seems fun will do
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wow that is very insightful!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
very cool thing btw
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I really am a fan of how the book club is run, we don't all read the same books! you pick a book that is fitting of that months themes, unfortunately i havent had a book that fits into either of the monthly themes :p oh well.
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There's a YA book series called Tunnels that I've loved since I started reading in 4th grade. Just speaks to me for some reason. Maybe it's the underground vibes. 
I also like the online web serial novels Worm and Pact, but keep in mind there are.... several triggers in them.
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Reading this:
And I am so excited! I've been holding onto this book for like a year since I heard a podcast episode of The Grey Area with the author as a guest. Finally getting around to reading it. An excerpt that got me really excited because it jives with my views on optimism:
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I recently read The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss which is a side story from a big series of his, but is just as powerful by itself. It follows the character Auri over seven days as she explores the Underthing, a series of passages and tunnels underneath a university, and does general gremlin behaviour, trying to find a suitable gift for another character.
Having read it a second time, I think this is now my new favourite book. Very poetic and pretty, kinda funky pacing and structure but I think that really works in its benefit. It's a fairly short book that could easily be read in one sitting. Highly recommend it.
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i love this book!!!
its also the first and only time i felt somewhat seen as a person with ocd
and i love the cute gobliney activities it is so nice
(on a side note i love the name of the wind (a book of the same universe) however the book written after was awfull and kinda gross and completely out of feild for the first book and verry disspointing for me personaly (so dont read the wise mans fear in my opionion) bro suffered from horny auther curse...fucking tragic
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yessss the whole idea of everything having its right place really spoke to me, very much reminded me of how my brain worked
ah thanks i had been meaning to try the rest of his stuff, ill probably skip that one then :( [1]
curse you allos!! /silly ↩︎
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2 weeks ago I read Dracula and it's currently one of the best books I've read (considering I'm not too much into books) and it was amazing, unfortunately I don't own the copy I read since it was from school, the day I finished it I read 114 pages and considering that I'm not an English native speaker (I'm B1+ afaik) it was quite a task to finish it in time.
This is the copy I read, it was amazing.
I'm considering reading more books, I have other books to read but also other things to do that I feel I would never end, but it's fun and soothing to read.
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Hi Chat. And by chat, we clearly mean the readers of this thread. Threads are not chat. I just finished reading House of Leaves, on the recommendation of someone here. Two people even I think. Before I begin, I'm giving my brief thoughts about a book that deals with mental illness really heavily. just a TW. Anyways we're procrastinating the actual thoughts behind this:
Yes. This was a great book Alex thought. But, unfortunately, the book deals with a metatext about paranoia induced hallucinations and a familial history of mental illness passed from mother to child. And the narrative inside that deals with a photojournalist photographing a home that ends up perverted by paranoia, loneliness, and an inability to keep "real" separate from "fantasy". These are both things that Alex themselves either struggles with or engages with on an actual level in their own "real" life. Spoiler here --->Yea so the actual plot inside the meta text is really quite good, the way the house reflects the fears of the one inside of it, etc. There is no monster, we made it up. Navidson being haunted by Delial the whole time and what being a photojournalist means, how you can justify this, etc felt like it was done pretty well.
If you're already struggling with keeping reality straight, this might not be the book for you. On the other hand, it might directly help you. For Alex at least, it's definitely helped contribute to my own project exploring very similar thoughts and feelings inside my own brain.
Oh and the plot is good too I guess.
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How to open a thread? is something i ask myself a lot and is really hard for me to do.
After a few times considering if i should revive (any) thread about books, i ended up going for a simple review, if you want to call it that, of Don Quijote of la mancha with some other novels/books i wanted to talk more about.
I read a spanish version of Don Quijote that had annotations and used mostly the old spanish language so this was a tough read
Don Quijote of la mancha
- How was Don Quijote?
He was a crazy man, consume by books about knights, knightly books, who one day decides to become a knight himself, specifically a knight errant.
by Gustave Doré
- Was his actual name Don Quijote?
