Back when I was on Twitter I used to follow a bunch of writers and Yellowface was so entertaining in its portrayal of that domain. Idk if you have heard about the recent Cait Corran scandal but it had me thinking about that book again.
I started this one in the middle of my 7 day camping trip last week. Maybe a quarter of the way through right now. Good so far, the first King book I’ve rear since around Gerald’s Game somewhere.
I really loved this novel. It gets better and better as you progress through it. I loved all the references to Jung, Gothic horror, and just about everything else! Enjoy!
Gene Wolfe, but I am a sucker for a longwinded description of a bizarre world. Definitely not for everyone. As type this I had the thought, "gods I hope he is not a shitass." BRB, got some searching to do
I do know that I'm not super enthusiastic about Amazon being the one controlling my reading history, but I've tried migrating to several of the alternatives and it's just too much.
Goodreads has a nice page where you can see 50 books at a time, skim down the list, and checkbox to make bulk changes. I'm willing to painstakingly reconstruct lists like that with an alternative, even though it will still be kind of a pain. But I'm not willing to manually search every title to add it to a list, or go through my reading history and need multiple clicks and backwards navigations for every book I want to add to a list, and that's the state of anything I tried a couple months ago. Bookwyrm specifically sounds really nice, as a way to use federated tools to find people with similar interest and follow their reading and share. But the transfer is a lot.
Bookwyrm was missing a lot of books, and I couldn’t quickly figure out a way to add them. I am pretty invested in Storygraph already so it wasn’t a big priority to figure it out.
I had like 1200 books when I tried it, and the number missing wasn't too bad.
But I'm not doing a list of 100 books searching one at a time. It's bad enough to have to do big chunks to add to my reading history because I don't keep that up. Re-doing organization without bulk editing just isn't going to happen.
@Bitrot Just search for the book you want, and if it isn't on your instance, it will give you the option to import it from other instances, Inventaire or OpenLibrary. Then you'll be able to edit the details. If none of these options are the right ones, you can manually add the book by clicking the last option.
But indeed, it does have a lot of missing books and editions of books. If you do not have the patience to add them, then it is clearly not for you.
Inventaire is also AP enabled, despite being centralized, tho.
I don't use their reviews to decide what to read, but I have checked after the fact on books I like and I think the quality of what they surface tends to be pretty bad.
A lot of mindless criticism, especially. It's perfectly OK to be critical when a book has flaws, but so many of the top reviews were people who just weren't the target audience criticizing it for being targeted at something different than they wanted. Whether that's rigorous academic nonfiction with reviews complaining that it cites its sources, kid/YA books with people complaining that there isn't enough depth, someone like Janet Evanovich or Jana Deleon writing deliberately nonsensical stuff for light humor getting complaints about not being realistic, romantic suspense getting criticism because characters are emotionally connected too fast when that's part of what the genre is, etc.
It's perfectly fine to be disinterested in a book because you're not interested in that genre, but it seems like way too many of the higher visibility reviews are people who just aren't interested in what the book is trying to do.
I’m in the same boat. I tried Storygraph and the error rate importing from Goodreads was too high for me and it was missing some features I use to keep my books organized.
I’d love to move away from an Amazon-owned company, but all the alternatives are lackluster, at least for me.
I think what I'm eventually going to have to do is roll my own. I don't need crazy complexity, but I do want some features nothing seems to have. I want the bulk editing that's only on goodreads, and I really want series to be first class citizens. That means series nesting in other series and being able to have a blurb/rating for a series instead of each individual entry, mostly. I just haven't got to it yet.
I don't necessarily have to have the metadata all the public social network style tools use to combine everyone's input to one book object, though I definitely understand how it's frustrating for services to lose information when you import your lists. But organization tools are critical to me.
i wonder if the best way to think about self-help as a genre is as a sort of placebo genre, where the act of engaging with the genre is a more useful act toward whatever you want to do than actually reading any particular book.
I get what you're saying. Merely being the impetus to make the effort has value.
It's kind of how I feel about pop science stuff like Malcolm Gladwell. Outliers is a little better than nothing, but there's a lot wrong with his core characterization of the research compared to reality. But if less people are going to read stuff like Peak or Range that use some academic rigor, is the partial presentation being popularized better? Or is the misrepresentation more harm than good?
I'm not entirely sure. But I do know to take his work with a heavy dose of skepticism.
