RandomDent

Yeah I do that too! I'm here for cozy literature talk, not whatever is going on in the rest of Lemmy lol.

For the new year, I'm going to try a thing based on a Ray Bradbury quote:

The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.

So far I've only got half of one 'cause it's the first week of January, but I'm going to see how far I can get with it.

This is one I've been meaning to read for ages! I really liked The Disposessed and The Left Hand Of Darkness, but that's as far as I've gotten with Ursula Le Guin so far.

The North Korea section of the book was so creepy, I still think about that from time to time.

I own it but haven't read it yet, but apparently Edith Grossman's translation of Don Quixote is supposed to be great. Also I just learned she died a couple of weeks ago, RIP.

For the show, the beginning of the 2005 revival is probably a good place to start! The first couple of seasons are probably a bit dated now but still good, and they treat it as kind of a soft reboot because it had had been off the air for ~15 years at that point so it's designed for new viewers to drop in without having to know all the backstory and stuff.

As for the books I have no idea lol. There are quite a lot of those IIRC.

I am convinced that there's not a book written that can't be improved by the addition of a Sassy Robot Sidekick.

Doctor Who is good for the second one too, that's basically the Doctor's whole deal that they never carry a weapon and just try to talk their way through everything. Although they will fuck someone up if they get pushed too far lol.

Yeah this seems like a good call TBH

I really like Homage To Catalonia, it might actually be my favourite Orwell book.

Also most Bill Bryson books. I read One Summer, America, 1927 recently and really enjoyed it, but A Short History Of Nearly Everything and At Home were also highlights.

I was going to say Ursula Le Guin but someone beat me to it lol.

So instead: I haven't read all of her books yet, but I've really liked everything by Emily St. John Mandel that I've read so far. Station Eleven was great (and the TV series is even better somehow!) and Sea of Tranquility was super interesting.

Good for them. They've been there for over 450 years, it should be on the Olympics to work around them IMO.