I’m reading The Garden of Departed Cats by Bilge Karasu. It’s a collection of very strange and seemingly unrelated short stories, interspersed with chapters about a traveler in a Mediterranean city who ends up taking part in a human chess game. The publisher’s description says, “With many strata to mine, The Garden of the Departed Cats is a work of peculiar beauty and strangeness, the whole layered and shiny like a piece of mica.” If you like Kafka, or Italo Calvino, this might be up your alley. Me, I’m not too sure yet.
I’m also listening to the audiobook of The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. It’s told from the point of view of Tookie, an ex con who works at a bookstore in Minnesota owned by an author named Louise. Tookie is now married to the tribal cop who arrested her, she has a fraught relationship with her step daughter and with the ghost of a former bookstore customer who died while reading a book that is now in Tookie’s possession that she thinks may be cursed. It takes place in 2020, and COVID-19 has just struck. I love Louise Erdrich, and this is much more engaging than the Karasu.
One of my many favorites is The Cave by José Saramago. It’s an indictment of capitalism, bureaucracy, and commercial development couched as a sort of realist fable. Saramago is compassionate and tender toward his protagonists and wryly sardonic in his social criticism.
For SF, I recommend anything by Becky Chambers. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is the first of her Wayfarers series.
“She had six strong legs and it frightened me. She had insect eyes but I could still see that the look she gave him you give to me.”
Why would he want to? The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Enjoy what you enjoy—life’s too short and there are too many other books out there to waste time on what you don’t enjoy! I have no qualms about not finishing a book, no matter how far along I’ve gotten. I’ve been known to skip to the last chapter or last few pages just to see how it ends, then move on.
On the other hand, for books that you have to read (for school, e.g.) set a goal of X pages per day, and reward yourself when you make the goal. I also find it helps to read more interactively: take notes, argue with the author, think about what you read and whether it’s total b.s. or whether there was anything, however small, of value in it.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (no, I’m not reading anymore Donna Tartt), Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
With no recorded cases since 2017, the archipelago has had a long journey to become free of the disease, which killed 608,000 people globally in 2022
I love Becky Chambers. Psalm for the Wild Built was one of my favorites from 2022.
I actually split between reading and listening to the audiobook. It was long either way! I didn’t care for it as much as I thought I would. The first part took me a while to get into, I loved the second part, but after
spoiler
Maidenhair dies
it was all downhill.
In very roughly descending order:
Auē by Becky Manawatu
Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson
Open Throat by Henry Hoke
Autumn by Ali Smith
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
Home by Toni Morrison
Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente
The Book of M by Peng Shepherd
The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
The Overstory by Richard Powers
The Door by Magda Szabó
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
I had a cat that was maybe 6 or 7 years old when she suddenly started having seizures. After a seizure, she’d be wobbly for a few days, then eventually back to normal… until it happened again. Vet couldn’t figure out what was going on. We decided to try to track when she had the seizures—was it when she ate something out of the ordinary, got exposed to something unusual, on a recurring schedule? That sort of thing. We quickly found out that within a day or two of giving her a dose of Frontline flea treatment (the kind you drip on the back of their neck) she’d have a seizure. We stopped giving her Frontline and she never had another seizure.
Just want to say that (a) I love the pattern and colors, and (b) it doesn’t look horribly wonky to me. Blocking might improve it, but I don’t think it needs “saving.”
—Oh, we use only the finest baby frogs, dew-picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in the finest quality spring water, lightly killed, and sealed in a succulent, Swiss, quintuple-smooth, treble-milk chocolate envelope, and lovingly frosted with glucose.
—That's as may be, but it's still a frog!
—What else?
—Well, don't you even take the bones out?
—If we took the bones out, it wouldn't be crunchy, would it?
Central Illinoisan here, and I’m pretty sure the half of Illinois south of the Mason-Dixon Line is the South, not the Midwest.
I hadn’t thought about it, but it sounds like a fun idea, so I’ve checked out The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, a horror classic that’s been on my to-read list for a while: “a collection of spine-tingling horror stories that are woven together by a fictional play called The King in Yellow.”
Critics of cash bail as a condition of pretrial release say it is especially unfair to Black people and other people of color.
A law abolishing cash bail will take effect in Illinois on Sept. 18. The change makes Illinois the first state to eliminate the practice and a nationally watched testing ground for whether such a change can work.
Digital Public Public Library fights back against rightwing censorship with resource that works through geo-targeting
“The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is trying to fight back. It recently launched the Banned Book Program, granting free nationwide access to books restricted in schools or libraries.
“It functions through GPS-based geo-targeting; by typing in your zip code, you are shown the complete list of titles prohibited in your area. Once you download the Palace e-reader app, these books are available to download.”
First of all, I want to say I’m happy to see this crochet community on Lemmy, and to get the ball rolling, here’s one of my many WIPs. It uses the Draco Shawl pattern on Ravelry. It’s one of my older WIPs since the beading takes forever.
