Books

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Listened to the audiobook version narrated beautifully by Michael C. Hall, this is the first Stephen King book I have listened to and the first by this narrator.

I don't even know where I'm going to rank this book in the Stephen King canon but I know that the trademark touch of horror that leaps out of the page and whispers and settles into you is in this book. More scary and human than Misery, it does not compare to the freak of IT but somehow the rising tension of its last act reminded me of IT's similar final act.

The best thing about Pet Sematary is how how it's paced so openly, the Creed family gets to live and breath and be happy in many of its pages even when narratively it seems tiresome and boring, even when the promise of horror keeping it's eye on the family begins to dull. When the shadow of death finally falls on this family, it almost seems unlike Stephen King, it feels accidental and natural too at some point. Like the characters in the book who think at various points that these things were meant to happen, we as a reader think these events were meant to happen to these characters in exactly this slow, tragic, sad and insane way. There are no big fireworks, yes a house burns down but nothing "spectacular" happens, Louis Creed our protagonist simply pays the price for what he bought.

And the narration is amazing, the way Michael C. Hall voices not only so many diverse characters from old people to kids but what's amazing is how he consistently voices the elements of the book as well. One of my favorite examples of this is the scene where a dog is howling and the narrator doesn't just say he barks but we get the actual sound. Of course now that I think about it it might just be the sound effect or recording of a dog but either way the sounds of this audiobook are beautiful and fitting. I think part of the way the novel felt so suspenseful and dreadful is helped by the sound production

Brilliant, scary, sad and altogether humane, Pet Sematary is a very very good Stephen King novel.

Review by @Legendsofanus@lemmy.ml

2025 Mathical Award Winners

For Preschool students and early readers (PreK), Seven Little Ducklings by Annette LeBlanc Cate (Candlewick Press) follows a mother duck counting carefully as she collects her seven missing ducklings, but her flock grows as she unwittingly rescues more creatures along the way. \

Young readers (Grades K-2) are invited to share their thought process — and sometimes whimsical ways — for tallying things up — as they explore colorful photos featuring mathematical groupings of everyday objects in How Did You Count? by two-time Mathical award-winner Christopher Danielson (Stenhouse Publishers).\

Elementary readers (Grades 3-5) will be drawn into the playful, true story of a woman from Oregon whose childhood love of exploring patterns led to her many discoveries as a recreational mathematics hobbyist in The Five Sides of Marjorie Rice: How to Discover a Shape by Amy Alznauer, illustrated by Anna Bron (Candlewick Press).\

Middle school readers (Grades 6-8) may be inspired by Imposter by Cait Levin (Charlesbridge), the story of two high school girls who join their school’s robotics team and make it to the national competition despite the doubts of others.\

For young adults (Grades 9-12), Reasons We Break by Jesmeen Kaur Deo (Disney-Hyperion Books) is a high-stakes, romantic drama as a teen makes a desperate bargain to be bookkeeper to a gang, hoping to clear the debts of a troubled friend and keep him out of prison.

The Martian Chronicles is a roughly connected collection of short stories written at various times by Ray Bradbury that were about humans going to Mars. They don't really have a coherent story but some of the characters and events cross over and it beats having to read 50 stories separately but is it worth reading them at all?

Where Fahrenheit 451 showed the sci-fi side of Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles shows his poetic side.

In many ways it is more ambitious than 451, indeed many of the themes that Ray had to connect with the thread of storytelling show themselves off beautifully here with short stories exploring colonialism, religion, need of belonging, blowing ourselves to bits (something that doesn't sound as far-fetched considering the events we are all going through) and he creates a wonderful mythology about Mars one that isn't more fantastical than realistic for sure but feels lived in.

Although even when talking about hardcore science-fiction books this little collection of stories manages to achieve something that I have seen very few stories do right, namely that it shows how weird and magical and utterly incomprehensible that other lifeform (be it Martians or otherwise) can be.

Ultimately this is a book about people and their stories, experiencing it brought out a lot of emotions and I was ultimately left amazed by how well the whole was written.

Highly highly recommended if you're into short stories

Review by @Legendsofanus@lemmy.world

Going forward, the Nebula Awards aren’t allowing for anything remotely involved with generative AI to be eligible for nominations, much less win.

On Friday morning, Kate Risatu, president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), reiterated the awards’ review process as it relates to large language model tools (LLMs). Sticking to the philosophy of “trust the voters,” the SFWA decreed any works “wholly written using generative LLM tools” were ineligible, and if a nominated work used LLMs “at any point” during the writing process, that’ll be conveyed in the ballot.

Also available in Shavian: https://a.co/d/gpq8LFK

This book collects 58 pieces of fiction that Anton Chekhov published between the ages of 20 and 22. Many appear in English for the first time. In her introduction, Rosamund Bartlett refers to the material with disarming candour as a ‘wholly unremarkable debut’. Is there ever any point in publishing juvenilia?

In his first years as a medical student Anton Pavlovich dashed off these pieces for a few kopecks a line (his father, born a serf, was a bankrupt shopkeeper). Ranging in length from three paragraphs to 76 pages, they appeared under pseudonyms in lowbrow comic magazines that included another Spectator (founded in Moscow in 1881). Unremarkable they may be – but they open a window on provincial Russia in the early 1880s, the tense period before and after revolutionaries assassinated Tsar Alexander II in St Petersburg. The reader will also enjoy identifying the seeds of the master’s mature style; and indeed some of the stories are worth reading in their own right.

