Dent Random Dent

Just in case anyone’s a fan of this book and wasn’t aware, there’s also a short story kind of prequel to this book called The Day Before The Revolution that’s free to read here.

Yeah I do that too! I’m here for cozy literature talk, not whatever is going on in the rest of Lemmy lol.

For the new year, I’m going to try a thing based on a Ray Bradbury quote:

The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.

So far I’ve only got half of one 'cause it’s the first week of January, but I’m going to see how far I can get with it.

No, not really. They’re all in kind of different states of completeness, if that makes any sense. Some don’t have names or faces yet, that sort of thing. But I tend to just leave them alone until I need them, then they start to become more concrete depending on the story.

I definitely do that! I have several characters floating around in my head right now that don’t have a story to go into yet.

I can appreciate that they’re in a somewhat difficult position, with the law on one side and what’s morally right on the other side, but also this is exactly the sort of scenario where everyone needs to band together to demonstrate that an unjust law won’t fly, and IMO trying to weasel out of it with a half-measure is just appeasing the wrong side.

In an ideal world all the libraries, schools and publishing companies would just ignore this and carry whatever books they see fit, and give the legislators a choice to either back off or go after them all at the same time.

This is one I’ve been meaning to read for ages! I really liked The Disposessed and The Left Hand Of Darkness, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten with Ursula Le Guin so far.

The North Korea section of the book was so creepy, I still think about that from time to time.

It really is a “give an inch, take a mile” kind of thing. Like as a society we’re already ridiculously generous to religious people - every city has multiple, un-taxed, absurdly opulent buildings for them to use as much as they want to do whatever they like in, plus there are huge networks of religious schools that get tax-payer funding as well, and they’re still out in the streets preaching and interfering with almost every other aspect of existence - shutting down libraries, getting films banned or altered, messing with politics etc. It’s ludicrous IMO.

I own it but haven’t read it yet, but apparently Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote is supposed to be great. Also I just learned she died a couple of weeks ago, RIP.

For the show, the beginning of the 2005 revival is probably a good place to start! The first couple of seasons are probably a bit dated now but still good, and they treat it as kind of a soft reboot because it had had been off the air for ~15 years at that point so it’s designed for new viewers to drop in without having to know all the backstory and stuff.

As for the books I have no idea lol. There are quite a lot of those IIRC.

I am convinced that there’s not a book written that can’t be improved by the addition of a Sassy Robot Sidekick.

Doctor Who is good for the second one too, that’s basically the Doctor’s whole deal that they never carry a weapon and just try to talk their way through everything. Although they will fuck someone up if they get pushed too far lol.

Yeah this seems like a good call TBH

I really like Homage To Catalonia, it might actually be my favourite Orwell book.

Also most Bill Bryson books. I read One Summer, America, 1927 recently and really enjoyed it, but A Short History Of Nearly Everything and At Home were also highlights.

I was going to say Ursula Le Guin but someone beat me to it lol.

So instead: I haven’t read all of her books yet, but I’ve really liked everything by Emily St. John Mandel that I’ve read so far. Station Eleven was great (and the TV series is even better somehow!) and Sea of Tranquility was super interesting.

Good for them. They’ve been there for over 450 years, it should be on the Olympics to work around them IMO.

I might have a similar situation coming up, but I think what I’m going to do is essentially just get rid of most of my books and then try to re-acquire them at the other end of the move. Apart from a few specific ones where the physical book itself is important, like a couple of signed copies I have and some well-worn ones that I’ve had forever.

I’m also working on cataloging everything in BookWyrm so I can keep track of what needs replacing. Bit of a pain but I just don’t think I can physically transport that many books.

As the technology progresses, I think it’d be cool if someone made make an eBook reader that could also use text-to-speech to read basically any book in a fairly natural way.

Of course it’s no match for a properly-acted audiobook, but it’d go a long way to making things more accessible I think.

Or we just conscript Stephen Fry and put him to work until we have him reading every book that exists lol.

I actually had no idea because I always bring things back on time because I’m a square lol, but I looked it up and apparently they got rid of them during the pandemic.