No, his real name was Alonso Quijano, Don Quijote is his knight name
by Ricardo Balaca
-Small summary
Don Quijote decides to become a knight due to the large amount of knightly books he has read, he prepares his armour and horse and takes his first leave. Looking for adventure alone, he stumbles upon a small venta(1) and makes a fool of himself. One of the highlights of this first departures is the fact that Don Quijote doesn't pay the owner of the venta what he owns for staying the night and tells the owner:
"in none of the knightly books i have read they mention how the knight pays for his stay"
hearing this the owner plays along and says to Don Quijote "of course they won't mention anything so mundane and simple, everyone knows that knights always carry some money with them"
(1) a Venta is a small establishment in Spain and some hispanic countries, think of them as inns.
by Gustave Doré
Once Don Quijote gets back home, he asks a small man to join him and be he shielder and go to adventures with him, The shilder's name is Sancho Panza, small man that rides a mule. In their travels Sancho tells Don Quijote how he knows very little about books and even less about knightly books but he still joins him since Don Quijote promised him a lot of riches, mostly Sancho being the owner of a insula(2).
(2) an insula is an island
by Gustave DoréAfter a few hours of traveling they stumble again to the venta that Don Quijote stayed last time. At night things become a bit of a mess, Don Quijote tries to comfort the daughter of the owner of the venta, but one of the workers there finds out and starts punching Don Quijote, the daughter hides under the covers where Sancho is sleeping, Sancho noticing something is on top of him he wakes ups and tries to talk but the daughter punch him and runs away.
Don Quijote still fighting the worker that started the fight but he ends up losing, already on the floor, the worker keeps punching him at this point Sancho wakes up and stops the worker, with all the noise going around more workers show up to see what was happening, they see Don Quijote laying on the floor, they all though he was dead. When Sancho goes to his rescue Don Quijote tells him:
"Give me the magic mix i told you, i will be up in no time"
Sancho follows and Don Quijote drinks the mix, after drinking it he stands up like nothing happend then starts to vomit and falls asleep.
The next day when they are both ready to leave the owner of the venta stops them and tells Don Quijote to pay, Don Quijote argues that he doesn't need to pay since at night some one attacked him. While they are both talking a group of people enter the venta and noticed the commotion and ask the owner what is happening, the owner tells them all that happened and before they could do anything Don Quijote runs with his horse leaving poor Sancho behind, before he could do anything the group of people took Sancho and made him jump with a big piece of cloth, Don Quijote tells Sancho not to worry because he will take him out but doesn't know how. After a few hours of throwing poor Sancho in the air they all get tired and let him go
by Ricardo Balaca
I could go on with every small thing that happened but i think that would ruin the enjoyment of the whole novel.
Don Quijote, the novel, is made by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra as a critique of the knightly books of the time, all trying to be this knight in shiny armour with their epic adventures. Cervantes uses his novel as a way to ridicule and make fun of them while also giving proper criticism and complains.
One of the latter chapters illustrates this better when a priest talks to another religious person who also shares his opinions on the knightly books. They both agree that they sell a lie, a fantasy that does nothing other than make for cheap entertainment and while they can have very good writing, most of them are nothing more than just entertainment. "the more things change the more they stay the same" is something i thought when reading Don Quijote and seeing the priest complain about other novels.
One, if not the most, famous example of this critique and perfect example of Don Quijote as a character is early on when they see some windmills
by Gustave Doré
Don Quijote is sure that the windmill is a giant ready to right with his arms, Don Quijote gives a whole speech about how other knights have fought giants with a thousand arms and he would take this giant in one single move
(unknown source)
The novel is a lot of fun, even though it can have walls of text and have chapters of nothing but walls of text, still a really good read.
But i can't finish this "review", or whatever you want to call it, without mentioning Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote by Jorge Luis Borges
This story is very interesting, to summarize:
Jorge Luis Borges, really good writer and author of The Library of Babel (side note: library of babel is a really cool site), tells the story of Pierre Menard who decided to rewrite Don Quijote but while doing so he starts to change a lot of things and put his own perspective into things. He copies Don QUijote word for word yet his Don Quijote is different to that of Cervantes' all due to the change of perspective and meaning.
