot to learn from his frame of mind and the angle from which he approaches political economy.

Blindsight I got on recommendation from here in a thread about the Dark Forest trilogy. I liked it a lot and the writing was impeccable (it had probably the saddest scene I read all year), but the basic philosophical premise on sentience is something I almost completely disagree with so it took a lot of the edge off the horror of it.

Essentially the ritual abuse and consumption of non-white bodies to further white supremacy. The book draws a lot of intersectional lines between white supremacy and exploitation of animals.

Thank you!

Idk I think that's just the easier way for me to pick up knowledge. Both of them aren't really reference books - the SQL one is more of a theoretical foundation - which made a useful companion to the practical SQL I do every day at work - and the Rust one steps upward through the language in complexity. The former was to help with my job, the latter was earlier and was actually to help with the job search (Rust is actually what made my application stand out enough to get to the interview part of the process). Either way, if you want to get something out of them you should be practising with the concepts on the side.

If you want something more of a reference, I've heard good things about the SQL Cookbook. But for both SQL and Rust, you're going to get better on-the-fly info from StackOverflow and programming forums than from trying to index a book IMO.

Absolutely try to finish The Dawn of Everything. Idk for me, Graeber is so incredibly nice to his readers that once I'm on a roll, I get so much stimulus out of having my perception twisted again and again and it's hard to put down. I was almost the opposite of you - after being a big fiction reader in my childhood, I pretty much abandoned it in my adult life because non-fiction was always just so much more relevant. After I did War & Peace in 2021 I got my love for it back and now try to keep a healthy balance. What's your favourite SFF?

I've never been a serious reader of poetry either. If you find anything good feel free to hit me up!

I was going to list some specific books I have sitting around that I’ve been meaning to read, but as the list got longer and longer I realized what I really mean is I’m resolved to less screen-time, more reading. I used to be a much hungrier reader than I am now and social media, podcasts, and video games has really swallowed up that space. Reading’s just so much more active than doing any of those things, it’s easier to turn on a TV show and then just look at Twitter while it plays in the background.

For sure. I find if I'm drained at all, it's just so much easier to scroll social media than commit to a book. Also, scrolling can fill very short gaps of time, from thirty seconds to a few minutes, where jumping back into a full book is a bit too much whiplash. But forcing myself to read longer form has been good for my brain, and I think it gets easier and easier. I still listen to podcasts, but I can only focus on them if I have something else to do with my hands, so I rarely just sit and listen.

I saw a tweet today where someone said they read 411 books last year. At first I assumed it must be a joke, maybe a reference I don’t understand, but there was a follow up tweet and it didn’t seem like a joke. I cannot comprehend reading that many books, even if reading books was literally the only thing one did with all their time every day. Maybe if by books they mean 50 page Kindle Unlimited novellas, I could see that being doable.

I'm curious how much they get out of each of them. I could probably do that if they were all novellas yeah, or if reviewing books was my job, but that would just strip the fun out of it.

Thanks for the rec, I'll throw it on the list for this year! I do like horror but I'm not super well read in a lot of it, and never been too drawn to the super mainstream stuff (Stephen King or whatever).

Capitalism and Schizophrenia I've heard of, and sounds really interesting, but it's one of those where I feel like I need a few more of the philosophical prerequisites before tackling it.