#bookposting

[vive-la-revolution]

if they ever stop making physical books in my lifetime i will literally die. i will keel over at the mere prospect

#lee.txt #top post #bookposting #1k #we did it lads #hall of fame

[yb-cringe]

perrin: god this sucks. i wish rand were here he’d know what to do

rand: god this sucks. i wish perrin were here he’s know what to do

mat: kinfe… .,…,..,,

#meanwhile theyre all exhausted and grieving #eotw spoilers #wot book spoilers #wot spoilers #wot #the eye of the world #wheel of time #bookposting

[plaguedocboi]

Hello literary agents are you ready for a novel about a sad scrunkly sopping wet Victorian orphan getting adopted by pirates in a story that gradually goes from adventure fantasy to supernatural horror? No? Too bad

#it’s my book and I get to bother people with it #bookposting #btw he is not actually Victorian but he has those vibes

[pluraljerma]

wanted to read house of leaves today. too bad. watching garten of banban let’s play

#postingposting #bookposting #house of leaves #rtvs #scorpy

[swadloom]

nick carroway could literally just mention dating a guy and I wouldn't bat an eye at all I keep forgetting I'm reading a book from the 1920s and not yaoi it's so fucked up really

#the great gatsby #tagging this. I GUESS #bookposting

[night-dark-woods]

ok Exordia review time (not spoiler free!) since i finished it a few days ago. this is long and rambling and unedited.

4/5 i love Seth's writing and im glad they got to play with scifi again BUT i think they needed a better editor OR to split it more cleanly into sections- in one of the interviews they said it was originally a series of novellas each from a single POV, and i think the constraint of that would have made it a much tighter story.

one of the best things about their Destiny lore is how much they do with so little- thinking of this section from the Beyond Light CE:

Disaster at the worksite. Clearly we will not be moving Clarity Control like we did the K1 artifact. It reacted violently to the attempt. I have entered 19 casualties into the log, since 19 engineers from the Hannu team were caught in its reaction...though there were many more than 19 bodies when it was finished. I have sequestered the recordings. Especially the sensorium telemetry. Quite upsetting. Yet I do not believe it was an act of hostility. Even this outburst carried themes of duplication...as if Clarity Control wanted to show it could help me.

which i was originally thinking of as a first run at Blackbird, but i think these may have been simultaneous? i'm not actually sure. i know Exordia was started after the first Baru book was published, but i'm not sure how much lead time there is for the CEs.

or the clarity of Unveiling compared to a lot of what felt like similar ideas that took much longer to get thru in Exordia. primes. pink noise. math. alright lets fucking gooo oh wait. five more pages of ethics first. okay sure i'll do that for ya Seth bc i love your prose. which also. a) conway game of life mentioned!!! b) this part from Exordia made me LOSE MY MIND:

But that was impossible. The whole universe came from the same source: the same designers. I was part of one of them. If I could only remember... We were arguing, I think. Or maybe we were the argument, because gods cannot do things, they can only be them. We were in contest over the morality of infinities: the cardinality of all possible souls measured against the mere infinity of souls to ever be born...

(this is the part from Unveiling, for the optimistically two people who will read this who haven't read Destiny lore):

Once upon a time,* a gardener and a winnower lived** together in a garden.*** * It was once before a time, because time had not yet begun. ** We did not live. We existed as principles of ontological dynamics that emerged from mathematical structures, as bodiless and inevitable as the primes. *** It was the field of possibility that prefigured existence. They existed, because they had to exist. They had no antecedent and no constituents, and there is no instrument of causality by which they could be portioned into components and assigned to some schematic of their origin. If you followed the umbilical of history in search of some ultimate atavistic embryo that became them, you would end your journey marooned here in this garden.

at the same time, idk what i would remove- at very few points was i reading something that dragged, with the exception of spending a LOT of time with Erik and Clayton in the middle (this is when i put the book down for a month and a half or so). and i know so many people were like sickos.jpg about them However their dynamic did sooo little for me and i don't think Rosamaria was given enough time on the page (and i think having her Be the ship was weird- i recognize that Blackbird needs to have a voice to make the plot go, but i don't think this was the best or neatest way to do it, and collapsed a lot of what i found fundamentally so interesting about Blackbird into something akin to a standard scifi Ship AI).

