I bought the Earthsea collection on kindle a while ago as I wanted to reread the three of them that I read as a teenager and read the three that I haven't read yet. So far I've reread A Wizard of Earthsea and Tombs of Atuan, I'm about to start The Farthest Shore for the first time, then I'll reread Tehanu, and then I'll read the last two books for the first time.
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited May 2023
Wth there's two more books.
I'll be honest something about The Fartherest Shore made me mentally switch to that world was over, time to move on, so when she writes new books I have a very odd feeling about it, like I'm disturbing the dead somehow. But I still liked Tehanu.
Honestly it's probably just because I owned the first three in a boxed set as a kid so I've read those three many times over in my childhood, and then I didn't hear about anything else until twenty years later when I read Tehanu about ten years ago.
Next you'll say the Chronicles of Prydain have a sequel series!
Dracula Daily: honestly what sticks out to me the most so far is the writing style, and how stylistically different it is from modern works.
It almost belabors the point with the detail - sometimes to it's detriment, but oft to it's benefit. Dracula speechifying on how he would be good own master is a good example, I think.
Dracula's charm is well done though - he's got a real presence in the page that Harker dosen't. Harker, honestly comes off as a bit of a fool
i have started reading Gibson's Idoru. Didn't realize it was a book 2 though, but I am assuming like the sprawl trilogy I'll be fine to just read this one?
I'll be honest something about The Fartherest Shore made me mentally switch to that world was over, time to move on, so when she writes new books I have a very odd feeling about it, like I'm disturbing the dead somehow. But I still liked Tehanu.
Honestly it's probably just because I owned the first three in a boxed set as a kid so I've read those three many times over in my childhood, and then I didn't hear about anything else until twenty years later when I read Tehanu about ten years ago.
Next you'll say the Chronicles of Prydain have a sequel series!
I have similarly mixed feelings about the later books, which are also 'disturbing the dead' related
One of the things that fascinated me as a small child about the world of Earthsea was the depiction of the afterlife. It's so bleak and so grim, and yet the people of earthsea still strive and live and find joy in things, even knowing that what awaits them is in a way worse than nothing at all. The inescapable flattening of death permeates the world building and creates an atmosphere of fatalism that must be almost unique in the realm of YA fantasy.
I was too young to connect this to other philosophical and theological schools, apart from some echoes of ancient egyptian mythology, but it both attracted and repelled me in equal measure, and was part of what made them so formative for me. Especially since so much of what i was reading at that age sits upon a christian tradition.
Obviously le Guin is free to revisit her own creation, and she's said she wrote Tehanu and the later books in an effort to address what she felt were unexamined assumptions she built on when trying to write outside her usual genre. But retconning earthsea's version of the afterlife really stripped out the thing I found most compelling and interesting
I know they're not this, but because I don't know what honkai means I'm imagining a manga that's an angsty teen drama where the characters are all geese and I'm enjoying the mental picture immensely.
Finally got around to finishing this book that was inadvertently recommended by @Jedoc because he had a library patron file a complaint about it.
It was a little difficult for me to read because of the style of writing was a bit difficult for me to get used to. The author tries to portray the Van Gogh brothers' life as if each moment is a painting, so every chapter in the book is reading like you're in a gallery and moving on to a new painting. (In fact some chapters are broken up really small and each section is called a croquis.) So I got bored occasionally and put it down for a few days at a time.
Jedoc's patron was concerned about the cussing in the book but I don't recall seeing anything particularly bad other than "damn." On the other hand the discussions about how both brothers visited prostitutes and got venereal diseases definitely makes it unsuitable for juvenile readers who just won't even really get what's it's all about (notwithstanding any moral objections some parents might have.)
Some fun things about the Van Gogh brothers I didn't know:
Theo was Claude Monet's agent. I knew Van Gogh hung out with a lot of famous artists at that time like Paul Gaugin (who apparently is even more of an asshole than I ever realized and might have been at least partly responsible for the ear incident), but I didn't realize that Monet was also still around at that time and although he never met Vincent he still sent some very kind words to Theo when Vincent died.
One of Vincent's drawings included in between chapters included a sketch of a Parisian scene with power lines in the background (or maybe telephone or telegraph wires?) Of course Paris had that sort of technology and it was a very advanced city for it's time but it still didn't occur to me he saw a lot of it and referenced it in his art.
DisruptedCapitalist on
"Simple, real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time." -Mustrum Ridcully in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather p. 142 (HarperPrism 1996)
So a trigun fan twittee did a big dick energy endorsement of This is how you lose the time war and suddenly the book is top 10 of amazon and getting an endorsement from the trigun director or author or ....fuck it, need coffee.
