reading

343d

Five stars:

At Death's Dough by Mindy Quigley (2025) is the fifth book in the Deep Dish mystery series. It's the first one not to have an audiobook version and I'll admit to missing Holly Adams's performance.

It's February in Geneva Bay. The snow is thick. The lake is frozen. Delilah O’Leary finds a body while ice fishing. That discovery leads to a story of hidden loot lost during the Prohibition years.

https://pussreboots.com/blog/2025/comments_12/at_deaths_dough.html

#bookstodon #mystery #reading
@bookstodon

Cover art

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330d

3.75/5 for "Let Him Lie" by Ianthe Jerrold, my penultimate read for #DeanStreetDecember 2025. A beautifully written Clayton's detective story.
#Reading #Bookstodon #Mystery

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/547711e9-a370-4629-8697-8ee1a9be78c0

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309d

📚 The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by: Kiran Desai

When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that served only to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.

Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recen...

https://bookblabla.com/book/the-loneliness-of-sonia-and-sunny

#books #reading #libraries #fiction #literary

When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that served only to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.

Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India. She fears that she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.

A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity, by the Booker Prize–winning author of The Inheritance of Loss

A transcendent triumph. not so much a novel as a marvel. The New York Times Book Review

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344d

After a disappointing start, Book 2 of my #DeanStreetDecember , "The Trail of The Three Lean Men" was a lot of fun. Two down, eight to go
#Reading #bookstodon #Mystery
@bookstodon

https://robinwalter31.blogspot.com/2025/12/ten-from-ten-dean-street-december-iv.html

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330d

When you're reading and someone assumes that means you're doing nothing and they can interrupt you.

#books #reading #writing

At Vespers by Halle. A young woman looks up from reading a book. It's probably some religious thing, but I've cropped out the cross and I just like the intensity on her face.

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179d

A second #SundaySentence, simply because Helen Garner’s diaries are so rich.

“There’s stuff I /should/ be reading, but I don’t know what it is, and so I read just anything, and feel all the time that it’s the wrong stuff.”

Happily, this is not where I am now. (After all, I’m reading Helen Garner!) But I’ve definitely been there.

@bookstodon #bookstodon #reading

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329d

📚 Sky Full of Elephants by: Cebo Campbell

One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he’s now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receive...

https://bookblabla.com/book/sky-full-of-elephants

#books #reading #libraries

One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he’s now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn’t even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old left behind by her white mother and step-family.

Traumatized by the event, and terrified of the outside world, Sidney has spent a year in isolation in Wisconsin. Desperate for help, she turns to the father she never met, a man she has always resented. Sidney and Charlie meet for the first time as they embark on a journey across a truly “post-racial” America in search for answers. But neither of them are prepared for this new world and how they see themselves in it.

Heading south toward what is now called the Kingdom of Alabama, everything Charlie and Sidney thought they knew about themselves, and the world, will be turned upside down. Brimming with heart and humor, Cebo Campbell’s astonishing debut novel is about the power of community and connection, about healing and self-actualization, and a reckoning with what it means to be Black in America, in both their world and ours.

Bold and imaginative. Tananarive Due
This stunning allegory will spark much discussion. Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A truly powerful and riveting story. Bo

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309d

Killing Stella. By Marlen Haushofer. 1958. (Translated by Shaun Whiteside)

In 1950s Austria, you are a housewife with kids, when an acquaintance dumps her 19 year old daughter with you for a year; the daughter is innocuous but your household is so fragile, and you are managing your own internal storm of mundane familial relationships, that the friends’ daughter is caught in the invisible crossfire.

4 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈

@bookstodon #reading #books #women #austria

Yellow book cover with two “x”s on it

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330d

📚 Norwegian Wood by: Haruki Murakami

Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces ther...

https://bookblabla.com/book/norwegian-wood

#books #reading #libraries #fiction #literaryfiction #mediatiein

Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.

Stunning and elegiac, Norwegian Wood first propelled Haruki Murakami into the forefront of the literary scene.

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210d

Heated Rivalry. By Rachel Reid.

You are a star hockey player just out of high school, when you meet your fellow rookie and nemesis, a Russian player, and you and he will go on to challenge each other on the ice and in the bed FOR 8 YEARS, which it turns out is longer than either of you can stand.

4 of 5 library cats 🏒 🏒 🏒 🏒

@bookstodon #bookstodon #books #reading #gay #lgbtq #romance #xxx

Book cover featuring two hockey players facing off

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329d

📚 The Ghost Brigades by: John Scalzi

Jared Dirac is the only human who can provide answers... A superhuman hybrid, created from Boutin's DNA, Jared's brain should be able to access Boutin's electronic memories. But when the memory transplant appears to fail, Jared is given to the Ghost Brigades.