Chekhov’s world unfurls in these pages. Character types limber up, preparing to emerge fully formed in the later work – among them Trifon Semyonovich, the owner of 8,000 acres of black earth, who enthusiastically fleeces ‘peasants and neighbours’ in the short story ‘On Account of the Apples’. Orioles whistle in the blackthorn; a tarantass rumbles past, loaded with travelling rugs and hunters’ guns; the whiff of salted fish pervades the spring air and everywhere narrators (often first-person ones) perceive ‘a sense of tedium… in people’s faces and in the whining of the mosquitoes’.

Experimentation with form is less familiar. The volume includes elaborate parody, satire, gothic fiction and sci-fi (in an example of the latter, mischievously attributed to Jules Verne, a fellow from London’s Royal Geographical Society tries to drill a hole in the moon). Chekhov even employs the epistolary form, in part to indulge his fondness for puns. The very first entry consists of a letter written from the village of Eaten Pancakes. The editors have curated this disparate, uneven stuff skilfully. The excellent footnotes explain the abundant wordplay.

As for the translation, the book is the result of a remarkable international collaboration. Eighty-three individuals from nine countries have each translated a piece and then passed it around for team revision. No individual translator’s name follows any one story, but a group credit appears at the beginning. This cooperative approach, a notable success, achieves a consistency often absent from multi-translator anthologies.

Returning to the ‘unremarkable’ aspect of the whole: endings do tend to have a dying fall, as though Chekhov were in a rush to get the thing off his desk. The squibs and comic skits are of the schoolboy variety – though I quite liked the Spectator fake ads, one offering sausage-free worms. ‘The Distorting Mirror (A Christmas Tale)’ was the only piece here that Chekhov included in his first Collected Works, and one can see why. The story has a thematic unity lacking elsewhere in this debut spread.

Chekhov had not found his voice by 1882 – but you can see him searching for it. (One novella foreshadows the theme of his celebrated story ‘The Bet’.) In short, the everyday realism of the later work is on display in this collection, but not its psychological depth. After all, the callow youth had not yet experienced the emotions at the heart of the later great stories and plays. (In Britain he is best known for his stage work; in Russia, for his short stories.) He had not confronted the unfathomable realities of life, nor the ambiguity and nuance that govern human behaviour. We go to the theatre to hear the Trigorins and the Prozorovs express elegiac melancholy – and that is not a young man’s game. On the other hand, the slapstick here humanises the writer whose sense of dramatic economy once caused him to note with approval the effect of placing a pistol on a table in the first act.

What links should we seek between an author’s early and late work anyway? How many of our juvenile preoccupations still concern us in middle age? The man who conjured Uncle Vanya was once a coltish 20-year-old. The trajectory from the inky youth of this book to the titan we know from the plays might be the most Chekhovian theme of all.

[Objectionable words have been passwordified; they do not appear that way in the article]

My fiction was too much for the Starmer government

By Ben Sims

In the House of Lords 65 years ago this month, the 6th Earl of Craven reminisced: “It was the day that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was on sale to the public and there, at every serving counter, sat a sn1gger of youths. Every one of them had a copy of this book held up to his face with one hand while he forked nourishment into his open mouth with the other.”

Young people reading novels was scandalous then – but that was the past. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was unbanned, as were Ulysses and Fanny Hill. I grew up with the freedom to think that things said daily in the real world were worthy of written expression. Much of my teenage reading, and likely what made me a writer, seemed to me incorrigibly edgy: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Naked Lunch, The Satanic Verses. It used to be understood that, however disagreeable the content, books deserved to be read if they possessed enough literary merit.

I therefore took it as a considerable critique when my own fiction was banned this week (2 December). Under the UK’s Online Safety Act, AI filters censored and suppressed one of my short stories, published 277 years after Fanny Hill. All UK-based users would have to prove they were over 18 before reading me. My unremarkable short story, “Nothing Unmediated”, described a Nobel Laureate and Oxford fellow who, on his way to a college dinner, is assaulted by muggers. Admittedly I, a mere gay man, had no right to use the words “p00f” and “f@gg0t” in the quoted speech of criminals in fiction. This was “hate content targeting people based on… sexual orientation” (presumably the terms on which the story was hidden from unverified users).

The government had a point. Having been called both a “p00f” and a “f@gg0t” many times in real life before the age of 18, I do wonder if I could have handled encountering those words in a short story. Likewise, it would probably have been wise to shield me from another blocked category, “realistic acts of serious violence or injury to people, animals, or fictional creatures”, such as the harpooning of Moby Dick, the duel in Eugene Onegin, or the Crucifixion of Our Lord.

Many now make their entire living from Substack. Because my writing has less literary merit than Fanny Hill, I do not – but nevertheless I was given no notification or warning that my work would be censored. After profuse whining, “Nothing Unmediated” appears to be accessible again. The principle remains. Fearing a fine of 10 per cent of its revenue, Substack has, sensibly, kowtowed to Ofcom. All sane platforms will.

This is because of how the law is interpreted by Substack, the incredibly genteel publishing platform, now with 50 million users, including novelists Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, and Ottessa Moshfegh. Following my august example, these and thousands of writers may become inaccessible without age verification.

My fiction being gatekept surreptitiously for two days was hardly a Stasi-like outcome. However, AI-automation (the only way anything as huge as the Internet can be policed) means you now have to seek exemption retrospectively. You are guilty until you request and are granted your innocence.

Perhaps access to fiction might encourage young people to read. But of course, that might cause them, in Lord Craven’s words, “to indulge in a feast of mental, and probably physical, impurity”. Maybe we’re better off keeping them away from challenging literature. Can we expect children to understand something our sensible government can’t?