“I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air -- or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the #Empire are irresistibly drained.”
#Empire #QuotsyMay19
SO EXCITED TO BE #STARTING!!!
pickThere was only one of these stories that I really didn't enjoy ("Eating the Alice Cake") which speaks to the quality of Ellen Datlow as an editor.
Several stories dealt with eating disorders (Eat me! Drink me!) and child abduction, but most dealt with the shifting identities of Alice in the text. Some really leaned into the nonsense which I loved.
Top 3: "My Own Invention", "Sentence Like a Saturday", and "The Flame After the Candle"
pickThis book, a truly unique First Contact story, was always right on the verge of being too dense. With a glossary full of made-up jargon, chapter-long Socratic dialogues, and so much theoretical cosmography, this sometimes felt like a 900+ page epic version of AP Calculus.
But Stephenson made our core group of sheltered Math Monks a likable bunch to spend time with and there was plenty of peril to keep the plot moving.
Recommended.
Last night I found myself mentally dividing this chunkster into regular-book sized components. This lead to giving them names:
Young Math Monks in Love
Math Monks: Quest for the Missing Mentor
Math Monks: Polar Peril!
Math Monks: Volcano of Doom!
Math Monks IN SPAAAAAAAACE!!!
Slap on some pulpy covers and you could remarket this thing. You're welcome, Harper Collins.
I was just texting the word “borrow” but apparently I have typed the word “Boromir” enough for autocorrect to suggest that instead, which somehow made me feel very good about myself.
That is all.
"Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a very long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story."
#rescue #QuotsyMay19
Public Service Announcement:
This book, about a detective who must solve the mystery of a murdered messiah in a world where modern Israel was never formed and instead the Jewish refugees fleeing Europe were all relocated to Alaska, is amazing and it is also Audible‘s Daily Deal.
You should probably make this happen.
“As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a #coward... It didn't matter what he had to do, he would do it and be glad.”
#coward #QuotsyMay19
“‘Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,‘ I said. ‘We have a protractor.‘”
The 1st 300 pages of this chunkster was kind of Dead Poets Society with math instead of poetry, but, as you can tell from the quote above, things have escalated somewhat.
“How #sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!”
#sweet #QuotsyMay19
“The self-congratulatory popular #account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened.”
#account #QuotsyMay19
“...unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into #experience.”
#experience #QuotsyMay19
“‘I began to feel like a man who has ridden through a vast desert... then comes upon the mirage of a #garden and a city, and finds that the mirage is real, and that it is bigger than the desert; that the desert was, after all his walking, only a small part of the mirage‘
‘Then you felt love, which is the state of feeling desire and the fulfillment of desire at the same time,‘ she said.”
#garden #QuotsyMay19
“‘I must apologize for calling so late,‘ said he, ‘and I must further beg you to be so unconventional as to allow me to leave your house presently by scrambling over your back #garden wall.‘”
#garden #QuotsyMay19
This chunkster is full of the made-up terminology used by the math monks on the planet Arbre in the far distant future. It teeters on the edge of being too dense to enjoy, but then Stephenson adds a dash of humor to liven up the proceedings.
See the definition above for the very technical term “bulshytt”.
1. Does it do something new? Something I‘ve never seen before? Is it clear the author put thought into the ideas at play? Natural dialogue and a pretty cover help too.
2. Movies! Justice League comics. I have to control myself because I have a Mr. Toad level collecting mania.
3. Nope.
4. Sarah Messer, e e cummings, Langston Hughes, local luminary Joseph Mill, and my college professor and former NC Poet Laureate Joe Bathanti
Here are my picks from the current Audible sale. Got all these beauties for quite cheap.
Anybody else taking advantage of the sale?
"A few other couples joined us on the dance floor and we lost ourselves among them. I'd never been able to figure out exactly what was involved in slow dancing, so I contented myself, as I had since high school, with gripping my partner to me, letting out awkward breaths against her ear, and tipping from foot to foot like someone waiting for a bus. I could feel the sweat cooling on her forearms and smell a trace of apples in her hair."
#breathe
“I often wonder what Einstein would have done in my position... Einstein was smart, maybe even as smart as Laserator, but he played it way too safe. Then again, nobody ever threw a grappling hook at Einstein. I like to think he would have enjoyed my #work, if he could have seen it. But no one sees anything I do, not until it's hovering over Chicago.”
#work #QuotsyMay19
“This is one of the chief differences between a child's experience of a favorite book and an educated adult's. For the adult, a book may be a #work of art, possibly a very great one, but for the child reader, certain books are universes. If we are lucky, we retain some of that capacity to be immersed in a story.”
#work #QuotsyMay19
Been chipping away for awhile but now that I‘ve finished some other books I‘m going to focus on this chunkster in earnest.
“Sometimes driven aground by the photon storms, by the swirling of the galaxies, clockwise and counterclockwise, ticking with light down the dark sea-corridors lined with our silver sails, our demon-haunted sails, our hundred-league masts as fine as threads, as fine as silver needles sewing the threads of starlight, embroidering the stars on black velvet, wet with the winds of Time that go racing by.”
#star #QuotsyMay19
Happy #FreeComicBookDay!