At first, Jared is a perfe...

https://bookblabla.com/book/the-ghost-brigades

#books #reading #libraries #fiction #sciencefiction #militaryfiction #actionadventure

Jared Dirac is the only human who can provide answers... A superhuman hybrid, created from Boutin's DNA, Jared's brain should be able to access Boutin's electronic memories. But when the memory transplant appears to fail, Jared is given to the Ghost Brigades.

At first, Jared is a perfect soldier, but as Boutin's memories slowly surface, Jared begins to intuit the reason's for Boutin's betrayal. As Jared desperately hunts for his "father," he must also come to grips with his own choices. Time is running out: The alliance is preparing its offensive, and some of them plan worse things than humanity's mere military defeat...

The Ghost Brigades are the Special Forces of the Colonial Defense Forces, elite troops created from the DNA of the dead and turned into the perfect soldiers for the CDF's toughest operations. They're young, they're fast and strong, and they're totally without normal human qualms.

The universe is a dangerous place for humanity—and it's about to become far more dangerous. Three races that humans have clashed with before have allied to halt our expansion into space. Their linchpin: the turncoat military scientist Charles Boutin, who knows the CDF's biggest military secrets. To prevail, the CDF must find out why Boutin did what he did.

Old Man's War Series
#1 Old Man’s War
#2 The Ghost Brigades
#3 The Last Colony
#4 Zoe’s Tale
#5 The Human Division
#6 The End of All Things
Short fiction: “After the Coup”

Other Tor Books
The Andr

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179d

Stag Party. By Torrey Peters.

You are an usually large and ugly 19th century lumberjack in an all male remote camp, and you get the chance to appear at an arranged “dance” as an available female, which you eagerly accept.

4 of 5 library cats 🌳 🌳 🌳 🌳.

@bookstodon #bookstodon #books #reading #lumberjacks #trans #sex

Book cover featuring elk in odd positions.

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329d

📚 Kindred by: Octavia E. Butler

"I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm."

Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: pro...

https://bookblabla.com/book/kindred

#books #reading #libraries #fiction #sciencefiction #historical

"I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm."

Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present.

Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present.

Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise. (New York Times).

Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS. ("You have to read them.")

The New York Times best-selling author’s time-travel classic that makes us feel the horrors of American slavery and indicts our country’s lack of progress on racial reconciliation

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199d

#Reading #Books
I've been regularly reading fiction type books for more than 50 years. And in that time, I never knew the definition of the genre called Literary Fiction.

Today that changed. And yes, I have read some books that would be in the literary fiction category.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_fiction

Edited 199d ago

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179d

📚 Seveneves by: Neal Stephenson

A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in a hastily built space ark.

But the complexities a...

https://bookblabla.com/book/seveneves

#books #reading #libraries #fiction #sciencefiction #thrillers #technologicalfiction #suspensefiction

A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in a hastily built space ark.

But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges threaten the intrepid pioneers, turning their mission into a desperate survival story until only a handful of survivors remain...

Five thousand years later, their progeny—seven distinct races now three billion strong—embark on yet another audacious post-apocalyptic journey into the unknown... to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth.

A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable. As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon comes an exciting and thought-provoking hard science fiction epic—a grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years.

What would happen if the world were ending?

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329d

After #DeanStreetDecember 2025, an update on the state of my https://www.deanstreetpress.co.uk/ library. It's in 3 tags: dsp-read, dsptbr, and dsp-dnf. On the left, dsp-read. On the right, dsptbr (atm) I did not screenshot dsp-dnf, because there are only five. 😁
#Reading #Mystery #middlebrow #Bookstodon #nonfiction
@bookstodon

Image shows the 122 Dean Street Press books the poster has read in left-to-right chronological reading order.

Image shows the 52 Dean Street Press books in his Calibre library the poster has yet to read

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328d

Are there any book clubs on Mastodon? The in-person ones around me keep petering out or are hard to get to, and the ones I’ve seen online are toooo big for my tastes. I have a slight preference for fantasy/sci-fi, but any genre is good. I just want to talk about books! #bookstodon #books #reading

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328d

The other day, I put "Sequoia" up into my PayHip store.

It's the first book I ever self-published, a cute short story that's difficult to define. There is time-travel, but also a shamanic quest, a tree-hugger and an old, grumpy guy. Also, my first queer character.

