It's almost nomination time for the Hugo Awards! As someone invested in recommendations as a type of critique/conversation, I'm thriving.
Good set of recs! I need to go through these more thoroughly later...
So that’s my two cents on where a lot of cozy fantasy is going wrong. And like, I can kind of see where my colleagues are coming from and why books like this keep being produced these days??? Like the pandemic really fucked up everybody, and so many of us are incredibly burned out and running on fumes… And so sometimes it feels impossibly challenging to write any book except one where nothing bad happens and nothing is in danger and nobody is really bothered or worried about anything and everything is mostly fine and there aren’t any major setbacks…..
But that leaves readers cold. And frankly, I don’t feel like it does much of anything to nourish either our souls or theirs. It feels like eating a bag of potato chips for dinner instead of going to the effort of even just heating up a frozen dinner that has a vegetable in it.
YES this is exactly my problem with these new cozy fantasy books that AREN'T romances. If they're romances they at least have the romantic story beats and that brings the tension and it's just a fun fantasy setting. But otherwise they're just so damn boring.
But as PL points out, Ask This Book is, in effect, “an in-book chatbot. You ask any question about the book, and a generative AI process provides you answers.” Which would seem…hmmm…to raise some rights concerns.
UGH, really??
[...] I posit: Kovid betrayed us with Calibre 8.16.2, and we as a community never should have let that happen, never have placed such a burden on individual generosity. The synthesis of these two truths, then, is nearly self-evident. There must be a new effort, free from AI encumbrances, that is built from the ground-up as a community effort. Something that can outlive the decisions of any one participant, something that does not place any one individual under an untenable load.
The rereading Project aims to do precisely this.
I'm interested to see where this project goes. It's unfortunate that Calibre is really the only widely-used/available cataloging system (I know there's other options but not if you a) want to use Linux and b) have thousands of things to catalog) so another option or two would be great!
I've rounded up a pool of younger people who have agreed to let me expose them to classic works of science fiction and assembled a list of older works I think still have merit. Each month my subjects will read and react to those stories; I will then post the results to this site. Hilarity will doubtless ensue!
Fab topic! I'd add this to my rss reader except there's no rss feed.
Lightning fast and privacy-friendly, Kavita is a self‑hosted digital library for EPUB, PDF, comics and manga — with built‑in readers (single, double page, and webtoon mode), OPDS, and rich metadata. Install and share your server in minutes.
Like Plex but for books/comics!
Quill OS is an open-source, fully-functional standalone OS for Rakuten Kobo's eReaders.
On January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1925. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. The literary highlights range from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage and the first four Nancy Drew novels. From cartoons and comic strips, the characters Betty Boop, Pluto (originally named Rover), and Blondie and Dagwood made their first appearances. Films from the year featured Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, the Marx Brothers, and John Wayne in his first leading role. Among the public domain compositions are I Got Rhythm, Georgia on My Mind, and Dream a Little Dream of Me. We are also celebrating paintings from Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee.
Yay, public domain day! Also noted is another Lord Peter Wimsey book going PD this year.
20,000 words. 100-ish pages. Everything I knew about taking a bunch of disorganised stuff and turning it in to a Johnny.Decimal system. Lovingly edited and laid out by Lucy. We were really happy with it. We still are. It stood the test of time.
Put together by SFF author China Mieville; 12 female authors and one of them is Ayn Rand, so take it with a grain of salt.