Saturday Miscellany—2/3/24

Odds ‘n ends about books and reading that caught my eye this week. You’ve probably seen some/most/all of them, but just in case:
Column: Need help finding a good book? Try one your 9th-grader isn’t allowed to read —There’s something to this strategy (especially if it leads someone to read Milton), but I’m mostly sharing this for some of the updates on the banning-but-not-technically movement across the states.
The Great Fiction of AI: The strange world of high-speed semi-automated genre fiction—as Pages Unbound noted, “The problem with this article is that we’re all mocking the authors for ‘writing’ books with AI, but they’re claiming people buy their books anyway and they’re making tons of money by churning this stuff out.”
What Is Punctuation For?: Between the medieval and modern world, the marks used to make writing more legible changed from “pointing” to punctuation.
Why Are We Talking About Books Like This?—This.
What Makes a Favorite?—I appreciated Kopratic’s musings on the topic
Dealing with DNF: The Practice of Did Not Finish—I’ve linked to a number of posts on DNFing over the years, I don’t know if any have been this thorough
Why I’m No Longer Reading Grimdark…—I get this. I absolutely get this. I’m not there, but I could be. And I really identified with the Orangutan Librarian’s ‘2nd paragraph.
Welcome to the #Febookary Reading Challenge 2024!—This looks fun. I absolutely don’t have time for it, but it looks fun.

To help talk about backlist titles (and just for fun), What Was I Talking About 10 Years Ago Week?
Fobbit by David Abrams
Split Second by David Baldacci
Unnatural Selection by Aaron J. Elkins
And I noted the releases of Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch (and I was not prepared for all of that) and Cress by Marissa Meyer.

This Week’s New Releases that I’m Excited About and/or You’ll Probably See Here Soon:
According to Mark by H. B. O’Neill—”Following a bad breakup, a despondent man, Robert, becomes convinced that the spirit of Mark Twain is trying to guide his life and thinking, giving him lessons in the form of quotations from Twain’s works. Eventually, Twain focuses on getting Robert to kill himself. Robert’s eager to follow the lessons of his hero, but things keep interfering with his efforts.” Is how I started my raving about the book. You can read the rest here.
A Quantum Love Story by Mike Chen—I stopped reading at the author’s name. So I don’t know what it’s about…it’s sort of a Groundhog Day/ST:TNG “Cause and Effect” kind of thing. But not?
Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson—Stevenson follows up his dynamite novel by sticking his protagonist in a locked room mystery on a train. Sounds perfect to me.
Rivers of London: Here Be Dragons by James Swallow, Andrew Cartmel, Ben Aaronovitch—Peter and Nightingale deal with a Wyvern above London in the newest comic collection.
These Deadly Prophecies by Andrea Tang—without reading it, I doubt I can do better than the description: “A teenage sorcerer’s apprentice must solve her boss’s murder in order to prove her innocence in this twisty, magic-infused murder mystery perfect for fans of Knives Out and The Inheritance Games.”

Lastly, I’d like to say hi and extend a warm welcome to mentalnotes1, who followed the blog this week. I hope you enjoy the content and keep coming back.