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 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈.
@TarkabarkaHolgy@bookstodon "Earth in Human Hands" by David Grinspoon. It's about how we humans may still be able act as responsible caretakers for our planet. It was a re-read for me, but it's the book I needed to re-read the most this year.
You put yourself together. Bit by bit. Part Sometimes you do it with clarity and precision. As if by a manual. As if provided with a step-by-step guide. At other times, in total darkness. In the midnight hour. Grappling with esoteric secrets. With hieroglyphics. An impenetrable mystery. Like Ikea instructions for building anything...
Huh. It just occurred to me that not everyone reads all the time. Like, there’s a bunch of people without books they’re reading right now. That concept is so bizarre to me. I’ve always got several books going. Ebooks, audiobooks and physical copies of books. If you don’t read anymore, when and why did you stop? No judgement. I’m genuinely curious. @bookstodon#bookstodon#books#reading#amreading
@pseudonymsupreme@bookstodon I stopped reading actively for years when my kids were younger and only just started back up in the last year or two. I was honestly just too tired and fried to commit to anything that seemed more active than TV in the evenings, but I listened to a lot of podcasts. Now I’m reading a book or so a week.
The Half-Made World is a 2010 steampunk fantasy novel by British writer Felix Gilman. It is set in an alternate version of the American Wild West in which the Far West reaches of the world are untamed and still being created.
🧵 1/ Perhaps you know this feeling: unpleasant current events come thick and fast, #doom & #gloom & #ecogrief can almost paralyse us. What's really good then: immersing yourself in #deepTime, shifting perspectives. What was it like on this #planet between the ice ages and the greenhouses? Why was the #earth never empty even when it looked desolate? And how does #evolution work?
A Shining, by Jon Fosse. You drive to the end of a road and hike into a Norwegian forest in winter, where you become lost and may die but your brain meanders casually over many topics until some presences show up which really don’t help much, so your brain keeps thinking random thoughts. 4 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈
On the packaging.Hidden in the terms and conditions. Who knew it’d be so foretelling, so prescient? “Some assembly required.” Like a chant. Like a mantra. Like the Rosary. A testament to how you’d spend your time and your days. A lifetime with tiny pieces. Trying to fit them in. Trying to figure out where they go...
as someone who ran a fiction magazine for a decade i don't agree with the premise of that article. The future is in the slush pile, not in a network of who happens to know the right person.
and i suspect the issue is more that the slush pile usually outweighs the subscribers for most small magazines.