aka @kingrat@sfba.social. I'm following a lot of bookwyrm accounts, since that seems to be the only way to get reviews from larger servers to this small server. I make a lot of Bookwyrm lists. I will like & boost a lot of reviews that come across my feed. I will follow most bookwyrm accounts back if they review & comment. Social reading should be social.
This link opens in a pop-up window
43% complete! Phil in SF has read 13 of 30 books.
A remote lodge. A stormy night. A shot in the dark. You may think you’ve read this story before. Think …
From the bestselling author of Sex Object, a searing investigation into American culture’s obsession with virginity, and the argument for …
Sam Mitchell lives in a rundown apartment filled with a collection of random objects, an assortment of knickknacks and ephemera …
Sam Mitchell lives in a rundown apartment filled with a collection of random objects, an assortment of knickknacks and ephemera …
One Saturday night in Las Vegas, twelve-year-old Newell Ewing goes out with a friend and …
Quality writing, but this book piles hopelessness on top of hopelessness.
One Saturday night in Las Vegas, twelve-year-old Newell Ewing goes out with a friend and doesn’t come home. In the …
@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.
The collapse of The Flow, the interstellar pathway between the planets of the Interdependency, has …
(reposting review because my edition got split off from the main work.)
I knew this would be awful. I was not wrong.
It's the same damn problem as the previous book in the series. Every character is too damn clever for their own good. Most characters are paper-thin schemers. The whole basis of the story is just predicting whether an incident will be a double cross or a triple cross or a quadruple cross. "Aha! I anticipated you would double cross so I have taken the liberty of triple crossing you!" Then there is the nature of some of the artificial intelligences that are characters. Specifically that these AI characters pepper every conversation with meta-discussion on the nature of their existence. "I, an AI, am sorry for your loss. Am I actually sorry or am I just programmed to say that? We must discuss the nature of this at every …
(reposting review because my edition got split off from the main work.)
I knew this would be awful. I was not wrong.
It's the same damn problem as the previous book in the series. Every character is too damn clever for their own good. Most characters are paper-thin schemers. The whole basis of the story is just predicting whether an incident will be a double cross or a triple cross or a quadruple cross. "Aha! I anticipated you would double cross so I have taken the liberty of triple crossing you!" Then there is the nature of some of the artificial intelligences that are characters. Specifically that these AI characters pepper every conversation with meta-discussion on the nature of their existence. "I, an AI, am sorry for your loss. Am I actually sorry or am I just programmed to say that? We must discuss the nature of this at every utterance of a pleasantry."
This series, particularly the second and third books, has been so tedious.
Phil in SF
boosted
At Jodrell Band in England Observatory in England, a radio telescope has detected a mysterious …
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.
One Saturday night in Las Vegas, twelve-year-old Newell Ewing goes out with a friend and …
Thus, amid the undefined fissures that, on a daily basis, drifted through that dilapidated school, the exiguity of a rapport had blossomed.
— Beautiful Children by Charles Bock (42%)
new vocabulary: exiguity
the quality or state of being excessively scanty
Phil in SF
boosted
Santo Domingo de la Calzada, 1532. London, 1837. Boston, 2019.
Three young women, their bodies …
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.
Phil in SF
boosted
Stranger in a Strange Land is a 1961 science fiction novel by American author Robert …
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.
