"The pile beside my bed never shrinks; at the bottom of the stack are books I've been planning to crack open for months. My shelves remain full of lingering aspirations," writes the Walrus's Michelle Cyca. She looks at the problem of unread books, and the difficulty in offloading our libraries. What do you do with your unwanted books?
@CultureDesk@bookstodon New hardbacks that I know I won’t read again I put on eBay. Other ones I give to friends or donate to a local book stall that sells them for charity. I have a cull once a year or so.
@CultureDesk@bookstodon I selected “I have an e-reader so I don’t buy books”, but that’s only half the story. All novels I buy are ebook, but there’s 20 years of collecting paper books before I got a kindle, plus a I still buy paper graphic novels and art books.
Each of Emma Newman's Planetfall quartet explores a different aspect of the same overarching story of religious driven intergalactic migration. In Atlas Alone (2019), the fourth story centres on an elite gamer & their attempt to uncover & then take revenge for a crime against humanity. To say much more would ruin the plot for you, but as with the others, this is great, fascinating sci-fi, which has a great payoff at the end.
@firefly@NeadReport@fskornia@TimWardCam@ChrisMayLA6@bookstodon I mean, technically I think you mean the Torah, a book which has remained copied word for word for thousands of years without changes. The Bible is a distinct and different thing.
The point of the faith that arose from the Essene prophet Jesus, was an intentional break with covenant of the Torah, while maintaining the history of it. As in, this is from whence we came, but we bring a new message from God.
Now, I could go into the splinters therein, and the vast difference between original Gnosticism, the various enclaves, and then the absorption and mistranslated messages promulgated by organized branches of the faith, but to conflate Bible as a term to mean the Torah, but none of the Jesus stuff, is simply not true.
The Aramaic, first version of the New Testament, written in Byblos Lebanon is the origin of the term Bible.
Nonsense. The first five books of Moses are called Torah. Then there is Neviim and Ketuvim. All of them together are called in Hebrew, "Tanakh" or "Miqra". In ancient Greek they were called, 'ta biblia' or The Bible centuries before Christ and the Apostles or any of the New Testament works.
> "a book which has remained copied word for word for thousands of years without changes."
This is not even remotely close to historical and recorded fact. Who taught you this nonsense?
> "The Bible is a distinct and different thing."
Nonsense, as proved above. Greek-speaking Hebrews in the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C. called the writings of the Prophets, 'ta biblia' (The Bible) The LXX (Septuagint) refers to the writings of the prophets as, 'ta biblia'. See Daniel Chapter 9 in the LXX.
> "The point of the faith that arose from the Essene prophet Jesus ..."
Jesus is no Essene. Your claim is New-Age and Hebrew roots nonsense. It's just made-up wooey hooey.
> "As in, this is from whence we came, but we bring a new message from God."
Jesus preached the faith of Abraham, which is not a new message at all, but God's original message recorded in the Hebrew Bible. You are inventing history like the cults and heretics often do. The gospel preached by Jesus is the same gospel preached to and by Abraham well before Moses.
> "and the vast difference between original Gnosticism"
Gnosticism is satanism. End of discussion. Jesus was not a gnostic. The Pharisees and Greco-Roman nobility were gnostics of the school of the Hellenes.
> "but to conflate Bible as a term to mean the Torah, but none of the Jesus stuff, is simply not true."
I have conflated nothing. You're the one conflating things wrongly. You misuse the word, "Torah", which applies only to the Pentateuch of Moses, when you should be using the Hebrew word, Tanakh. But the problem with your false theory is that millions of Hebrews in ancient times didn't speak or read Hebrew. Rather they spoke and wrote Greek, the language of the Septuagint, which is how they started calling the Tanakh "The Bible" instead.
> "The Aramaic, first version of the New Testament, written in Byblos Lebanon is the origin of the term Bible."
This is based on the spurious "Aramaic Original New Testament" theory, and it has exactly zero historical or archaelogical support. And this theory is 400 years too late, since Greek-speaking Israelites had already been calling the Tanakh, 'ta biblia' for 300-400 years before any Aramaic New Testament manuscripts appeared.
Some people hate the gospel of grace so much they will go through years and ages of mental gymnastics to re-write history in support of a works-based gospel that glorifies their, 'superior knowledge'. Thereby the Judaizing or gnostic "believer" can take center stage in the salvation story with his self-aggrandizing superior rationale. Salvation is by simple faith in the Messiah as our sacrifice for all sin, not by some superior hidden knowledge. Paul the Apostle made a fine point of this truth.
In sum: Ancient Jews did call the Tanakh, 'ta biblia' or "The Bible." In fact, many bible scholars insist on calling it specifically, "The Hebrew Bible" to be accurate and consistent. Judging by your claims, you don't know what you are talking about. Take a step back and think things through before you accept such sectarian and gnostic theories as fact. I recommend you read the entire Bible two or three times through, then read several tomes on textual criticism and philology before you read another single line of theological or historical claims.
