If there's one thing audiobooks are not so great for it's the ability to go back and digest things. I have to say if I had that ability with this book I might just never finish it. Wikiquote let me find this part again, thank you for that, and I am including it half in gay laughter and half bc I like these commandments a lot even if I rarely keep to them.
User Profile
@worshipthesquid@weirder.earth on mastodon. Use yr favourite pronouns, or mix it up.
Trying to get back into reading light & easy books to relax instead of scrollin’! I like mysteries, fantasy & sci fi (of the shorter & sillier variety), and the odd non-fiction book, mostly on foraging or history. I tend to pick up my books from free piles or the library so mostly older titles.
This link opens in a pop-up window
Blackberry Jim's books
2024 Reading Goal
5% complete! Blackberry Jim has read 1 of 18 books.
User Activity
RSS feed Back
"Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of 'em. But that's against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth — So here goes again."
Blackberry Jim commented on Moby Dick, Or, the White Whale by Herman Melville
Nobody told me Moby Dick was funny?? I always expect classics to be kind of hard to engage with emotionally or in prose style, and to be fair I bounced off this a couple times as a teenager because I kept forgetting what people's names were by focusing on every little detail. This is a funny book. One of my favourite flavours of funny, which is an earnest but humorous narrative voice. AND it's an earnest but humorous narrative voice that looooves trying to taxonomise whales while emphasizing the futility and yet importance of this attempt.
This audiobook narrator (Stewart Mills) is bringing out the humour in the lines really well without overdoing it. I'm having fun :)
Blackberry Jim commented on Octavia's Brood by adrienne maree brown
tasty and fun!
4 stars
Content warning spoilers? horror - dysfunctional families
It's so nice to receive this just in time for Halloween season! I'm not much of a LARPer, but I love roleplaying games and delicious horror and people trying to create weird and powerful narrative experiences (really sounds like ad copy when I put it like that, but I don't know how else to put it). And I do love horror about food and houses. This is a very fun collection of earnest LARPs mostly about food!
There are a couple of genuinely scary games in here, and a few more genuinely uncomfortable games, which is a good hit rate. I don't read a lot of LARPs so maybe I'm generalizing here but I think there's an earnestness in these, and a willingness to do things that might look silly, that probably a hardened LARPer is particularly suited for, and I aspire to it. It also makes these really fun to read and imagine. In one, a family's controlling father is optionally played by a mannequin at the dinner table. There's a set of ~~scary~~ bedtime stories & poems in the middle, which are scary in a like, unselfconscious cheesy campfire story way.
Beyond that, some of these LARPs take the opportunity to effectively evoke a very specific feeling and setting. The very first game is a solo game where you play a housewife hiding her alien features: putting on makeup, making dinner for two, hearing from her husband that he'll be late, eating one portion alone at a candlelit dinner table. I haven't played it (yet?) but the scene-setting seems completely effective. Not all the games are this successful, I think, but enough of them are, and I found all of them interesting - and there's quite a few of them. I also really liked the integration with some online resources, like soundtracks and a 1999 new year broadcast! And I have to mention the lovely art - every LARP has a gorgeous full-page horror illustration attached to it.
My wishes for this collection would be: - some more interesting rules? there were one or two places where you could feel the design very satisfyingly and the mechanics came together wonderfully with the scene, but I would have loved to see a deeper delve into mechanics, I guess bc that's what I'm really fascinated with. Maybe what I really want is a behind-the-scenes discussion about writers' design choices. I should see if they've done that! - a little more copyediting, there's a few distracting spelling & formatting errors and the wording of rules in some places is unclear - not to unplayability, but it takes you out of it a bit. - more recipes!
