#on reading

[bookaddict24-7]

I tried to be funny on Tik tok 😂

[patolemus]

It’s very humbling when you’re reading a book —part of a trilogy, very acclaimed— and the only thing you can think of is ‘the fanfic I read the other day was better’

[uglygreenjacket]

*reads child a bedtime story*: I wonder when and why I stopped needing one of these.

*pulls up ao3 in bed like I’ve done every night for years*: Oh. OH.

[faeriefully]

What’s that specific type of book if you answered the second option?

My friend and I are having a discussion.

[feral-ballad]

Sayat Nova, from Anthology of Armenian Poetry, ed. & tr. by Diana Der Hovanessian and Marzbed Margossian; "Listen to me"

[kitchen-light]

Nothing I write could do him justice or communicate how great of a teacher, friend, poet, and activist he was. He was very strong and very stubborn. I always believed that people like him never die . . .they somehow transcend death and pain and come back to us as a source of hope, strength, and belief. In a way, we already see how far-reaching his words are now. His poem “If I Must Die” has being translated into more than two hundred and fifty languages, and his verses are chanted at protests all around the world. As we navigate the waves of sorrow at losing him, it is important for us to remember that he was targeted because of his words and his message and that it is our duty to carry it and amplify it. After all, he told us: “If I must die,/ You must live,/ to tell my story.”

Nadya Siyam, from "Remembering Dr. Refaat Alareer", published in Words Without Borders, January 29, 2024.

[derangedrhythms]

She feels the lure of sitting with a good book, a big thick one of the kind that leave an impression stronger and realer than life itself.

Hanne Ørstavik, Love, tr. Martin Aitken

[somerabbitholes]

— index cards, moyra davey

[onenakedfarmer]

ITALO CALVINO If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

[bookaddict24-7]

"I like that library books have secret lives. All those hands that have held them. All those eyes that have read them."

―Same Sun Here by Neela Vaswani

[glitterblossom]

looking for a new eldritch horror story

ask my friends if their faves are interesting or just tentacles

they dont understand

pull out illustrated diagram explaing what is interesting and what is tentacles

they laugh and say “it’s a good story maam”

spend hours of my life reading it

its tentacles

[antigonick]

But in the end, I think it’s perhaps best for [my characters] to belong to the reader, who will visualize them through the lens of imagination in a vivid and constantly changing way no camera can duplicate. Movies, after all, are only an illusion of motion comprised of thousands of still photographs. The imagination, however, moves with its own tidal flow. Films, even the best of them, freeze fiction [...]. That is not necessarily bad… but it is limiting. The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.

—Stephen King, in his "Preface" to The Stand

[chthonic-cassandra]

Book post for a Saturday: I'd love to hear recommendations of books that you feel changed you - shifted your perspective on something, whether about the subject of the book or about what books and words and stories can do, widened your frame of reference, effected some kind of internal transformation, large or small.

[navybrat817]

I need a day off to write.

I need another day off to read.

Anyone else?

[elucubrare]

one of the things i think is really fun about porting a pre-modern story into a modern setting is finding correspondences between story elements - "what act/object/concept fills the same niche in our society as the original element?" and i think that goes really well with my post from last night about essential elements of stories -

i think the best way to recontextualize Achilles' initial complaint against Agamemnon is that you'd be pretty mad if you did all the work in a project and someone else took all the credit, right? when he calls Agamemnon "dogface" etc it's because Agamemnon wants equal right to the glory from the war so far despite having sat in his tent at Troy the whole time.

so if I'm moving it to a college setting, it's a group project where Achilles did all the work. But grades aren't divided in the same way that plunder is - does it change the story too much if Agamemnon plagiarized and Professor Apollo says that he'll fail everyone if the plagiarist doesn't step forward? It's an inversion of the immediate cause of contention (Agamemnon takes too much credit vs. Agamemnon won't take responsibility) but it preserves enough of the spirit of the conflict (Achilles wants to be judged for his own deeds) that it counts for me.

Any retelling has to make a lot of these choices, and I think they're fun, but I also think that that sheer amount of them and their inherent subjectivity make it very easy for retellings to stumble and fall flat.