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[Vector]

Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Sangokushi by Yokoyama Mitsuteru is one of my favorite manga adaptions. It's not completely accurate to the RTK novel, but the classic 1970s and 1980s illustrations are a treat.

Hox has fully translated all 60 volumes on their blog.

EDIT:
Recently, I've been reading Ad Astra which covers the Second Punic War. It's been pretty good so far.

Cooooool. I love the 70s/80s manga style. Bookmarked!

Do Should books we're already reading count towards the challenge?

It's up to you! I decided to set it up like a personal challenge instead of a competition this year. You should do it however makes you feel good about your challenge

[Arx]

>tfw no Dutchling

I'm not going to impose an actual goal on myself because I have no idea where 2021 is going to go (as an opening gambit, my country is back under semi-hard lockdown and my current contract expires in June although it'll likely be renewed). I'd like to read more proper physical books though, I've been reading too much trashy (?) girls' manga and manhwa recently It's easy to read, heartwarming, and generally pleasant in a currently-unpleasant world, buuuut it doesn't have much intellectual merit.

Oddly The Scramble for Africa is also next on my hitlist. It's been mouldering on my shelf for some years now, but I figured it was time to bring it out.

I also finally acquired the second book of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, but after reading a hundred pages of it I think I need to re-read the first book to make sense of it. Whoops.

[Caz]

My only goal is to actually read the textbooks I need to instead of just skimming the relevant parts 2 days before an assignment is due >_>

Also I'll try to read more since I've kinda stopped doing that a lot. I'll add whatever books I read to here I guess. Finally finished up one I've had a bookmark in for months (re-read hornet's nest) which is p much 650 pages of grim political setup for a 20 page payoff (good one though) and then weirdly an epilogue that has more action and more interest than the first 600 pages. It's kinda a weirdly-structured book imo. I suppose it'd make more sense if we actually got to see the sequels but I've had them sitting on a shelf for years without reading (kinda put off by it being a different author but apparently some people think they're better, so...) I guess those will be my next reads.

[Jimmy]

Where do serial web-fictions sit in this list?

I regularly read web-fictions such as The Wandering Inn, Metaworld Chronicles, A Practical Guide to Evil, and a host of other self-published serial fictions. Since a novel is usually 60,000 to 100,000 words long, and these works typically put out between 4,000 to 40,000 words per week, I honestly have no idea how many "books" that would add up to reading over a year.

[Frumple]

When I'm bothering to count anything, I usually count something like than when I catch up to wherever's current. I don't tend to keep up with those, though, just read through and then forget they exist for a few months/a year or so and then re-read from the start. If you're actually keeping up, I'unno. Maybe count it as a finished book every couple months of staying on top of it?

Challenge is interesting, but actually chronicling my reading habits is... intimidating. Both because reading is pretty much always multiple hours a day (50+ whatevers is more like three or four months than a year, basically), and I have a strong tendency to drift off to another story before actually finishing any particular one. There's probably over a hundred tabs open on this tablet of works I'm in the process of (re-)reading, just shifted over to something else before actually ending it.

[Cthulhu]

How many books I read will probably depend on how long work from home lasts, not having to drive back and forth for work has given me more time to take non-working lunches, etc. and given me more time to read.  I read a lot of books in 2020, something in the 15-25 range I think, would have to look at my kindle.

Most recent was Chaos, the Charles Manson book.  Great book if you like being blackpilled.  Kind of a weird hybrid of true crime and memoir, the author was contracted to write a magazine article about Manson for the 20th anniversary, and in his efforts to find a new angle that hadn't been done to death he discovered some old interview transcripts from the trial that proved the prosecution's narrative of the killings was wrong and that they'd suborned perjury to make the narrative stick, badly enough that it would've overturned the conviction if it came up.  This led him down a nightmare rabbit hole that consumed 20 years of his life.  A lot of the conspiracy stuff you hear nowadays about Manson comes from the book, how the Manson Family was basically immune to the law and routinely violated probation and got arrested for all kinds of shit and just walked out after a few days with no charges, numerous very obvious CIA agents getting themselves involved with the investigation, and most disturbingly correspondence between Louis Jolyon West (most famous for killing an elephant with LSD) and Sidney Gottlieb (director of MKULTRA) where West claims to have developed methods for using LSD and stimulants to induce psychosis and alter morals.  West worked at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic where Manson hung out while he was first forming the Family.

You know, Manson, the guy famous for LSD and stimulants to induce psychosis and alter morals.  Like I said, great book if you like being blackpilled, but worth noting that it doesn't come to any conclusions.  The entire Manson story is such a clusterfuck of coverups and spooks and mysteriously missing documents that it's impossible to pull out a single clear answer to what and why, and basically everyone who would've known the truth is dead now.

[Caz]

Great book if you like being blackpilled.

What does this mean?

[Yoink]

I had a vague idea it was an anti-natalist thing, but I'm probably misremembering. Maybe it's just to do with conspiracy theories and paranoia.   
Lemme google it real quick and see what horrors await.   