again i think the restriction of each section of the story being from a single POV might have been the restriction needed to end up with a tighter story- at no point were the multiple plot threads & POVs confusing, per say, but i'm not sure what the structure did for the story bc we could switch to whoever could tell us the most about what was happening whenever convenient, instead of having to piece things together from a limited POV. i'm thinking again of the BLCE, this time the part where Clovis is talking about Maya Sundaresh behaving erratically- i'm no Ishtar group expert but i believe we are supposed to put together that these are all different iterations of her from within the garden). oh- i also wonder if Aixue and Chaya are another run at Maya and Chioma to some degree...

anyway. i also think i am also less the target audience for this book because seth loooves their trolley problems and i simply do not have the patience for it! i loved the hard scifi and the first contact aspects and the character work (Seth's character work is, as always, spectacular. their characters always feel deeply real and flawed in very human ways, while still being exaggerated in the ways characters have to be to function as plot fulcrums), but this isnt something like Baru where i can be like yes you should read this to everyone i talk to.

I think the language in the book is DELIGHTFUL, as always, especially how Seth plays with the idea of an alien translator that sometimes can get an English equivalent to something and sometimes can't! i think that's very fun. because it's on my mind bc ive been listening to the Shelved by Genre episodes on it, it makes me think of Book of the New Sun, and how the "translator" figure of G.W. talks about picking words that are close but they aren't being used like we would use them now- e.g. "metal" in BotNS isnt the same thing we think of as metal! its used more broadly! but its close enough in purpose and point to work just fine. the destriers have horns. i need to know if Seth has read these books.

but back to Exordia. here are some specific prose parts i fucking loved.

this part of the full-page loving, detailed, and technical description of 40 alien nukes detonating in atmosphere:

In the band of thickening atmosphere twenty-five to thirty-five kilometers above the Earth, these gamma rays slam into atoms of oxygen and nitrogen, stripping their orbiting electrons. The orphaned electrons hurtle away at 90 percent of lightspeed. They want to go in a straight line, but hold on now, it's not so easy to leave home. Earth's magnetic field bends their course. They begin to spiral down. When an electron moving near lightspeed has to turn, it emits synchrotron radiation. Poison light. And beneath each bomb there are 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 electrons swerving at once. The result is a blast of electromagnetic noise. No: not noise. A coherent pulse, spiking and faling in harmony. Shiva's own beat drop on electrical civilization. An EMP.

This part. i love Anna and wish we got more of her.

He gives her back her Glock. She accepts it with resignation. "You'd better get your men ready," she says. "It's going to be bad." "Women too," he says, trying for lightness. "The pilot's a woman. We've got a female forward surgeon, a psyops lead, a linguist- she's pretty badass, ran with SEALs in Afghanistan. And Lt. Gainer, she might have some advice for-" "For what?" Anna says calmly. "Advice for what, Erik? How to get killed in a feminine way?"

Seth has such a good and specific way of writing metaphors. a little bit Douglas Adams:

The upshot is: the air around the engine exhaust beam explodes outward with a sound like a tuning fork hit by a Space Shuttle launch. Lung-jellying power. Anything in the beam path suffers the short, severe influence of a needle faster and hotter than a vajra thunderbolt. Anything around the beam eats fireball.

& this part. again. i wish more of the book was Anna and Ssrin's fucked up kismessitude. or whatever.

She slides the barrel of the weapon into the uppermost crater on Ssrin's spine. Slick pain makes Ssrin hiss in psuvoluntary fury: psuvoluntary because it is reflex subject to veto- she could quash it, but the feeling is deliciously wrong, and it is so good to bare her fangs and to unleash that ancient khai instinct of pain-as-motivation. "Questionsss," Ssrin gasps. "I want to know how this story ends." Oh serendura. You'll wish you hadn't asked. You'll wish you'd gone in with your eyes shut and your tongue in your throat so you couldn't smell the poison til it was too late.

which also!!! that's something i love about the Ssrin POV like. Seth is always good at writing aliens and slipping in details that tell us about them. "tongue in your throat" to not smell the poison bc she is a snake alien and smells with her tongue!!! that rules!!!

