quillpunk: screenshot from the anime Apothecary Diares of a character (I don't remember who) blushing so much they're melting. (melting)
[personal profile] quillpunk posting in [community profile] booknook
Same exact deal as last year! XD

This is the sign-up post for the 2025 October Review-a-Thon I’m hosting here in [community profile] booknook! To sign up, simply comment on this post with what day(s) you’re claiming.

Each day claimed equals one distinctive review, so if you’re claiming three days, you’re signing up to post three different reviews. You can claim up to five days. You can claim a day that’s already claimed, but you must claim different days for each review. You do not need to mention what book(s) you intend to review. You can claim more days up to the max at any time, simply make a new comment and claim more. You can unclaim a day at any time. Sign-ups are open until Oct 30.

Good luck!

Claimed Days


Days to Claim )

Posting Guidelines (click the arrow!)
  • We’re not doing any specific rules regarding the reviews for the events. Your post just needs to adhere to any General Posting Guidelines that applies: this means including a clear header with information regarding the book’s title, author, and any applicable content warnings.

  • Any spoilers (no matter how old the book is) need to be behind a cut or an accordion (this is an accordion!)

  • If your review is not suitable for all ages, adjust the age restriction of the post.

  • The subject line should clearly state that it’s a review. Please tag for at least format, age group, and genre.

  • The review needs to be posted in its entirety, don’t just go ‘and you can keep reading on…’

  • You need to be a member to post to the comm.

Questions and Concerns
I will make a top comment on this post, please leave any questions and concerns about the event as a reply to that comment to easily keep everything in one place. This post will not be sticky, as I think we’re already on max on that, but I will link it in the sidebar under the new ‘Quick Navigation’ heading.

What if I don’t make it to my claimed day?
If you don't post a review on the day you signed up for, nothing will happen :D This is intended to be a low-pressure, fun event, and not meant to put undue pressure on you. Again, [community profile] booknook is always open to reviews! You can post it later, or not at all. You also would not be required to mention in your sign-up which book you intend to review so you can change your mind until the very last second. There are no repercussions for not posting anything on your claimed day!

What if I’m not signed up but I want to post a review in October?
[community profile] booknook is open to reviews 24/7 and that would not change. You’re absolutely still allowed to post a review during this month (even on a claimed day) without signing up!

What kind of books can I review?
Any kind of books! Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, webnovels, short stories, etc. If you think it counts, it counts. Likewise, it doesn't matter how old the book is; a 200-year-old book is just as welcome as one that was just published two weeks ago. Here, it's just all about the books! :D

How does reviews work?
In general, a review should contain an introduction of the book and what you think about it and whether it's something you would recommend to others. Here's a few quick links I found searching (if you've got resources for tips on writing reviews, you're welcome to share them and I can add them to the list):



It's time for the Fake Internet Deadlines to shine! :D

Demonic Ox arrives today!

Jul. 11th, 2025 11:29 am
[syndicated profile] lois_mcmaster_bujold_feed
The newest Penric & Desdemona e-novella, "The Adventure of the Demonic Ox", is being uploaded today. The time for an upload to penetrate the system varies wildly, from an hour to a day, but I'll post direct links here as each of our 5 vendors goes live.

Amazon Kindle is first out the gate:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FHBMR3DN

Not yet up, but pending:

Kobo, Google Play Books, and Apple Books are interesting if you search by my name, because they each carry so many foreign language titles, if you scroll down. (Amazon ditto, I suppose.) These pages should populate in due course, though it may take a while for a new entry to sift to the top:

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/search?que...

https://play.google.com/store/info/na...

https://books.apple.com/us/author/loi...

B&N Nook, same deal:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/lois...

To recap:



The Adventure of the Demonic Ox

When sorcerer Learned Penric hears of the suspected demonic possession of an ox at his brother-in-law’s bridgebuilding worksite, he thinks it an excellent opportunity to tutor his adopted daughter and student sorceress Otta in one of their Temple duties: identifying and restraining such wild chaos elementals before harm comes to their hosts or surroundings.

What begins as an instructive family outing turns anything but routine when a mountain search becomes a much more frightening adventure for Penric and his charges. What is undergone there by both mentor and students will yield lessons both unexpected and far-reaching.

***

I'll make my usual spoiler discussion space post tomorrow, for the speed readers.

As always, reader mentions of the new title out and about on the internet and elsewhere are always greatly appreciated, as this blog and word of mouth are the only advertising my indie books get. Amazon always gets plenty of reviews; the other vendors are usually more in need. But no one will see any vendor pages unless they've already heard of the story someplace else, and go to look, so outside reviews and mentions are especially important.

