Still reading What If? by Randall Munroe.

A very entertaining read, could've finished by now, but reading it slow so that I can understand some of the science. More than halfway through.

What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening to lately?

For details on the c/Books bingo challenge that just restarted for the year, you can checkout the initial Book Bingo, and its Recommendation Post. Links are also present in our community sidebar.

I’m always searching for a book with a truly shocking twist, and "The Intruder" delivered! ​The whole time I was reading, I felt like I was holding my breath. It’s a fast-paced, suspenseful story that you won't be able to put down. If you're a fan of authors like Lisa Jewell or B.A. Paris, this is for you. ​I know everyone is looking for their next great read, so I put together a quick post on my blog showing how you can get this book (and other bestsellers) for free right now. ​Check it out here if you're interested: ​Giveaway The INTRUDER ​Trust me, you won't regret reading this one!

The Project Gutenberg community mourns the passing of our CEO, Dr. Greg Newby (@gbnewby).

Without his years of leadership, Project Gutenberg wouldn't be what it is today. Learn more about him and his contributions at

https://www.gutenberg.org/about/newby.html

Started What If? by Randall Munroe.

It's by the guy who runs / draws xkcd.com web comics, and gives serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions. For example: Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward firing machine guns?

Questions are weird like that, but the science is real, so an interesting read. Specially if you are a fan of xkcd.

What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening to lately?

For details on the c/Books bingo challenge that just restarted for the year, you can checkout the initial Book Bingo, and its Recommendation Post. Links are also present in our community sidebar.

(editing an earlier post)

Just finished this morning! Spoilers below. If you intend to read the book, do NOT go any further. You need to take this ride with no hint of what's coming.

Nothing from the movies or pop-culture prepared me for this mess.

We don't get a solid description of the monster, but apparently he's horrifying to behold. What? Did Frankenstein make him ugly on purpose?! We're not told where or how he came up with the biological material, no grave robbing mentioned. An 8-foot humanoid just sorta appears on Frankenstein's work bench.

So the monster wakes up (we're not told what caused this), Frankenstein is horrified at what he's created...

Let us pause a moment. Frankenstein knows what the fuckin' thing looks like, he made it! He set out to create artificial life and accomplished it. And now he's scared shitless the moment his goal comes together?! Y'all, he had plenty of time to think on this.

...runs out in the street for 2 days, his bff spies him and takes him home. Frankenstein (who's not a doctor BTW, he's a college kid) runs upstairs and is relieved the monster has ambled off.

"Oh thank Heavens that 8-foot abomination before God is wandering around loose. Not my problem! LOL!"

The monster spends over 2 years in a shed outside of an exiled, French family's shack in Switzerland. And in all that time no one ever looked in there?! Guess he's got some sort of cloaking ability, because he runs all over Europe without ever being seen. "Oi! Luv! Was that an 8-foot humanoid monster in the woods?" "Nah, probably another hill giant. Damned illegal Norwegian troll immigrants!"

Monster has a tiny peephole to watch the family and learns French by listening to them. So where did he learn the English he later uses?! Also, he learned to read from the family teaching a beautiful Arab girl that shows up. Whole 'nother story there.

Frankenstein is such a panicky little bitch that every time he gets upset he goes into a fugue and goes nuts for months on end. He does this at least 3 times, if not more. "Boo!" "I have to go to the sanatorium."

The monster has already killed Frankenstein's little brother and framed a family friend, getting her hanged. He threatens Frankenstein to continue fucking his world up if he doesn't make him a bride companion. Frankenstein and bff are going to Scotland where Frankenstein is going to secretly do this thing. He takes nearly a fucking year touring about. "We spent 3 weeks looking at cobblestones." "Hadn't you better hustle up in case the monster gets impatient?"

Frankenstein spies the monster watching him work on the bride, freaks out and destroys her right in from of him. Um, I would not piss off an 8-foot monster with superhuman speed and strength. Monster says, "Catch you on your wedding night! K I love U bye bye!" Frankenstein, while looking around the house for the monster on his wedding night, sends his bride upstairs, alone. Guess what? Chicken butts.

Core of the story is Frankenstein and his monster making the same exact mistakes, over and over and over again. Then they lament for 10-pages about how sorry they are. Then they do it again. You can find the plot on any given shampoo bottle, "Lather, Rinse and Repeat."

So much more weirdness. And BTW, I think Frankenstein should have married his bff instead of his cousin, seemed way more into that guy than her dumb ass. Hell, I'm straight, but that dude sounded pretty tight!

tl;dr: Every single person in the book is a drama queen. 150 pages of drama queen. Makes one wonder what young Shelly was like IRL. Starts and ends with an exciting dog sled race across arctic ice! Everyone dies in the end.

To Mary Shelly's ghost; You did fucking awesome for a teenager! Most impressive! Next time, get an editor, dial it in. Great arctic chase though! Also, nobody in 2025 gives a shit what Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, or John Polidori wrote for that contest. Smoked 'em girl.

One more thing. Why did you blank out the dates? August, 8th, 17__? 1701 was a very different time than 1799. What were you hiding?!

Finished Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.

I didn't realise second half will also feature Iran and the life after revolution. A very interesting look at part of recent history I knew nothing about. Highly recommended if you don't mind graphic novels and memoirs.

Bingo squares: Banned Book - hard mode, Set in war

Also read Old Man's War by John Scalzi.

This is my second book by Scalzi and he is reaching status of my favourite author. It's an easy to read space, military sci-fi. Another highly recommended book for sci-fi fans.

Bingo squares: Set in war, Stepping Up, Late to the Party

What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening to lately?

For details on the c/Books bingo challenge that just restarted for the year, you can checkout the initial Book Bingo, and its Recommendation Post. Links are also present in our community sidebar.