Don Quijote is not just the knight of the sad figure he is a madman, an idiot, a knight of a bygone era, and yet he is the perfect knight for this novel. Someone so crazy that decides to become a walking joke but still being an honest knight.
- Versions
This is a bit of a difficult topic to comment since i haven't read any version of Don Quijote in english so i don't have any version to recommend if you are going to read it in english. If you, the person reading this, have a recommended version for others please let others know, thanks in advanced
As for the spanish version.
this is the version i have, but fair warning, old spanish can be hard to read and follow
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Is another book i finished before reading Don Quijote. This time it was hard to follow old english but still very enjoyable and interesting way to do an autobiography.
This one is hard to tackle and do a full rundown, i don't think i can do it justice to this one. If you are interested i do recommend that you read it.
- Versions
I am not sure if the versions changes that much but i have this version
The Ballad of Reading Gaol and other stories
Another read before Don Quijote, this one is a collection of poems and well, "other stories"
The way Oscar Wilde writes them is very fun, the way he uses Greek mythology is really fun. I don't have much to say since each poem is unique and i don't remember much of each one.
- Versions
Like with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, i am not sure how much each version changes things but this is the version i have
really cool collection.
-
conclusion?
source
Don Quijote was a big read, and while enjoyable, still very challenging, as for the others novels i mention here, they were easier but still challenging.
Would i do this kind of "review", or whatever this can be called, again?. Maybe, i am not sure since most of the novels i read are sci-fi and mostly set on a series/universe so trying to do something like this with novels like that would be weird since not everyone is into 40k or halo novels, yes i know i am massive nerd. But i do read other things from time to time.
Maybe i could do one for Sherlock Holmes but that would be for another time.
I am still uncertain if this was a good "review" of the 3 novel i talked about, if anything i just wanted to talk a bit about 2 of them and go into more detail about Don Quijote.
I am a bookworm and while i don't read books in one or 2 sittings, i do read a lot, but i also play a lot of games so having a way to express what i liked about a book/novel can be harder to do since not everyone is into reading, and while i like a lot of games, i do have harsh things to say about almost all of them, maybe tetris has a free pass and is the perfect game, but that's another topic.
Have you ever thought of becoming a knight and making your own epic? How many giants did you defeat? How many portraits did they make of you?
Maybe one day we will see each other at the bottom of the ocean or will be free to run, maybe we will see each other, maybe we will only hear about our tales. Ah but our tales would be different, would you still be a knight? or be a painter that drowned itself in sorrows and nights?
No matter what you do, i will find your tale in this infinite library with only one exit.
[couldn't find the proper source of this one, the link they provide doesn't seem to work]
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I haven’t seen anyone put “the expanse“ books here yet so i’ll just throw in leviathan wakes into the mix as some of the best sci fi
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While I was setting up stuff on this PC, I needed to make sure I could still strip the DRM off ebooks I buy to read them on anything at all. On a whim, it was the entire set of the Murderbot Diaries, which I've been tangentially aware of but hadn't properly . So I've been taking a mental break this week and bingeing through them. 5 books of 7 in, probably finishing up on Monday at the rate I read in the office.
It's a really good series! Gave me a lot of thoughts, and not just about the subject matter.
(Don't worry, Homestucks! I will be back on for Act 3 this month. More on that in a bit.)
The main throughline so far has been human dysphoria for murderbot, and it's really weird seeing how the technological features are written lining up with my own preferences (god please give me a feed i can tap for acknowledging people are talking without saying anything that'd be so nice).
Hm...what else to say on it? Oh, one of the names it picks is Rin, which is so fucking bizarre to see given how heavily i relate to its internal monologue and outlook on certain things. There's also a small bit of nondescript alien tech remnants, which really makes me think about Pacific Drive, and I do wonder if there's any actual influence on the dev team there.
