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The amount of times I was tricked by the LOTR poster... It's fine 🙃

for more Octavia Butler, I really loved Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. I'd also recommend Beloved by Toni Morrison if you haven't read it because I found them similar in exploring generational trauma of slavery just through different devices

45:45 Everything can be a poem If you make enough br- Eaks Rachel Oates

There are some online study guides for Master and Margarita and I did find it helpful to read chapter guides as I went. Definitely not one to just read at surface level

I'd suggest to give a try to the Starfish Rrifters series by Peter Watts. The three books will depress the shit out of you. I liked it. Peter Watts has s scientific background, it's a very rich in detail read.

Deckled edges are ironically more expensive

Russian names RIP Za-`mya-tin Bul-`ga-ko Na-`bo-kov Words can have more than two syllables

59:29 Caution: Keynes is to economics as string theory is to physics. I mean, I'm exaggerating. But he's controversial. If you are persuaded by his economic world view, I recommend reading about Modern Monetary Theory. The very basic bastardized idea of MMT: countries like the United States (that borrow in their sovereign currency) don't need to worry about debt because we can always borrow money into existence to pay for stuff. As long as we're spending money on stuff that's worth more than the money, then the thing we're spending the money on pays for itself. (And then we can argue about what has value and what does not. Like, is it worth $4 trillion to further incentivize millionaires and billionaires to become billionaires and trillionaires?) For example, consider two quantities. M is all of the money in the world. W is the value of all the wealth in the world. kM = W. This k term represents the value of each unit of money. k = W/M Now consider two other quantities. C is the cost of a project. V is the value of a project. Suppose V>C. After spending money on this project: M' = M + C W' = W + V k' = (W+V)/(M+C) Given that V > C: k' > k Thus, if you spend money into existence on projects that have more value than what they cost, the value of each unit of currency increases. That is, sovereign debt is not necessarily inflationary. (But I am not an economist and I don't play one on TV....) I think the even more basic idea of MMT is that the government doesn't really spend tax money. They spend money into existence, and tax money out of existence.

Books are for nerds. The Kobo Libra color tho is just big enough to read comics with and looks really great. The game of thrones books were good but he can't even finish them so what's even the point.

Book recommendations from someone who has no idea if you've already read them... This Perfect Day by Ira Levin - Similar to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World and We. Everyone is drugged to keep them as compliant citizens to be controlled by a global computer until... Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy - An Anarchist fiction classic and feminist classic about a woman in a mental hospital who keeps time travelling between her present day and a hopeful utopian future but is it all just a symptom of delusion? The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin - Another Anarchist Libertarian Socialist classic. A physicist born on a Utopian moon, in an effort to complete a theory of interstellar instantaneous communication, travels to the neighbouring planet, which is basically an analogy of 1970's Earth, with little idea of what he's about to confront.

Print on Demand helps keep books from small publishers available in actual paper instead of just as ebooks. Printing on paper is expensive - to get a low per-copy price you have to print a lot of copies (often overseas to get low prices), and you're still spending a lot up front that you may or may not recover (and it ties up a lot of money while you're waiting to sell them). Literary fiction is a pretty low volume business and a lot of the printed books end up pulped. After being shipped around a bunch of times and stored (eating up storage charges at distributors). POD is more expensive per copy, but nearly every printed copy gets sold to someone who keeps it (or passes it along), so it's much more cost effective and lower risk for small publishers. And it's mostly still higher production quality than mass market paperback and comparable to trade paperback if the person who lays it out puts a little effort into it.

I recently read The Little Prince and I'd highly recommend it if you haven't read it. It's a sci-fi-adjacent children's book about curiosity and imagination but also not at all a children's book about loneliness and loss.

This was the motivation I needed to go through my own pile of DNF’s.

While you read English fiction have the Chinese news channel on.

13:30 "I don't know much about this part of the world". Yeah, Russia, Moscow is such an obscure place, it's not even worth mentioning by name, nobody would even know where it is. It seems that you really tried to avoid saying "Russia" and I find that strange. My apologies if I've got a wrong impression.

I think you might like A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. It's a nice, fairly cozy, short book set hundreds of years after a robot uprising that wasn't an apocalypse.

35:28 Mount Eerie (Phil Elverum) released an album last month titled Night Palace (named after the poem) with a song "Writing Poems" on it, whose chorus is simply "A poem only barely says the thing halfway". Highly recommend the album, if you're in the market for new music. 36:35 You've undoubtedly come across it, but Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber is a non-fiction book on the topic that you might enjoy. 38:35 She's also the author of the Moomin novels for kids! Highly recommend for for the young ones in your life. Kids stories with good politics are rare enough, and the Moomin novels are fantastic.

I really, really liked The Last Samurai for the mother's sections (less enthusiastic for the kid's part) and found it super interesting how the book does with language as the character suggests they should do. That's fun.