Really really enjoyed this one although it took me a few weeks to fully digest. Here's two of my absolute favorite excerpts (please forgive any OCR glitches). They both describe fairly old phenomena, one that's been around as long as the internet, and one that's been around as long as language, but in both cases people have a tendency to ascribe their effects to something new and uniquely bad despite then having been part of humanity far longer than we often realize.

The shift from "le$bian" to "wlw," the shift from "suicide" to "unalive and all these other instances of linguistic Whac-A-Molery exemplify the euphemism treadmill, a concept intro-duced by Steven Pinker to describe the continuous motion of evasive words in the English language. The euphemism tread-mill is why were constantly updating our words for offensive things. The words "idiot"' "imbecile and "moron" all used to be serious words for classifying mental disability, but then they became negative, so we replaced them with the word "retarded" which also became negative, so we replaced that with "mentally disabled"' which is also becoming negative. The same process happens with terms for racial and sexual minorities as the words they use to describe themselves become poisoned over time. That's why "colored" became "black" and why some people now prefer capital-B "Black." Once words are used maliciously, we replace them until the cycle continues, as if moving along on a treadmill. This is a normal and inevitable linguistic process that can only really be solved by addressing the underlying societal problems causing the treadmill to move in the first place. When the algorithm prevents people from saying "sex" or "suicide" or any other sensitive word, it becomes a proxy for human behavior. Instead of people turning a word negative over time, the platform labels it as undesirable for social media, caus-ing the treadmill to move faster rather than actually preventing discussion of forbidden topics.

Some time after the serious philosophy was turned into a joke, though, it began to be treated seriously again by some of those out of the loop. At least some of the beauty influencers talking about hunter eyes and interocular distance misinterpreted the ironic context of the lookism words and spread them as genuine beauty standards, which spawned more jokes, leading to more serious reinterpretations. After the jokes about canthal tilts and mewing went viral, we began seeing increases in canthal tilt eye-liner demonstrations and Google searches for "jaw surgery' On the one hand, that just made the jokes funnier; on the other, incel ideas about attractiveness became more culturally relevant. Again, how did this happen? Well, it's famously difficult to discern tone on the internet, to the point where there's an adage about it called Poe's law: "Any sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken for a sincere expression of those views," and vice versa. Poe's law explains how dangerous ideas spread as memes. If something is meant genuinely, but it is also crazy enough to be interpreted as a joke, people may reward it with "likes" and other engagement because they find it funny. Meanwhile, if something ironic is interpreted as genuine, people will be offended by it, which then also drives engagement as a form of ragebait. Either way, "edgy" humor is able to worm its way into the mainstream via the algorithm.

I requested the library buy it on release and checked it out immediately but it's been autorenewing ever since while I tote it back and forth to and from work. I'm almost sad to take it back at the thought it might sit alone on the shelf but there is a limit even to the autorenewals. Somebody go check this out, it's really good!

Reading Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. It, and couple of others, were recommended here recently, and is somewhat of a new genre for me, memoir / biography in graphic novel format, graphic memoir?

Got the omnibus edition, "The Complete Persepolis", it's a pretty interesting read. It's about young girl in Iran during the Islamic Revolution of 1979, at least the first volume, after that it's about her life after that.

What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening to lately?

For details on the c/Books bingo challenge that just restarted for the year, you can checkout the initial Book Bingo, and its Recommendation Post. Links are also present in our community sidebar.

I'm curious about where I can find public lists of banned books across various states in the US. Are these lists openly accessible to the public, or do they mainly remain internal documents shared between the government and libraries?

Sorry missed last week's post, just busy with life.

The silver lining is, I don't have to stay "still reading" for yet another week, as I finally finished Whispers Underground by Ben Aaronovitch. Book 3 of Rivers of London series.

Yet another case involving magic in London and the Police solving it.

What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening to lately?

For details on the c/Books bingo challenge that just restarted for the year, you can checkout the initial Book Bingo, and its Recommendation Post. Links are also present in our community sidebar.

The titles are:
"Reaper Man", "Small Gods", "Wyrd Sisters", "Moving Pictures"

Went to an adorable book shop and found these guys. I haven't read Pratchett yet but I feel it'll be right up my alley

I'm pretty sure I see "Small Gods" and "Wyrd Sisters" recommended a lot and I know you can't really go wrong, but of these which would you recommend the most? Since this is what I have I'll read them all eventually

Regardless I'm excited to have gotten physical copies because my library has long wait lists for his books

Edit: Thanks for all of the discussion! This post brought me a lot of positive on an otherwise rough day. I've decided to start with "Small Gods"

I just want to say again thank you to everyone who responded to me or to someone else. It's been a joy hearing what each person has to contribute to the conversation

Even if they fall flat (which I highly doubt) all of your enthusiasm came through and that really in itself means so much. It was truly touching

I'm not sure if anyone in this community is doing this type of thing, but I know that there is a volunteer community of ebook editors. I've come across some books in my field that have very poor ebooks and I'd like to try editing them at least for my own use and, where appropriate, public consumption. I've tried using the built in Calibre Ebook editor which is functional but a bit of a slog. Is there dedicated software (preferably FOSS) That is really great for editing ebooks? Thanks in advance for any recommendations!

Edit: The answer was Sigil. They also developed a very good WYSIWYG app called PageEdit, which helps to streamline a lot of tasks. I found that making the necessary formatting edits in PageEdit, then cleaning up the code in Sigil was the way to go.

I'm making very reasonable progress on a roughly 1000 page volume with extensive formatting and footnotes. There are some complexities of dealing with footnotes (and lack of standardization). I have not found any easy tool for managing footnotes /endnotes, but that will wait for another post!

Short stories are a great way to ease back into reading and rebuild your stamina and focus. Here are some extra short ones that got me reading again.