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.
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63% complete! Phil in SF has read 19 of 30 books.
Back in the days of video stores, I often found myself perusing aisles other than "New Release". Either everything good was out, or I'd already seen it in the theater. Finding a decent VHS in the other aisles was hard. This book tried to rectify that, and did a solid job.
James Beard Award winner Kevin Pang and his dad Jeffrey, hosts of the hit America’s Test Kitchen series Hunger Pangs, …
"A heartwarming and refreshing debut novel that proves one thing: there's not enough data in the world to predict what …
So much of our human body is made up of salt that we'd be dead …
14½ hours of facts about salt and salt-adjacent things. Iodized salt. Potassium chloride. Mahatma Gandhi's Salt Campaign. Soy sauce. Catsup. Cheshire. San Francisco Bay. Oil exploration. The Dead Sea. The book never dwells too long, and everything is surprisingly, for me at least, interesting.
@bigethan@sfba.social Nothing in the main plot really depends on previous books, but you'd be missing a lot of context like why there's a moon colony at all. The previous books are amazing themselves, so i'd say read them first.
It's 1963, and riots and sabotage plague the space program. The climate change caused by …
It's amazingly hard to mix crime fiction with science fiction. The Relentless Moon manages to create a mystery that works in space. This takess place is an alternate history where a meteor hit Earth in the 1950s and humanity tries to settle Mars in the 1960s to save itself from massive global warming. While the Lady Astronaut Elma York heads to Mars in The Fated Sky, fellow astronaut Nicole Wargin heads to the moon for visit to ferry colonists to the base that will be used for staging future trips to Mars. However, while there things start going wrong, and it's quickly apparent that the subversive Earth First organization has a mole in the space program on the Moon. Things get worse. The subversive plot reads as something that could happen. No weird coincidences. Bad guys that make sense psychologically. Our hero is both competent and flawed.
I listened to …
It's amazingly hard to mix crime fiction with science fiction. The Relentless Moon manages to create a mystery that works in space. This takess place is an alternate history where a meteor hit Earth in the 1950s and humanity tries to settle Mars in the 1960s to save itself from massive global warming. While the Lady Astronaut Elma York heads to Mars in The Fated Sky, fellow astronaut Nicole Wargin heads to the moon for visit to ferry colonists to the base that will be used for staging future trips to Mars. However, while there things start going wrong, and it's quickly apparent that the subversive Earth First organization has a mole in the space program on the Moon. Things get worse. The subversive plot reads as something that could happen. No weird coincidences. Bad guys that make sense psychologically. Our hero is both competent and flawed.
I listened to the author perform the audiobook version of the story. Kowal is a top-notch performer. Don't miss out. About the only drawback is the cast of characters is large, and I find it difficult to follow who's who and remember who did what. The emotional immediacy of the story in audio form more than makes up for the flaw.
Arsene Lupin is one of the most unforgettable characters to emerge from the early heyday …
Content warning spoilers on a couple of stories as examples
In one story, the narrator reveals he is Arsene Lupin at the end of the story where everyone (including him theoretically) is trying to figure out who Lupin is. In another, Lupin gets away because the police, prosecutors and jailers can't recognize him even when they've been holding him for months. The stories range from improbable to just clunkily written.
However, the plot elements have a solid core that the Netflix show put to good use. So watch that. If you can get past the drawbacks of early 1900s writing, read on because the core is enjoyable.
Academy Award nominee Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction) rocks this mock bedtime story, capturing a hilarious range of emotions as …
Superior Glokta has a problem. How do you defend a city surrounded by enemies and …
I don't often talk about my feminism because it's usually pretty sus when dudes talk about being a feminist, but this is the book that made me think about how implicit biases impacted me. Not because this book is a good example, but rather the opposite.
While I read the book, I started to notice that the defining characteristic of all the major female characters was that they had been used for sex to fill out their backstory. Sex slaves and that sort of thing. This was at the height of grimdark fantasy. It was no great revelation, but I wasn't being coached about that trope. Just that something finally broke through my wall of cluelessness.
I wrote about my realization about the book on my book blog at the time. Author Joe Abercrombie noticed it. And wrote his own blog post that acknowledged what I noticed. More than one …
I don't often talk about my feminism because it's usually pretty sus when dudes talk about being a feminist, but this is the book that made me think about how implicit biases impacted me. Not because this book is a good example, but rather the opposite.
While I read the book, I started to notice that the defining characteristic of all the major female characters was that they had been used for sex to fill out their backstory. Sex slaves and that sort of thing. This was at the height of grimdark fantasy. It was no great revelation, but I wasn't being coached about that trope. Just that something finally broke through my wall of cluelessness.
I wrote about my realization about the book on my book blog at the time. Author Joe Abercrombie noticed it. And wrote his own blog post that acknowledged what I noticed. More than one of his fans ended up commenting at my blog that I was just wrong, and how dare you, though most of the commenters at Abercrombie's blog were less confrontational. Anyway, the comments at my blog were also eye-opening.
I did like the book though!
That was 16 years ago this week. I make no claim to any kind of great feminism, just that I try to be intentional these days. This book was the start.
Transit Maps of the World is the first and only comprehensive collection of historic and current maps of every rapid-transit …
I didn't rate this as highly when I first put this on my old book blog in 2008, but I've kept it and used it over and over and over when a lot of my other cookbooks have fallen away and been culled.
Jacky was running. There was no thought in his head, only an intense drive to …
Everyone was camped in the scrub, under mallee, in depressions in the ground, covered with tarps, twigs and debris.
— Terra Nullius by Claire G. Coleman (Page 291)
new vocabulary: mallee
a low-growing bushy Australian eucalyptus which has several slender stems
“A rare historical insight into the tragic changes taking place in Palestine.” —Jimmy Carter
From one of Palestine’s leading writers, …
