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Reading's slowed to a crawl. Last year I read: - Haruki Murakami's "Underground", about the Aum Shinrikyo subway attacks in 1995. A Buddhist cult gassed the Tokyo subway using Sarin. This is a collection of interviews with victims, and uninvolved cult members. - Haruki Murakami's "Hard-Boiled Wonderland, and the End of the World" - Scifi/Fantasy novel. Don't want to say much more than that. It's a good idea to go into that one blind - Aubrey Wood's "Bang Bang Bodhisattva", A queer cyberpunk mystery. Underrated. - William Gibson's Bridge and Sprawl trilogies entire (Again). Old favourites. I love them. - Started but haven't yet finished "Noli me Tangere", the first novel by Jose Rizal, second president of the Philippines and revolutionary martyr.

Coming to the end of I Am A Cat (Soseki again). Was good. Wasn't sure how a book of cat-observations managed to be so big, but as it turns out it's split between cat stuff and observed conversations and actions of a schoolteacher and his mates and family, with the cat-observations becoming less and the teacher stuff coming to the fore. It's not unlike Salinger, just trending a bit sillier. (Not a bad silliness). Since everyone in this topic bar me is either reading Earthsea, or has read Earthsea, next book is going to be first four books of Earthsea... Or; The First Socialist Schism - Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association. Going to flip a coin about it.

Some of the most savage parts of the Offit book, that he presents with some tact; - Jenny McCarthy tilts at various toxins alleged to be in vaccines with a face full of botulinum toxin (This was a masterclass in parliamentary language) - The anti-vaccine movement existed when vaccines were invented, in p.much the same form Just finished Grey Eminence by Huxley... Which is legit making me want to switch majors to PPE

Charp clocked Moby Dick recently and said the same thing about it being very in-depth down to the specific obscure maritime knots used on var. bits of rigging; and also lots of Very Gay cerumen-kneading. I really ought to sit down and read a Tome, but I tend to be limited to reading books the size of my pocket. (reading being smn I do on public transport and pubs and only very rarely in the house, which is where my PS4 and laptop live.) I shud probably dig my 2011 kindle fire out of the cobwebs it resides in and actually use the thing. For the 100% truth in physical books being tangible and pleasant and probably better for retention; an ebook enables you to discretely walk around with a thousand-pager without people going "Pff."

Ringworld was neat. The hard scifi aspects were fun, good adventure romp... Some of the imagery got lost in that same hard scifi minutae though, to the point that I couldn't picture some of the space-stuff for it being over-explained. I liked the campy zapp-brannigan-ness of the romance stuff too. made me lul. And the species were all cool, esp the pierson's puppeteers. @Lu funny enough a bookstore near me had the first 4 books of Earthsea for sale in the window on sale so I have that! I might expedite reading that one, then so we can shoot the shit about it.

- What are you reading? - How acquire? - What do you generally read? - Where you find out about books and that? Read this one called "Botchan" recently that was good, by this suave looking fucker A few of his novels are set in and around schools and universities during the Meiji period. So; people in education or teaching during a time of very dramatic social change, which is something I never even thought about before but leads to hella compelling books. "Botchan" is basically about a hard-headed, basically simple Tokyo guy, black sheep of his family, who moves to the absolute sticks after Falling into teaching as a profession, attempting to stay above the weird internal politics of the school he's been placed in. I'm now about halfway through this book about the antivax movement by a pediatrician called Paul Offit. It's called "Deadly Choices - How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens us All". Some interesting parts so far include the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund in the US giving out substantial awards for whooping cough vaccy injuries at it's onset, and all those "vaccine injuries" later proven to be due to the same genetic condition; and an expert in a vaccine injury class action being shown to not know when questioned on the study he was citing; what the age range or the gender balance of the children involved was... and then the lawyer examining him rugpulling and revealing that the study was on RATS. (Which the expert didn't know! Dude hadn't read it). It's sad and scary as fuck but shows epidemiologists and paediatricians doing what they do, which is cool. Offit also wrote the excellent "Autism's False Prophets" and I feel like keeping up on counter-antivax and autism-woo stuff is kinda work-relevant, kinda-interesting. Places I get books: Amazon (bleh), one excellent pain-in-the-ass bookshop that is just a big, old school heap of books with no decent POS machine so you gotta use cash, which is annoying, and charity shops (solike; the British version of Goodwill). I find out about books through friends, distance learning, sometimes /lit/, and sometimes lucky dip.