Not quite a biography, given so little can be known of Pythagoras's life, but instead a history of how his name and ideas associated with him have been used across the millennia. The most interesting part was how Kepler was convinced that the ratios for harmonious musical chords should exactly match the ratios between planetary orbits - a false but useful idea, like alchemy. Overall the book was educational but very slow if you aren't fascinated by the history of numerological pseudoscience, e.g. the assignment of spiritual concepts to specific numbers. #Bookstodon @bookstodon
bookstodon
finished reading The Cruel Stars 🌕🌕🌕🌑🌑
by John Birmingham.
Action space opera that doesn't take itself too seriously. Humanity has become a diverse species dangerously dependent on digital & genomic enhancement - a zealous puritan strain plans to change that. A few too many characters to begin with - none of them I connected with, and many of whom die - but they come together nicely.
#BookReview #Books #Bookstodon #SciFi
@WildWoila @wildwoila@wyrms.de
“It’s devastating for us to know that these kids who put in hundreds of hours of hard work had that torn away from them because of the objections of a single parent,” says Picoult... "I had 20 books banned in one school district in Florida alone because of a single parent’s objection and she admitted she had not read any of the books...She said that they were banned for ‘mature content and sexuality.’ There were books of mine that did not even have a single kiss in them.”
#books #writing #writersofmastodon #WritingCommunity #bookstodon @bookstodon
Book Review: The Nameless Land by Kate Elliott
Elen’s story continues and finishes in a land of lost magic, royal intrigue and much more
@Princejvstin has our review at the NOAF blog
http://www.nerds-feather.com/2025/10/book-review-nameless-land-by-kate.html
#bookstodon #books #review @bookstodon
Five stars:
"The Scarlet Moving Van" by John Cheever (1959) is a cautionary tale of undesirables moving into suburbia. The Folkstones live a quiet life in Shady Hills and do the right thing when a new couple move in next door. They invite them over for drinks and all is well until Gee Gee gets drunk.
http://www.pussreboots.com/blog/2025/comments_10/scarlet_moving_van.html
Five stars:
Crime and Cherry Pits by Amanda Flower and Rachel Dulude (Narrator) (2024) is the fourth book in the Farm to Table mystery series. During the men's cherry pit spitting contest, a theater professor/actor dies of an allergic reaction.
https://pussreboots.com/blog/2025/comments_10/crime_and_cherry_pits.html
Furhter confession: It wasn't a mistake, I just find your parties boring... 😂
@reading @bookstodon @books @humor @humor@lemmy.world @aiop
#ReadingMemes #Memes #ReadAllTheBooks #Humor #Humour
#Reading #Readers #ReadersOfMastodon #ReadingCommunity
#Book #Books #Novel #Novels #Fiction
#Recommendation #Bookrecommendation
#Bookwyrm #Bookworm #Bookstodon #BookLove
Christmas in Norway, 2025 is an advent calendar of twenty-four texts of and about Norwegian folklore to provide you with a few moments of relief each day from your holiday preparations. Escape into the Norwegian mountains, valleys, forests, and fjords with the nisse, the hulder folk, some trolls, and the undead.
Release is later this coming week.
Unrestricted ebook download or on Kindle.
Details here: https://norwegianfolktales.net/books/Christmas-in-Norway-2025
#ChristmasInNorway #Folklore #NorwegianFolktales #NorwegianLegends #Folktales #Bookstodon
Edited 19d ago
More on school book bans from Kelly Jensen for BookRiot:
"There are now 19 books prohibited in any Utah public school. Of them, 16 are written by women, and their average publication date is 2011. This means that most of these books have been on shelves and available for many years and caused no issues until this manufactured crisis."
"There are 42 public school districts in Utah, but two districts account for nearly 80% of the books banned statewide"
#books #writing #writersofmastodon #WritingCommunity #bookstodon @bookstodon
This week's #NewBooks at the library: I bought several second copies of
- How the Mind Changed: A Human History of our Evolving Brain
- Kate Raworth's Doughnut #Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. We had hoped to get this signed when she recently spoke in London, but, alas, failed.