Ta, L.

posted by Lois McMaster Bujold on July, 11

Trying to read Dogs of War

Jul. 12th, 2025 01:52 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
Adrian Tchaikovsky is amazingly hit-or-miss for me, but this looks like it's coming up "hit". The sapient arthropods are a swarm of bees. If there are any spiders, I haven't met them yet!

Listened to some stuff

Jul. 11th, 2025 04:35 pm
antisoppist: (Default)
[personal profile] antisoppist
While doing very boring work, I listen to spoken radio, which because BBC Sounds recommendations and "your next episode" are rubbish*, means going back through the schedules of Radio 4 and Radio 4 extra day by day and seeing what's been on. Yes I could Subscribe to Podcasts but I've been listening to speech radio since I was recording it on my cassette player I was given when I was 7 so I could listen to it again, and I like being in control and searching for what I want rather than having things piling up like an external obligation. So using this method, recently I have listened to:

1977 by Sarah Wooley
Which is a play about Angela Morley composing the music for Watership Down. Before transitioning, Angela Morley had written and arranged music for the Goon Show and wrote the theme tune to Hancock's Half Hour, and the play begins when Malcolm Williamson, Master of the Queen's Music is overwhelmed with writing music for the Queen's Silver Jubilee and has totally forgotten he is supposed to also be writing the soundtrack to Watership Down. Several times in this play people say something like "Oh God, the rabbits!" Malcolm Williamson is really not in a good place and stops answering the door and then runs away to the Carmargue with his (male) publisher, leaving not very many minutes of not arranged music with the symphony orchestra and the recording studio booked for something like 10 days' time. And people go "oh shit" and "the only person who can do this is Angela Morley" and go and grovel and promise it's not going to be about her, it's all for the sake of the rabbits and persuade her to just watch the film, no strings, and of course she does it and it's brilliant. 

Limelight: Pretender Prince
about Bonnie Prince Charlie and the 1745 Jacobite rebellion
This is part drama and part author (Colin MacDonald) telling us why he has dramatised it the way he has, and part interjections from historians, which worked much better across all the episodes than I thought it would the first time the drama was interrupted by the writer or the historians. Bonnie Prince Charlie doesn't come out of it all very well. The only Stuart history I did at school (in England) was James I to Civil War and death of Charles I (A-level) so all I really know about that bit comes from folk songs. So it was good and I enjoyed it.

As it's a Limelight drama it might be available as a podcast other than on BBC Sounds which now won't let you listen to it outside the UK. I've liked a lot of the Limelight ones, though they tend to be tense thrillers and not about Bonnie Prince Charlie, but I dislike the way BBC Sounds views all of them as a series and is now telling me to continue listening to my "next episode", which is about the CIA and not at all the same thing.


*You listened to a play. Now listen to another play that was on at the same time the next day.
pauraque: Picard reads a book while vacationing on Risa (st picard reads)
[personal profile] pauraque
In this first book of a hard SF trilogy, nanomaterials expert Wang Miao is recruited to help investigate the suicides of several prominent scientists. His inquiries lead him to a strange VR video game called Three-Body, in which the player is challenged to solve the mystery of why the game's simulated world keeps falling victim to unpredictable changes in climate that cause its civilizations to inevitably collapse. Interwoven with the book's near-future narrative is a story of the past, in which an astrophysicist who lost everything in Mao's Cultural Revolution is assigned to a secret military base that she comes to realize is dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life. These two seemingly unrelated threads come together to reveal a multilayered conspiracy of world-ending stakes.

I had this on my TBR list for so long that I'd completely forgotten what it was about, and I think that worked out well for my experience of it. I never knew where it was going to go next, and I thoroughly enjoyed the ride. Liu has a flair for creating epic set pieces of jaw-dropping cinematic scope that nonetheless follow naturally from the speculative science. I consumed a lot of popular science media in the 2000s, specifically, so for me the science in this book felt... oddly nostalgic? Not that it's obsolete, necessarily, but the particular preoccupations of that era and what was cutting-edge are strongly represented here. It made me want to go read a Brian Greene book.

The translation by Ken Liu reads nicely and I appreciated the informative but not excessive footnotes helping with some points about Chinese culture and history. I love that they let him write an afterword about the translation process!

The book is definitely more interested in ideas than people, and it's particularly weak on female characters. I was not entirely surprised to hear that the Netflix adaptation makes some of the male characters women, including Wang Miao. (I guess it also changes the nationality of a lot of characters, which makes less sense to me since the Chinese setting seems crucial to the book's themes, but I haven't actually watched the adaptation so it's not for me to say how well it works.)

I do plan to continue with the trilogy, though I have a suspicion that it might turn out to be too pessimistic in its outlook on the future for my taste? But I guess it depends on where the story ends up. My library hold on the second book just came in.
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


New Dawn requires only that people conform without exception or face memory erasure and worse. Yet, a minority insists on being individuals.