(In this example, Ericsson (Peak) was on the initial research Gladwell jumps "10k hours" off of, which only explored the very structured training, with frequent feedback, of classical violin. Epstein (Range) sort of presents his as critiquing the original work, but mostly is really pointing to the flaws of Gladwell's presentation, before providing a different perspective mixing anecdotes with research supporting a broader base and showcasing how bringing ideas from other disciplines can have a lot of value to problem solving.)
I listen to audiobooks while falling asleep. Best of both worlds. You’re not “wasting time” waiting to fall asleep, and you’re reading. And if you fall asleep while reading, all the better! Just jump back to what you last remember tomorrow.
I’ll say that this works best with books I’ve already read.
Sometimes I deliberately put on a book I didn’t enjoy if the book I’m reading is keeping me up from being too engaging.
I prefer text-to-speech to narration, though. I find human speech too hard to understand at high playback speeds with various vocal inconsistencies, like different character voices. And low playback speeds don’t keep my ADHD attention, so my mind wanders and I get frustrated when I tune back in and have no idea what’s happening.
I like Moon+ Reader Pro the best, just using the default old Google voice.
FBReader is also pretty good, and the free version allows plugins, which allows you to add the free TTS plugin. (Integrated TTS is in the paid version of FBReader.)
I also use Android’s TalkBack mode with Kindle. It works well, since it auto turns pages for you. It needs to read whole pages at a time, so it’s a bit of a pain re-reading things if you get interrupted. (Reduce the number of words per page to mitigate this.) It also puts a beep in each time the page turns (so don’t reduce the words per page too low.) And it only keeps taking while you’re screen is on, so it uses a lot more battery and will mess up your playback if the screen is touched. (Increase your screen on time in display settings so it reads for up to half an hour without touching the screen, or use Google Maps navigation overlay or some other method to force the screen to stay on indefinitely, if desired.)
I prefer a more monotone/robotic sounding voice for maximum consistency and to allow me to interpret tone, but there are lots of other TTS Engine options that can easily be added to Android if you prefer more natural sounding voices. That said, most have a much reduced maximum speed compared to Google’s TTS option, so you might find other engines limiting once you get used to TTS if are looking to speed things up.
If anyone knows of a TTS with a faster maximum speed than Google’s TTS, I would love to hear about it. I haven’t found any faster ones in my searching, but there shouldn’t be any technical reason why faster isn’t possible.
We should encourage young adults to read about everything, drugs and sex included!
Book banns on these topics are like training a soccer team and not tell them they could get hurt. If they know, they can make an informed choice and avoid it. If they don’t… that’s how you get teen pregnancies and drug abuse. Kids that don’t know about it find it cool and go after it.
After two weeks, I’m on the last chapter of paradise lost by John Milton! It was a weird read to end my summer of working through several of the epic poems. It’s one of the most beautifully written poems I’ve ever read, but Jesus Christ has it been a weird and difficult read. My fav part was when Jesus out of nowhere rides in on a chariot and chases satan off the edge of heaven. Genuinely not enough talk about how some of this shit felt like a weird fever dream twist.
This is on my to read list. I have an annotated copy to help because I've heard it's hard going but I know it's hugely influential and so keep meaning to get to it!
It was definitely hard going. I had multiple browser tabs open, the heavily annotated modern library version, and my years of Catholic upbringing to guide me through it all and it was definitely a journey. I read it right after reading Dante’s divine comedy and while the comedy and they both really blew me away. Half of Paradise Lost (and Dante too for that matter) is just really deep references to the Aeneid, the Iliad, the odyssey, and Ovid’s metamorphoses.
I've read Dante and enjoyed that a lot. It's interesting how Dante also puts a lot more of his contemporaries into the various parts of the afterlife then I was expecting; so footnotes can veer from talking about Greek mythology to minor figures from the civil war that had led to his exile. Which can be a little jarring sometimes!
Three body problem series is fantastic in my opinion. I love that heavy sci-fi shit. And viewing the world from a different cultures perspective was fascinating.
Yes. Without going into spoilers, the event that started the Deterrence Era blew my mind. It’s so rare to have an unexpected reversal like that in sci fi it really caught me by surprise.
I really wish I could read it in the original Chinese. The translator did a great job though.
Well, now you’re making me want to go back into the series. I liked the premise of the first, but found the writing foreign - which, hey, it is! I felt like I really should read more everyday Chinese fiction as I didn’t understand a lot of the nuance and it felt less polished (to my American sensibilities) as a result.
I actually just finished Three Body Problem yesterday. Really fascinating perspective and lots of big ideas, even if the characters could be better and there could be less telling and more showing. But can’t wait to get my hands on the rest of the trilogy!
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