Reading & Writing

Bluntly, I can spend my days sorting “book club” spam, or I can write books. One pays me money. The otherff does not. So until further notice, I’m not entertaining book club invitations from anyone, and I likely won’t respond to your invitation at all. I’m sorry but this is the reality of the moment.

The best argument I can make for why I like reading fiction in translation is because it facilitates the psychedelic experience of encountering someone else’s subjectivity twice over. The translator must act as a prismatic filter, faithfully attempting the impossible task of replicating someone else’s experiences and ideas. To read in translation is to read two stories in harmony with each other: The one the author wants to tell and the one the translator has brought into your linguistic world.

We did a bonus podcast episode discussing three of the stories from Susanna Clarke’s short story collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu - the stories are all set in the Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrell universe but its not vital you’ve read the novel before reading these stories.

Not a fan of Yenpress in general, but this one I have to plug.

The next book posted from this account will be Edith Wharton’s Summer.

Some of Ireland’s top authors today reflect on the power of reading – and the books that inspired them.

Until now, every reading app I’ve found has been a compromise. There are closed source apps like Moon+ Reader with plenty of features and beautiful design. Some people don’t mind the one-time purchase. There are beautiful apps like Book’s Story with a clean, modern design and simple library management, but with little beyond the core features. There are apps like KOReader designed for e-readers with little design consideration for tablets or phones, and a somewhat cluttered design. Each of these apps are beloved by their users for different reasons.

Listened to the audiobook version narrated beautifully by Michael C. Hall, this is the first Stephen King book I have listened to and the first by this narrator.

For those unaware, they take public domain books and create really high quality, free versions that can be read on any ereader or online. Every book also has an oil painting that is also public domain chosen to be its cover.

A dark, fantastical tale that is intended to unfold a paragraph, or thereabouts, at a time.

For almost a decade in the Anglophone world, comment on the unravelling of reality has become commonplace. See Brexit, Trump 1.0 and 2.0, pandemic, Trump 2024-, the surge in domestic terrorism, internet addiction, AI hallucination, and so on. “Post-truth” has, arguably, arrived hand-in-hand with state violence and social decay. Those who feel we have all literally or figuratively slipped onto the “wrong timeline” may think of their own familiar televisions as Tse describes a news anchor appearing onscreen with her usual smile absent, and instead of announcing the news: weeping.

“I cannot overstate how much knowledge is housed in this library about literally our entire universe,” she told me. “The most expansive understanding of human knowledge about space is being packed up.”

Fun fact, while revisiting an old story I published, I realised that, after doing a lot of research previously into the years of a specific thing, that I could not use a name of a place because it was changed in 1954… The story took place in 1955. I am so stupid.

Lord Soth. I’m 32 years clean from D&D but I still appreciate the good times.

New episode of the podcast is out now wherever you get your podcasts from.

Has anyone read any of her Lieutenant Bak series? “Right Hand of Amon”, “A Face Turned Backwards”, and those?

From what I’ve been able to gather, I think they just have the writer wrong, it’s Isaac Asimov, and the book those two did together is The Space Merchants, which doesn’t appear to have to do with crime at all.

Slow day so here’s a free public domain eBook. Enjoy!

Foreigner is CJ Cherryh at her absolute best, a fantastic novel that’s smartly written and with a well-realized world. It’s got a couple of small hiccups, but this book shows why Cherryh is considered one of the foundational sci-fi writers of our time.

A dark, fantastical tale that is intended to unfold a paragraph, or thereabouts, at a time.

cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/9268729

The Guardian has published a piece on Infinite Jest. Thought some folks here might enjoy this :)

Books themselves aren’t going anywhere, or so I keep telling myself and fervently hoping despite all the evidence humanity’s collective brains are dissolving into a stew of slop and influence.

I also saw a person buy the first book coming out of the store. I really enjoyed the series so far.

The Martian Chronicles is a roughly connected collection of short stories written at various times by Ray Bradbury that were about humans going to Mars. They don’t really have a coherent story but some of the characters and events cross over and it beats having to read 50 stories separately but is it worth reading them at all?

https://archive.ph/9Tvkw

In the filings, Anthropic states, as reported by the Washington Post: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world. We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

First I’m hooked on The Expanse series. I finished three books in the series in Jan and I’m nearly done with another one that I’ll finish in the next few days. It’ll be a sad day when I’m all caught up. But I’ll watch the TV series at that point.

I started writing mostly for catharsis. This week I write for resistance. Words, grammar and spelling mistakes are 100% human made. Does anyone feel in a similar way?