Steven Ray wants to read Lives On The Left by Francis Mulhern
This volume brings together sixteen interviews from New Left Review in a group portrait of …
just arrived on my bookshelf.
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Scott reviewed Harriet Tubman : Live in Concert by Bob the Drag Queen
Intentional, and entertaining
4 stars
This was well written and well read by the author. It defines its characters well. And makes them rise out of the page. It knows what it wants to do, it gets to the business of doing it, but doesnt get to heavy on the way of getting there.
A really affecting story of race, queerness, history, and freeing one's self.
CW: US-South slavery, queer outing, alcoholism
Roy Adams reviewed Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries by Otto Penzler
Very good collection of mysteries
4 stars
An interesting set of locked door mysteries from the Golden Age of detective fiction (roughly the 1920s and 1930s). Fourteen interesting and ingenious tales with unexpected twists and turns along the way. I particularly enjoyed the Ellery Queen's The House of Haunts and C. Daly King’s The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem.
Warning that some of the stories do have dated attitudes, especially towards women (thus dropping the rating to four stars). #Bookstodon
Sean Bala started reading On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder
In previous books, Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder dissected the events and values that enabled the …
Snyder is one of the most lucid, clear eyed historians of his time. Reading this now for no particular reason. ROFL. It is a bit slighter than I would have liked - really more of an extended essay. But it is great food for thought.
Sean Bala started reading The Second Sleep by Robert Harris
1468: A young priest, Christopher Fairfax, arrives in a remote Exmoor village to conduct the …
Heard about this on the "Church Times" podcast. A medieval murder mystery set in rural England. Or is it? To say more would give too much away. Liking it so far but it is not high on my reading priority list.
kiarazard reviewed Vanished from Budapest by David Maughan
Not very realistic crime mystery
2 stars
Content warning Spoiler alert...
I found the beginning slow and the language a bit childish (short sentences, repeating the name on each line, for example), it got better later on but the plot was not credible.
How could Peter take the case without having Samantha's name or address? Normally there would be some investigation on her family at the start etc. and the hallucination would have been discovered straight away.
Another detail I found hard to believe was when Peter uses the Internet for the first time and immediately finds that the professor is not who he says he is. To do that he would have needed some sort of image recognition software, which I'm fairly certain was not available in an internet point in 2000.
Roy Adams commented on The Warm Machine by Aimee Cozza
When a robot built for construction work first sees an angular, sleek prototype military robot …
5 out of 5 stars Two bots slowly work their way to independence, friendship and then love while searching for the mythical Root. #Bookstodon
Sean Bala quoted Golden Road by William Dalrymple
For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization, …
The first Buddhist art is strikingly different from the pure and philosophically abstracted Buddhism admired around the world today, with its familiar image of the Buddha lost in meditation. Instead, early Buddhist art is aniconic, yet every bit as vibrant, crowded and cacophonous as so much later Buddhist art is still, silent and quietly meditative.
One reason for this is that the art of the first Buddhist monasteries is shot through with the cosmology of ancient animist cults that existed before the arrival of the new teachings. The first Buddhist monks believed that they lived in a spiritually charged landscape, alive with powerful local godlings and spirits - called yakshas when male and yakshis when female - who took up residence in the trees and stones and streams around monasteries.These spirits personified the forces of nature and revealed themselves at will.…
In all this early art, you feel strongly the Buddhist intuition that the natural and animal worlds are closely related to humankind through great cycles of reincarnation: a neglected Elephant Queen in the earliest murals of the Ajanta Caves may be reborn as the Queen of Varanasi, yet she remains the same essence. Animals are therefore depicted with the same love and respect as humans. After all, in a world where trees could be spirits and the waters are alive with sentient beings, ethical living requires treading softly on this earth, guarding the purity of water and preserving the life of both trees and animals.
This is really fascinating. One thing that struck me from my studies of #Buddhism is just how rich the cosmology is. It makes sense that a faith rooted in reincarnation would have a different relationship with the natural world.
#India #Books #Bookstodon #ReadingNow #AncientHistory #VisualArt #Art #Religion @histodon@a.gup.pe @antiquidons@a.gup.pe
Roy Adams commented on Aurora's Pale Light by E. W. Doc Parris
5 out of 5 stars An excellent continuation of the Walrus tech series. The characters and story are very engaging. I'm looking forward to reading the next book when it is released. I really appreciate the plot recap from the first book that the author provided. #Bookstodon
Sean Bala quoted How Do You Live? by Neil Gaiman
First published in 1937, Genzaburō Yoshino’s How Do You Live? has long been acknowledged in …
That is why I think the first, most basic step in these matters is to start with the moments of real feeling in your life, when your heart is truly moved, and to think about the meaning of those. The things that you feel most deeply, from the very bottom of your heart, will never deceive you in the slightest. And so at all times, in all things, whatever feelings you may have, consider these carefully.
If you do this, then someday, somewhere, a unique, once-in-a-lifetime experience will leave a deep impression on you, and you will come to understand something that has a meaning that is not just limited to that one moment. That thought will be an idea that is truly your own.
To put it a slightly more difficult way, you must make a habit of thinking honestly, with your own experience as a foundation, and-Copper, this is very important!—if some one fakes this part, no matter what kind of great-sounding things they think or say, they are all lies in the end.
— How Do You Live? by Neil Gaiman, Genzaburō Yoshino, Bruno Navasky
Moving passage. I think we sometimes forget how much our intuitions and deepest feelings can guide us well if we only listen.
Roy Adams finished reading Kamikaze Short Circuits Anthology by Hank Jones
An anthology based on the graphic novel series Kamikaze. It features a young covert operative …
5 of 5 stars A great anthology of five stories in the Kamikaze world. The stories were written by five guest authors with artwork by six guest artists. #Bookstodon
Roy Adams finished reading Castle in the air by Diana Wynne Jones
Having long indulged himself in daydreams more exciting than his mundane life as a carpet …
5 / 5 stars
A wonderful second book in the series. Abdullah's story slowly builds and reveals his character and wit. When characters from the first Bill finally started appearing I was fully invested in Abdullah's story. It was good to have them but they were incidental to me. #Bookstodon
Roy Adams commented on Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint, Vol. 1 by Sleepy-C
My daughter is a fan of the web comic and likes the graphic novels a lot too. Her glowing descriptions have persuaded the whole family to start reading the graphic novel. It's an interesting story so far! 5 / 5 stars #Bookstodon
Roy Adams commented on Waypoint Kangaroo by Curtis C. Chen
"Kangaroo isn't your typical spy. Sure, he has extensive agency training, access to bleeding-edge technology, …
Waypoint Kangaroo by Curtis C Chen is a very good space spy story with interesting twists. Be sure to play the puzzle site listed after the acknowledgements. #Bookstodon
Roy Adams reviewed Morphotropic by Greg Egan
In a world where the cells that make up our bodies are not committed to …
Another engaging exploration of a different reality from Greg Egan
5 stars
Engaging exploration of a world where cells are more generic and called cytes. The cytes can survive on their own as unicellular organisms, group together in multicultural organisms and even be exchanged between different people or animals. #Bookstodon