I was in a bookshop today but they didn't have the book I wanted. So I went to the desk to see if they could order it. While I was waiting I looked at a book on the counter called A Field Guide To Tasmanian Fungi and I thought what a great book to help ID all the species I see about. I wasn't going to buy it, though, until I noticed that I knew one of the authors, who besides being a mycologist, is a keen chess player.
@beexcessivelydiverting@bookstodon What 2005 film? As far as I'm concerned, there is no screen adaptation of Pride and Prejudice other than the 1995 BBC miniseries. All others are dead to me. 🙂
#BirnamWood couldn’t be more different from #EleanorCatton’s previous Booker prize winning novel. It’s a fairly straightforward literary thriller and one that is very much of the zeitgeist with environmentalism, social media & billionaires under the microscope. Even the morally upright journalist thinks about his scoop as a path to fame. It’s very readable but also, particularly at the end, just a little bit silly. #bookstodon@bookstodon
@bookworks@bookstodon it was enjoyable & topical but I don’t think it had anything to say about current issues, which a better ending might have been able to do
@hoare_spitall@bibliolater@bookstodon i find them greatly dissimilar, unless he was molesting teenagers he brought along for the ride? No?
Didn't think so, or YOU would've spoken up, or at least refused to go along with it silently, and certainly not defending him when the truth came to light
@whatzaname@bibliolater@bookstodon
I'm not defending anybody, not even me. But I am aware that sometimes prima facie situations appear to be other than they are, and I have also learned to wait until all the pieces of the jigsaw are on the board before deciding what the picture shows.
The Angel of Indian Lake - Stephen Graham Jones
*What I'd Rather Not Think About - Jente Posthuma
*You Dreamed of Empires - Álvaro Enrigue
Yours For The Taking - Gabrielle Korn
Headshot - Rita Bullwinkel
The Emperor and the Endless Palace - Justinian Huang
Tom Lake - Ann Patchett
The September House - Carissa Orlando
A Season of Monstrous Conceptions - Lina Rather
A Desolation Called Peace - Arkady Martine
*There's Always This Year - Hanif Abdurraqib
*Greta & Valdin - Rebecca K. Reilly
Ghost Station - S.A. Barnes
River East, River West - Aube Rey Lescure
How To Say Babylon - Safiya Sinclair
Shanghailanders - Juli Min
The American Daughters - Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Traces of Enayat - Iman Mersal
Fervor - Toby Lloyd
Elena Knows - Claudia Piñeiro
@lunalein@bookstodon
Good, narrated by Hera, it has just the right amount of knowing and snark in the tone.
And I have no idea where she's going with it, despite knowing where the story ends up.
"If you think about Harry Potter books as emblematic of where we are, even though those books were written by a women they tend to be very traditionally sexist, very imperialist and racist in the sense that once again we have our little European white-boy hero. And I'm not here to say those books are not enjoyable or valuable, but they certainly don't offer a paradigm that breaks with conventional thinking. And the question to me isn't so much 'Why are the Harry Potter books so well received?' but: Why aren't other books that are alternative, that offer different kinds of visions, just as popular? Because we do know that a very patriarchal, white male-dominated mass media really pushed the Harry Potter books. ... People say to me,'Well, children really love them." I say, Well, guess what? Children wouldn't have known anything about what some white female in England is writing without a powerful patriarchally based mass media that really hyped these books.
"And one of the constant struggles for feminist thinking and writing and our visions is that we rarely have access to that kind of powerful mainstream media. There are wonderful visionary feminist #books that no one reads. They don't get hyped." - bell hooks on #HarryPotter, Bitch magazine, 2000
@swisslet@kitoconnell@bookstodon I always thought the boarding school part of it sounded not great, but it was just a background feature of the story to me. 🤷
@swisslet@kitoconnell@bookstodon CS Lewis’s autobiography and arguably several of his non fiction pieces are about the abuse he suffered at some boarding school.
I found the perfect read to start #pridemonth ! Queer Cheer is a self help book answering any question you could have about LGBT+. It helps navigate various topics linked to relationships, self-care, school or the community in general. I really love this book ! It is full of affirmative affirmations and testimonies.
Not sure if I'll be able to get my hands on a copy, but very excited to see this collaboration between "OXO Museo del Videojuego Málaga" and "Héroes de Papel".
This book about #Dinamic will be released alongside the museum's temporary exhibition.
My #bookreview is brief/won't spoil, to spread good, great, & spectacular #horror#books far & wide.
💙📚 You may presume you'll know the story that unfolds in I THINK I'M ALONE NOW, but you'll be wrong as hell. I read this novella in a single sitting: Ali Seay has written a thoroughly enjoyable, vivid, violent, deliciously dark chunk o' horror set in the 80's that's, like, totally rad. (Grindhouse Press)
As I noted right here in this feed, this past Saturday was Towel Day. That inspired me to check out The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy from the library to re-read it for the first time since 2000. It still holds up! What a delightful classic.
Also worth noting: Douglas Adams basically described an e-reader device almost 30 years before Kindle came on the market.
I've #finishedReading a few of these #GardnerDozois best-of anthologies, and they've all been ridiculously good value. This one collects #SciFi short stories from 2001, with my favourites being 'On K2 with Kanakaredes' by #DanSimmons , 'The Chief Designer' by #AndyDuncan and, best of all, 'May Be Some Time' by #BrendaWClough , a time travel story that tells which 'some time' Captain Oates headed into the Antarctic blizzard for. #Bookstodon@bookstodon
@bookstodon also, while #SciFi stories aren't really 'for' predicting the future, 'The Real Thing' by #CarolynIvesGilman is a bang up to date, only slightly exaggerated, satire of the current state of the internet, written in 2001! Cesspits of conspiracies, amoral tech bros, AI-sweetened images, actual information as an expensive niche product, it's all there...