If that's your kind of thing, take a look!

https://shop.hannah-steenbock.de/b/sequoia

#Reading
#TimeTravel
#ShortStory
@bookstodon

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326d

#sundaySentence @bookstodon #reading #literature #bookstodon

“…each and every one of us carries with us a wholly uncharted world that reveals itself to us only on occasion, in unfathomable states of perception, and may not such rich mental states, this secret reality, the life that exists in the remotest depths of the soul, be represented in literature too?”

Karl Ove Knausgaard

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308d

📚 We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse) by: Dennis E. Taylor

There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it's a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street. Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state.

He has been uploaded into computer ...

https://bookblabla.com/book/we-are-legion-we-are-bob-bobiverse

#books #reading #libraries

There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it's a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street. Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state.

He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets.

The stakes are high: no less than the first claim to entire worlds. If he declines the honor, he'll be switched off, and they'll try again with someone else. If he accepts, he becomes a prime target. There are at least three other countries trying to get their own probes launched first, and they play dirty. The safest place for Bob is in space, heading away from Earth at top speed. Or so he thinks. Because the universe is full of nasties, and trespassers make them mad — very mad.

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308d

I do like both, and I've never understood why this is an issue, is it not the content of the book that matters? Not how that content is delivered? 🤔😁

@reading @bookstodon @books @humor @humor@lemmy.world @aiop @joinin

#ReadingMemes #Memes #ReadAllTheBooks #Humor #Humour
#Reading #Readers #ReadersOfMastodon #ReadingCommunity
#Book #Books #Novel #Novels #Fiction
#Bookwyrm #Bookworm #Bookstodon #BookLove #FantasyBooks

Tom and Jerry meme, Tom is having a sword fight with the dog, and Jerry is watching.
Captions:
Dog: ebook readers
Tom: Physical readers
Jerry: Me liking both

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328d

Things from the Flood. By Simon Stalenhag. Translated by Martin Dunelind.

You are a young Swedish teen, growing up in the aftermath of a failed industrial project that may have opened a portal to another world, but the poisoned and destroyed landscape is your playground, and the agonies of adolescence find a comfortable home there.

4 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈.

@bookstodon #bookstodon #books #reading #sweden #scifi #adolescence #graphicnovel #tech #art

Book cover featuring a beat up android alone in the wilderness

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328d

📚 Oona Out of Order by: Margarita Montimore

It’s New Year’s Eve 1982, and Oona Lockhart has her whole life before her. At the stroke of midnight she will turn nineteen, and the year ahead promises to be one of consequence. Should she go to London to study economics, or remain at home in Brooklyn to pursue her passion for music and be with her ...

https://bookblabla.com/book/oona-out-of-order

#books #reading #libraries #fiction #womenfiction #timetravel

It’s New Year’s Eve 1982, and Oona Lockhart has her whole life before her. At the stroke of midnight she will turn nineteen, and the year ahead promises to be one of consequence. Should she go to London to study economics, or remain at home in Brooklyn to pursue her passion for music and be with her boyfriend? As the countdown to the New Year begins, Oona faints and awakens thirty-two years in the future in her fifty-one-year-old body. Greeted by a friendly stranger in a beautiful house she’s told is her own, Oona learns that with each passing year she will leap to another age at random. And so begins Oona Out of Order...

Hopping through decades, pop culture fads, and much-needed stock tips, Oona is still a young woman on the inside but ever changing on the outside. Who will she be next year? Philanthropist? Club Kid? World traveler? Wife to a man she’s never met? Surprising, magical, and heart-wrenching, Margarita Montimore has crafted an unforgettable story about the burdens of time, the endurance of love, and the power of family.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK

AMAZON EDITORS' 20 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR PICK

With its countless epiphanies and surprises, Oona proves difficult to put down.USA Today

By turns tragic and triumphant, heartbreakingly poignant and joyful, this is ultimately an uplifting and redemptive read.The Guardian

A remarkably inventive novel that explores what it means to live a life fully in the moment, e

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1y

My cartoons for this week’s @theguardian.com books #holiday #vacation #reading

com.atproto.sync.getBlob?did=did:plc:oflombnj6v6xyohhatfkbzyd&cid=bafkreifkvs4wotafm5mybvrnz3aokqyb6d7yw3qrps7uv4f2na33g56xv4

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327d

I finally read "I, Robot" by Asimov. I think it is good, and especially with #Ai and #LLMs here now, so many tech-bros citing stuff like the three laws, think it is worthwhile to go read the actual book. It is not about robot crimes, at all. It feels astonishingly up to date for something written during and shortly after WW2. I guess because people now aren't that different from people who lived 100 years ago. #bookstodon @bookstodon #books #reading

bookcover of I, Robot by Asimov. the cover is a dark blue with the outline of a human head in light blue dots and lines representing circuits.

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