Books

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16892902

The best horror books of 2024 according to the Esquire (April 10)

• The House of Last Resort, by Christopher Golden
• This Wretched Valley, by Jenny Kiefer
• Among the Living, by Tim Lebbon
• In the Valley of the Headless Men, by L.P. Hernandez
• The Haunting of Velkwood, by Gwendolyn Kiste
• Mouth, by Joshua Hull
• King Nyx, by Kirsten Bakis
• The Angel of Indian Lake, by Stephen Graham Jones
• The Black Girl Survives in This One, edited by Desiree S. Evans and Saraciea J. Fennell
• Bless Your Heart, by Lindy Ryan
• This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances, by Eric LaRocca
• Diavola, by Jennifer Thorne
• The Underhistory, by Kaaron Warren
• Incidents Around the House, by Josh Malerman

Hiya,

My local library summer reading challenge has a few items with which I could use y'all's help.

Read a book with a musical theme.

Read a book outside your comfort zone (I read mostly novels, and mostly sci-fi).

Read a book by an author from a different cultural background. (I'm a white American and I've already read Three Body Problem)

Read a book suggested to you.

I would appreciate any suggestions!

-Pidgin

We see you, hard-core NPR readers — just because it's summer doesn't mean it's all fiction, all the time. So we asked around the newsroom to find our staffers' favorite nonfiction from the first half of 2024. We've got biography and memoir, health and science, history, sports and more.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/34435904

I've been seeing her name a lot lately in terms of good science fiction and fantasy. I feel like I've lost so much attention span in terms of my ability to read and stuff and I'd like to start getting back into it, perhaps starting with her (or Terry Pratchett lol).

If I start with her, what's a good place to start with her work?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16219937

https://bookriot.com/2023-stoker-award-winners-for-best-horror-and-dark-fantasy/

The Bram Stoker Award is a prestigious literary award presented annually by the Horror Writers Association (HWA) to recognize "superior achievement" in dark fantasy and horror writing.

Here are the 2023 Stoker Award Winners

• Superior Achievement in a Novel: The Reformatory by Tananarive Due
• Superior Achievement in a First Novel: The Daughters of Block Island by Christa Carmen
• Superior Achievement in a Middle Grade Novel: The Nighthouse Keeper by Lora Senf
• Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel: She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran
• Superior Achievement in Long Fiction: Linghun by Ai Jiang
• Superior Achievement in Short Fiction: “Quondam” by Cindy O’Quinn
• Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection: Blood from the Air by Gemma Files
• Superior Achievement in an Anthology: Out There Screaming edited by Jordan Peele & John Joseph Adams
• Superior Achievement in Long Nonfiction: 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered by Sadie Hartmann
• Superior Achievement in Short Nonfiction: “Becoming Ungovernable: Latah, Amok, and Disorder in Indonesia” by Nadia Bulkin (Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror)
• Superior Achievement in Poetry: On the Subject of Blackberries by Stephanie M. Wytovich
• Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel: Carmilla: The First Vampire by Amy Chu, art by Soo Lee
• Superior Achievement in a Screenplay: Godzilla Minus One

I do not read books as often as I watch movies, but I am willing to create a habit of reading by taking a suggestion for a book from this community, and I want to start from this genre.

However I am quite picky in this matter. I cannot stand romance involving breakups, betrayal, love triangle or anything of such sorts. All I am looking for a simple story where only the couple is the protagonist, if you understand what I mean. I do not wish for any other character act as a rival in their relationship. Minor inconveniences or tensions could still be tolerated but I wish for the couple to have a satisfying ending as they were destined to by spending time with each other or being involved in circumstances that reveal similarities between them.

I would be more inclined towards stories with settings during the present times or having the characters hate each other at first, but these are optional.

Jessica Huang from Fresh off the Boat TV series, said this in response to Honey quoting the movie. I totally feel the same way.

I've been feeling really lonely lately so I've been trying to find any romance books to distract me.