Shout out to Ssalefish Comics in Winston-Salem, North Carolina!
pickIf you‘ve only seen the movie then you know the 1st 2/5ths (I did the math) of the book pretty well. While the film ends once Bastian enters the magical world of Fantasia*, the book follows his journey as he is twisted by his wish-fulfilling powers that steal his memories of Earth into a monstrous demagogue. His journey back to himself is a slow one, but rewarding all the same.
I recommend this classic to all fantasy fans.
Print > audio.
pick“You can‘t go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it‘s just a cage.”
Somehow Sir Terry synthesizes folk tales, voodoo, European travel, fairy godmothers, and New Orleans into this tale of the witches trying to help Emberella not attend a ball, achieving both madcap hilarity and a thoughtful meditation on free will and the power of stories.
Just wow. #DiscRead
“The stars were going out now, one by one, dropping like pennies behind the television aerials and the skylights and the washing strung between the chimneys. The sky was still dark - a sated, navy-blue woman - but the grass was jittery with the expectation of dawn”
#star #QuotsyMay19
Peter S. Beagle sure puts words together pretty. Art by J. J. Long.
“My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built. Life is commonplace; the papers are sterile; #audacity and romance seem to have passed forever from the criminal world. Can you ask me, then, whether I am ready to look into any new problem, however trivial it may prove?”
#QuotsyMay19
“It was a bookstore, and he felt at #home in bookstores, and he hadn‘t had that feeling much lately. He was going to enjoy it. He pushed his way back through the racks of greeting cards and cat calendars, back to where the actual books were, his glasses steaming up and his coat dripping on the thin carpet. It didn‘t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway #home.”
#quotsymay19
“I have come #home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now...Come further up, come further in!”
#QuotsyMay19
For my birthday last week my brother got me 3 books from 3 different independent bookstores. 2 of these (Miranda and Frankenstein) were very much on my radar. The one in the middle is by a weirdo film critic that I‘ve never heard of and sounds delightfully crazy.
Here‘s my #birthdaybookhaul from this weekend. Got that Beatles book and D.O.D.O. from my favorite used bookstore that I only allow myself to visit yearly because of my tendency to buy so much faster than I read.
Got the start of an Adrian Tchaikovsky trilogy about shapeshifters, a Making of 2001 book, and a Justice League manga amongst other things!
It was a great weekend made greater by Endgame!
So I promise I just found him like this. I‘m not entirely sure how he got to the middle safely either.
#RaisingReaders #MaybeWeNeedABookshelf
1. Thundercats (HOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!)
2. SCOTLAND (still had the caps lock on and just went with it)
3. I schedule it out way in advance working through my absurd owned TBR alternating genres
4. Arthur C. Clarke
5. Do you think J. J. Abrams will walk back Rey‘s origin in The Rise of Skywalker? (I have been thinking about this an unreasonable amount)
#friyayintro @howjessreads
“Rain symbolizes mercy and sunlight charity, but rain and sunlight are better than mercy and charity. Otherwise they would degrade the things they symbolize.”
#symbol #quotsyapr19
Requiescat in pace, Gene Wolfe
While clearing the stacks of books from my closet floor I was reminded that I have two copies of Creature Tech because one time I let someone borrow it and they took a really long time reading it and I got antsy not having a copy of Creature Tech on hand.
A heart-warming tale of space eels, the Shroud of Turin, demon cats, alien battle armor, a man finding love and reconnecting with his faith, and a lovable giant praying mantis named Blue.
pickJedediah Barry‘s The Manual of Detection, a bizzaro detective novel in a dream-like world of rain & dapper hats, is one of my favorite books of the year thus far & I was bummed to find that he hasn‘t published much else...
except for this e-short which I got for $.99. The terms bizzaro & dream-like still apply in this tale of a couple on the verge of marriage who find themselves on the run from jellyfish goons in a land of babies & alpacas.
“This album began as a rock opera about a besieged seaside community called Riversend ruled by a benevolent wizard.”
The new Mountain Goats album is being described as “dragon noir” and my brother got me an advanced copy as an early birthday gift!
I‘ve loved lead singer John Darnielle‘s novels and I am so stoked about this!
pickMay has turned into my month to tackle mega-chunksters and a friend gave me a doozy to read so I‘ll be tackling it instead of book 3 in the Stormlight Archive.
Still I couldn‘t stay away from Roshar all year and this fast, fun little novella about uncouth young thief Lift really hit the spot. Even with reduced page count, Sanderson still brought the plot twists and an emotional punch of an ending (see spoiler in comments).
I‘m a Steven Universe mega-fan, and while my 4 year old is not ready to watch it, I read him the comics which mostly steer clear of the show‘s space war mythology and are mainly about doughnut competitions, taking care of baby birds, and using gender neutral pronouns.
I won‘t be sharing this one about Lapis and Peridot‘s attempts to make a play of Degrassi-esque Camp Pining Hearts fanfiction, but how great is this scene about Permission to Adapt?
The boxing of closet books continues. It‘s a semi-Shakespeare themed edition of #randombooks
Hey! I‘ve actually read a couple of these!
While the inner-pedant in me knows it‘s probably closer to May 5th due to Julian/Gregorian calendar shenanigans, I still always think of today as Shakespeare‘s birthday (and deathday).
As I told my students today, the fact that his plays are still dark, intense, fascinating, heartbreaking, fun, and funny after 400 years speaks to his mastery of his craft.
Also a 3rd grader today asked me if he wrote Hamilton which I found humorous.
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