I remember the already highly finished sketch for this cover coming through the fax machine (a long time ago, 1995). I was waiting for another entirely unrelated fax, I saw this cover slowly emerge and couldn’t believe how great it was, even though I did know the Dillons were amazing artists.
I am so confused by this 😂
I think you and I "grew up" in similar fandom times, and I remember when I was a teen, people used to have lots of fun with the 100-word limit on drabbles & agonize and dither over cutting and adding each word ... a lost art
My photo shows a museum display with colourful Minoan pottery cups arranged on three clear shelves, one above the other. These cups, known as Kamares Ware, are from Phaistos, Crete. They were made in palace workshops, c. 1800-1700 BC. The cups range in shape and size from conic and cylindrical cups (top and middle shelves) to hemispherical and carinated shaped cups (bottom shelf). They are decorated with multi-coloured geometric motifs; with spirals and swirls painted in red and white pigment on black.
Sipping my coffee ☕️ and thinking about these marvellous Minoan cups!
They look so modern it’s incredible to think they were made during the Bronze Age some 3,800 years ago!
Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete. 📷 by me
#Archaeology
or I mean, tweet → post (I refuse to use the word "blueet" haha)
this is the most "you" tweet ever 😂
Humour is a leavening agent for prose and writing that lacks it tends to feel leaden and stolid. If have I laughed with a character I am far more likely to cry with them later. These days I find it hard to push through fiction that doesn't have at least some sense of fun or joy to it.
And of course if you want to read something inspired by authors who can mix humour and peril, but absolutely it's own thing, with adventure and hijinks and some good jokes, you might enjoy my novel, The Redstone Rescue: turnanother.page/book/the-red...
art of faces & places! that are actually in the book! and make you feel things! and evoke the world you're about to step into!
book cover for montgomery bonbon: mystery at the manor. bright green and yellow colour scheme with cartoony art. a detective in a red trenchcoat, who actually looks kind of like a 9-year-old girl with a fake moustache, is spotlighted against the front doors of a manor house crawling with ivy
book cover for the secret keepers. a cartoon style with plenty of impressionistic swirls, in blue and red colours. cameo portraits of two children and a lighthouse, with pouring rain and sea in the background.
book cover for scarlet morning. a plucky-looking boy and girl against a backdrop of fog and sea, a red moon and shadowy rogueish figure in the distance. the entire thing suffused by the red from the moon
book cover for the swifts. a family of characters rendered in a charming, quirky sketch style descend an ornate staircase
those silhouette book covers w/ minimalist graphic design were neat when they first hit fantasy books, but I'm so tired of them now. publishers, please pay human artists to draw & paint faces again! :(
one of the great things about middle grade books is that they still have actual cover art, e.g. +
Mutazione is one of my all-time favourites! the writers really understand the messiness and worthwhile-ness of community ... beautiful. I bought Saltsea ages ago but haven't gotten around to playing it yet -- I suppose part of me is "saving it for a rainy day," though that's silly isn't it
so true!! I opened it the other day to watch the Critical Role adaptation and my partner and I ended up spending twenty minutes hate-watching — hate-browsing?? — through the descriptions of shows and just laughing. so much generic recycled content
I can't decide which would be funnier:
1) the cat is really sweet to Jiang Cheng, who treats this cat that everyone else hates like a little baby,
2) the cat is really mean to Jiang Cheng but Jiang Cheng thinks the cat is a perfect little baby anyway
Miles Vorkosigan, though I'm not sure if he'd have a cat (too much running around the galaxy) so also pick any character from that series that might amuse you!
The ebook and print versions also have lovely little beginning-of-chapter illustrations that you definitely don't want to miss out on! :)
yeah, it's a sweet way of keeping in touch! ☺️ and occasionally seeing what people are up to. I do the location sharing thing too (with my best friend who lives in another province)
bsky.app/profile/anci...
so alternative option: listening to smart people talk about it! I like this podcast a lot and I like how discussions and reviews let me experience a book again in a different way (I really wish I still had a real-life book club, mine faded away quietly during 2020)
sometimes I'm struck with the desire to reread The Secret History, but I suspect that I might find it annoying now, so what I *actually* want is to read a new book that makes me feel the way The Secret History did when I was twenty
Happy birthday! 🎉 💜
Hoping for an easier upcoming year for you 💕
Very much second that rec! The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy was one of my favourite reads from last year; it's like a sci-fi worldbuilding extravaganza but based on Facts. :) I also loved Other Minds, though I admit I had to read several parts of it twice (it's very dense/complex)
excitement at the topic even though he never really says anything about himself.
Ooh, adding those to my list! And I also really like Atul Gawande -- I think the year I discovered him I read four of his books in a row 😅
In terms of nature writing, recently loved An Immense World by Ed Yong. So. Many. Facts! The way he writes, you get a distinct sense of his wonder and +
navel gaze-y or wallow-y at all. Also I remember it being just amazingly good writing on a prose level
Great rec! I also loved Emperor of All Maladies, despite not usually liking narrative-heavy nonfic. I think that, yeah, it was because all of the patients' stories funnelled into a greater understanding of cancer and its impact, rather than being about the author's life/feelings. It wasn't +
I have realised that my big problem with a lot of non-fiction books is when authors put tons of personal narrative to carefully wrap actual facts and information in. The books that get praised as "lyrically written".
I guess I am basically interested in clearly written textbooks.
I just want to learn about stuff and I'm not really interested in the author's personal journey of connection when the book was pitched as being about volcanoes.
I am apparently not the target audience for most books about the natural world in particular, sadly.
You are *so* right about this! I can think of many offenders off the top of my head and all of them are nature writing 😂 (and, unfairly, none of them were advertised as memoirs!)
Like you, I think I basically just want facts organized in a logical sequence that helps you scaffold and remember the concepts. The more concise, the better. Why are science and nature books so full of journalists' *feelings* 😭
I am jumping up and down and throwing my hands up in the air because I agree with you SO MUCH!!! Other readers seem to love meandering, memoir-ish books about how transformative it was for the writer to learn about some aspect of nature and I HATE it :D
Yes, my experience was similar! It was so neat to come to the podcast with no context whatsoever and try to work out what was going on!
