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larryhammerA book meme swiped from muccamukk:
My favorite book of all time is: Always Coming Home, Ursula Le Guin.
My current favorite book (read or re-read in the last 3 months): Persuasion, Jane Austen, which also contends for the previous. (The book I most recently reread, if that’s what this is asking, is Sage Empress, Sherwood Smith.)
The last book I bought was: The October Horse, Colleen McCullough
The first book I bought with my own money: Too long ago, no idea.
The first book I received as a gift: Too long ago, no idea. I cannot remember not having/receiving many books.
The last book I received as a gift was: There were a handful all at once this past holiday season, the one I remember is The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar
The last book I borrowed from the library: The Trouble with Magic, Ruth Chew
The book physically closest to me right now: A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese, rev ed., Paul W. Kroll
Do you read bookfic, and if so what is your favorite bookshop fic? I mostly only read bookfic, as I understand the term, but not very many fics set, either by canon or AU, in bookshops. Am I misreading this question?
Physical book or e-book: Yes.
Used or new: Yes.
Fiction or non-fiction: Yes.
Read at a coffee shop or at the park: Yes.
Paperback or hardcover: Paperback, says my wrists.
Romance or Crime: Romance.
Stream of consciousness? Rarely.
Poetry? Hard yes.
Memoirs? Rarely.
Philosophy? Sometimes.
Thrillers? Hard no.
Chronicles? Sometimes.
Dialogue heavy? This is so orthogonal to my reading choices it’s a meaningless question.
---L.
Subject quote from Escapade, Janet Jackson.
muccamukk:General Questions
This week I’m reading: The Grass Crown, Colleen McCullough, a reread by way of reading through the Masters of Rome series, which I previously left off after book 4.My favorite book of all time is: Always Coming Home, Ursula Le Guin.
My current favorite book (read or re-read in the last 3 months): Persuasion, Jane Austen, which also contends for the previous. (The book I most recently reread, if that’s what this is asking, is Sage Empress, Sherwood Smith.)
The last book I bought was: The October Horse, Colleen McCullough
The first book I bought with my own money: Too long ago, no idea.
The first book I received as a gift: Too long ago, no idea. I cannot remember not having/receiving many books.
The last book I received as a gift was: There were a handful all at once this past holiday season, the one I remember is The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar
The last book I borrowed from the library: The Trouble with Magic, Ruth Chew
The book physically closest to me right now: A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese, rev ed., Paul W. Kroll
Do you read bookfic, and if so what is your favorite bookshop fic? I mostly only read bookfic, as I understand the term, but not very many fics set, either by canon or AU, in bookshops. Am I misreading this question?
This or That
[aka the false binaries section, imposition of dichotomies division]Physical book or e-book: Yes.
Used or new: Yes.
Fiction or non-fiction: Yes.
Read at a coffee shop or at the park: Yes.
Paperback or hardcover: Paperback, says my wrists.
Romance or Crime: Romance.
Yes or No
[aka the other false binaries section, denial of continuums division]Stream of consciousness? Rarely.
Poetry? Hard yes.
Memoirs? Rarely.
Philosophy? Sometimes.
Thrillers? Hard no.
Chronicles? Sometimes.
Dialogue heavy? This is so orthogonal to my reading choices it’s a meaningless question.
---L.
Subject quote from Escapade, Janet Jackson.
no subject
Date: 13 June 2026 11:42 pm (UTC)I have never read any of her Roman novels. Talk to me about them?
no subject
Date: 14 June 2026 02:02 am (UTC)One place in her adaptation I found especially interesting, the Catiline Affair. She has a long appendix justifying departing from the standard history, arguing that our only primary source, Cicero, had a self-interest in fudging the order of events, to make himself look good, and her proposed chronology does indeed make more sense than his version.
I am, at the moment, watching the slow breakdown in the relations between Marius and his former right-hand man, Sulla.
no subject
Date: 14 June 2026 02:43 am (UTC)I may be convinced to check that one out because the two fictional treatments of Catiline I have read are very different from one another and I would be interested to see how McCullough's differs from them.
(John Maddox Roberts' The Catiline Conspiracy (1991) and Steven Saylor's Catilina's Riddle (1993). I discovered the latter series in high school and the former in college and tapped out around 2000–2001 on both except for Saylor's A Gladiator Dies Only Once (2005) which I can remember packing up with the rest of my library, but I haven't read a lot of Roman Republican fiction since.)
no subject
Date: 14 June 2026 04:00 am (UTC)I'm interested in hearing your comparison. (Cataline is covered in book 3, Fortune's Favorite, fwiw.)
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Date: 13 June 2026 11:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 14 June 2026 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 14 June 2026 02:26 pm (UTC)Are there any true binaries, outside of conceptual? We can say "good" and "bad" as a concept (or maybe better "good" and "not-good" or "bad" and "not-bad"), but I feel like what goes into those buckets ends up being difficult without lots of qualifying. ... But I guess maybe there are, in science. Hmmm.
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Date: 14 June 2026 02:31 pm (UTC)There are true/false statuses, such as pregnant, so there's those true binaries. But nowhere near as many as many people claim. (Especially in this political climate.)
no subject
Date: 14 June 2026 02:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 14 June 2026 07:20 pm (UTC)Even something like "pregnant" is squishy. ("currently, but going to result in a live birth" and "currently" are different, pre-implantation/post-implantation are not the same in placentals, hardly anything in the grand scheme of things is a placental, etc.)
"All taxonomies are inherently lossy; being lossy is why they're useful. It is perilous to forget this." is what I'd say about the dichotomies. (Well, aside from the tautological "not every taxonomy is useful to you, and sometimes this is because of its choices about what can be disregarded".)
no subject
Date: 14 June 2026 11:10 pm (UTC)(I can look this up, I know, but here I am asking you...)
The tautological statement, tautological as it is, is definitely something I nod in vigorous assent to.
no subject
Date: 15 June 2026 12:55 am (UTC)Lossy is something like "The model does not retain all the information in the data".
Information itself is not easy to define; there are minimum-encoding definitions and heuristic definitions ("information causes change") and complexity-based definitions and they're not equivalent to each other. It's one of those "let us not look down and walk on the air" definitions.
One lossy taxonomy example would be a card catalog entry for the Mahabharata that says "Sanskrit text". Or we could look at all the travails of the species concept and (for example) how even something like the biological species concept ("the members of an interbreeding population") sometimes falls down (sapiens, denisovans, and neanderthals had gene flow; at what generation from a hybridization event is an individual a member of what species?)
I have serious reference books that list many species of junco (a songbird); post-genetic analysis, and accepting the biological species concept, there are two, dark-eyed and light-eyed. Or the redpolls collapsing into a single holarctic species, or the two species of brown bear in Alaska, both of which have had less gene flow with each other than they do with polar bears despite humans having had no idea there were two species until genetic testing, or the insects with developmental morphs we thought were distinct and not very related species until genetic testing got widespread.
Taxonomies are useful because they let you deal with what you care about while not having to put effort into what you don't care about. ("It flies, it has feathers, I can call it a bird without having to demonstrate that it's descended from the most recent common ancestor of Triceratops horridus and Vultur gryphus.") It is still important to check that things you care about aren't getting lost from a particular taxonomy because it's certainly losing more things than it is retaining.
(Or consider, with characteristic-score based roleplaying games, the arguments about where what kind of activity goes in terms of which characteristics apply to the skill check.)
no subject
Date: 15 June 2026 02:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 15 June 2026 02:38 am (UTC)You're welcome!