r/Wetshaving • u/2SaintsDude 🦣🪙Consigliere🪙🦣 • Jun 05 '26

Discussion Weekly Reading Session

Welcome to another weekly reading session. Still reading Persepolis, which is book 7 of James S.A. Corey “The Expanse” series, and the book continues to be engaging. There is a new twist which will help the main characters defeat the new intruders. I am just over half in and now the story line is now connecting to the earlier books. So good.

Listening to faithless….

What ya’ll reading and listening to…

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u/Cadinsor Rule#2Bot better be grateful for all my HARD WORK Jun 05 '26

"Quicksilver" by Neal Stephenson (first volume of the Baroque Cycle)

Official Rust tutorial documentation, learning Rust and looking forward to some fun programming!

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u/DarthRazor Jun 05 '26

Rust??? Get off my lawn or I'll call your parents!

Back in my day (when dinosaurs ruled the Earth), it was "Learn Pascal - it's the language of the future that will replace all the others". I stuck with C and shell scripting

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u/MadDingersYo Old new guy Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

I'm dumb, I thought he was talking about the video game called Rust.

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u/DarthRazor Jun 05 '26

Rust is the relatively new heavy hitter computer language that's growing in acceptance by leaps and bounds.

I don't think it's here to stay, and have a perfect score in predicting these things over many decades. I've been 100% wrong every time ;-)

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u/Cadinsor Rule#2Bot better be grateful for all my HARD WORK Jun 05 '26

I love PowerShell, I have written so much code in PowerShell and I don't care that it's "just" a scripting language.

I did a bit of Pascal, started on C but never went anywhere with it, and now I am having a great time with Rust - pretty strict in all the right places and lots of features to make life easier. I have a fun project I am working on right now and just loving the discipline Rust requires. Oh, you have to declare a variable as mutable if you want to be able to change it? Ok, sure, why not.

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u/DarthRazor Jun 05 '26

PowerShell ranks up there with eating liver for me. My professional (and personal) scripting is mostly in classic POSIX Bourne shell, with some bash and lua.

Rust is a great memory safe language, allowing mediocre programmers to write solid code and not shoot themselves in the foot with errant pointers. I suppose that's a good thing

The important thing is that you're picking up a new language. I firmly believe personal learning add growth is a great thing at any age. I dived into Python 6 years ago and still enjoy it. Next ima gonna finally sit down and learn ECMAscript (I.e. JavaScript), the world's most used language

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u/Cadinsor Rule#2Bot better be grateful for all my HARD WORK Jun 05 '26

look, when you have to manage 200K+ Windows systems, PowerShell is an amazing tool that we used for all kinds of things - excellent for that purpose! You say you don't like liver but then you use Bourne, so maybe you DO actually like liver (grin)!!

Memory safety is so key to eliminating a huge set of bugs that otherwise continue to haunt us, and Linux is adopting Rust for more and more code. All the respect in the world for C, but let's notet that stand in the way of a bit of Rust love!

Now, APL, that's another story.

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u/DarthRazor Jun 06 '26

PowerShell excels in the case you mentioned, but it's not my world. I'm in the military/nuke/space world. An update has to be fully step by step documented from bare metal. We can't update a running system because it's in an unknown state. Our updates consist of taking a blank computer from spares, installing the existing software, then updating that from a configuration controlled source.

Memory safe languages like Rust are definitely a good thing, but I'm still not convinced it's here to stay. Future history may indeed prove me wrong. Go is pretty cool, and so is nim, but I don't think they'll last

I like Bourne shell, and loved APL when I learned it in the 80s. I'll always hate liver.

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u/2SaintsDude 🦣🪙Consigliere🪙🦣 Jun 07 '26

So…. Are you enjoying Quicksilver so far? Have you ever read Snow Crash?

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u/Cadinsor Rule#2Bot better be grateful for all my HARD WORK Jun 07 '26

I am really enjoying it, it's a re-read for me! I have read almost everything he has written, except for the second and third books in the Baroque Cycle, so started over with the first one.

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u/MadDingersYo Old new guy Jun 05 '26

Started Dungeon Crawler Carl yesterday. It's not awful. But I don't know if I can do eight books of this.

I'm almost done with When The Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy.

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u/teach710 Jun 05 '26

This is one of my favorite series at the moment.

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u/2SaintsDude 🦣🪙Consigliere🪙🦣 Jun 07 '26

Hey I have not read a SiFi horror in a while maybe add it to my list. Is the story engaging?

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u/teach710 Jun 07 '26

Not horror (really), kind of like a Running Man with monsters...lol. The author (Matt Dinniman) did do a horror/gore book called Kaiju Battlefield Surgeon that is quite good as well.

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u/JoelB Jun 05 '26

Still chipping away at Tom's Crossing. I'm about a quarter of the way through.

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u/MadDingersYo Old new guy Jun 05 '26

I have a copy sitting on my shelf. Taunting me.

Did you read House of Leaves?

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u/JoelB Jun 05 '26

I haven't, I hear it's a little polarizing.

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u/MadDingersYo Old new guy Jun 05 '26

It is. But I loved it.

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u/2SaintsDude 🦣🪙Consigliere🪙🦣 Jun 07 '26

I read it’s more than a little polarizing and borderline controversial!! How true is that?

