Book title: Compulsory Author: Martha Wells Rating: 4/5 Is it fair to count this as a book with only 8 pages? (It has an ISBN number, so the answer is yes!) I know nothing about the series except it has a TV show on Apple TV.
As some of you may have seen on social media recently, an enjoyable reread of Anri Yasuda’s excellent Beauty Matters: Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics – 1890-1930 had me caving in once again and reaching for my wallet. I ended up with four new books, one for each of the main chapters, and I’ll hopefully be getting to each of them in turn over the coming months. However, I was actually fortunate enough to get one of them as a review copy, courtesy of Prototype…
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen published 1938 This picture is Boredom, 1935 Alexander Deineka – I don’t believe Portia would have worn such a low-cut dress, BUT her elbows feature a surprising amount in the book, and there are several mentions like this one: ‘Portia nursing her elbows as though they had been a couple of loved cats’ I very much enjoyed a recent re-read of Friends and Relations by Elizabeth Bowen I liked it much more than I remembered and found a lot to talk about. So…
The twists and turns wound me up. I'm just about to let go. How far you ask?
As I hinted in my end of June post and my review of “Women of Iron and Velvet”, I’ve been off down a number of rabbit holes recently, particularly with French authors. Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet were involved, and Margaret Crosland added complications as I did have to pick up a reasonably priced copy of her Cocteau biography! So when I was casting around for a book to read after my failure with “The Lighthouse Stevensons”, my eye fell on my Cocteau stacks and there sat “Opium”; translated by…
A reader asks if I remember diagramming sentences. In math I was competent and uninspired but almost anything with words constituted play time. In short, I loved diagramming sentences. I think Mrs. Whistler, my sixth-grade teacher, enjoyed calling on me to take a sentence apart on the blackboard and reassemble it in a manner almost mathematical – probably my first insight into logic. She appreciated the pleasure I took in diagramming, a pleasure not shared by most of my classmates. Whenever…
As I mentioned in my IndieWeb Book Club post, I first read Fromm’s book more than 20 years ago. I was in my early high school years when I stumbled upon his work and was immediately intrigued by his way of looking at the world. The fact that he was not “just” a philosopher but also a psychologist and a sociologist meant his ideas felt more concrete and applicable in today’s world, even though his book was more than 30 years old at the time and is half a century old now. In reading To Have or to…
13th july to 19th july what i did i was sick for the better part of the week, and my partner also. it wasn’t a great week health wise, but things are looking up: it seems a conflict of some medicines was causing my partner’s issue, and hopefully next week will see that that is all it was. a lot of the things i wanted to do this week (finish reading one of my mithras books, work on next month’s WCC, work on ｢saturn｣, think about some future stuff that seems more pressing than usual) did not…
→ Bluesky
Brand for FIFA World Cup 2026Today (July 19, 2026) the 23rd iteration of the World Cup ended. This was a unique tournament this time increasing the amount of teams to 48 from the previous 32 limit. This meant this tournament would introduce a best of 32 round prior to the existing round of 16. All this meant was more games and more chances for other nations to compete outside of pool play.As the dust settled after 104 games Spain came out the victors, taking down Argentina and Messi's dream of…
The last line from a prose poem by Grace Yee called “Living Among Trees” From the latest issue of Heat: …I know that when lightning strikes a giant sequoia and burns out its heart, you can step inside the trunk, look up at the sky and hold it.
My second Sunday at Avant, beginning to refine old routines and create new ones. Did not celebrate with gay porn, but instead with an old favorite movie, the frivolous Astaire-Rogers delight The Gay Divorcee (from 1934). Your wife is safe with Tonetti / He prefer spaghetti. No Palo Alto Sacred Harp singing this Sunday, so I sang for two hours on my own, to Irish YouTube videos, eventually reaching peak loudness and passion. My tongue broke out in unknown strains / And sung surprising grace.…
Since these guys have popped up a few times in the current Krevborna campaign, I thought I should add them to the world-building blog posts. If it wasn't obvious from what follows, the cauldronborn are Krevborna's answer to the idea of "orcs." CauldronbornAs a last-ditch tactic in their war to push mankind out of their territory, the aelvani submerged their human prisoners of war in magical cauldrons gifted to them by Baba Vasaga, the Hag-Queen of the Autumn Court. When these captives emerged,…
Finished reading: Perfect by Judith McNaught 📚
To make maps, we must sin against the landscape. We distort the earth’s roundness, and we simplify complex realities down to a series of colors and symbols. Ancient trees become a scattering of green pixels on a screen; a horrific battle becomes a labeled dot; and an awe-inspiring bird migration becomes a simple arrow. But this is necessary. Maps work because they abstract and generalize (as noted by Arthur Robinson, who said “the act of generalization gives the map its raison d’être”). They…
Great writing and premise, as poor hungry gal Loretta Young (who I just saw in The Stranger) is pitied by rich guy Spencer Tracy and taken out for a nice meal. Only he’s not rich, just pretending, and they get kicked out and retreat to his shanty town. She loves the place and wants to settle down there, but Tracy likes to move from town to town, plus they’ve gotta eat to stay alive, so already a few conflicts before throwing in the predatory criminal next door (a banker in The Devil Doll, a…
I recently spoke to some new authors who were worried about their work-in-progress. They were worried if they were “doing it wrong” or if a technique they employed was “too weird.” The answer for them — or any writer — has everything to do with the author’s goals for the story. The goal determines who the customer (or audience) of the story actually is. You’re writing it for yourself or your friends. You and your friends are the customer. The only metric that matters is whether or not it’s…
Another baffling Smurfs™ product from Dollar Tree. Full disclosure: I didn’t buy this, nor have I used it.