The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monáe

The Friday Five for 11 July 2025

Jul. 11th, 2025 12:59 am
anais_pf: (Default)
[personal profile] anais_pf posting in [community profile] thefridayfive
This week's questions were suggested by [livejournal.com profile] silent_r_infork

1. What was the most sick that you've ever been?

2. What disease are you afraid of getting?

3. Are you a big baby when it comes to taking medicine/shots for your illnesses?

4. Is going to the doctor really THAT bad?

5. Would you have the flu twice a month if you were paid $1,000 for having it?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

(no subject)

Jul. 10th, 2025 11:33 pm
skygiants: the aunts from Pushing Daisies reading and sipping wine on a couch (wine and books)
[personal profile] skygiants
I mentioned that I did in fact read a couple of good books in my late-June travels to counterbalance the bad ones. One of them was The Pushcart War, which I conveniently discovered in my backpack right as I was heading out to stay with the friend who'd loaned it to me a year ago.

I somehow have spent most of my life under the impression that I had already read The Pushcart War, until the plot was actually described to me, at which point it became clear that I'd either read some other Pushcart or some other War but these actual valiant war heroes were actually brand new to me.

The book is science fiction, of a sort, originally published in 1964 and set in 1976 -- Wikipedia tells me that every reprint has moved the date forward to make sure it stays in the future, which I think is very charming -- and purporting to be a work of history for young readers explaining the conflict between Large Truck Corporations and Pugnacious Pushcart Peddlers over the course of one New York City summer. It's a punchy, defiant little book about corporate interest, collective action, and civil disobedience; there's one chapter in particular in which the leaders of the truck companies meet to discuss their master plan of getting everything but trucks off the streets of New York entirely where the metaphor is Quite Dark and Usefully Unsubtle. Also contains charming illustrations! A good read at any time and I'm glad to have finally experienced it.

Thursday Recs

Jul. 10th, 2025 09:29 pm
soc_puppet: Dreamsheep, its wool patterned after the Demigirl Pride flag, in mirrored horizontal stripes of gray, pale gray, pink, and white; the Dreamwidth logo echoes these colors. (Demigirl)
[personal profile] soc_puppet posting in [community profile] queerly_beloved
Coming in a touch late this week to balance the scales from last time 😛


Do you have a rec for this week? Just reply to this post with something queer or queer-adjacent (such as, soap made by a queer person that isn't necessarily queer themed) that you'd, well, recommend. Self-recs are welcome, as are recs for fandom-related content!

Or have you tried something that's been recced here? Do you have your own report to share about it? I'd love to hear about it!
rocky41_7: (Default)
[personal profile] rocky41_7 posting in [community profile] booknook
Title: The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade series book #3)
Author: Seth Dickinson
Genre: Fantasy

Today I finished the latest book in the Baru Cormorant series (fourth book remains to-be-released), The Tyrant Baru Cormorant. Y'all, Baru is so back.

! Spoilers for books 1 & 2 below !
(Book 1 review) (Book 2 review)
 
If you've looked at other reviews for the series, you may have seen book 2, The Monster Baru Cormorant, referred to as the series' "sophomore slump." I disagree, but I understand where the feeling comes from. The Monster feels like a prelude, a setting of the board, for The Tyrant. The Monster puts all the pieces in place for the cascade of schemes and plays that come in The Tyrant. They almost feel like one book split into two (which is fair—taken together, they represent about a thousand pages and would make for one mammoth novel).
  
 
 
 
 

 

delphi: An illustrated crow kicks a little ball of snow with a contemplative expression. (Default)
[personal profile] delphi
Fandom 50 #23

Untitled Daisuke and Monty by Julia Stark
Fandom: Dimension 20: Cloudward, Ho!
Relationship: Daisuke Bucklesby/Monty LaMontgomery
Medium: Art
Length: 1 piece
Rating: SFW
My Bookmark Tags: slice of life, happy ending, established relationship, then and now, clothing, nostalgia

Description:
Two full-colour images of Daisuke and Monty, one in the present and one in flashback to their younger days. The first is fully saturated and features the two walking close together with Monty in the lead. Daisuke's hat is tipped forward over his eyes as he looks down with a faint smile and puts away his flask. Monty is watching him over his shoulder, likewise smiling and seemingly mid-conversation with him. Above them, larger and more faded out, is a memory of them sitting together decades ago, Daisuke speaking while Monty watches him with soft-eyed attention.

Very Minor Spoilers for Episode 6 )
This piece is just so sweet. The whole "getting the band back together" element of Cloudward, Ho! has been right up my alley, and I like that their separation was more about losing something that was holding them together rather than a big falling-out that created any ill will. It's made for a great story so far about some highly competent older characters reuniting warmly with old friends and working well together because of their shared history.

