My total reading count is technically inaccurate because I don't include manga or graphic novel series on my Storygraph. I don't like how it skews the genre and author data. So when Storygraph says I've read 16 books so far this year, Goodreads holds the truth: 23 books.
My friend successfully convince me to catch up with Jujutsu Kaisen since the 3rd season had come out. And in the middle of me watching it, I decided to catch up on Spy x Family too. That turned into me reading SxF and now i have volumes 5 - 29 of JJK checked out from the library so I can finish the entire series.
So my reading stats are gonna be off to say the least
Authors set out to correct under-representation of female sounds – and found some surprising revelations
When we hear the beautiful call of a bird from a high bough, we’re told it’s likely to be a male – singing for territory, or belting out tunes to woo a female. But as the annual dawn chorus reaches a crescendo this spring, a new guidebook is urging us to think again – and turn our ears to the hidden world of female birdsong.
The songs, sounds and sights of female birds have historically been overlooked in field guides and sound archives. In 2016, just 0.01% of the bird sounds in the global Xeno-Canto sound library were labelled female. Another sound archive was just 0.03% female, according to a 2018 study.
But the new book – The Sound Approach to Birding 2 – aims to correct this under-representation and properly explain female birdsong. Female birds sing for territorial displays, to ward off other females and to attract extra males, according to Lucy McRobert, a writer and researcher who studied the issue for the guidebook.
The book comes with its own library of 300 sounds from 200 species, accessed via web or app.
The clips are drawn from the larger online archive of Sound Approach, a birdsong project founded in 2000 with confirmed recordings of females for 41% of species found in the Western Palearctic, a biogeographical region encompassing Europe, north Africa and most of the Middle East...
Rereading The Goblin Emperor and The City of Brass was unplanned but it was fun to return to these stories. I also bought them - in addition to the other 2 books for the Daevabad trilogy. I was also on a large reading streak of 21 days, but I fumbled it over the weekend. I was busy.
Model Home was a little disappointing in terms of entertainment and enjoyment but I appreciate what it did. Don't go into it thinking you'll get a Haunting of Hill House or Just Like Home. It's a family drama.
You Are Here is the poetry collection we read in the library's environmentalism book discussion. I got it on my to-buy list, really enjoyed it.
Kingdom of Copper was good, though somewhere in the middle I got less and less invested in Dara's chapters and would wonder when we would get back to Ali.
There are Trans People Here is a little difficult for me and not because of the subject matter. It frustrated me because I had the thought 'these poems aren't hitting, they feel simple like i could have written them'. But the real difference between me and Melt is, I didn't write these poems; I let my perfectionism get in the way meanwhile people who I think I can write just as good as are publishing their work and getting awards. So I'm sorry Melt for being a hater. You're out here doing what I wish I was doing.
Books on the currently reading shelf for May:
Silver Nitrate - this month's book for the horror book discussion at the library. I hit 27% today in this and it's alright. We're slowing descending into the horror waters but we're still in the shallow end. The meet up is next Saturday and there's an audiobook version of it so I should be done by then.
Imagination - an informative read on the importance of creating and engaging with other imaginations to envision a liberated society for the present and future. Think 'Land Back' and solarpunk and afrofuturism and anticapitalism. It's a solid read and I'm 60% into it. That said, I almost feel like I've gotten all I need from it. I'm thinking of either skimming it or reading just the last few pages.
Empire of Gold - the finale to the Daevabad trilogy. I'm almost intimidated by the length of the book. I'm also experiencing a little anxiety and fear for our trio.
Border & Rule - 13% into this nonfiction book about global migration with the focus on migration from South and Central America into the United States. Accessible and infuriating.
The Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein - I'm upset because the ebook version is janky so I can't read it properly on my Kindle; I have a physical copy and yknow maybe this is the way God intended. If you wanna be frustrated and furious, while fighting back the feeling of hopelessness, this is the book. The chapter on hyper surveillance really messed me up. This world is fucked.
If James Patterson publishers one more book I'm crowdfunding an assassin. All library staff will support me on this. I am tired of that man taking over shelves upon shelves with his endless bullshit. Why do you have like 3 or 4 separate books on our New shelf which only holds items published in the last 6 months! No court will find me guilty. Or the hired assassin for that matter
Slowly starting Empire of Gold - the last book in the Daevabad trilogy - and realized I don't know how to share updates about my thoughts on it without them inherently being spoilers lol anything I say will have to be incredibly vague because I can think of only one mutual i have that has read the series in its entirety. I know some people probably won't care because they have no plan to read the series but I'll make sure I don't say anything too spoiler-y
Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?
Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"
Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.
Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/
Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain. You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.
It is free.
It is legal.
I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.
I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this. I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this. Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this. When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here. It’s a great resource.
Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!
If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!
And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!
I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!
Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!
it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!
Also don't think a book is old because it's in the public domain
lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons
because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death
Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune
and the more popular the classic - the more likely someone has uploaded it
Anything published (in the US) from 1927 or earlier (this number goes up every year for quite a while), and
Anything published between 1928 and 1963 that wasn't renewed, and
Anything published before 1989 without a proper copyright notice.
(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)
There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)
There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.
Project Gutenberg began in 1971; the first text was the US Declaration of Independence, shared through the university computer system. That was the start of "hey computers + public domain text = FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE."
Adding on that Project Gutenberg is not just Eng language texts either! I know specifically about the French texts because I did independent study French lit in high school and all my sources were Project Gutenberg acquired (Candide my beloathed) but there's many open source texts available in a number of languages.
Oh man, yeah, young people definitely need to learn this. I read so many public domain things when I was fresh out of college and penniless but still needed entertainment. Just going straight to Wikisource works too:
And yes, Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. But I got bored with Sherlock Holmes after a few months, and became much more pumped when I discovered his mirror opposite, Arsene Lupin. Because when you're not only young and penniless but living through the Great Recession, what you really want to read about isn't the world's greatest detective solving crimes. It's the world's greatest thief robbing fat cats blind while pantsing the police along the way.
And you can Ctrl-F find words in electronic texts.
This is so powerful that in the old times they made a whole-ass index of every word in the Bible, called a concordance. It is now possible for every electronic book
Libro.fm has a sale going on right now. I've never bought an audiobook since they're expensive (for my budget) but this sale got books 60-80% off so I just might cop a few.
I think StoryGraph should have the option to randomly suggest a book from my TBR list as my next read. gimme a spinning wheel and tell me what to read next.
If you go into your To-read Pile and push the ‘suggestions’ there’s one of the options that’s tagged ‘Here’s a random pick’ and all of the books in the suggested section is from your tbr. Is that what you are looking for?
I was right: I finished The Kingdom of Copper by the time I got home from Philadelphia. I enjoyed it a lot. I know most folk don't particularly care for the 2nd book in trilogies but I tend to like them. Out of our trio, Ali is still my favorite. I don't dislike Dara but I did care less when we return to his point of view. There's no respite for that man and I feel for him but any time we switched to his pov, I was reading to get back to Nahri or Ali.
I hope Nahri is kinder to Ali in the last book. I'm kinda tired of him being guilt tripped and made to feel small for his mistakes by her. Everybody's hardheaded and he can be frustrating but god forbid a man has morals and sticks to those morals lol. If this was dnd he would be a paladin.
to love a half-built garden; @dandelion-network - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