sufficientlylargen:sufficientlylargen:millionsknives:millionsknives:can you curry anything else or is it just favortimSo “currying” a furry animal means grooming or brushing it with a currycomb, which in turn comes from the Old French correier meaning “to prepare [something]”, because you prepare a horse for riding by brushing it; it’s most commonly applied to horses but you can get e.g. currycombs for dogs.If I understand correctly, medieval French folk tales considered chestnut-colored horses…
When volume two of this series of books detailing the works of Reginald Heade arrived in 2020, it was widely thought to be the final word on Heade and his career as one of Britain's premier cover and dust jacket artists. Six years later, we have an update that not only offers further insight into his life, his family and the agents and publishers he worked for, but an astonishing collection of
I close my eyes and listen to the church bells reverberate through the city — the air, the street, the park; the hearts.Usually when I go into a bookshop, I find myself looking at all the books. Often, for nothing in particular, but rather to see what is new. Who knows what I might find; what stories might stand out today. My time spent wandering around the walls of words today, however, was characterised more by writing than by reading. The books were my anchor. The word was in my spirit. My…
Space Between Entertainment is a smaller independent publisher I am familiar with, as I've followed the work of creator Pat Shand for years and he does a lot with them--which makes sense as he founded and owns the company! SBE recently released print and digital copies of a new series, "Moonjiggle." It is written by Dave Franchini with art by Bamburat. It is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek satire that heavily mocks concepts of censorship through sci-fi metaphors. A regime dedicated to eliminating…
There’s a line from Rutherford Craze’s latest note that hit me like a piano tumbling out of a six story building: When we ask Midjourney to draw an ox, it does not think of home. ChatGPT will never invent a new calligraphy technique, because it has no wrists to feel uncomfortable. That link points to Phaedra Charles’s Undercase Type and a beautiful thing she printed called A Guide to Sinistral Hand. It’s a small booklet, half type specimen and half essay, that reimagines type design and…
Oh my God. That’s her. How about a double feature, baby? Black Athena It’s hard to explain to people how fucked the field of Classics is. There’s a guy who almost exclusively writes articles about how the Metamorphoses does not depict rape on the part of the gods and is actually about art and how it captures its object (uhh). There’s an article from I think 2015 which goes back and forth about whether we should see Greece/Rome as exceptional or not, because they obviously are (mhm), but it’s…
Programming note: This finally completes the original 4 Dragon Warrior games, which I didn’t know I would do, and which I started in 2020, apparently As far as the big picture of the whole series, this one is probably the most underwhelming and also the easiest (if we are being honest those things usually go hand in hand) HOWEVER, in spite of that, this installment starts out hotter than any of them. It is separated into 5 chapters, where the first 4 are each a separate little story for each of…
The weather’s turned cold and stuff, so I think it’s time to spend a day reading comics. And accompanied by music from 1982 only. Kate Bush: The Dreaming 12:03: Betas by Nick Maandag (Drawn & Quarterly) This book feels kinda displaced in time — it’s about PC Madness Gone Wrong etc, and is probably meant to be read as a parody of right-wing fears of sorts? And there are some funny bits in here. But reading this is just page after page of these conversations that aren’t very entertaining, so the…
John McPhee, writing in 2015 in The New Yorker, about the process of being edited at Time magazine:After four days of preparation and writing—after routinely staying up almost all night on the fourth night—and after tailoring your stories past the requests, demands, fine tips, and incomprehensible suggestions of the M.E. and your senior editor, you came in on Day 5 and were greeted by galleys from Makeup with notes on them that said “Green 5” or “Green 8” or “Green 15” or some such, telling you…
It's been two weeks and we've been publishing like mad. So read on for an overview of our latest content and make sure you check out our new Affiliate Links page. I'd been asked for something like this for a while. It's a single directory of stores you can shop from and help support our work!And make sure you check out the end of this article where we break down this week's analytics! DAILY SUMS Daily Sums is a game here on the The Bryant Review that provides a new puzzle every day! Play Now…
