Literature

Children's reading enjoyment has fallen to its lowest level in almost two decades, with just one in three young people saying that they enjoy reading in their free time, according to a new survey.

Only 34.6% of eight- to 18-year-olds surveyed by the National Literacy Trust (NLT) said that they enjoy reading in their spare time. This is the lowest level recorded by the charity since it began surveying children about their reading habits 19 years ago, representing an 8.8 percentage point drop since last year.

It is also part of a broader downward trend since 2016, when almost two in three children said that they enjoyed reading.

Wikipedia TL;DR

Oil! is a novel by Upton Sinclair, first published in 1926–27 and told as a third-person narrative, with only the opening pages written in the first person. The book was written in the context of the Harding administration's Teapot Dome Scandal and takes place in Southern California. It is a social and political satire skewering the human foibles of all its characters.

The main character is James Arnold Ross Jr., nicknamed Bunny, son of an oil tycoon. Bunny's sympathetic feelings toward oilfield workers and socialists provoke arguments with his father throughout the story. The beginning of the novel served as a loose inspiration for the 2007 film There Will Be Blood.

My Take: Basically the TL;DR is that Oil companies have been buying politicians and stalling progress while their actions destroy the lives of untold masses forever. This book is like 100 years old, so that means it has been a big enough problem to write a whole pulpy novel about it for longer than any of us will ever live. Corporations are bad. Great characters and retro cultural obscura!

Linked below is an excellent copy by Standard Ebooks you can legally have for free if you also want to be mad about the oil industry and capitalism more broadly.

Oil! 🌋 Upton Sinclair

I have been listening to the podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz, which picks a sound or music (eg music of Hans Zimmer) and the host recommended another podcast called Imaginary Worlds. I cannot get enough of it. The host picks a topic and usually has guests to discuss it (eg Terri Pratchett’s Discworld, or how Norse mythology permeates present day).

The show tickles my sense for philosophy by asking really open-ended and thought-provoking questions. And the host quite often has a books or movies that I would have never otherwise heard of, such as Octavia Butler- Lilith’s Brood (aka Xenogensis) and Dora Raymaker - Resonance; which explore the experiences of black and autistic authors, respectively, and how that shapes the stories they create.

Not many things prompt me to think outside of the box like this show. I just wanted to share, in case anyone else could enjoy it as much as I am.

For the uninitiated, “shipping,” or the act of creating a romantic pairing between two people or characters who may not already be romantically involved, may seem like an uniquely internet phenomena.

But really, it IS the stuff of legend. From today’s Tay/Trav, to Shakespeare’s Romeo/Juliet, to Homer’s Achilles/Patroclus, to Adam/Eve. Romantic shipping (denoted by the “/”) is practically biblical.

It's human nature to pair Human A and Human B (and possibly Human C, D, etc.) together and hope for the best. But how do we collectively decide WHO gets shipped?

We set out to try to answer that question by looking at 11 years of Archive of Our Own (AO3) data compiled by centreoftheselights.

archive.is link

Mine is Becky Chambers. I've just finished rereading all of her work, and it gave me the exact same feeling of hope I had the first time. Not groundbreaking, but soul-feeding.

Publishers are complaining that people prefer to read the novels in English instead of their native tongues.

Hey folks! I'm hoping that someone can recommend a book or two on herbalism - preferably ones where the author discussed the terpenes and secondary plant metabolites more than the magickal properties of the plants in question.

Currently I'm looking up plants through things like the NIH portal but would prefer to have some books I could reference as well; those studies are usually focused on one or two metabolites or compounds and it would be nicer to have that sort of information for each indicated use. For example: plantain (Plantago major) and comfrey (Comfrey officinale) are both used for skin conditions due to their production of allantoin; mountain mints (Pycnanthemum spp) are used in various ways for their production of carvacrol, menthone, isomenthone, β-elemene, limonene, piperitone, and germacrene D.

Thanks!

Anthony Bourdain & The Balvenie head to San Francisco, California to meet with Andrew Hoyem, master typographer and printer of Arion Press. One of the last of its kind, Arion Press has only a handful of members on its staff, all fellow craftsmen dedicated to this age old process. Each works meticulously to create the books in multiple parts, from the typecasters, to the proofreaders, to the printers and the bookbinders. All of these hands build a work of art through a process that must be seen to be believed, and can only, truly, be described as magic. Episode directed by filmmaker Rob Meyer.

Огляд коміксу «Одна весна в Чорнобилі» від Емманюеля Лепажа. Історія про Чорнобильську атомну катастрофу очима європейців. "Таємна кімната" - про комікси та мальописи українською.

Not sure I like the "Netflix of books" suggestion(libraries exist!), but I thought this was interesting.

Please see also: https://beehaw.org/post/12924678

We've all got one. That pile of books waiting to be read, some of them surely doomed to linger for years as other more enticing novels are selected instead. What's in yours?