literature.cafe chat

This is my first post so I decided to ask this.

Mine is “a time to kill” bye John Grisham.

I have been thinking more and more about how our personal lives impact our access to literature and information in general.

For example, I am reading a book I am rather enjoying, but it's in French with no translation in any other languages. It's also from a local small publishing company. At the moment, I am not aware if it has been published as an e-book, that would make it more available, but for what I know this one book is accessible only to people in a rough 100km radius from where I am, and has a language requirement.

In a similar way, news is highly language based, and new outlets will differ significantly in what news they are distributing depend ing on language and geographical location (have you heard about the Serbian protests in the last weeks? I wouldn't if it hadn't been for a Serbian friend - and I have very limited first hand access to news about it).

How conscious are you that you live - necessarily - in a bubble? When do you notice it most?

Related, check out this website: novelty-insights.com where you can analyse your goodreads book data to see what sort of categories you read most from - a sort of "filter" we apply to ourselves, sometimes willingly, sometimes unconsciously.

cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/15172721

cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/15172719

Hey everyone, I am working on a project for a science fiction college class. Initially I wanted to post a couple short stories I had ideas for on here, I still would like to do that. However as I started brainstorming and planning I realized one writing idea was longer form than a short story. So I still would like to post my short story once it is writing but I was wondering how people who write on here tend to actually start their writing, how much planning happens before ink hits paper as it were? Also how much help can newcomers find on Lemmy? I'd like to do a presentation on Lemmy as a resource similar to how reddit is commonly used. Any help would be appreciated!

I did a book review of an overlooked metafiction classic: The Affirmation by Christopher Priest

I've never use a book reading tracker before. But I made a few weeks ago a BookWyrme account.
BookWyrme is the fediverse book reading tracker and I'm marking books I've read when I remember them. Often, I need to add them to my instance as I've mainly read in French and many books needs to be manually added or imported before completing missing information.

This made made think about my journey as a reader. I've read lot older books in english or at least old enough to have more than one french translation. Would I love them with another translator or another translation? Would I enjoy reading them in english now? Would the langage difference be too much? Have a change too much as person?

I've read comics in paper format, volume by volume but I read them now online, chapter by chapter. How should I should I add them? Should I add both forms?

Which field are missing in BookWyrme to add information that are pertinent to me? What are its limitation? What are the workaround these limitations?

I looking for people to discuss these subjects.
Are you interested?

I don't want to write such big post again and make giant conversations but to publish smaller post on semi-regular basis and hear a bit of feedback.

Is this the right place? Do you know a more fitting community?

Heya, I'm still here. Still working on things in the background and been quite busy. Right now the instance server needs some updates and the pictures backend is a little wonky. Gonna take the instance down for a bit presumably sometime tomorrow for some (hopefully) quick spring cleaning.

As almost every readers, I have some favorite authors from which I like to read everything they publish. But I wonder how I can efficiently "follow" their publication. Do you know about a service (free, at least as in free beer, at best from the foss world)which can offer such syndication? I'm thinking about a personalized rss feed, or a e-mail, or any way. For the moment, I just look from time to time to their website or social media page but the issues I have are:

• I look when I think about it (it would be better to be somehow notified)
• It's time consuming and inefficient

I'm French native speaker. I believe I can speak fluent English but I know want to discover English poetry. Where should I start ?

I got a few, but mainly just stuck to the library.

I'm new to the Ebook game and confused about the ecosystem. Do Amazon, Rakuten, and Barnes and Noble really control the whole market? Anywhere I can buy big titles not from big companies?

• Bag of bones: Made a post about this already.
• Test Cricket By Jarrod Kimber: A history of the sport written by a great storyteller. Very digestable, the best book if youre a cricket fan.
• Your face belongs to us: If you're on lemmy you likely care about your privacy and need to know about this. This is the emd of privacy.
• God, Human, Animal, Machine: It's been the year of AI and this is a brilliant book to read with great history, philosophy and a personal touch. Very accessible too. (Discovered from the Ezra Klein podcast)
• A dictionary of symbols by Juan Eduardo Cirlot: We all rely on symbolic expression, paeticularly in art. Reading emtries in this book as essays has improved the way I think about amd interpret art. It's an incredible tool if you find symbology important.
• The last Mughal by William Dalrymple: I cannot recommend this enough. One of the most readable history books ever and based on an incredible time period that isn't talked about enough. Incredible individual stories. Really, it's a must read imo.

These are the important recommendations, read a lot of short stories this year and intend to post them on !shortstories@literature.cafe

Some books I haven't recommended since they weren't interesting enough and some were already talked about more than enough.

Including:

• Stats
• Where I find my books
• Where I find reading recommendations
• My best reads of 2023

(The vast majority of these books are available in English, a couple are only in French. The review itself is in English.)