Locus, the Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, is the paper of record in the science fiction community. Every year the editors and reviewers at Locus publish a recommended reading list which includes novels, YA novels, first novels, anthologies and collections, related non-fiction, art books, and three types of shorter work (
novellas,
novelettes, and short stories). If you are at all interested in the current state of the SF&F genre you can't do better than Locus' yearly effort. The
list for 2010 appears in the February issue.
[more inside]
posted by Justinian
on Feb 18, 2011 -
25 comments
The Suck Fairy. "The Suck Fairy is an artefact of re-reading. If you read a book for the first time and it sucks, it’s nothing to do with her. It just sucks. Some books do. The Suck Fairy comes in when you come back to a book that you liked when you read it before, and on re-reading—well, it sucks. You can say that you have changed, you can hit your forehead dramatically and ask yourself how you could possibly have missed the suckiness the first time—or you can say that the Suck Fairy has been through while the book was sitting on the shelf and inserted the suck."
[Via]
posted by homunculus
on Sep 30, 2010 -
168 comments
Picture Book Report is an extended love-song to books. Fifteen illustrators will reach out to their favorite books and create wonderful pieces of art in response to the text that has moved them, shaped them, or excited them. From sci-fi to children’s books to fantasy to serious novels, we’ll cover them all. For three weeks out of every month there will be a new illustration every day from one of us along with our thoughts, process, anything we can come up with. Together we will try to excite readers both new and old and capture some of that magic of storytelling..
[more inside]
posted by The Esteemed Doctor Bunsen Honeydew
on Feb 15, 2010 -
12 comments
"Meanwhile, down in Vaginaland, Mr Condom's beginning to feel a bit iffy. He's overheating. For some reason, the shagging seems to be twice as fast this evening, and he grimaces as he gets flung willy-nilly in and out of the pink tunnel. He starts getting friction burns, hanging onto Bobby's stiff penis for dear life, headbutting Georgie's cervix at 180 beats per minute. 'Help me!' he yells in the darkness, feeling himself melting."
This year's worst sex. [NSFW or post-turkey family reading] [more inside]
posted by iamkimiam
on Nov 25, 2009 -
44 comments
Nina Sankovitch is
about to finish reading a book a day for a year. She not only reads them, she
reviews them too. "You can’t go from ‘Little Bee,’ by Chris Cleave, which is about this young woman who witnesses torture and herself is a victim of abuse in Nigeria — a really great book, but you’re just crying or your stomach is clenched — to another book like it the next day,” she said. “If I read a book like that every day, I would have collapsed a long time ago.”
Other 365 day projects have included
this,
this, and
this.
posted by Xurando
on Oct 13, 2009 -
133 comments
It’s only natural that if you wish to present yourself as a well-read person, a certain degree of complete bullshit is required. There’s no shame in lying about what you’ve read. There’s only shame in getting caught. Then you look like a doofus, and an illiterate one at that... How to lie about books.
posted by Artw
on May 28, 2009 -
73 comments
People of the Screen : "Digital literacy’s advocates increasingly speak of replacing, rather than supplementing, print literacy. What is “reading” anyway, they ask, in a multimedia world like ours? We are increasingly distractible, impatient, and convenience-obsessed—and the paper book just can’t keep up. Shouldn’t we simply acknowledge that we are becoming
people of the screen, not people of the book?"
posted by dhruva
on Jan 16, 2009 -
31 comments
I know a man who once went to Sioux City, not one of the world’s leading destinations, precisely because he had never been there before. More than a decade later he still talks about the experience, from the Sergeant Floyd obelisk to the dog track of North Sioux and the meat packing plant converted to a shopping mall. The same impulse explains a non-specialist’s reading a history of Byzantine iconography or a survey of Australian wildlife. Both offer a break in daily life and an enlargement of our sense of wonder and possibility. That awareness can provide a sense of transcendence, and connection, or even the spark of divine discontent that leads people to change their lives.
Reading as Vacation, an essay by J. D. Smith and
Subway Reader, pictures of people who read while using public transportation.
posted by Kattullus
on Apr 6, 2008 -
17 comments
Are people reading less? Government survey says:
yes. Declines in how much and how well people read “are adversely affecting this country's culture, economy, and civic life as well as our children's educational achievement.” Also the cause of poor
test scores.
Steve Jobs agrees: Kindle DOA because nobody reads books anymore.
WaPo says 1 in 4 persons read no books in 2006. And children didn't keep reading after they got through Harry Potter,
either.
So literacy's in a long slow decline.
But wait.
[more inside]
posted by cogneuro
on Feb 21, 2008 -
122 comments
Pages Unbound is a portal for serialized web novels, similar to web comic portals such as
Buzz Comix and
Top Web Comics, if not nearly as fancy. It is a new project by
Tales of MU author
Alexandra Erin. Note: Tales of MU and some of the novels found on Pages Unbound may be NSFW, as they contain explicit material of various sorts. MU, specifically, is concerned with LGBT issues and racism in a fantasy setting.
posted by Caduceus
on Dec 18, 2007 -
9 comments
It's a
sad old story but the reading of literature continues to decline.
Prospero's Books - a Kansas-city used bookstore - is so desperate to thin out its collection it has started to burn books. Co-owner Tom Wayne says he is unable to sell many of his
thousands of books, or even to give them away to libraries and thrift stores, so he started a pyre in protest.
posted by stbalbach
on May 29, 2007 -
66 comments
New Notions 5 Reading Challenge "Not long ago, I was challenged to rethink some notions I had previously held near and dear to my heart. Wrestling with the issue and trying to make it fit within my worldview made me abandon some antiquated (for me) ideas and adopt new ones. It was that occurrence that led me to think up the New Notions 5 Reading Challenge."
posted by Amy NM
on May 5, 2007 -
30 comments