Anyway,
not going to give a real textual summary of the story, what's been more interesting to me is the metatextual experience we've had through this. A few realizations, or perhaps even re-realizations after a while of not thinking about things.
- Lots of things in the Diaries are conveyed as data. Time is perceived very differently (commented on very often as an objective difference while watching media, and the subjective experience in tense/uncomfortable situations, which is very fun), but also, it got me thinking about multitasking involving data streams* - audio is so much more difficult to manage than multiple silent feeds of text, which can be a problem when trying to satisfy everyone's requests for stimulation because i can't backburner things the way Murderbot can, i really wish i could, aaaaagh. This is maybe also partially related to audio processing and the potential that i experience APD, dunno, it's a weird mishmash of things, but generally i think this is half of why i've been leaning toward seeking out purely instrumental tracks lately as i get more social (the other half is trying to find good inspiration for guitar practice (still searching for more good bass tracks, slow going...) ).
- Somewhat related, but I do definitely enjoy reading more when i don't have active stakes for it (self-guided learning rather than for a grade), but also, related to the last point, a "good book" seems to be one that i find easy to extrapolate voices, visuals, appearances, details out of, and that experience is something that i find i miss out on with things like webcomics [1] when everything is presented beat-by-beat.
- I think this is a big part of why I enjoy low poly and stylized media as well; there's enough left in the gaps for me to fill out, and it isn't all completely defined. Night in the Woods wouldn't be half the game it is if the graphics were arbitrarily "better", and even a game with higher "fidelity" like Elden Ring leaves so much up in the air for you to dig into at your own pace.
- I need more books, and this was a good reminder that i do still enjoy them very much. As long as there's no constraints on how I get to engage with it.
Anyway, I need to get back to Homestuck, but I'll probably start picking away at turning my theoretical bookshelf into an actual one since I don't foresee myself progressing that series at the office ever.
obligatory: they're still good stories! and between Homestuck and pieces like Room of Swords i do really enjoy defined visuals, though i am really really really really really really really tired of everything being vertical please let me just use a normal book interface i am begging you ↩︎
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This week's in-office attempt has been Infinite Jest.
oh, what a book this is.
Interim review, while I decide if I'll ever want to finish this one up.
So rarely do I read something that is this interested in being miserable, for lack of a better term. Nobody is happy, nobody can be happy, there are many ways in which each of these characters are not able to be happy, except maybe the one thing in specific, which maybe that's supposed to be a grand sort of irony to the world setting? There is a trend of visceral description within the ramble of each massive paragraph block, but i don't think i can describe it any better without reading more of the book.
The first handful of chapters is exceedingly occupied, it seems, with the following things:
- conveying the internal thought processes of most characters in the most neurotic(?) and encyclopedic way. I didn't mind it for Hal, given it came off as his rationalizing whatever is actually going on in that first chapter, but by and large, it seems more interested in building massive paragraphs for the sake of themselves than doing things with the granularity. the roach in the shelf thing, was fine? the first of (so far) two instances of marijuana-based paranoia was less engaging.
- oral hygeine? perhaps hygeine in general, but it just feels like it (and consumption, to an extent) makes much more of a presence of itself than i'd expect.
there's some other things on occasion that have caught my eye, that i could otherwise write off as "well, it's almost 30 years old", but contribute to the book feeling hostile to me in a way i don't particularly care to continue engaging with right now.
i think it's a fairly interesting piece of work, so far. i'm given to understand that it may, in fact, "get better" further in, once i reach the arbitrary point where the years make sense as anything more than random assemblages of words in the chapter titles (and sometimes the narration).
i don't think it's that worth pursuing, right now.
do i recommend this? i don't know. borrow it from a library if you can and check it out? not even Hakita's album based on it playing in the background was enough to get me over my qualms with the process (not really expecting it would, more so just to slip that reference in here, since it came up again and reminded me to try reading this). i went in expecting something very much like House of Leaves, and this... is decidedly something different. Perhaps categorically similar, but lacking nearly all of what appeals to me of the Navidson Record. [1]
i need to remember to put more books on my ereader this week, so i have some more available! that's always the hard part.
