What are your thoughts on DNF (Did Not Finish)-ing books? Do you feel guilty about it? Do you worry you missed out on something? Or are you confident in dropping a book and reaching for the next one?
At what point are you most likely to DNF, if ever? What sorts of things cause you to DNF?
#AmReading (rerading) Network Effect because I didn't understand a word of System Collapse without the background and oh, I love Murderbot so much. It's so horrified by emotion it convinces itself it doesn't have any, even while it's feelings are spilling all over the place. And it keep finding family it pretends it doesn't want. Such brilliant writing.
“Some of us, when we feel joy circling close, fly into a state of panic. And we'll do whatever it takes to avoid it, to push it out of our path before it descends on us. Because we'd have no idea what to do with that hap-piness, how to make it fit inside our bodies so that we can continue moving forward.”
“A Little Luck,” Claudia Piñero tr. Frances Riddle
Hey bookish folks, I'd love your help! How do you find new-to-you books to read?
I'm trying to figure out where to advertise my books now that I have a fourth book out ( https://buy.bookfunnel.com/vxvlyi6b0v ). I'm rather unknown so can't spend big $$ but it's hard to know where is best to find readers. And yet, it's hard to have a budget without readers, too!
Review of "When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent" edited by Alan Pelaez Lopez
A powerfully moving collection of poetry sprinkled with prose and an illustrated memoir. Organized around the themes of Memory, Care, and Futures, the texts in this volume wrestle with grief, loss, belonging, ancestors, dreams, and more. The offerings hit hard and create capacious grounds for reflection, mourning, healing, conspiring, reclaiming, and building.
As editor Alan Pelaez Lopez writes in their excellent introduction, "In a way, this anthology breaks epistemological frameworks of race, gender, sex, sexuality, nationality, and heritage....'When Language Broke Open' makes room for us (Black queer and trans* writers of Latin American descent) to be multidimensional beings who inherited and must work with, against, in suspicion of, and through the imagined communities of 'Latinidad' and 'LGBTQIA+ unity.'"
From the opening poem to the coda, this volume does just that. Highly recommended.
I'll be recapping the films each week over at Excessively Diverting, the newsletter. If you want to follow along, keep an eye here (so you can read the issue on the web) or sign up there: https://excessivelydiverting.substack.com/.
From the introduction to The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker: "The slaver is a ghost ship sailing on the edges of modern consciousness. To conclude on a personal note: this has been a painful book to write, and if I have done any justice to the subject, it will be a painful book to read. There is no way around this, nor should there be."
"Writely or Wrongly" by Joanne Anderson is my third 5/5 read for 2024 @thestorygraph but the first to tagged as a personal "top read". Its closing paragraph nicely sums up why I enjoyed it so much. #AmReading#ebooks#Kobo#Language@bookstodon
After a lengthy chapter on usage issue (e.g. discreet/discrete, who/whom, less/fewer etc) that was informative, reasoned and balanced, "Writely or Wrongly" pretty much guaranteed a 5/5 rating with the next chapter's title 🤣 #AmReading#Nonfiction#Language@bookstodon
"Witely or Wrongly" by Joanne Anderson is a real delight, and making me think I need to read more G.B. Shaw (articles, letters etc). LOVED this re apostrophes:
"There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli."
Who knew that in addition to being 100% on point about the "pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy" that is nationalism, GBS also had a thoroughly correct laothing of petty prescriptivist pedantry? Thanks to Joanne Anderson's "Writely or Wrongly", I do now. #Language#AmReading#nonfiction@bookstodon