I’m reading Star Wars Ahsoka (trying to finish my books TBR this month) and I must say I really like her. It’s an interesting character and a nice addition to SW stellar crew. But I think it’s so upsetting all this discourse of “not being a Jedi” just because she doesn’t belong to the Jedi Temple Studio 54. So, to be a Jedi you must be a member of a country club and that’s it? #starwars#ahsoka#books#reading@bookstodon
@pivic@bookstodon I hate Goodreads, I had an account in its early days and loved how I could add all the books I own to an online library, but a lot of the reviews are just mean. I deleted my account a long time ago. I've read about the recent review bomb campaigns against new authors and it's awful but not surprising. It's such a toxic culture there.
I have so many more unread books on our shelves than I'll ever read. Each of those books is somewhere on my TBR
list. I'm thinking that I might complement my #TBR list with a #NTBR list. There are so many (and more and more)
books, and I have so little (and less and less) time in front of me when I might read them. Obviously, winnowing
the collection would help to declutter our small space, but might it also declutter my mind? https://johnrakestraw.com/post/from-the-tbr-pile-to-the-ntbr-pile/. @bookstodon#reading#books
You said in your article "one has to be very careful when one considers getting rid of books that one urgently needs to read... I have to admit that there’s something freeing about it."
I'm currently reading Walking on Water by Anthony De Mello. He mentions detachment often in regard to freedom, including spiritual freedom. He gives this exercise: Take these books (hard to separate from) and say to them "How precious you are and loved, but you are not my life. I have a life to live and a destiny to fulfill different from you." That seems to be a way to get rid of something with care.
@NatureMC@bookwyrm@writers while I didn't dig deep, I'm not sure how bookwyrm would prevent fake review bombing... tho federated instances could block, but it's still lots of content moderation...
@pyperkub Of course but here real people and admins are working for that. I also think that with the size of the servers here, a bombing would be noticeable due to the size of the data. @bookwyrm@writers
My most profound read of the year was "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. Although I rarely check in on that other platform nowadays, I happened to see @mrnugget wax lyrical about the book. Since he personally recommended most of my other best reads of 2023 I knew I had to dig into it.
Occasionally a book, play, or film just reaches into your worldview and imposes a shift. This book did that for me; one of very few.
Atomic Bomb is not a new book – in two weeks it will be 38 years old. Nor is it a light read: The paperback weighs in at 896 pages. I read the excellent audiobook during runs and travels. The books are somewhat hard to get hold of.
"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" might be the greatest literary gesamtkunstwerk I have read. It's a historical work that reads like a novel. It's a collection of biographies that artfully dramatizes the subjects' lives. It's a book about science that makes much of nuclear physics wonderfully accessible. It's the best exposition of 20th century history I've found, including the Cold War. It presents political science in an accessible way. Towards the end, it confronts the reader with the terrible ethics of our capability, but without deigning to prescribe. Yet most of all, it is a beautifully philosophical work, and Rhodes has this Beethovian sense of pace where he can be describing an aspect of history in a scholarly tone for a while and then suddenly modulate into the philosophy of human nature.
Just picking a random example, here is Rhodes casually describing the young Niels Bohr's relationship with his brother, Harald:
"In my whole youth,' Bohr reminisced, my brother played a very large part ... I had very much to do with my brother. He was in all respects more clever than I.' Harald in turn told whoever asked that he was merely an ordinary person and his brother pure gold, and seems to have meant it."
In the very next paragraph, with a perfect sense of pace, Rhodes suddenly pulls the relaxed reader into philosophy, to segue into a scientific concept:
"Speech is a clumsiness and writing an impoverishment. Not language, but the surface of the body is the child's first map of the world, undifferentiated between subject and object, coextensive with the world it maps until awakening consciousness divides it off. Niels Bohr liked to show how a stick used as a probe – a blind man's cane, for example – became an extension of the arm."
From there the text flows from biography to science again.
I had read John Hersey's "Hiroshima" many years ago, but the latter part of "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" brought the reality home again much more deeply. I am left with that concern that as a society we are caught in Kundera's unbearable lightness of being, where the bloody events of the late 40s have turned into "mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one." There is an infinite difference between a Hiroshima that occurs only once in history, and a bombing that eternally returns.
Today I worked on some art for a bit, read a fantastic book of eldritch horror, & now we're going to visit a haunted house via ROSE RED which I haven't watched since it originally aired. All in all, a wonderful day filled w my favorite things.
Hope you all read, watched, or made something spooky! 👻
Guess I should bust out my Diary of Ellen Rimbauer tonight.
@horror This was sillier than I remembered but the premise is still super fun. For every bad bit of acting & cringe-y dialogue, there are Melanie Lynskey, Nancy Travis, & Julian Sands totally invested & bringing it.
P.S. God, I miss Julian Sands. His charisma is amazing; he should've been a top leading man.
I #read as #audiobook The Witness by Nora Roberts. Despite the hundreds of #books she’s written, I’m a 48yo Roberts virgin; she’s always been the #romance of my mother & MIL’s generation. ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ I love good plots that don’t rely on dramatic breakups & makeups. While very white & not written specifically with this diagnosis of the FMC, she very much seemed to me as high-functioning autistic. #reading@romancebooks@romancelandia https://amzn.to/3RDvDjU
@bookstadon I'm currently #reading "Mod: A very British style". I anticipate finishing it it today. I've had some interesting music recommendations from the book (Two Tones and The Specials) that I've followed up, and I have thoroughly enjoyed the explanation of the political philosophy of dandyism.
@forpeterssake@bookstodon I kept in mind that it's a novel Austen didn't finish so S1 was not going to be as Austen-esque as I wanted. BUT, taking Austen out of the picture, and thinking of it as just a period piece, I really enjoyed it!
#BookReview Setting the perfect tone for this collection of twenty-three tales of Baba Yaga is the spell-poem by Stephanie M. Wytovich that opens it. The stories that follow are traditional and modern, set in Slavic forests or a swamp in the American Deep South. Two of the stories are interesting variations on our Hansel and Gretel tale, another is told by the Baba Yaga's hut on chicken legs, and in one Baba Yaga falls in love.
The Baba Yagas vary too, they are ancient and young, beautiful and ugly, cruel and compassionate, but she is always a powerful figure who is closely connected to the natural world.
Into the Forest was edited by Lindy Ryan with an introduction by Christina Henry, and the stories are by women fantasy and horror writers who bring a welcome feminist sensibility to many of them. There are some very strong selections, but the collection does have a few weaker choices.
A couple of the stories are bursting the seams of a short story and could be developed into novels. The perfect kind of eerie anthology to cozy up with through the dark, cold months. #reading#books@bookstodon
I #read Gnome Sweet Gnome by Elva Birch (#book 2/Lawn Ornament Shifters) today because rn it’s #free (not sure how long that will last), and because the cover & title made me laugh. This shorter-length Christmas story takes rom-com almost to absurd #romance. Get ready for a jewel thief owl shifter to meet her mate as a Norwegian gnome factory owner. #reading#books#romancelandia@romancebooks https://amzn.to/3NlwpzF