I also think the footnotes are just not done as well in IJ; it could be personal taste mostly, but having the Appendix proper be the separate section to dig through and the footnotes properly accompanying the text just felt better. either way would be suffering in an ereader, so there's probably no winning outside of the physical heft of the novel... ↩︎
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i've been through a lot of options when it comes to ebooks, so i'm going to ramble a bit about that process now that i have something that works.
Ebooks are in a bit of a terrible state, generally speaking. At least here in the US, they have waiting times for ebooks at a library upwards of multiple months pretty frequently, which limits options, and the Kindle software is worsening with each update they make, which limits options. I...don't know if it's possible to download from a major storefront in a way that's simpler than Google Play Books does, which is something I am still trying to figure out sooner than later just in case they also get restrictive?
Having a non-standard ebook reader also limits options. I've brought up the Supernote a few times to date, and I stand by it as a very decent option (this reminds me, I need to update the firmware today to see if it fixes the occasional gesture drop I run into at the office (this is always fixed by cycling the screen or using the pen once, so it's not a major gripe)). But it's not A Kindle! Which complicates things a little.
Thankfully, there are perfectly legal options, which I'm very glad to have. gourou is a package available for some number of distributions that lets you interface with ACSM data (adobe edition books) without needing the full GUI client, though it does still require an account (there's some weird process by which you can exist on what is essentially a guest account? but it can also be a burner account since you don't need to log into it more than the setup). Together with Calibre to import the account lock thingymabob, you can just load up the ebooks right there without needing specifically A Kindle Device, which is fun! And exciting! and cool!
Though, notably, I think you need to download the .acsm files after configuring your adobe license key, or it'll have an epoch mismatch and not acquire the data from the file. a re-download will fix that it's just a funny thing i noticed when getting this set up. ^[Strictly speaking, if there's DRM on the resulting .epub or .pdf, it'll still be there when downloaded, and Calibre is responsible for stripping that automagically with the license key, but gourou also has a utility for that. acsmdownloader pulls the book data, and adept_remove once you have the account configured removes the DRM, in case you like to read your files in, like, emacs.]
Now, I would love to find other storefronts that let me export the darn ACSMs without using a client, so if anyone has other experiences in that vein, lmk!
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I don't have any big thoughts to share, but I smashed through Hijab butch blues this weekend, and it was refreshing. Trying to get back into the habit of reading instead of rotting.
Contrary to other queer novels I've read, there was little mention of sexual encounters and the trials of various relationships— it was more about acceptance and growth. Throughout the book there is a focus on the author building and helping their communities, and how the various aspects of their identity play into this. I found it really interesting!!
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got these today, no longer human has been on my read list and i’ve wanted to read some junji ito so i figured i’d do both at once when i saw it. Also nichijou
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A great weird, beautifully written sci-fi/fantasy novel. It’s the second in the series. The first book Perdido Street Station, is great. Highly recommend. Has some pretty dark themes though so be warned.
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Hey there, I’ve been reading, more accurate to say listening to, a lot of books this year. Mostly in the progression fantasy genre.
I recently finished the series Fates Parallel by DarkTechnomancer, I found and read it on a whim because it was listed as queer (lesbian). The gist is it’s a cultivation series about two girls who are not cultivators themselves and end up in an academy for promising young cultivators. Within the series cultivation is split into different types of cultivation. It’s 8 books long and was a serialized production, and it shows at times but, I really loved the series and the characters were a personal highlight.
I’m currently listening to Unbound, which is the second book in the Songs of Chaos series by Michael R. Miller. The story is a cultivation, dragon rider, progression fantasy. It follows Holt Cook, a servant boy who’s gone against his roll and saved a doomed dragon egg.
Songs of Chaos is far more European fantasy in it’s overall vibe and setting. But I really like the dragons of this series far more than some other dragon rider novels.
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