However, the only books with male heterosexual protagonists I can find are either sports romances or have "alpha male" protagonists.

Are there any books where the main character is nerdier and more relatable?

For me, the first time this happened was with The Royal Assassin Saga from Robin Hobb, and then Metro 2033.

This year, it’s The Witcher saga… (I can’t move on) I love all those introspective books with thoughtful heroes trying to make sense of the world they are forced to evolve into.

Do you have any other book like that?

At the start of the book, there's an acknowledgement by the author, that goes something like:

This one is for Stephen

The idea for this book was suggested by a boy in a school I was visiting, who asked me to write a book called The Moving Castle.

I wrote down his name, and put it in such a safe place, that I have been unable to find it ever since.

I would like to thank him very much.

Any recommendations for left wing reads. Preferably something not depressing. Thanks!

Hopefully I'm in the right place.

This is what I remember. The book is set in outer space some time after an intergalactic war with an alien species. Large ships were built during the war. One such ship was placed on the very edge of the known universe, which was where the aliens came from, as an outpost/watchtower of sorts. They keep watch over the edge for any sign of the aliens returning. Anyways, the characters in the book realize that the universe is contracting back in on itself and destroying everything in its path. Over the course of the book they must figure out what is going on while staying ahead of the contraction.

Please help.

Después de ver la serie #ReinaRoja en #Amazon decidí comprar la trilogía de libros 📚 para mi #Kindle

His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His books have been translated into more than forty languages.[1]

hi, i recently wanted to look for the best psychology books in [https://www.goodreads.com/] and website doesn't allow me to sort them by ratings. is there any way to do this? i don't want to end up searching "best psychology books" on web and look for ai generated blogs. thanks.

When I asked my friend how she found the book to be, she described it as “a jumble of thoughts that felt familiar.”

As Orientals, they indeed feel familiar to us. Although I never picked up the book before now, I couldn't say I have not read it. I read it on the faces of Western "political experts". I read it in laws of counterterrorism and anti-immigration. I read it in the newspapers, listen to it on the radio, and watch it on the TV. But most crucially, I read it when I look into the mirror, this self perception of being an “Oriental”, an inferiority complex transfused throughout the years from teachers and professors, intellectuals and celebrities, family and friends, and especially strangers.

“Oriental students (and Oriental professors) still want to come and sit at the feet of American Orientalists, and later to repeat to their local audiences the clichés I have been characterizing as Orientalist dogmas.” (Ch.3, IV).

Orientalism, according to Said, is not merely a scientific, objective field as it has always been characterised by the Orientalist himself. Rather, it is a subjectivity: that is, the Orientalist does not study the Orient, but he “comes to terms” with an Orient “that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience.” Though the same may be said about the Occident which does not just exist as an inert fact of nature, for such divide is a social construct first and foremost, and does not translate smoothly into a physical or geographical classification.

Orientalism reflects a history of colonial exploitation. By scrutinising, interpreting and classifying the Orient, the Orientalist justified (in advance and after the fact) the West's right to dominate, restructure and have authority over the Orient.

Although the otherisation of the Oriental has already existed for millenia, Said traces back the changing point of Orientalism to the onset of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. It is at this point in time that Orientalism was institutionalised and 'scientisized'. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the majority of Orientalists were philologists and anthropologists. Yet, the core values of the scientific method—objectivity, disinterest, mutability—notwithstanding, Orientalism preserved, see “secularized,” the mythic discourses of premodernity.

“the scientific categories informing late-nineteenth-century Orientalism are static: there is no recourse beyond “the Semites” or “the Oriental mind”; these are final terminals holding every variety of Oriental behavior within a general view of the whole field. As a discipline, as a profession, as specialized language or discourse, Orientalism is staked upon the permanence of the whole Orient, for without “the Orient” there can be no consistent, intelligible, and articulated knowledge called “Orientalism.”” (Ch.3, II).

