How Kurt Vonnegut Predicted the Automation Crisis Player Piano may have been written 67 years ago, but its prescience is uncanny — though not inexplicable. It is a product not only of Vonnegut’s extraordinary imagination, but his years of experience working directly with engineers, whose mentality the novel reflects in reaching its logical conclusion. Getting […]
Detective novels are, for me, a sort of literary comfort food; a respite from real life — in which problems aren’t always neatly wrapped up — and a chance to walk in the sensibly shod footsteps of a crime-solver . . . , analyzing clues and side-eyeing witnesses and, ultimately, making the world a tiny
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GOODREADS HACKS: GET A DNF SHELF, MARK REREADS, AND MORE If you find it hard to keep up with all the cool kids who use Goodreads to track their reading, this article will put you in the know about some of the more esoteric aspects. The main subject here is how to create a DNF
Why we need to stop forcing ourselves to finish books we hate When I was younger, I felt that I had to finish every book I started. But some time around my 40th birthday I realized that I had probably completed about half my life and no longer had the luxury of time to waste
What a time-consuming yet fruitful project this turned into. When I started looking back at my long-term reading log for the 6 Degrees of Separation meme, I discovered a lot of authors and/or series that I had begun to enjoy in the past but had not kept up with more recently. Many of these authors and
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WHY READ FICTION IN THIS AGE OF ATROCITY? Content Warning: This piece discusses recent sexual assault headlines. I want to be as frank with you as is possible: it is increasingly hard for me to find joy or purpose in reading lately, specifically novels. I find myself asking, why read fiction at all when the
Here’s my entry in Kate’s 6 Degrees of Separation Meme from her blog, Books Are My Favourite and Best. Here’s how it works: Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may choose
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Final Girls by Riley Sager Penguin Audio, 2017 Narrated by Erin Bennett and Hillary Huber Ten years ago Quincy Carpenter ran from the woods covered in blood—the sole survivor of five young people vacationing in a secluded rental cottage. That experience made her a member of a group no one volunteers to join—Final Girls, the
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SCI-FI DOESN’T HAVE TO BE DEPRESSING: WELCOME TO SOLARPUNK Welcome to solarpunk, a new genre within science fiction that is a reaction against the perceived pessimism of present-day sci-fi and hopes to bring optimistic stories about the future with the aim of encouraging people to change the present. The first book that explicitly identified as