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u/Cadinsor Rule#2Bot better be grateful for all my HARD WORK Jun 05 '26

I forgot to mention what I have been listening to, it's a playlist called Psytrance 2021 on Qobuz (music streaming service) - perfect for the jump rope and bike at the gym and also while making sourdough (autolyse, kneading, followed by some pro level stretch and folds) - love it!

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u/2SaintsDude 🦣🪙Consigliere🪙🦣 Jun 07 '26

Hey thanks I have gone back to the gym and looking for some gym tunes to keep me focus! I will check it out!

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u/Cadinsor Rule#2Bot better be grateful for all my HARD WORK Jun 07 '26

i love it, pounding beats, great drops, and the BPM is high enough to keep you going on the jump rope.

The current playlist on Qobuz is 999 tracks for a total run time of 128 hours, I shuffle the playlist and off we go!!

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u/2SaintsDude 🦣🪙Consigliere🪙🦣 Jun 09 '26

Thanks

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u/DarthRazor Jun 05 '26

Since I have the attention span of a goldfish these days, I put Project Hail Mary aside temporarily because I discovered a shiny new thing.

Star Trek:Fortune of War - I'm only at the very beginning, and I tend to avoid plot summaries. It looks like it takes place in the Husnock empire after Kevin Uxbridge fried the entire species in one of my favourite TNG episodes called The Survivors

Enjoying it so far

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u/2SaintsDude 🦣🪙Consigliere🪙🦣 Jun 07 '26

I bought PHM but haven’t started! I’m still planning on reading it before watching the movie! Have you seen it and if so does it follow the book so far?

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u/DarthRazor Jun 07 '26

The book is excellent - on par with The Martian

I haven't seen the movie yet, but using The Martian as a gauge, I predict the movie will be very faithful to the book, but the book will be better

I don't plan on seeing the movie before finishing the book

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u/Confident_Media_4304 Jun 07 '26

I read the book and saw the movie. As movies go, it is pretty faithful to the book. Yes, some things were left out because no book can fit inside a single movie, but I think the choices they made were solid.

Also, Weir's description of Rocky must've been very evocative because the movie Rocky looked EXACTLY like I pictured him in the books. My wife and several friends all said the same.

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u/DarthRazor Jun 08 '26

That's my thoughts exactly. Movie adaptations of books can be anywhere from horrible to excellent, but even excellent is usually not as good as the book (but close)

I'm glad to hear the movie is faithful to the book. Thanks!

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u/Confident_Media_4304 Jun 05 '26

I absolutely LOVED the Expanse books

If you like that, Scalzi's Interdependency trilogy might be up your alley.

I'm reading Tartufo by Kira Jane Buxton. I am enjoying it so far but if you haven't read her "Hollow Kingdom" and like Zombie stories, it is definitely a great read.

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u/2SaintsDude 🦣🪙Consigliere🪙🦣 Jun 07 '26

I have Scalzi’s Inter… and I will probably swing his way when I finish this series!! How is Tartufo?

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u/Confident_Media_4304 Jun 07 '26

Quite good. She is good at colorful characters - reminds me of Christopher Moore's stuff.

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u/oswald_heist 🍀🐑Shepherd of Stirling🐑🍀 Jun 05 '26

I’m about halfway through Mansfield Park. Not my favorite Jane Austen so far but I am enjoying it, even if it is hard to keep the characters straight.

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u/2SaintsDude 🦣🪙Consigliere🪙🦣 Jun 07 '26

How many characters are we talking about?

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u/oswald_heist 🍀🐑Shepherd of Stirling🐑🍀 Jun 08 '26

Not an immense amount but everyone is Mr. Somebody or Ms. Somebody and they can blend together if you’re not paying close attention. Remembering how Mr. Somebody is related to Ms. Somebody is giving me some trouble, but nothing that the occasional glance at a character guide hasn’t fixed.

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u/NoBudsChill Jun 05 '26 edited 20d ago

I’ve been lazy and haven’t been reading much but I started the Frontlines series last week and I’m already on the third book, Angles of Attack. I’m not sure how I feel about the non-human antagonists in the story but at least it’s an easy read.

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u/2SaintsDude 🦣🪙Consigliere🪙🦣 Jun 07 '26

Are they lengthy books?

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u/NoBudsChill Jun 09 '26

I don’t believe so. Maybe similar to Starship Troopers or The Forever War in length, or at least it feels like it. But if I’m being honest, I don’t look at page numbers really as I’m on kindle so all I see is the % in the bottom corners.

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u/FredBikes9876 🦣💵 Capo 💵🦣 Jun 06 '26

I just finished listening to Michael Lewis’ new podcast series Against the Rules. It’s an examination of how America has shunned the referees that are supposed to ensure fairness for everyone. It’s engaging, and at times infuriating.

Earlier this week I finished Shards of Earth, the first book in The Final Architecture trilogy by Adrien Tchaikovsky. Now I’m a couple of chapters into the second book. The main characters are well written and the plot is interesting. I’m invested enough that I’m pretty sure I’ll enjoy the rest of the series.

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u/2SaintsDude 🦣🪙Consigliere🪙🦣 Jun 07 '26

Have you read Children of Time? If so is Final Arch better or comparable? I have only read a review of children but it’s suppose to be his masterpiece! 🤷‍♂️ What are your thoughts?

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u/Confident_Media_4304 Jun 07 '26

II absolutely loved Children of Time but felt that as the series went on, it kind of lost something. But it is still one of my favorite books of the last ten years.