Edit: oh, it basically just means the realisation that life ain't fair and the world is mean. I mean... duh.   
What do you mean, you needed a pill for that? Wasn't it included in your childhood vaccinations?    

[Arx]

The universe is terrible and nothing can be done to fix it, is the basic idea I think.

[Caz]

So... misery porn?

[Cthulhu]

Oh my god, forget I said the word, Jesus.  I just mean it's the kind of book that makes you look at the world a little differently afterward.  A tiny fragment of the truth about a single event in history, making you wonder what else there is, what you'll never know about.

[scriver]

I don't really read any more because of attention-related shit but some weeks (or a couple of months?) ago I ordered a book about Kristina Gyllenstierna from my local library which I am at least going to try to read.

Writing a script about her and those months before the Bloodbath of Stockholm has been one of my dozens perpetual projects (that I never actually work on of course) for the last couple of years or three, since I first read about her. So reading this book is an attempt to at least fool myself into pretending that I'm actually doing some research or whatever.

She's purty cool, when her husband the leader of the Swedish side in Illegal War of Danish Aggression Over the Refusal of the Swedish Thing to Elect the King of Denmark and Norway, Christian II the Tyrant, to the Throne of Sweden Another Time Which Was Totally Our Right To Do and Made the Danish Completely In the Wrong (name of war pending) died on the battlefield, she took control over the fortifications in Stockholm in the name of the claim of their son, and first held the city as a front figure who inspired and roused the populace against the Danish, then became the de facto leader of the rebellion when the majority of the Swedish nobility agreed to lay down arms (and elect Christian the Tyrant in exchange for retained privileges), which she continued to lead as a popular war throughout Sweden for several months.

Now that is a name I haven't seen in a long time... a long time.

[Loud Whispers]

The story was genuinely interesting, I just didn't want to go through all the "Herman Melville is so clever look at what he knows" to get to it :p

I read it less as cleverness than as lived experience. He wrote about it lots, how you live being important - like the difference between the sailors who sailed the ocean in their sailcraft and the phenomenon of leisurely passengers, made ever more prominent in their new steamships. It's one of the reasons why I believe the best way you experience a country is by working in it for a living, not by being a tourist - one's just passing through.

Agreed LOL. You might like books by Victor Hugo if you like the ol' Moby.

I'll give it a look, I'm a sucker for Romantics who flitted between extreme religious devotion and near-atheistic introspection

Romance of the Three Kingdoms is also bloody amazing. Would recommend 100/10 Wei Yan gets no justice, no love

I'm not going to impose an actual goal on myself because I have no idea where 2021 is going to go (as an opening gambit, my country is back under semi-hard lockdown and my current contract expires in June although it'll likely be renewed). I'd like to read more proper physical books though, I've been reading too much trashy (?) girls' manga and manhwa recently It's easy to read, heartwarming, and generally pleasant in a currently-unpleasant world, buuuut it doesn't have much intellectual merit.

Unironically enjoying trashy heart-warming pulp is intellectually a BIG BRAIN move. You enjoy anything consistently and sincerely enough and it becomes a classic, like how loads of music genres or books had to age a while before people accepted they actually had something worth saying

Oddly The Scramble for Africa is also next on my hitlist. It's been mouldering on my shelf for some years now, but I figured it was time to bring it out.

Honestly the juxtaposition between one European explorer quoting (to paraphrase) "This King Leopold II seems like such a good natured fellow without a single ulterior motive" and King Leopold II writing to one of his confidantes "It's Congo Free Real Estate" is something you just wouldn't believe

Great book if you like being blackpilled.

What does this mean?

"If only you knew how bad things are" mood, defined by a crippling isolation caused by uncomfortable nihilism that you wouldn't wish upon others, that you yourself regret because you cannot return to the state you were before you came to the conclusion. Like when a loved one is lost to you and you wonder why this sort of thing would exist in a world with a benevolent creator; you wonder if there isn't one, or if they're indifferent. Sounds edgy but there's no way around the egde sometimes

[Caz]

"If only you knew how bad things are" mood, defined by a crippling isolation caused by uncomfortable nihilism that you wouldn't wish upon others, that you yourself regret because you cannot return to the state you were before you came to the conclusion. Like when a loved one is lost to you and you wonder why this sort of thing would exist in a world with a benevolent creator; you wonder if there isn't one, or if they're indifferent. Sounds edgy but there's no way around the egde sometimes

<_< why would you want to induce this feeling

[Loud Whispers]

<_< why would you want to induce this feeling

Sometimes you don't want it, but are compelled to seek it. Sometimes to understand things more, or ask more questions, or just to relate... Or just because you are compelled to and don't know why.

See also "the call to the void," when people peer over the edge of some great drop and some startling part of their brain says to jump. It's an intrusive thought that the thinker doesn't want, and can't explain why it exists. Reminds me when I was a school kid always crossing over the river thames, and my books were the only thing I had worth preserving. Occasionally I'd get these intrusive thoughts suggesting I throw my books into the river, and I could never explain why these thoughts existed at all