I love how the artist has captured this. The flashback looms large over the two men, creating a sense of those past conversations fuelling their present ease with each other and shared direction. It spot-on conveys Monty's wonderful attentiveness to people and suggests a lot in imagining the usually laconic Daisuke so engaged in talking to him. As someone who loves the aesthetics of this season, I'm also very much here for the details in their outfits and the little ways they've changed over the years.

Very dirty

Jul. 10th, 2025 11:01 pm
[syndicated profile] bad_machinery_feed

Posted by John Allison

I knew there was someone missing from this story. While Daisy and Esther were issued with new fantasy names, I’m afraid that Susan remains constant across all possible realities. In name if not in barbarous strength. But is she a barbarian at all?

The post Very dirty appeared first on Bad Machinery.

sovay: (Rotwang)
[personal profile] sovay
It was helpful of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race (2021) to include a dedication to its inspiration of Gene Wolfe's "Trip, Trap" (1967), since I would otherwise have guessed Le Guin's "Semley's Necklace" (1964)/Rocannon's World (1966) as its jumping-off point of anthropological science fiction through the split lens of heroic fantasy. As far as I can tell, my ur-text for that kind of double-visioned narrative was Phyllis Gotlieb's A Judgment of Dragons (1980), some of whose characters understand that they have been sucked down a time vortex into the late nineteenth century where a dangerously bored trickster of an enigmatically ancient species is amusing himself in the Pale of Settlement and some of whom just understand that Ashmedai has come to town. I got a kind of reversal early, too, from Jane Yolen's Sister Light, Sister Dark (1988) and White Jenna (1989), whose modern historian is doomed to fail in his earnest reconstructions because in his rationality he misses that the magic was real. Tchaikovsky gets a lot of mileage for his disjoint perspectives out of Clarke's Law, but just as much out of an explanation of clinical depression or the definition of a demon beyond all philosophy, and from any angle I am a sucker for the Doppler drift of stories with time. The convergence of genre protocols is nicely timed. Occasional Peter S. Beagle vibes almost certainly generated by the reader, not the text. Pleasantly, the book actually is novella-proportioned rather than a compacted novel, but now I have the problem of accepting that if the author had wanted to set any further stories in this attractively open-ended world, at his rate of prolificacy they would already have turned up. On that note, I appreciated hearing that Murderbot (2025–) has been renewed.

today's window into another world

Jul. 10th, 2025 10:39 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

a circular lamp embedded in a cracked paving stone, with green leaves visible beneath the glass

(I am continuing to think a lot about sensory systems; today I have mostly been discovering how many of the things I thought I half-remembered about nerves are wrong.)

Grace Icons

Jul. 10th, 2025 07:40 pm
purplecat: The Eighth Doctor. (Who:Eight)
[personal profile] purplecat
I see I thought yesterday was Thursday and posted a "Throwback Thursday" post. So for today have a post from my "list of things to be posted"


Grace from Doctor Who, smiling Grace from Doctor Who. Grace from Doctor who in blue opera gown, running down corridor. Grace from Doctor Who - close up of face. Grace from Doctor Who chewing pencil next to microscope.


Snagging is free. Credit is appreciated. Comments are loved.
[syndicated profile] lois_mcmaster_bujold_feed
So...

The Vorkosigan novella "The Flowers of Vashnoi" has not been available in a paper version since the Subterranean Press edition sold out. The novella "Winterfair Gifts" has had only scattered paper publication, not easy to find. (Both, of course, are continuously available under their own titles as my indie ebooks, or audio downloads from Blackstone.)

Neither would be economically viable for any pro publisher to handle, but it occurred to me they'd be just the thing to add to my little list of print-on-demand paper editions, including The Spirit Ring and "Knife Children". So I've put them together in a single PoD volume, to be titled Two Tales.

Experience with the long-time reader confusion over the novella "The Borders of Infinity" and the 3-novella collection it's in, Borders of Infinity, made me try to label this paper mini-collection as clearly as possible. We'll have to see how it works out. I'm not yet sure how to make it searchable under either of the novella titles, which is what I suspect most people would first be looking for.

Anyway, I asked artist Ron Miller to do us a cover in the style of my other indie VK ebooks, and here's a sneak peek:



When this paper-only edition becomes available to buy, later this summer, I'll post the ISBN number, which should helps folks trying to order it through bookstores. (Uncle Hugo's will certainly have it; they also carry the other two of my PoDs.)

Ta, L.

posted by Lois McMaster Bujold on July, 10

Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

Jul. 10th, 2025 08:53 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Desperate to pay her brother Jasper's way out of Muhlenberg County, Opal accepts a job at an infamously cursed mansion.

Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

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