Book 56, 2023: am Homeless if this is not my Home by Lorrie Moore. I love Lorrie Moore’s work; her short stories especially. But this novella about a man driving across America with the ghost/corpse of his ex-lover just didn’t resonate with me at all. I liked some lines, and the final chapter was good but nope, not for me. And that’s fine. Has anyone else read it, and liked it? @bookstadon#novels#Reading#literature
AN ASTONISHING, HARROWING, BEAUTIFUL novel mixes the everyday horrors of racism with the terrors of the supernatural in a tale of a brutal Florida reformatory haunted by the boys who died there. SOLID A
A SURREAL POST-APOCALYPTIC SETTING lends power to this dreamlike retelling of Macbeth. Hallucinatory, atmospheric prose captures the point of view of a man pushed to his limits with no options but to fight. B PLUS
MURDERBOT’S BACK, BUT not better than ever. In fact, the semi-human fighting machine is feeling vulnerable—at the worst possible time, as it and the humans it protects are dealing with multiple interplanetary threats. Fast-paced, thoughtful. A MINUS
HOW TO SAVE THE WORLD? The characters in Naomi Alderman’s crisp near-future technothriller have a lot of ideas—some of them on a collision course with others. Action and deft satire blend in this high-energy yet thoughtful read. A MINUS
All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque. You are a teenage German boy who signs up to fight in WWI with your classmates, and you never find anything worth fighting for, just mud and death in the trenches, as any sense of yourself or any recognizable future fades. 4 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈.
SHIMMERING, GORGEOUS, WISTFUL meditation on life, love, art, and loss set against the surreal cityscape of New York in the 2020 COVID lockdown. Everything is vivid, everything feels deeply true. A MINUS
A LONG-FORGOTTEN LITERARY GEM from 1938, reissued in a sumptuous new edition. Beautifully stark modernist novel traces the gradual diminution of a woman’s life with pitiless clarity. A MINUS
THE FAMILY THAT SLEUTHS TOGETHER…finds out more about themselves and each other in this charming, engrossing California murder mystery starring three generations of smart, sharp women solving a complicated crime. B PLUS
Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott. You are the most iconoclastic/‘tomboyish’ of four young sisters, and it looks like you may chart a path as a writer, but as your sisters fall into the roles allocated them by the 19th century patriarchy, you too may be deprived of the dull spinsterhood you aspired to.
Book 52, 2023: Our Lady of the Highway by Hal Hartley. I loved this novel. Renegade anarchist nuns hole up in a Brooklyn convent! Lola joins them to try to curb her violent mystical powers. They make hallucinogenic beer! The cops try to close them down!There's a pitbull named Desmond!
A SPIRITUALIST’S WIFE STRUGGLES to come to terms with her husband’s new world of séances and “readings”—and fears he’ll find out some of her own secrets. Lush evocation of post-World War I Scotland and the frenzies of Jazz Age society. B PLUS
"Tokarczuk is wrestling with the biggest philosophical themes: the purpose of life on earth, the nature of religion, the possibility of redemption, the fraught and terrible history of eastern European Jewry."
A Nobel-Prize-winning bacteriologist, Jeremy Stone, urges the president to approve an extraterrestrial decontamination facility to sterilize returning astronauts, satellites, and spacecraft that might carry an "unknown biologic agent."
Book 51, 2023: River by Esther Kinsky. An exploration of London’s rimy River Lea, and the neighbourhood’s characters, combined with stories from time spent near the Rhine, Oder, and other rivers. @bookstadon#books#reading#novels
LOVE, HEARTBREAK, AND LOSS are the cornerstones of this elegantly constructed novel that captures the power of connection and the pain of isolation. Sex is a constant presence in the book, but evocations of food and friendship hit even harder. A MINUS
SENSATIONAL WILD-WEST DETECTIVE yarn features the “Holmes On the Range” brothers—a pair of cowboys turned sleuths—guarding a fossil dig in Wyoming with trouble not far behind. Brilliant return of these colorful characters in a sharp, twisty plot. A MINUS
Would it be acceptable in kbin etiquette to add a tag in at least one thread in a magazine I created, and when talking about stuff in other places that touch the same topic, I use the same tag there as well to "promote" the existence of the magazine?
@Damaskox The magazine tags work in a way that automatically adds content to it that someone has tagged, for example, on Mastodon. The magazine's name is automatically a tag. I've seen comments on this matter, and I'll be addressing it soon to improve the mechanism and provide a detailed description of its operation in the admin panel. So, for example, all posts tagged #books on the microblog will be included in the magazine "books," but you can add a tag like #novels in the panel if you want those tags to be included as well.
On The Road, by Jack Kerouac. It’s the late 40’s, and you are a young man trying to dig America and its many people and pick up chicks, so you spend a lot of time trying to meet up with your whacked out best friend by hitchhiking and busing repeatedly across the US, but whether you learn anything is debatable. 3 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈.
NEAR-FUTURE NOIR THRILLER, set in a Pacific Northwest sodden with “broken weather,” combines lots of action and a colorful cast of characters for a highly entertaining read. B PLUS