The City and The Stars by Arthur C. Clarke

This is the book I've chosen to read as my second volume of 2025! ;) It's a 50th Anniversary Collection hardcover copy. Like most of my books, I stumbled upon this one at a second-hand shop and what immediately attracted me to it was that its cover artwork reminded me so much of the Ray Bradbury's science-fiction novels I read during my teenage years. It's a genre that I love and this should motivate me to read. :) It'll also be my first Arthur C. Clarke book. Looking very forward to discovering this story!

> Status: my bookmark lay at page 13 of 212

I finished reading yesterday(usually I’m postponing,delaying,belating very often readed physical or digital books.
Goście z Kosmosu? Katastrofa Tunguska,Trójkąt Bermudzki,Obce Ślady written by Lucjan Znicz published by Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza Gdańsk 1987(possibly it was a year of it being published).

If it's the 2nd edition it seems to have been 87, first one in 81: https://search.worldcat.org/formats-editions/749606122
Also 2 games on GOG based on the myths surrounding that meteor strike (or more exactly air burst).

As far as I know as far as I remember it took me two years to finish reading Project Montauk Experiments in Time Silver Anniversary Edition written by Preston B. Nichols and Peter Moon published by Sky Books USA from year of 2018(in the Deep Web there’s seems to be some sort of another 2020 digital update).

River of Souls, by Robert McCammon. The fifth in the Matthew Corbett series. This book is a lot shorter than the others and has Matt going back to the Carolina colonies for a simple job, but while he's down there he stumbles across a murder on a nearby plantation and some slaves blamed for it take off running up the river. Matt joins a search party with the goal of sorting out what really happened.

I appreciated that the book is leaner and meaner than the others and generally reins in some of the glibness that was starting to creep in here and there. It isn't really complex - Matt develops a theory about what happened pretty quickly and it turns out that he was basically dead on, and the story involves everyone going up a creepy river for a while, going through some crazy stuff, and then heading home. The book ends on a set up for the next one that involves the hoary old devices of coincidence and amnesia, so maybe McCammon was reading Edgar Rice Burroughs when he wrote this one.

ALERT!

Some of you that get Kindle ebooks from Amazon, may not be aware, that on the 26th February, it will no longer be possible to Download & transfer via USB. That option is being removed.

That means it will no longer be possible to download from Amazon and side-load your Kindle ebooks to your Kindle device. The only option going forward will be Wifi.

This is a huge backward step, tying Kindle customers to the Kindle Store deeper than before, with DRM that much more difficult to remove. So in essence, there goes having backups for new purchases, and old ones will no longer be available to you unless you have already backed them up locally.

See the MobileRead Forum for greater detail and how to grab your downloads via scripts before it is too late, etc.

*ahem* Include me :)
Include The StoryGraph
Include Goodreads

Feb 26-Mar 1: The Narrow Road Between Desires | 3/5 (SG | GR | blog)

The Narrow Road Between Desires

This doesn't fit how I think of Bast. But to call what I remember about a secondary character that I didn't care much about to begin with vague would be an understatement, nearly ten years after reading The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear and nine after reading The Slow Regard of Silent Things, which isn't even relevant in this matter. So I'll take it for what it is, a faerie tale without the sort of action that'd be expected of one, a children's story that merely threatens to become dark for a moment and then backs well away even from that while also skipping over any bits of content that'd tend to be considered unsuitable for children, for one reason or the other. I guess I could call it a wholesome story, and one that may be said to be so in spite of its main character.
Based on the above, you might think that it shares quite a few similarities with The Slow Regard of Silent Things, but I'd disagree, at least if you scratch beyond the surface. It's written well and achieves what it intends, the author's note doing a good job of explaining just what that is, but it's not what I'd normally read or enjoy and just that note and the target bothered me even more, considering my stance on children and, especially, those who have them. I even considered lowering the rating, but decided to just take the story itself into account, judge it based on what it aims to be and not what I'd have wanted from it, and appreciate the fact that it shows that the author hasn't completely forgotten about the series. So, if you take it for what it is and enjoy this sort of thing, it's pretty good, at least as far as I can tell. But if you hope for something to at least match The Slow Regard of Silent Things, to leave aside the main books in the series, you're unlikely to find it here.

Rating: 3/5

Last January after a rainy night, I found a pile of books behind the dumpster which in turn is behind the laundromat visited every Saturday. The novels were nothing special, but a ragged and water-damaged condition didn't keep the lone comic from being quite the find: a 30+ year-old copy of V for Vendetta! The movie is a distant memory which I wasn't especially impressed with, but I was of the understanding the book is from Alan Moore's hay-day and surely worth something despite the cover missing a torn spot and hanging on by little more than a thread.

Alas, if the movie was as good as I remember, the Wachowskis really went above and beyond to minimalize the bad writing. The title character is a pretentious mary-sue who sings praise for anarchy to the only culture that could benefit from it. Rebellion against oppressive authority is a fine default for any story, but a protagonist should have more personality than to be the author's well-spoken mouthpiece.

It was egregiously hypocritical of Moore to show somebody watching a grossly bigoted propaganda movie featuring violent savages when he's himself guilty of exactly the same basic wrongness: depicting those you don't like as much worse than they really are. In V for Vendetta's timeline, the English civil war of the late 80's was won by the favorite boogey-man of anybody who couldn't finance their way out of a wet paper bag and I would bet good money that if Alan Moore wrote it within the past 10 years, he'd color all the hats red. The authorities are so cruel as to round up every rape-gangster and pedo-clown, which makes the England depicted in this comic better than the current real-life equivalent.

Conclusion: It was good to read for myself why this story has such a reputation, with such flowery poetry masquerading as dialog; but the political bias of it has aged like milk from a paranoid cow. It's more for the poor physical state of the comic that I find no reluctance to trash it.

The Resistance — The French Fight Against the Nazis by Matthew Cobb

There are thousands of books in French about those men and women opposing the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. Matthew Cobb has written what I feel is a quite comprehensive and readable English volume on the subject, and succeeds in providing a fair treatment of all sides involved. That does not seem like an easy feat, since the Resistance was not at all a homogenous force, with many players, and groups of varying sizes, fueled by often different political and moral motivations, as well as conflicting ideas about means of resisting.

A meticulously researched book that lets history come alive with intimate tales of sabotage, guerilla warfare, sacrifice and betrayal on ground level, as well as meddling, hesitation, and shifting alliances on the international political stage.

Cobb recommends the 1997 film Lucie Aubrac, a biopic of a well-known woman resistant. While watching I was pleased to see that reading the book had equipped me to understand context and nuances, as well as recognize people portrayed.