literature.cafe chat

I've never use a book reading tracker before. But I made a few weeks ago a BookWyrme account. BookWyrme is the fediverse book reading tracker and I'm marking books I've read when I remember them. Often, I need to add them to my instance as I've mainly read in French and many books needs to be manually added or imported before completing missing information.

This made made think about my journey as a reader. I've read lot older books in english or at least old enough to have more than one french translation. Would I love them with another translator or another translation? Would I enjoy reading them in english now? Would the langage difference be too much? Have a change too much as person?

I've read comics in paper format, volume by volume but I read them now online, chapter by chapter. How should I should I add them? Should I add both forms?

Which field are missing in BookWyrme to add information that are pertinent to me? What are its limitation? What are the workaround these limitations?

I looking for people to discuss these subjects. Are you interested?

I don't want to write such big post again and make giant conversations but to publish smaller post on semi-regular basis and hear a bit of feedback.

Is this the right place? Do you know a more fitting community?

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/12924678

> [Dear Friends, before I post this somewhere, probably Medium, in the hopes of getting as many eyeballs as possible to look at this, would you be so kind as to look this over and offer some constructive criticism before I post it? And is there some way that the folks on BookWyrm have the option to see this?] > > This is a hastily written, very brief, not particularly well-thought out response to the sudden disappearance of Small Press Distribution by one of the many people who relied on them to get their books before the eyes of the public. If you’re reading this, I suspect you probably already know about about what happened to SPD, and so in the interest of time, I’ll skip the background which can be read about on SPD’s Wikipedia page, and in the following Lithub article. I’ve thought it appropriate to post this on Medium, which is the same site where an employee of SPD first blew the whistle on some of their more unsavory practices several years ago. > > As a user and fan of Bandcamp, I’ve often wondered if the same sort of business model, with some obvious and extensive modifications, might not also be a viable model for small presses or booksellers in general. Bandcamp is a site and platform where musicians can sell their music, whether in digital or physical form, and be fairly remunerated for their work (as opposed to sites like Spotify). Here, musicians’ songs can be listened to, in whole or in part, and then purchased digitally as DRM-Free mp3 or flac files. Bands can also sell physical media such as vinyl, CDs, cassettes, T-shirts, and all sorts of other merchandise while also having an opportunity to have more interaction with their fans. > > I use Bandcamp to keep up with bands that I listen to by signing up for their mailing lists and for buying digital media; I have admittedly not yet purchased any physical media from anyone, and I get the idea that this is a site that is predominately dedicated to selling digital media. > > Switching to this model would require, at least in part, a bit of a “paradigm shift,” for lack of a better term, that many publishers will potentially not like. As a reader, I am perfectly content to read high-quality ebooks, provided that they are one of the vanishingly small number in PDF or epub format that are not encumbered by digital rights management (DRM), but I realize that in this screen-oriented age of ours that many readers prefer to read books the old fashioned way, on paper. To my mind, this would not dispense with books as physical media; on the contrary I feel that books should be able to exist side by side with digital versions (and the reason they haven’t so far in the way that music and movies have been able to transcend their physical media to a degree is because too many people bought into the Amazon kindle ebook ecosystem of poorly-formatted, DRM-encumbered, and prone to disappearing ebooks, but that’s a whole other rant). Skipping over print on demand (POD), which as a publisher I have really had a less than spectacular experience with due to quality control issues, for which providers such as Ingram/Lightning Source already exists, I wonder if publishers might consider making their books available digitally on Presscamp as either PDFs, epubs, or whatever other format readers prefer, while having a limited print run of offset-printed books sell beside them as a sort of deluxe format, in the same way that I might have an entire hard drive full of music files, but sitting next to it a cabinet full of vinyl LPs for the albums I hold to be among my most favorite. Traditional offset print runs can be excessively expensive and prone to being left to sit around unsold, but if a smaller number were printed, the most ardent fans of those particular authors or presses would be alerted to their publication and sold to them, but when the physical media has been sold out (barring reprintings or reissuings), the work will still remain available to purchase and read. I realize that there will probably be a lot of objections to this way of doing things, and rightly so, but this is simply one possibility that I’ve considered that I thought make sense to other presses in the same boat. > > Barring the investment of a suddenly-appearing, kindly, and free-spending millionaire, a setup like this would require some kind of crowdfunding to get off the ground, servers to host the ebooks, and warehouses to store the physical media (I actually don’t know if Bandcamp warehouses their artists’ physical media or if they themselves are responsible for sending them out). And some kind and honest folks to administer all this! In the same way that musicians give away their music as a means of advertsing for their live shows, ebooks could be provided, in whole or in part, as an advertisement and incentive to buy a physical copy (or perhaps even as an advertisment for an author reading, but that might be stretching things a bit . . .) > > Putting something together like this is honestly far beyond my competence, ability, and resources; I’m simply writing this in the hopes of putting a bug in someone’s ear who has a higher degree of the aforementioned qualities not to mention the time (ha!), to assemble something like this. If this sounds like a good idea to anyone at all, please take it and run with it! The demise of SPD can be a blessing in disguise if we can get our act together and move on to something better! > > [Ok, you made it all the way to the end, so tell me what you think!]