I hate to say that I oppose libraries, but my library just bought two 600+ page books titled Brain Saver and Brain Saver Protocols. Now don't judge a book by the title, who is the author?
Medical Medium Anthony William, the chronic illness expert, originator of the global celery juice movement, and host of the Medical Medium Podcast, is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of Brain Saver, Brain Saver Protocols, Cleanses & Recipes, Cleanse to Heal, Celery Juice, Liver Rescue, Thyroid Healing, Life-Changing Foods, and the revised and expanded Medical Medium. Anthony was born with the unique ability to converse with the Spirit of Compassion, who provides him with extraordinarily advanced healing medical information that’s far ahead of its time.
Since age four, Anthony has been using his gift to see into people’s conditions and tell them and their doctors how to recover their health. Over decades of helping individuals find the answers they needed, Anthony found that he could only help so many as his waiting list continued to grow. Anthony now dedicates much of his time and energy to listening to Spirit of Compassion’s information and placing it into books so everybody can have an opportunity to heal.
Huh. Call me 5G, but I think that didn't really happen.
I gotta say, I do admire the self confidence of such dedicated and high visibility grifters. At no point has a smidge of self doubt ever crossed this dudes mind, I can't imagine what it feels like to live like that.
There's a decent chance that they didn't buy that on purpose and that if you point them out to your library's librarians that they'll quietly make them disappear. A lot of libraries in the US at least are relying on vendors to put together their ordering lists based on a set of criteria that the library gives them, it's increasingly rare to have a real human selecting each and every title that is purchased due to general budget and personnel cuts. I watch every book that comes into my branch and I've definitely disappeared some books before they ever hit the shelves and wrote some smokin e-mails about others, in both cases things we really shouldn't have purchased.
It's like those grifters who claim they can live on air alone
I have a friend whose father is one of these types, runs a low-key cultish new age group that's leaning on a lot of buddhist tradition. His thing is that he has achieved such a level of mental clarity that he no longer needs sleep, instead he just meditates deeply and this replenishes his body and mind.
... the truth is that he's a narcoleptic with a tenuous grip on reality. But he completely and utterly believes his own bullshit.
CornerEagleMagic Man by HeartCopenhagen, DenmarkRegistered Userregular
"I don't sleep, I just mediate deeply every night" feels like the dial-turned-to-eleven version of "I'm not napping, I'm just resting my eyes".
+16
JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
Counterpoint: if a book is popular enough libraries will buy it out of self defense even if it's clearly nonsense. Because we won't refuse to put in an ILL request for a book we don't own, and by the third ILL transaction we've spent more money on ILL than we would have on the book itself.
I'm not exactly putting The Oxygen Revolution out on display, but not owning it would actively hurt our budget for better books.
Additionally, this is the flip side of all the book bans you've been reading about in the news. You don't need to trust my medical credentials any more than you need to trust that your local librarian isn't an evangelical who religiously opposes abortion and LGBTQ rights. You just need to trust the library school indoctrination.
+5
JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
edited May 2023
To be clear: I don't believe that bad science or hateful ideology deserve equal time in the news or in the classroom or on Twitter or in your house or on the street or in advertising, I believe that some ideas are true and good and other ideas are wrong and bad, and just about everywhere you exist you should defend the former and attack the latter.
I also believe there is one very specific place where it is more important that information is available than that is is true or good, and that is the library. Libraries are wonderful wholesome places, but they're also the festering grease trap of the national mind, and if They (any They, living or dead, extant or imaginary) Don't Want You To Know something, it's my sometimes unsavory duty to ensure that you have the opportunity to know it.
"I don't sleep, I just mediate deeply every night" feels like the dial-turned-to-eleven version of "I'm not napping, I'm just resting my eyes".
He once slept (on and off) through most of a 6 hour drive with his son in law, and proclaimed when he got to the end, "wow, we had such a great conversation I didn't even notice the journey! The time just flew by!
Also my comment and Jedoc's comment aren't mutually exclusive (despite his use of the word counterpoint, which I will never forgive). Both things are true, libraries have all kinds of books both because they mean to and because someone at Baker and Tayler is asleep at the switch sometimes.
And professionally I don't mind most things, everyone has the right to use their own best judgment, but when a book enters the "cure cancer with the power of positive thinking" kinds of realm we do have to give it a longer look. A good example from earlier in my career is the first Kevin Trudeau book that really hit big, it was super popular but we wouldn't carry it because it was such bunk. I'm sure that wasn't the case everywhere, every library has its own standards and should based on their community, but there are some pretty universal guiding principles.