Angela reads 100+ books a year and complains about not reading enough. Happy New Year. 🎉

I am also newly obsessed with Emily Dickinson. My high school best friend has been trying to get me to read her for a decade and I finally understand why

Loving the range of descriptions. Going from super detailed several minutes discussion to "He has a mustache that he shaves and people tell him he never had a mustache" and "They wear uniforms and sign up for sex time" 💀

I'm a big fan of Tchaikovsky! If you like him I highly recommend Children of Time. While it's a series, the first book is self contained and can be read on its own. Go into it blind! It was a wonderful plot and structure to unpack without spoilers. The audiobook was a great way to read it as well Also, Dogs of War and Bear Head sound silly from their synopses, but are actually some really thought provoking social commentary

That framed picture of the Argonath on the wall fooled me basically every time. I kept thinking Lord of the Rings was next in the discussion!

love ted chiang!!! I get why arrival is the one that got turned into a movie but they're all so good!

My favorite Le Guin novel from the same universe as "The Word for World is Forest" is The Dispossessed but The Left Hand of Darkness might be the best. I hope you continue to enjoy her work!

You at 50:01. Hello fellow human. This is why I subscribed and watch.

I read of mice and men this year too 😢

Please, if you haven't already, watch Ms Cordova's Errorist vs Grammarian video. It is the dirge of the prescriptivist acknowledging the battle for truth and sanity has been lost.

I am 253rd on the NYPL hold line for Orbital 0:57:16 I wonder if I get it before Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus. 17 vs 16 weeks I’m 485th for Nexus.

You don’t like Virginia Wolf because the style at the time was to write in serialization. You probably don’t know that.

31:21 I'm going to donate it and probably buy it again... O my gosh, hehehehe

If Francis waisted his life, then there isn’t much hope for very many of us… and that’s perhaps a pretty good moral to the story.

28:52 I love Le Guin's novels. I really enjoyed The Dispossessed but it had an odd ending and I feel like you'd get annoyed with her interpretation of physics but it does a really fun narrative choice of switching between moments of the main character's life. I also really enjoyed her book 'Always coming home', if you enjoyed Le Guin's alien world building then you'd really love the novel because it reads almost like a part anthropology book on alien's culture.

Like this comment if you were also tracking the movement of the sun reflection on the door

I never understood why someone would buy a bunch of books impulsively, and then I discovered that a library within walking distance of me has 25¢ to 1$ books about a month ago and I have already gotten 3 feet of books...

physics mommy :D

All profits from sales of Zoe Thorogood's 'It's Lonely...' until the end of the year are going to mental health and suicide prevention resources, in memory of her late brother James. Buy it for yourself, buy it for your friends, buy it to donate, do good things.

I read the first two stories in Rejection and was about to recommend it to a friend before I got busy. Then I read the third one and decided she can find it on her own if she's meant to read it

The overlap between your reading list and the Books Unbound podcast is insane, I love it so much.

It makes me smile to see someone discovering Bitter Southerner. Also, I hate poetry too, but I love Linda Pastan.

I strongly recommend Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son." It's a powerful and lucid gut punch.

do you keep a goodreads acct / would you be willing to let us follow it? would be fun to be able to see the reads as the year goes and be able to read them before the video, like a mini parasocial book club

I just finished The Left Hand Of Darkness and was completely blown away. It's one of those books that within the first 10 pages made me go from "wtf is going on" to "oh my god this is going to be incredible". It's alien but so human. A book about accepting change and of love and friendship with others who are different. I had to read it twice back to back and I still can't get it out of my head. Very much a winter book. I just moved on to The Word For World is Forest, only a few pages in and already there are small hints and connections to the larger world that these books live in. I can't believe how long these sat in my shame pile. Thank you for your reviews and recommendations! I've added quite a few to my list

Please please someone tell me which rendition of Auld Lang Sign plays at the end. Its wonderful and I need it in my rotation!

I just read Jekyll and Hyde which I didn’t like and so I considered getting rid of it, but it has my favorite line of any book which is “If he be Mr Hyde then I shall be Mr Seek.” Perfect. No notes. The book stays on my shelf.

Yay for John Wyndham! Try Triffids next. Double yay for Ted Chiang! Great stuff. Next read Exhalation. 🙂

a canticle for liebowitz was on my upcoming read list...and I missed your dedicated video to it...but thanks for letting me know its a possibility.

dickinson is truly the american poet. no one else has done it like her!

Gang, do we think Acollier would enjoy "The Memory Police" by Yoko Ogawa? Cuz I think she really would but I'm also famously bad at recommendations. Someone help me out here! 😂 I really think she'd love it.

I don't know if you accept recommendations, but an very good alternative to Digital Minimalism is "How To Do Nothing", by Jenny Odell. At first I didn't like this book but then it grew on me. It talks about how to choose to be conscientious about what we do and prioritize even doing nothing over doing things that were designed to get and steal our attention, like social media and many apps.