No Good Books

There are no good books. There are no bad books. There are only books. Goodreads YouTube

[nogoodbooks]

No Good Books? No Bad Books?

"No good books"?! What a strange thing for a long-time bookseller to say.

Well, before I was a bookseller, I was a software engineer, and before that I was a math major. I like precise definitions.

How do you define "good" or "bad" in relation to a book? Is there an objective standard or does it come down to "I know it when I see it"?

"Good and bad I define these terms, Quite clear, no doubt, somehow. Ah, but I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now." —Bob Dylan, My Back Pages

If lots of people dislike a video enough to click a dislike button or leave a negative comment, does that mean it's bad?

What if a work is universally celebrated, then time goes by and it's widely panned, and then it's celebrated again? Was it good and then bad and then good again? Or were the audience and critics wrong?

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." —Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2

[nogoodbooks]

Skybound Firsts

Distributed free to serve as an introduction to Robert Kirkman's Skybound Entertainment, this volume reprints issue #1 from several of their titles. Quality ranges from 3 to 5 stars, with 4 as an average. The stars of the show are "Invincible" and "The Walking Dead." (I wish I could remember who gave me this so I could thank them.)

https://www.goodreads.com/nogoodbooks

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Someday I will learn to keep my mouth shut.

Well, no, I probably won't.

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Not being lonely is too much work.

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Taking a bus in my hometown: Trivial. Boring. Smelly.

Taking a bus while traveling: Adventurous! Lively! Cinematic!

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Fancy "Pants" Shock Principal of High School Student Sent Home Because His Raiment Was Deemed Too Gorgeous Revolt Is Expected

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri, May 20, 1908

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Magical Mood Improver

Feeling crummy and sluggish. Time to haul out the big guns of day brightening.

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Is this satire? I can't tell anymore.

"We need to return the ownership of these huge corporations to everyday folks, the people who do the work. It's the only way to stop their socialist agenda."

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"Teddy and I were going to do a guinea pig survey today, but we realised we didn't have any guinea pigs."

[disguisedfeelings]

To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June.

Jean-Paul Sartre

[nogoodbooks]

I quite enjoy going for a walk in January.

[Sorry. Sometimes the troll in me comes out and I just can't help myself. It is true, though, that I like to walk during any month of the year.]

[dry-gold]

Hey in middle earth is there any ecological consequences for those big fuckin eagles

[astercrash]

Goblins and hobbits both make their homes underground

[max1461]

Harry Potter is like Star Wars in that, in its original incarnation, you aren't supposed to think about it, its world is a pastiche meant to provide suitable aesthetics for a simple and fun adventure story. And at that task it succeeded so thoroughly that it attracted a lot of people who wanted to think about it, and in its later incarnations it seems that its creators want to too. But this was a doomed thing from the start because it wasn't designed for that and was never going to succeed at it.

[nogoodbooks]

Brilliant.

Though probably not safe to think too hard about.

[nogoodbooks]

The Best of C.M. Kornbluth

I like short reviews, so here is one:

The Best of C. M. Kornbluth by C.M. Kornbluth

Kornbluth was a brilliant writer primarily of short science fiction. Nearly every story here is very good, but "The Marching Morons" would be a 5 star book all by itself: prescient, terrifying, profound, disturbingly funny, unpleasantly but plausibly solving the world's problems in a few pages. Frederik Pohl's hagiographic introduction is also interesting. I hope this starts you looking for more Kornbluth (and Pohl).

You can find more of my book reviews on Goodreads.

[nogoodbooks]

Josh Gondelman gives good advice

#113. Another Resolution Speed Round Resolutions: Because the first solutions didn't work!

Josh responds to reader questions about resolutions:

I’m working to get my dumb ass to read a book a month. It shouldn’t be hard, but there’s so much tv and things to look at on my phone instead.

Oh yell yeah. As someone with a similarly dumb ass, who is also prone to scrolling, I believe in you (and me) here! There are so many great books, and so many of them are fun to read. And guess what? The fun ones count as books too! A.B.A.B. (All Books Are Books). You don’t have to read War and Peace to consider yourself a reader. You don’t have to swim against the tide of Moby Dick’s page count to prove your literacy! I am POSITIVE that you can find a book or two that fires up the little pinball machine lights in your brain and makes you want to leave your phone across the room for an hour or two.

Extremely biased recommendation: Nobody talks about books and suggests good books to read like Maris Kreizman over at her newsletter The Maris Review!

[o-the-mts]

Why your local indie bookstore might not have Hillbilly Elegy in stock this week (or ever).

Last week, shortly after the announcement that JD Vance would be joining the Republican ticket, I was working my bookstore gig at The Golden Notebook when a woman came in and asked me if we had any…

[nogoodbooks]

Now and then I have a conversation that goes like this:

"You're a liberal bookstore so I'm sure you don't have the book I'm looking for."

"What book are you looking for?"

"[Latest conservative bestseller.]"

"Here it is."

Now and then I have to try very hard to resist feeling smug.

[nogoodbooks]

Trump vs. Luthor: Who Presidented Worse?

Eileen Gonzalez January 10, 2025

I firmly believe that mockery is one of the strongest weapons we have against thin-skinned tyrants — and it’s certainly one of the most fun. So today, I’m starting a monthly limited series to compare the (unfortunately) former and (even more unfortunately) incoming president of the United States to comicdom’s most infamous supervillains to see how he stacks up.

First: Lex Luthor, who also served as president.

Luthor was elected in 2000, much to the shock and dismay of Superman, who assumed the American people were smart enough not to hand the nuclear codes to a self-obsessed, unrepentant criminal (you sweet, summer child). Before that, Luthor was a criminal mastermind and a cunning and ruthless businessman. While comparing the two men’s business acumen, or lack thereof, is beyond the scope of this article, I would like to point out that Luthor built on his fortune by using mysterious alien tech to make things like “repair spiderbots,” which, while scary, is also kind of awesome.

Trump vs. Luthor: Who Presidented Worse?

Who was the worse president: Trump or Lex Luthor?

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Quotes from comedian and cricket broadcaster Andy Zaltzman:

'You cannot teach a dead dog to play the bassoon,' as Aristotle said.

That's like losing to Mozart in a triple jump competition. No matter how bad you are, he's been dead since the 18th Century.

It's lucky no one spotted the sheep-o-copters.

Expectation, like an exploding rhinoceros, is a dangerous beast.