Tor is one the remaining websites that I can go to even when I'm feeling crappy and sad and fragile and they never let me down.
0
JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
edited May 2023
I really liked Autonomous and Scatter, Adapt, and Remember but I'm halfway through The Terraformers and I'm afraid I'm bouncing off pretty hard. It's one of those sci-fi books that has some interesting concepts, but it's so post-human that I'm having real trouble caring about anything that happens to anyone in the year 50,000-some-odd. I came for the flying sapient moosen but was unable to stay for the horny anaerobic cyborgs, and that's probably on me.
I just finished The Helm of Midnight by Marina Lostetter and it was really good, it was a really interesting blend of serial killer investigation procedural and fantasy novel, I've never read anything quite like it. The fantasy of it all is pretty unique, the set-up is that there are five gods in the pantheon (Time, Nature, Knowledge, Emotion, the Unknown) and they've set up pretty tight rules for society. Time is used as a currency, emotion can be stored in gems and then experienced by whoever is holding the gem, and your knowledge and personality can be extracted and set in a wooden mask that someone else can put on and utilize to live on after your death. The procedural part is good and unfolds through three different perspectives (present day invesigator and two characters in the mid and farther past that play into it all). It's paced well, it's got gruesome moments that aren't excessive, and it's satisfying in itself while also setting up a new series that you'll probably want to continue. It might be the best book I've read this year, I'll have to think on that, but it's really worth checking out.
I just finished The Helm of Midnight by Marina Lostetter and it was really good, it was a really interesting blend of serial killer investigation procedural and fantasy novel, I've never read anything quite like it. The fantasy of it all is pretty unique, the set-up is that there are five gods in the pantheon (Time, Nature, Knowledge, Emotion, the Unknown) and they've set up pretty tight rules for society. Time is used as a currency, emotion can be stored in gems and then experienced by whoever is holding the gem, and your knowledge and personality can be extracted and set in a wooden mask that someone else can put on and utilize to live on after your death. The procedural part is good and unfolds through three different perspectives (present day invesigator and two characters in the mid and farther past that play into it all). It's paced well, it's got gruesome moments that aren't excessive, and it's satisfying in itself while also setting up a new series that you'll probably want to continue. It might be the best book I've read this year, I'll have to think on that, but it's really worth checking out.
I immediately got City of Stairs vibes from that description, another good mystery in an interesting fantasy setting if you haven't heard of it.
I have been watching reign the conqueror's english dub and one character is voiced with 75 - 85% of the tone Mickey had in that Murderbot audiobook and its making me thankful he isnt talking a lot.
Just got an email from the local library that they won a national medal from the institute of museum and library services.
That's sweet I didn't know that award existed. But the Toledo Lucas county library system does a ton of good work and I'm super happy I live in an area that still has good libraries.
The IMLS is one of those things like the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that Republicans are constantly trying to get rid of entirely but is very popular and is a relatively miniscule amount of money, so it survives for now. They basically exist to funnel federal money to state libraries, who then give it to local library systems in the form of grants, which is a good and proper thing for the government to do.
Fun fact, the DC public library is the de facto State Library for the District of Columbia as the only library system in the District, so we get the money from the IMLS that a state library would get (proportional to population, so not an awful lot), which we then award mostly to ourselves (again as the only library system in the District). It's a neat system!
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I'll be honest something about The Fartherest Shore made me mentally switch to that world was over, time to move on, so when she writes new books I have a very odd feeling about it, like I'm disturbing the dead somehow. But I still liked Tehanu.
Honestly it's probably just because I owned the first three in a boxed set as a kid so I've read those three many times over in my childhood, and then I didn't hear about anything else until twenty years later when I read Tehanu about ten years ago.
Next you'll say the Chronicles of Prydain have a sequel series!
It almost belabors the point with the detail - sometimes to it's detriment, but oft to it's benefit. Dracula speechifying on how he would be good own master is a good example, I think.
Dracula's charm is well done though - he's got a real presence in the page that Harker dosen't. Harker, honestly comes off as a bit of a fool
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And I'm still mad about how long it took me to figure out what the title meant.
Ooh I loved the book when I read it years ago, but I'm kind of afraid to reread it and think differently about it now.