- An ex-library copy of an older classic on #Buffon: From Natural History to the History of Nature: Readings from Buffon and His Critics, of which I made a note after reviewing Every Living Thing some time back.
#Books #Scicomm #Bookstodon #Neurobiology #Degrowth #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #HistSci @bookstodon
Looking for a new ebook? My novel THE EXPERT OF SUBTLE REVISIONS is on sale now! Just 1.99, wherever you buy ebooks.
"In this 'appealing intellectual mystery' (Publishers Weekly) spanning continents, Hase knows exactly what to do when her dad goes missing: Go to the library, find a specific book, and follow instructions. 'Brilliant, uplifting… I was swept away' (New York Times bestselling author Janet Skeslien Charles)."
#books #writing #writersofmastodon #WritingCommunity #bookstodon @bookstodon
FREE short story! “Ondine’s Curse,” a 19th century historical fantasy with a mermaid. https://youtu.be/NmA-Ew-Drms?si=SOpSVRkkIMdpK5GL
#bookstodon #shortstory #fantasy #audio @books @Books@mstdn.social @bookstodon
I couldn't resist doing some analysis of ABC Radio National's Top 100 Books of the 21st Century.
How much more likely were people to vote for books because they had read them in recent memory (recency bias)? You would expect that good books are spread out evenly across the years, but it's hard to remember books that you read many years ago! Turns out there was an even spread of books across 2000-2019. But there were 40% more books than expected from 2020-2024. (See first graph.)
Were newer books more likely to be lower down the list? I thought this might be lkely because votes for recently read books might spread out more. But that wasn't completely true. The bottom 40 of the list did lean new, but so did the top 20. (See second graph.)
How diverse were the authors on the list? Not very! Only 22 of the books were by authors with diverse backgrounds, by which I mean non-white or not hetero-normative. The top 20 were the least diverse, but it was pretty even across the range. Probably not surprising - people might connect most strongly with books that speak to their own experience. Would be fascinating to see more demographic info on the voters.
Most books were by authors from Australia (35), the USA (31), the UK (17) and Ireland (7). Ireland seemed to punch above its weight. New Zealand only had one author! (Heather Morris, The Tattooist of Auschwitz).
There were very few non-fiction books, especially if you exclude memoirs and true crime. I count 4: Dark Emu, Stasiland, Sapiens and A Short History of Nearly Everything. And yet non-fiction accounts for something like 40% of book sales. I wonder if that is because a non-fiction book tends to focus on a particular subject, which would have less widespread appeal. It could also be that the type of people who vote in this sort of poll are book nerds, and book nerds mostly read fiction.
As a keen #fantasy & #scifi reader, I was disappointed. Project Hail Mary is the only full-blown scifi, but I wouldn't say it is a good representation of the genre. There is Hunger Games and Harry Potter, but both are young adult. The others (Cloud Atlas, Station Eleven, Piranesi, Never Let Me Go) feel borderline (I've not read the last two).
How did the list compare with my own ratings? I've read 57 of the 100 books, and I did rate higher books better, but the relationship was very weak. (See third graph.)
Highest ranked book that I didn't really like: #12. Where The Crawdads Sing. (Runner up The Dry.)
Lowest ranked book that I really liked: #86. Cloud Atlas
Highest ranked book I'd never heard of: #9. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
I've got 43 books to catch up on in the next few years, plus the favourites as voted by my friends. Never short a good book!
Edited 24d ago
My contribution to the #1925Club this week is a post on the wonderful Love by Elizabeth von Arnim, which had a lot to say about double standards in society and the pressures on women as they age #bookstodon #BookReview #audiobook @kaggsy59
https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/3589831a-2956-408e-a6dc-19397cf94635
"It takes an entire lifetime to unravel the mysteries of our own lives. Layer upon layer of knowledge accumulates upon the past, revealing it anew each time as a past that we certainly lived through, but couldn't even begin to understand."
