Literature is not a popular contest. A lot of great books would have been buried if we let review sites take control. Not to mention the amount of astroturfing and trolling tainting the “reviews”.
Some of my friends are doing the Dracula Daily newsletter this year, where it emails you the chapters as they happen in real time. Pretty cool idea and they’ve really enjoyed it!
I liked Dr. Sleep more than I thought I was going to! I thought it worked as a follow up to The Shining, but still had a lot of original stuff going on, too.
We want to be progressive and we live in a society that pretends to be rad and chill with everything. However we feel the need to censor and modify everything that “offends” us or doesnt fit our vision of the world.
I think I’ll add The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon to my stack of to-be-read books. I think it was Michael Silverblatt (Host of Bookworm on NPR until 2022) who said,“There are so many great books. What is more rare is great readers.” I used to consider myself a great reader. Or at least good. I received a BA in English Lit from a top tier University and loved reading and analyzing heavy, dense, beautiful prose and stories. It seems the past half decade or so, I only want to read lighter stuff for pure entertainment and escape. Not Marvel movie levels of vapidness, but still. I’m not sure how I feel about this state of being.
I can relate to that. I’m pretty firmly in the “read what you want” camp, and I mostly try to adhere to that for myself. I try to strike a balance between escapist, light books, and books that are more challenging (and I enjoy both!). But it’s hard to shake that feeling of “I ought to be reading XYZ book instead of this,” no matter what I’m reading.
Ebooks.com sells books without drm for publishers that don’t require it! I read a lot of sci-fi and Tor doesn’t publish with drm so I always buy their books there. I think Kobo is owned by Walmart so I try to stick to ebooks.com whenever I can.
This is really amazing. I have been looking for something like this for some time. Not super hard, but I am not buying an ebook with drm. I am surprised how many books on on there.
It is really great! Also just to be clear some books do come with drm, but it’s explicitly listed for every book. But you can also use a no drm filter in the search to see all the ones without it. A great way to find publishers to support!
This makes me sound like a total wanker but I reread my favorite Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. I find them both very comforting because generally nice people end up happy in the end.
Definitely with you there on Jane Austen. I like that ultimately everyone gets married and is happy (even if that’s not my idea of a happy ending necessarily)
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