Blackberry Jim reviewed The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik
:)
5 stars
Aw, I just really like this series. Thoroughly recommend it. I keep expecting it to be less polished, because a lot of Temeraire feels less polished and more, like, thematically aimless to me, but it‘s very well-thought-out I think. I enjoy how the protagonist‘s perspective on the world changes, and we get to see some of this world‘s politics and the inequities thereof. There‘s also a very effective horror scene in this book. Mostly it‘s really nice to read a well-executed series that leads the reader inexorably toward the necessity of working with others to change the systems of global & institutional inequality, in ways that will be frustrating and incomplete but are worth doing - what this rekindled in me is a sense of powerful urgency & drive to join others in this work, which seems like a sign of a successful series to me. Themes of personal development …
Aw, I just really like this series. Thoroughly recommend it. I keep expecting it to be less polished, because a lot of Temeraire feels less polished and more, like, thematically aimless to me, but it‘s very well-thought-out I think. I enjoy how the protagonist‘s perspective on the world changes, and we get to see some of this world‘s politics and the inequities thereof. There‘s also a very effective horror scene in this book. Mostly it‘s really nice to read a well-executed series that leads the reader inexorably toward the necessity of working with others to change the systems of global & institutional inequality, in ways that will be frustrating and incomplete but are worth doing - what this rekindled in me is a sense of powerful urgency & drive to join others in this work, which seems like a sign of a successful series to me. Themes of personal development & collaboration in order to effect radical change are of course present in Temeraire, but that feels like a lead-up to this in a few ways.
Anyway. Recommended! Time for me to see if I like Spinning Silver!
Blackberry Jim started reading Far Out by Paula Guran
Blackberry Jim finished reading My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness by Nagata Kabi
I saw @lapis@bookwyrm.social recommended this series, and it turns out my host has this volume & was happy for me to read it! Read it in one go without meaning to. Really interesting and it‘s nice to see this voice in a longer form comic, talking thoughtfully and sensitively about her experience of having very bad social skills, isolation, purpose and seeking unconditional love. I think (even though I would probably never run into it) this would have been really good for me to read as a teenager, and it‘s still good to read now.
Blackberry Jim reviewed The Grief of Stones by Katherine Addison
:)
5 stars
I like this series a lot. This was a strong entry I think! I can’t try and be objective because it really hits a lot of things I enjoy and others may not. I read it in two big gulps, not wanting to put it down at any point; two chapters in onward I was grinning and feeling very delighted as I read. Light spoilers (nothing plot relevant) time:
- A book that spends a couple of pages at least dealing with the mundane process of finding directions in a city where maps are maintained by two organisations with different priorities is a book that has probably already won my heart. Lots of little things like that in here, never at a Les Miserables level or anything - the protagonist is actually, e.g., changing lines twice on the tram in order to get to the other side of the city, or …
I like this series a lot. This was a strong entry I think! I can’t try and be objective because it really hits a lot of things I enjoy and others may not. I read it in two big gulps, not wanting to put it down at any point; two chapters in onward I was grinning and feeling very delighted as I read. Light spoilers (nothing plot relevant) time:
- A book that spends a couple of pages at least dealing with the mundane process of finding directions in a city where maps are maintained by two organisations with different priorities is a book that has probably already won my heart. Lots of little things like that in here, never at a Les Miserables level or anything - the protagonist is actually, e.g., changing lines twice on the tram in order to get to the other side of the city, or talking to an established quiltmaker who might well share names of her patterns to make him feel welcome, so rather than being a random worldbuilding aside it does feel smoothly integrated to me. We have a continued interest in clothing and textiles from the previous books, which is always nice.
- I’m a sucker for a messed up duty obsessed protagonist tortured by their code of ethics. This is a lighter one of those, where he has friends and not Too much ongoing trauma.
- I am not a mysteries connoisseur. This one seemed fine! Believably took the main character between interesting places and people.
- I don’t think I’ve seen ‘stridden’ in a book for a long time. Tickles me
- Maybe it’s because the phrase gets my attention every time, but I feel like ‘wonder-tale’ was overused in this book. Much as I enjoy the narrative referencing other fictional narratives & broadening our understanding of the culture that way.
- I’m interested in that ‘justice is a role of the government & it must be done’ conversation near the end. It ended unsatisfyingly but maybe truthfully for the characters. I’d be interested to see more of Thara’s philosophy in that respect. He’s written as separate from the police, who are sometimes violent and discriminatory in-universe, and he lacks the power to compel people to talk to him or let him search places, or to arrest people; however with detective stories like this the ideas about justice, mercy, the law, etc that they communicate are always worth looking out for. I hope we see some development on this theme and how Thara’s experiences inform his opinion there in the next book. (I think we see it a little with the reflection on the title later in the book.)