I have similarly mixed feelings about the later books, which are also 'disturbing the dead' related
I was too young to connect this to other philosophical and theological schools, apart from some echoes of ancient egyptian mythology, but it both attracted and repelled me in equal measure, and was part of what made them so formative for me. Especially since so much of what i was reading at that age sits upon a christian tradition.
Obviously le Guin is free to revisit her own creation, and she's said she wrote Tehanu and the later books in an effort to address what she felt were unexamined assumptions she built on when trying to write outside her usual genre. But retconning earthsea's version of the afterlife really stripped out the thing I found most compelling and interesting
Finally got around to finishing this book that was inadvertently recommended by @Jedoc because he had a library patron file a complaint about it.
It was a little difficult for me to read because of the style of writing was a bit difficult for me to get used to. The author tries to portray the Van Gogh brothers' life as if each moment is a painting, so every chapter in the book is reading like you're in a gallery and moving on to a new painting. (In fact some chapters are broken up really small and each section is called a croquis.) So I got bored occasionally and put it down for a few days at a time.
Jedoc's patron was concerned about the cussing in the book but I don't recall seeing anything particularly bad other than "damn." On the other hand the discussions about how both brothers visited prostitutes and got venereal diseases definitely makes it unsuitable for juvenile readers who just won't even really get what's it's all about (notwithstanding any moral objections some parents might have.)
Some fun things about the Van Gogh brothers I didn't know:
Theo was Claude Monet's agent. I knew Van Gogh hung out with a lot of famous artists at that time like Paul Gaugin (who apparently is even more of an asshole than I ever realized and might have been at least partly responsible for the ear incident), but I didn't realize that Monet was also still around at that time and although he never met Vincent he still sent some very kind words to Theo when Vincent died.
One of Vincent's drawings included in between chapters included a sketch of a Parisian scene with power lines in the background (or maybe telephone or telegraph wires?) Of course Paris had that sort of technology and it was a very advanced city for it's time but it still didn't occur to me he saw a lot of it and referenced it in his art.
?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1655084850926473216%7Ctwgr%5E8065883cebeafc1e91a33e7ca53830a9c8e394bd%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.polygon.com%2F23718970%2Fthis-is-how-you-lose-the-time-war-trigun-vira
So a trigun fan twittee did a big dick energy endorsement of This is how you lose the time war and suddenly the book is top 10 of amazon and getting an endorsement from the trigun director or author or ....fuck it, need coffee.
Point is she getting well deserved sales
Huh. Call me 5G, but I think that didn't really happen.
I have a friend whose father is one of these types, runs a low-key cultish new age group that's leaning on a lot of buddhist tradition. His thing is that he has achieved such a level of mental clarity that he no longer needs sleep, instead he just meditates deeply and this replenishes his body and mind.
... the truth is that he's a narcoleptic with a tenuous grip on reality. But he completely and utterly believes his own bullshit.
I'm not exactly putting The Oxygen Revolution out on display, but not owning it would actively hurt our budget for better books.
Additionally, this is the flip side of all the book bans you've been reading about in the news. You don't need to trust my medical credentials any more than you need to trust that your local librarian isn't an evangelical who religiously opposes abortion and LGBTQ rights. You just need to trust the library school indoctrination.
I also believe there is one very specific place where it is more important that information is available than that is is true or good, and that is the library. Libraries are wonderful wholesome places, but they're also the festering grease trap of the national mind, and if They (any They, living or dead, extant or imaginary) Don't Want You To Know something, it's my sometimes unsavory duty to ensure that you have the opportunity to know it.
He once slept (on and off) through most of a 6 hour drive with his son in law, and proclaimed when he got to the end, "wow, we had such a great conversation I didn't even notice the journey! The time just flew by!
And professionally I don't mind most things, everyone has the right to use their own best judgment, but when a book enters the "cure cancer with the power of positive thinking" kinds of realm we do have to give it a longer look. A good example from earlier in my career is the first Kevin Trudeau book that really hit big, it was super popular but we wouldn't carry it because it was such bunk. I'm sure that wasn't the case everywhere, every library has its own standards and should based on their community, but there are some pretty universal guiding principles.
I immediately got City of Stairs vibes from that description, another good mystery in an interesting fantasy setting if you haven't heard of it.
That's sweet I didn't know that award existed. But the Toledo Lucas county library system does a ton of good work and I'm super happy I live in an area that still has good libraries.
Fun fact, the DC public library is the de facto State Library for the District of Columbia as the only library system in the District, so we get the money from the IMLS that a state library would get (proportional to population, so not an awful lot), which we then award mostly to ourselves (again as the only library system in the District). It's a neat system!