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@picklish@books.theunseen.city I'm pretty sure that a lot of edition splitting is due to sourcing from OpenLibrary. Even if you put in editions correctly on one instance, there's a mechanism where it gets overwritten by bad data from another instance. I've dug through the source code and have been unable to find it though.

I'm about ready to throw in the towel on Bookwyrm. It's just so frustrating to find that books I've read have been split off from the main book. Someone reads the hardcover, I read the ebook, and our comments & reviews get split from each other.

Babel, by R.F. Kuang, is like the worst case of this: sfba.club/author/696/s/r-f-kuang?page=1 There are SEVEN different entries for the book on SFBA.club.

I picked this up after someone compared it to Danielewski's House of Leaves. This novel reeled me in with its first contact premise. The graphics and typography are cool but offer little to the already-lacking story. Once I hit the third volume of the eight-part "novella within a novel", I dipped out. While Hughes has a knack for crafting a sentence and designing graphic content, the story was too shallow, meandering, and repetitive for me to power through another 600 pages. It doesn't help that some of the fonts were impossible to read on an e-reader.

new vocabulary: exiguity

the quality or state of being excessively scanty

Alice, Charlotte and Maria all hunger for a life different than circumstance has afforded them.

An enjoyable read with a slightly different take on vampires. I love the title, and the twists to classic vampire lore Schwab plays with. Much of the book is historical fiction, and also queer, both of which I find appealing.

While I found the stories of Maria and Charlotte most engaging, Alice’s used a few tropes I am thoroughly tired of. Her chapters were the ones I least enjoyed. I also found the denouement somewhat lacking. Otherwise, a fun read with well-defined characters and interesting storylines.

When #Heinlein illustrated the Martian's maturity by having him kill someone and then have sex, and then go out on his own, and subsequently had the main female character say something victim blaming about rape, my interest in this book dropped to little more than a poorly substantiated drive to finish what I start.

I will likely achieve this by mid-year. Given my lack of reading mojo during the pandemic, I decided to set modest reading goals coming out of that funk. 24 books in 2023, 26 in 2024, 28 in 2025, and now 30.

A short but oh so great collection, including the historic poem which gives the book it's name. In this reread, I discovered that I liked the penultimate poem ('Wild Orphan') almost as much as Howl itself. A nice read to finish up the year.

Finished creating a list of books from Reactor Magazine Reviewers’ Choice: The Best Books of 2025. There's some pretty good stuff here, including this book.

On SFBA.club, the list can be found here, and I made sure the books have high-res covers and descriptions. YMMV on other servers. However, a lot of the books hadn't been added anywhere yet, so there's a decent chance the data I entered is copied to servers where accounts follow me.

I picked this up after skimming similar books and was disappointed by the general lack of content. Most of it could be summed up in a few pages. I stopped reading actively around the 10% mark and skimmed the rest, realizing it's more about creating a space for deep work so you can be another cog in the machine than finding purpose and enjoyment in creating something exceptional by locking in and putting in the hours.

This is a one of a kind audiobok and a story that probably doesn't work as well without the audio element. The music and singing which is integral to the story elevated the whole experience. Quite short so worthwhile to try out even if you're skeptical.