Although Science, as an ideal of truth should theoretically be prone to change, admits proof and counterproof; the scientist still holds on his shoulders the overwhelming weight of his predecessors and their values. He is impelled to follow their path, avoid uncertainty and existentiality, to reproduce mythic discourses. And this is especially relevant to Orientalism.

From an existential standpoint, the gaze of the White Man makes of the Oriental man “first an Oriental [essence] and only second a man [existence].” Dehumanised, otherised and silenced; the Oriental is a piece of mold that can be shaped by the Orientalist according to the zeitgeist of his epoch on the one hand, and to the eccentric tendencies of his personality.

In the second half of the twentieth century, which coincides with the decolonisation movement and the zenith of American hegemony, Orientalism went through major transformations. European focus on philology was superseded by a jejune, American obsession in “Social Sciences”. The Orient became then the experimental laboratory of the American social scientist.

“No longer does an Orientalist try first to master the esoteric languages of the Orient; he begins instead as a trained social scientist and “applies” his science to the Orient, or anywhere else.” (Ch.3, IV).

Late (read: American) Orientalism was shaped by government and corporate interests in the non-Western world, and fueled by the Cold War and competition with the Soviet Union. This is why very perverse and polemical "studies" of Islam were mass-published (especially by Zionists). Islam, according to the modern Orientalist, is a volatile and purely political religion, a force “contending with the American idea for acceptance by the Near East” along with communism. All this whilst maintaining the early myths of “Oriental despotism.”

“The legendary Arabists in the State Department warn of Arab plans to take over the world. ... the passive Muslims are described as vultures for “our” largesse and are damned when “we lose them” to communism, or to their unregenerate Oriental instincts: the difference is scarcely significant.” (Ch.3, IV).

Edward Said's magnum opus is a seminal and well-acclaimed work. Yet it had its fair share of critics. Apart from the Zionists and Orientalists themselves (which we shall dusregard), some scholars criticised Said's dealing with the Middle East as a monolithic category consisting of pure Muslim Arabs. It is not entirely incorrect to say that Said did not leave much space to the other constituents of the region; however, Said is very well aware of the cultural and ethnic diversity characterising West Asia and North Africa. Rather, their virtual absence from the big picture is a better reflection of the Orientalist's vision of what the Near East is, in which non-Arabs and non-Muslims hold a peripheral, if not silent, role. Britain and France, Said contends, viewed themselves as the protectors of Christian minorities from the evils of Islamic "barbarism."

Moreover, Islam is equally simplified by Orientalists and reduced to Islamic Orthodoxy. In the Islamic Orient, everything cannot but be perceived as Islamic, even modernisation and the adoption of European technologies and institutions is itself Islamic. To reiterate a previous thought, the essence precedes existence.

It is important to note that this book was released decades before the 9/11 attacks which spurred another Orientalist wave. Although today the formal, academic field is almost nonexistent, its essentialist doctrines are still being disseminated into the masses, both in the West and the East. The face of Western progressivism has shown a grim, and not entirely unfamiliar face, especially amid the genocide in Gaza. The struggle against dehumanisation and exploitation is not over yet.

P.S. Take a shot every time you read the word Orient.

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!]

Looking for recommendations for books about off grid living, and ideally, earthship biotecture.

The book starts out with a girl with magic eye on a flying ship to catch magic sand only she can see. She has no memory of how she grew up. At the start of the journey a man destroys the ship, but safes her. During the book(s) it is reveled that the man and she herself are basically here to destroy humanity because humanity threatens magic. Instead she decides to destroy all magic herself at the end of the last book.

Edit:

Humanity retreated to safe parts of the world where magic isn't as strong. I think these parts are mostly cities and used completely by humans. Because the magic found in the wild and the land itself is deadly to humans, they can only traverse it using flying ships. Further they use these ships to gather magic gathered in storms to power their machinery. There is also a part where she travels with the demon boy through the wilderness which is super magical and beautiful.