Heya, I'm still here. Still working on things in the background and been quite busy. Right now the instance server needs some updates and the pictures backend is a little wonky. Gonna take the instance down for a bit presumably sometime tomorrow for some (hopefully) quick spring cleaning.

As almost every readers, I have some favorite authors from which I like to read everything they publish. But I wonder how I can efficiently "follow" their publication. Do you know about a service (free, at least as in free beer, at best from the foss world)which can offer such syndication? I'm thinking about a personalized rss feed, or a e-mail, or any way. For the moment, I just look from time to time to their website or social media page but the issues I have are:

• I look when I think about it (it would be better to be somehow notified)
• It's time consuming and inefficient

I'm French native speaker. I believe I can speak fluent English but I know want to discover English poetry. Where should I start ?

I got a few, but mainly just stuck to the library.

I'm new to the Ebook game and confused about the ecosystem. Do Amazon, Rakuten, and Barnes and Noble really control the whole market? Anywhere I can buy big titles not from big companies?

• Bag of bones: Made a post about this already.
• Test Cricket By Jarrod Kimber: A history of the sport written by a great storyteller. Very digestable, the best book if youre a cricket fan.
• Your face belongs to us: If you're on lemmy you likely care about your privacy and need to know about this. This is the emd of privacy.
• God, Human, Animal, Machine: It's been the year of AI and this is a brilliant book to read with great history, philosophy and a personal touch. Very accessible too. (Discovered from the Ezra Klein podcast)
• A dictionary of symbols by Juan Eduardo Cirlot: We all rely on symbolic expression, paeticularly in art. Reading emtries in this book as essays has improved the way I think about amd interpret art. It's an incredible tool if you find symbology important.
• The last Mughal by William Dalrymple: I cannot recommend this enough. One of the most readable history books ever and based on an incredible time period that isn't talked about enough. Incredible individual stories. Really, it's a must read imo.

These are the important recommendations, read a lot of short stories this year and intend to post them on !shortstories@literature.cafe

Some books I haven't recommended since they weren't interesting enough and some were already talked about more than enough.

Including:

• Stats
• Where I find my books
• Where I find reading recommendations
• My best reads of 2023

(The vast majority of these books are available in English, a couple are only in French. The review itself is in English.)

As @Arthur@literature.cafe requested, here's a review of Time Shelter. I apologize in advance for what you are going to read.

As this was my first work by Gospodinov i didn't know what to expect but i really enjoyed it!

I want to start with Gaustine, and precisely, his name. From Garibaldi and Augustine, a revolutionary and a philosopher (with interesting beliefs about time). That basically sums up what Gaustine is - a revolutionary for that world, someone who unifies others with their past, just as Garibaldi helped unify Italy. But does unity with your past free you from the constraints of the future? It's a question posed frequently by the book. For many the the certainty of the future that has happened brings them comfort, but the mistakes still lie in that future. He truly feels like somebody outside of time, even down to the way he speaks, a wanderer in time. For the most of the story he still was that young mysterious young man we met all the way back in that seminar, at least, until that "i don't know".

I must say that I definitely enjoyed the first part of the book more, I enjoyed the human aspect of it. Who are we without our past? What binds us to it? All those questions, all those characters' stories, even when most of them were so tragic. While I liked the philosophical aspect more, I still found enjoyment in the "social commentary" if I could call it that. As a Bulgarian it absolutely hit close to home, actually a lot of the book did. At the beginning of the book, when he talks about life under communism, about that room. It was so familiar, while I wasn't alive in those years it was just like talking to my father. The little toy cars, the strange foreign triangular candy... the famed truck driver who brought all of that home, like the one my grandfather was. Got bit carried away (lol) but the whole Referendum and everything before and after really felt realistic.

I also really loved G.(G.)'s character, a writer who can't remember his story, his time left falling out of his pockets. From the person who helps these people to someone who becomes one of them, being sent more and more back. From a few words, to a notebook of them, to phrases, names and after all that is left is that rose. Really loved how trough the story the line between G. and G.G. gets blurrier and blurrier. Gaustine didn't disappear without a trace as the main character states, he was always there, he never left. Also I actually liked how meta the book was at times and even funny while at it.