That was not very coherent! I am very sleepy. Book good. Excited to read the next.
Blackberry Jim started reading Peter Darling by Austin Chant
A friend who’s very into Peter Pan recommended this, and I am really enjoying it so far. I expected it to be fun but not that good, because that’s what my experience with a lot of self-published fantasy has been, and I was wrong! It’s pretty great. I’m listening to the audiobook as usual and, although it’s slightly less polished than many audiobooks, the sound quality is good, it’s clear and engagingly read, and the voice the narrator does for Hook especially is imo fantastic.
:)
4 stars
I enjoyed this! I was not expecting a lot of it! It’s very surprising that it came out last year bc I’m just trawling my library audiobook collection :3 I think it successfully told a beautiful and broad-ranging story about love, romantic, familial, complicated. The audiobook is also good, with two readers tackling chapters from different perspectives.
I probably will look out for more by this author - it didn’t blow me away and fill me with awe, but it was definitely more engaging and I think more skilful than most light historical fiction/light fantasy I read.
Alright, spoilers ahead.
-
-
-
-
-
I think the parts in the seraglio sometimes dragged on a bit. Also, it’s been two months & I am not equipped to do this atm, but there is probably much to say about race in this book, especially in relation to it as historical …
I enjoyed this! I was not expecting a lot of it! It’s very surprising that it came out last year bc I’m just trawling my library audiobook collection :3 I think it successfully told a beautiful and broad-ranging story about love, romantic, familial, complicated. The audiobook is also good, with two readers tackling chapters from different perspectives.
I probably will look out for more by this author - it didn’t blow me away and fill me with awe, but it was definitely more engaging and I think more skilful than most light historical fiction/light fantasy I read.
Alright, spoilers ahead.
-
-
-
-
-
I think the parts in the seraglio sometimes dragged on a bit. Also, it’s been two months & I am not equipped to do this atm, but there is probably much to say about race in this book, especially in relation to it as historical fiction drawing from historical tropes. I didn’t think of it while reading somehow but of course the European held in the seraglio, and the ending in a marriage (or three couples), and probably other things I’m not noticing, are totally in dialogue with period literature & drama (alas I don’t read enough to tell what or when, only to recognise these elements!). It didn’t make that literariness an inescapable part of the story, though (except for a self-indulgent but I think successful quote near the end), which, even though I do like that now and then, I appreciated. The whole thing had an interesting approach to slightly fantastical historical fiction that I’ll probably think more about. And to romance!
mouse quoted The lonely city by Olivia Laing
What is it about masks and loneliness? The obvious answer is that they offer relief from exposure, from the burden of being seen — what is described in the German as Maskenfreiheit, the freedom conveyed by masks. To refuse scrutiny is to dodge the possibility of rejection, though also the possibility of acceptance, the balm of love. This is what makes masks so poignant as well as so uncanny, sinister, unnerving.
Blackberry Jim commented on Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
I am enjoying this book so much. I guess I was ready to think about a lot of its themes, because it feels like scratching an itch even when it’s uncomfortable. Trying to tease out what this book thinks about individualism and community & power, & what I think.
The audiobook I’m listening to is great. I’m taking a break just now because wow, it’s getting heavier! But this definitely makes me want to read more of Octavia Butler’s work and see what the themes are, and if the other books have more things for me to think about. (Also it’s fun reading a science fiction book that starts in 2024.)
Blackberry Jim commented on The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
the audiobook for this is very soothing. Short chapters just the right length to fall asleep to… monks with different voices played by the same guy… long lists of different fabulous gargoyles or heresies or whatever… sections of untranslated latin, which I mayyybe might be able to puzzle out in text but spoken are white noise… arguments about biblical interpretation, basically ditto… for all I know the book is a very good mystery but it is also very good at lulling me comfortably to sleep, 5 stars, will borrow again