Jenny Erpenbeck, "Homesick for Sadness," in her memoir 'Not a Novel'
#SundaySentence cluster @bookstodon #reading #bookstodon #identity #memory
FREE SHORT STORY! Saving Alan Idle, a story about a sentient computer program that previously appeared in Escape Pod. https://youtu.be/A7mEXacgd08?si=qwUY33Y2veBcgaTW
#bookstodon #scifi #shortstory @books @Books@mstdn.social @bookstodon
Looking for more spicy audiobooks for spooky season? 🎃
My Wife The Witch is another Size Fantasy I narrated for Amber Collins.
A naughty witch shrinks her husband to fit the dollhouse where she keeps four enchanted, doll-sized girlfriends — and then keeps shrinking!
This story goes hard, harder than most of my catalogue, so I will put content warnings in the next post in the thread.
If you like erotica with witches, magic, and a degree of peril, this might be for you!
Get yourself in the Halloween spirit with this spicy story. 😉
Available in audiobook format on Amazon, Audible an Apple Books. Also available in ebook format on Amazon.
1/n
#NSFW #Audioook #Audioobooks #Books #Bookstodon #Halloween #Erotica #SizeFantasy #Shrinking #Magic #Witch #Halloween
Edited 17d ago
Launching November 3! Get the audiobook and a special edition hardcover! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/villyard/immortal-gifts-hardcover-paperback-and-audiobook
#bookstodon #kickstarter #vampirebooks @books @Books@mstdn.social @bookstodon
Book Review: EC Comics Library: Weird Science Vol. 1 (Taschen)
The Rolls-Royce Collection of Era-Defining Sci-Fi Comics
NOAF co-founder @scifiromance has our review at the blog:
http://www.nerds-feather.com/2025/10/book-review-ec-comics-library-weird.html
#books #comics #review #bookstodon @bookstodon
Five stars:
The Puppets of Spelhorst by Kate DiCamillo and Julie Morstad (Illustrator) (2023) is the first of the Norendy Tales. It's a short, heavily illustrated parable of stepping into the roles given to you while still being true to yourself. The story follows five puppets as they come into the ownership of an old and lonely former ship's captain and then to a family with children.
https://pussreboots.com/blog/2025/comments_10/puppets_of_spelhorst.html
Four stars:
Audition for the Fox by Martin Cahill (2025) is a fantasy novella with a similar vibe to the Singing Hills Cycle by Nghi Vo. Nesi, a failed acolyte has one last chance to find her calling, if she can convince T’sidaan, the Fox of Tricks to take her on as his apprentice.
https://pussreboots.com/blog/2025/comments_10/audition_for_the_fox.html
#CoverReveal : We're obviously always delighted to celebrate one of our (very!) local literary stars, Muriel Spark, and Hodder has James Bailey's Like a Cat Loves a Bird, "a spiky and delicious new literary biography", coming next April.
#books #livres #MurielSpark #Edinburgh #Edimbourg #LikeACatLovesABird #JamesBailey #Biography #biographie #ScottishLiterature #bookshops #librairies #bookstodon
“You seem very unconcerned about this.“
“Man, I was not raised in the woods by Bolsheviks.“
“Are you a capitalist?“
“You should have asked me if I'm a fellow traveler before you kissed me, don't you think?“ Sam said, smirking.
“But?“
“I'm a librarian.“
“Is that a political affiliation?“
Sam considered this. “Near enough.“
#AmReading Old Time Religion by E.H. Lupton @pretensesoup
#Bookstodon
@bookstodon
finished reading A Court of Thorns and Roses 🌕🌕🌗🌑🌑
by Sarah Maas.
My first foray into #romantasy. The plot is so-so (humans vs faeries, love & intrigue) but finishes strongly. The romance is weak - it's never clear why she loves the faerie lord, except for his sexy man-beastiness. Hopefully this is not the best the genre has to offer.
#BookReview #Books #Bookstodon #Fantasy #Romance
@WildWoila @wildwoila@wyrms.de
Finished reading it yesterday.
"I'm afraid you've got dragons" by Peter S. Beagle:
https://text.tchncs.de/cedara/h2im-afraid-youve-got-dragons-by-peter-s