David’s Comments (group member since Mar 14, 2025)

David’s comments from the Beyond Reality group.

For me, the issue is not actually time, but mental energy. I usually have an hour or so in the evening, but quite often the brain isn’t willing.

On the bookshelves that are supposed to be only for books, there’s toy cars, play-doh (that earned the kids a warning), photo albums (book-like enough to be with the books), occasionally brushes and dolls.

And on the bookshelves that are also for other things (like CDs and souvenirs), that would take ages.

Yeah, English for one. Plenty of good books in English. That’s the only reason my English is as good as it is, actually. ☺

Pusillanimous. I’m quite sure I encountered it before and that I managed to guess the meaning from context, but this time I decided to look it up.

Recently I re-read Cánh Đồng Bất Tận, and I decided to look up *all* the words I didn’t know. I ended up looking up over 500 words. Not going to give the entire list.

Last time I bought books, it was three at once:

Children of Time
Stupeur et tremblements
Les Trois Mousquetaires

They cost me about $3 including shipping. They were used. Not going to call them “pre-loved”, as what they went through was obviously not love. But they’re in good enough state now that I’ve let them dry out.

Finished the book yesterday night. Completely agree with Kathi’s point of view.

Contrary to many people in the discussion above, I was never rooting for the humans to be exterminated. True, some of them were problematic, but the spiders weren’t all that nice either. I was really hoping for some peaceful solution, except at some point there were not enough pages left for anything but the humans being exterminated.

Yet the author pulled it off.

The only book I can remember reading with alt-history in it was Century Rain. It’s actually sci-fi, but some alien race had, for unfathomable reasons, copied the earth at certain stages of its history. The bad guys find one those copies, which is just before WWII, and they go there and intervene. As a result, WWII ends before it really starts. No holocaust, but also no post-holocaust soul searching, and so Nazism remains a big thing.

I didn’t think it was Alastair Reynolds’s best, but it was good enough.

I’m David. My real name is my account name here. I’ve been living in Đà Nẵng, Vietnam, for over 11 years now. Bookshops and libraries are underwhelming here, which is the main downside. If only shipping fees could go down.

I have three kids, but currently no pets. I’m not a fan of having pets in a tiny house with no garden in the city center; otherwise I’d have cats.

Fun facts:
1. I often necropost. (You might’ve noticed. ☺)
2. I try to read one book in Vietnamese for every book in another language (usually English). The time I spend reading in Vietnamese is quite high, but the number of pages I read in Vietnamese is not...

I ended the year in hospital (no, not because of heavy partying!), and so did not yet finish what I expect to be my best book of the year. But this is what I have so far:

1. Did you set a reading goal of any kind for this year? How’d you do on it?
Having three kids plus fulltime job, my reading goal is to get any reading done at all. I managed that. ☺

2. Did you participate in any reading challenges this year? How did that go?
Nope.

3. What were your best reads of 2025, by whatever measure you choose to use?
Many good reads this year.
I started the year with a collection of chapters about history. Đối thoại sử học Some were very repetitive (there were several about the correct reading of the same Chinese character and the repercussions thereof for the identity of one particular general), but there’s one I still think of regularly. It details the march that preceded the battle of Đống Đa in the late 18th century. Apparently they managed to keep secrecy up to the point that many professional historians today still don’t understand how they got there that quickly.
Another one that gave me a positive surprise was Làm đĩ. I never expected an early 20th-century book about prostitution by a Vietnamese male author known for comical satire could be good, but it was.
A Brief History of Seven Killings was a hard read, but really good.
Wizard and Glass was more emotionally engaging than I had expected from the Black Tower. I understand people’s complaints, but I liked it a lot.
I don’t normally read psychology, but I’m happy to have made an exception for Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents.
And All Systems Red (Murderbot 1) is waaay too short. I finished it in one evening, still taking out time to put the kids to bed.

4. What were your worst (or most disappointing) reads of 2025, again, by whatever measure you choose?
Nothing worth mentioning, really.

No-one read stories to me when I was little, so I taught myself to read (my mother recalls I pressed them into supporting me) with De matroos. Initially it was the only book I had to read, so I read it so many times I could “read” it without opening it. I still remember some fragments (and many pictures) to this day.

I wanted to use it to teach my kids to read (it’s proved its worth ☺), but sadly I can’t find any copies anywhere.

(My first post to this group. A magical moment. ☺)