#bookposting #exordia #this is sooo long sorry #before i reread this i am going to reread blindsight. bc i think a lot of it in in here. #also i cant believe i hadnt even finished exordia when i was writing the gunplay fic. that passage was sitting there waiting for me. #anyway.

[ipromiseimawriter]

if i end up Inkheart-posting, dw about it. i'm feeling sooooooo normal and regular about my best friends Silvertongue and Dustfinger (they are estranged and in love and also in love with Resa even though she's been gone for Forever)

also Meggie is right about everything. underrated icon of a kid protagonist.

#inkheart #bookposting

[selfiesforalgernon]

Signalis to Gibson Pipeline??

Ok so let's talk about this because I haven't seen it anywhere.. I just read Hinterlands by William Gibson and listen, Signalis wears it's inspirations on its sleeve, but Hinterlands's DNA is all over Signalis, am I wrong? Look at this shit: (also I know that gestalt is not just specific to these but the term combined with surrogates and space sets off bells to me)

It's also just a necessary read if you're a fan OF Signalis imo

#bookposting #william gibson #hinterlands #signalis #am I going through my “Gibson inspired everyone phase” rn? maybe but deny this go ahead #I'm not saying it was inspired by Hinterlands but it might be inspired by stuff that was inspired by Hinterlands lol #I can't claim to be super familiar with Nier Automata but I know that was where Signalis probably got a lot of stuff secondhand #gestalt #scifi #burning chrome

[unnonexistence]

discworld question: does lady sybil have a prominent role in any of the books besides guards guards? and if so, which ones?

#discworld #this is Very Important shes one of my favourite characters #ive read the city watch books up to jingo now & i keep wishing she was around more... #im going to read all the books either way but depending on the answer i may go back and read guards guards again before i continue on lol #bookposting #i need a discworld tag but idk what it should be. hmm

[elamimax]

Every year myself and several other trans people get together and write a bunch of short stories for Christmas. Then, we get together, bundle them, and throw it all up on itch.

Close to 200.000 words worth of short stories (and even a novella) about Christmas, transness, queerness and way way way more, including my own short story, Icing On The Cake, about a woman who needs to take over her father’s bakery and finds that she might not be fully equipped to handle the harsh reality of the world: that it has attractive lesbians in leather jackets in it.

A signal boost would mean a lot, as would, of course, clicking through and checking it out. I can’t recommend out enough.

Linking it again, just in case, here.

#writing #writeblr #writerscommunity #trans writers #bundle #writblr #writers on tumblr #bookposting #itchio #wlw

[yb-cringe]

newest arc in eye of the world; thom and his two dumbass nephews try not to get thrown overboard

#i do rly love thom. i thought id hate his ass but hes just the most sensible guy here #lile yeah old man. you got style and story. kick ass #bookposting #the eye of the world #eotw spoilers #wot book spoilers

[plaguedocboi]

HEYYY GUESS WHAT I HAVE A BOOK COVER I JUST BOUGHT IT

DONT JUDGE THE QUALITY ITS A PICTURE OF A COMPUTER SCREEN

#bookposting

[pluraljerma]

This House Has People In It

#postingposting #house of leaves #bookposting #this house has people in it #thhpii #alan resnick

[knight-of-heart-and-art]

there's something delightful about the book I'm reading establishing that the main character is bisexual on page 23 and then apparently not doing anything with it. he's too busy being auditorily overstimulated as hell and learning how to kill people. everyone knows he likes guys, it's not subtext, but it has no bearing on the story. 10/10.

#the book is not really my fave but that has me weirdly happy #across the nightningale floor if anyone was wondering #bookposting

[rovetrade]

overly wordy roundup of everything i've read this year :3

#bookposting

[ipromiseimawriter]

i wanna TSH post NOW.

yes i am several years late to that party but this book fucking rules. they're SO ANNOYING. they're my BESTIES AND MY WORSTIES. i LOVE THEM.

unfortunately i understand richard papen deeply and also want to bully him. something about being a bitch from california who tried to escape it, y'know? to become someone else? just to stumble into the Horrors? yeah i'm not an accessory to murder but shhhhsshhshshsh

#the secret history #bookposting #making that tag now. bc it Will happen again. maybe will keep happening even