I've seen some criticisms that the book doesn't have a climax, but to be honest it doesn't need one. It laid out everything it set to tell and told it. From the promises of a better past to repeating those old mistakes again. But it shows what we, as humans miss, those days when we were happy and young, a shelter... After all everybody yearns for their own time shelter.

Thanks for reading trough this if you did, it really was fun writing it and made me think more deeply of what I read and dive deeper into it's meaning.

TL;DR Nice book

Gabe, please remove this if it doesn't belong here.

The instance of my Mastodon account has chosen to federate with Facebook. This wigs me out, so I'm looking to migrate. Do y'all have any suggestions?

I've never used one but it struck me as odd that people would use a seperate device for smth so easily done on your phone.

Is there smth special about the hardware? Is it better somehow?

The whole "bovine" joke was hilarious on one hand and a little horrifying on the other. It got me thinking: how would I feel if an animal I was about to consume came up to me enthusiastically conveying its consent for being eaten? I will be horrified, just like Arthur! But why?

Will it be better to eat against its consent instead? Why?

Then… what about salad's consent?! Interesting thought experiment…

I am presenting the joke in the form of three extracts from the text:

Extract 1:

"A large dairy animal approached Zaphod Beeblebrox's table, a large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type with large watery eyes, small horns and what might almost have been an ingratiating smile on its lips. "Good evening," it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, "I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?" It harrumphed and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters into a more comfortable position and gazed peacefully at them. Its gaze was met by looks of startled bewilderment from Arthur and Trillian, a resigned shrug from Ford Prefect and naked hunger from Zaphod Beeblebrox. "Something off the shoulder perhaps?" suggested the animal, "Braised in a white wine sauce?" "Er, your shoulder?" said Arthur in a horrified whisper. "

Extract 2:

"‘You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?’ whispered Trillian to Ford. ‘Me?’ said Ford, with a glazed look in his eyes. ‘I don’t mean anything.’ ‘That’s absolutely horrible,’ exclaimed Arthur, ‘the most revolting thing I’ve ever heard.’ ‘What’s the problem, Earthman?’ said Zaphod, now transferring his attention to the animal’s enormous rump. ‘I just don’t want to eat an animal that’s standing there inviting me to,’ said Arthur, ‘it’s heartless.’ ‘Better than eating an animal that doesn’t want to be eaten,’ said Zaphod. ‘That’s not the point,’ Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘maybe it is the point. I don’t care, I’m not going to think about it now. I’ll just . . . er . . .’"

Extract 3:

"I think I’ll just have a green salad,’ he muttered. ‘May I urge you to consider my liver?’ asked the animal. ‘It must be very rich and tender by now, I’ve been force-feeding myself for months.’ ‘A green salad,’ said Arthur emphatically. ‘A green salad?’ said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur. ‘Are you going to tell me,’ said Arthur, ‘that I shouldn’t have green salad?’ ‘Well,’ said the animal, ‘I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am.’ It managed a very slight bow. ‘Glass of water, please,’ said Arthur."

cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/2905115

> Hi! Does anybody know of any online book clubs for banned books? > > Or does anybody wanna…start one? > > I’m looking a comfy group to join that doesn’t cost money or conflict with my busy schedule of being sick all the time. > > (if this isn’t the right community to post this is, let me know)

👀

I can do a 13 days of horror books highlighting some horror books in !fiction@literature.cafe if there's any interest in that. It seems that making highlight posts made a lot of people engaged and started a lot of conversations. Thoughts? I'm willing to do like daily to weekly themed book highlights. I can even do nonfiction book highlights as well. I have a shit ton of books I know of.

A few days back, I came across a thread on Mastodon where people were sharing great opening lines of books. I pitched in with the following opening lines from Discworld:

"THE SUN ROSE slowly, as if it wasn’t sure it was worth all the effort." - from The Light Fantastic.

"THIS IS WHERE the gods play games with the lives of men, on a board which is at one and the same time a simple playing area and the whole world. And Fate always wins." - from Interesting Times.

So to all Discworld fans out here, pitch in with some Discworld quotes, be it starting lines or anything else. Or even just talk about your favourite books in the series. Let's have some fun!

This is another one:

"I meant," said Ipslore bitterly, "what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?"...

Death thought about it. "CATS" he said eventually. "CATS ARE NICE."

-Terry Pratchett (Sourcery).

AND….

GNU PTERRY