Nostalgia tastes like toffee. Like butterscotch. Like caramel. And that’s the danger of it. It’s confection. It’s empty calories. All sugar and no substance. The longing for something that isn’t real.
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
That’s so uncannon and go so against the very core of Star Wars. We all have learn that Luke is a Jedi. “Return of the Jedi” means something to anyone? Luke even restored the Jedi Order in EU (what they call Legends now). I know it’s an identity issue for her, but it really is… boring. #starwars#ahsoka#books#reading@bookstodon
#JustFinised the first book in the Skulldugery Pleasant series. Well, after the prequel that is... It's shaping up to be a pretty decent fantasy/adventure series with some under- or over- stated humour. I haven't decided which, maybe both.
I'm listening to it as an audiobook, which works well since it's a young adult series and there's no issue keeping up with what's going on.
As a reader, do you prefer when people give you random books as gifts, or do you prefer getting a gift card to a bookstore (so you can pick the book)? Just curious.
@Likewise@bookstodon I usually prefer "random books" -> it is a chance to discover things I would not have discovered on my own. A good example was, when I was gifted with "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern. I was completely unaware of it, but loved it once I dived into it.
One limitation to this: it requires care by the one making the gift, they have to know you good enough to know what is not an option. So if you are not sure enough, the voucher is better.
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.
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
Spent all weekend working on a project that failed. Today’s newsletter almost didn’t happen. It’s hasty and haphzard. When it comes to luster, it’s lacking. But…it’s here…
Climb into the Fictionable archive, with exclusive #ShortStories from @mjohnharrison Joyce Carol Oates, Ali Smith, Sarah Hall, Diana Evans, Etgar Keret, Sabba Khan and more …
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
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.
Five stars: Barbacoa, Bomba, and Betrayal by Raquel V. Reyes and Frankie Corzo (narrator) (2023) is the third book in the Caribbean Kitchen mystery series. What starts as a vacation to the Dominican Republic and becomes a work trip in Puerto Rico puts Miriam into the middle of a gentrification money laundering scam that's affecting so many of the small towns across the Caribbean, regardless of country.
I don't remember where I stumbled on this book -- perhaps even here on Mastodon? -- but I have to say that Jeff Deutsch's 'In Praise of Good Bookstores' is a wonderful celebration not only of independent #bookstores but also of #books, #reading books, and conversations about books. And there's a bonus -- a nice mini-history of one of my favorite bookstores, the #SeminaryCoop bookstore in Chicago. Well worth the read. @bookstodon#bookstodon
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
"This interdisciplinary study analyses the connections between literary Modernism and right-wing ideology. Moreover, it is the first academic study to explore the reception of these Modernist authors by today's far right, seeking to understand in what ways they use strategic readings of Modernist texts to legitimise right-wing ideology."