Doing a pinned #Books thread of my reading for 2024. Goal is 40 books, which is for sure low, but I also believe in playing games on "easy" mode. Audiobooks count, sorry.
Feel free to mute this if not your ball of wax.
This book was simply amazing. I felt like as it went along bringing up people and subjects (Stafford Beer/Cybernetics, Systems, Human Decentrification) that I will need a notebook for a re-reading. A lot of thoughts that I have had about how our species fits into the larger world were articulated for me. Written in 2020, but has AI arguments that we are just seeing now. Great stuff.
Serious #Downfall vibes in the series finale of #Rome. I’m not an educated classicist and I know they had to change things for the show and its collapsing budget by this point, but I’m a bit skeptical that the real story was like this.
No wonder people see this show as a precursor to Game of Thrones - I may get round to watching that. I’ll have to rewatch season 1 later.
I also just bought Ten Caesars and will read it soon.
@GrittyLipids@bookstodon Tom Holland’s Rubicon, an excellent short history of the last century of the Roman republic, was the first book I read after watching Rome, and it really made me want to read some fiction set in the period (and that’s when I found McCullough’s at-the-time ongoing series).
@trif@TootTropiques@bookstodon OK, now I am absolutely stuck-in-love with Dave Hutchinson. On his 2nd in Fractured series and have rest on pad waiting to be read. Thank you. Thank you! Who knew? Me and Science Fiction! Never saw it coming.
"What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father recreated in his models. Mazes in the nodules on the murex shells and in the textures of sycamore bark and inside the hollow bones of eagles. None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes."
Time to get cracking on the rewrite of my sequel hacker thriller “Submerged.” I’ve got feedback from two development editors and three alpha readers to compare and contrast. And I’ve got coffee. @bookstodon
I’m listening to this song now while reading Star Wars Thrawn. No, it’s not a direct allusion to the Thrawn of Rebels (because there it seems to me a little different from the books), but it definitely helped me get in the mood.
@bookstodon on this #WorldRefugeeDay I'd like to both list and solicit recommendations for books about refugees. With the deepening Climate Crisis, each of us could find ourselves in such a position at any time.
My rec's:
The Beekeeper of Aleppo, Christy Lefteri
Illegal, Eoin Colfer
Welcome To The New World, Jake Halpern, Michael Sloan
@kimlockhartga@bookstodon that was the first one of hers I read, blew me away. I pretty much turned straight back to the start to read it again, and I never normally do that
With the most likely imminent loss of my day job, I'm thinking of changing my patreon back to my writing.
Would it be too confusing if I had people able to subscribe either by my website, Patreon, or Ream? (Either same benefits each place OR same benefits with bonus short stories on my website.)
I've got a serial idea in the works and I hope to dive into it no later than June.
Decidedly NOT confusing, however I would specify or provide a REASON for the things to be available. "To appeal to a wider base" is a given, but doesn't really seem to be enough to generate interest.
If it's just simpler to have only one, then having more than one can create more questions that it offers solutions in the eyes of your potentials. But if having the alternative solves some sort of issue or scenario, EVERYONE can get on board and tend to support it.
Reader here; as someone with a very limited budget who needs to pick and choose who and where and how to support creators, the suggestion of "same benefits everywhere (for the same $$), with a bit extra offered at the place YOU get the most back" makes the most sense and feels the most fair..
It allows people to make the choice to support you either on the platform they already have or where it does you the most good, being assured they aren't missing out elsewhere.
This book was absolutely unhinged. That’s the best way I can describe it. The main character was unhinged, the way the book took a turn and nearly became a horror novel was unhinged. The way it ended was unhinged. I was getting so enraged at the main character’s behavior that I was live reacting as I read in a mutual’s DMs who had just finished reading the book the week prior.
Would I read this book again? Probably. Not anytime in the near future though. Aside from the insane plot line, this book touched on themes like interpersonal racism, discrimination, identity and authenticity, representation, cultural appropriation, and cancel culture.
@alexisbushnell@infinitesoleil@bookstodon Coincidentally
A tech report just got covered on slashdot: there's a known bug with propagation of links with images causing temporary transfer overloads, especially on smaller servers. The lag symptom I saw is not mentioned, but I wonder if it might be related.
@beecycling@weirdwriter@bookstodon The environmental cost is too much even if the work is public domain. And the 'AI' will always have been trained on stolen content.
@cynical13@Narayoni@bookstodon Somebody once asked on social media for the most “kick-ass” female character in books or on film. Mainly the replies involved Lara Croft, Ripley, or Zena.
They were wrong of course.