TrickJarrett.com

Ebook2audiobook selfhosted project

Saw this project and dropping it here for me to come back to. The idea is you can upload an ebook and it generates an AI generated audiobook file for it.

My To-Be-Reads

I literally partake in Tsundoku with my ereader, adding far more books than I consume. But doing so brings me immense joy to see my virtual library and know that there is always a large variety of books available for me when I'm ready. Above is a look at the most recently added books to my ereader.

DRM means you don't own the files

The "Roald Dahl books being updated for a modern audience" drama continues to generate an unreasonable amount of headlines in my feeds. Most recently is another iteration of people discovering the digital item they bought can be modified after the fact.

It shocks me how often people continue to be surprised when they purchase digital items hosted or owned on a third party server.

If it has any sort of DRM and is not a standalone file on your own machine, then this is a reality of it. You didn't buy the file. You bought a digital pass to enable you access to it. If they change it, yours is changed. If they remove it, yours is removed (presumably with a refund of some sort.) If the company goes away, your key is suddenly no good at all.

Please, people - learn and understand this.

A good book day

Remember how I was bemoaning the massive pile of unread books I have? Yeah... about that.

I stumbled across this amazing pile of ebooks courtesy of Cambridge University which had a number of fascinating ebook pdfs available for download. The post that sent me to it said the downloads would only be available until January 11th. But I went ahead and downloaded them all, I don't expect to read the majority of them but there were a few which genuinely seemed interesting.

Emotions and Temporalities by Margrit Pernau

This Element brings together the history of emotions and temporalities, offering a new perspective on both. Time was often imagined as a movement from the past to the future: the past is gone and the future not yet here. Only present-day subjects could establish relations to other times, recovering history as well as imagining and anticipating the future. In a movement paralleling the emphasis on the porous self, constituted by emotions situated not inside but between subjects, this Element argues for a porous present, which is open to the intervention of ghosts coming from the past and from the future. What needs investigating is the flow between times as much as the creation of boundaries between them, which first banishes the ghosts and then denies their existence. Emotions are the most important way through which subjects situate and understand themselves in time.

It sounds like a brain bender, but I think that can be very good for us.

Violence and the Sikhs by Arvind-Pal S. Mandair

Violence and the Sikhs interrogates conventional typologies of violence and non-violence in Sikhism by rethinking the dominant narrative of Sikhism as a deviation from the ostensibly original pacifist-religious intentions and practices of its founders. This Element highlights competing logics of violence drawn from primary sources of Sikh literature, thereby complicating our understanding of the relationship between spirituality and violence, connecting it to issues of sovereignty and the relationship between Sikhism and the State during the five centuries of its history. By cultivating a non-oppositional understanding of violence and spirituality, this Element provides an innovative method for interpreting events of 'religious violence'. In doing so it provides a novel perspective on familiar themes such as martyrdom, Martial Race theory, warfare and (post)colonial conflicts in the Sikh context.

Given the prominant Sikh community around where I live, I'm always curious to learn more about them. I don't think a book like this should be my initial introduction to Sikh history and faith, but it did jump out at me.

Global Medievalism: An Introduction by Helen Young and Kavita Mudan Finn

"The typical vision of the Middle Ages western popular culture represents to its global audience is deeply Eurocentric. The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones imagined entire medievalist worlds, but we see only a fraction of them through the stories and travels of the characters. Organised around the theme of mobility, this Element seeks to deconstruct the Eurocentric orientations of western popular medievalisms which typically position Europe as either the whole world or the centre of it, by making them visible and offering alternative perspectives. How does popular culture represent medievalist worlds as global - connected by the movement of people and objects? How do imagined mobilities allow us to create counterstories that resist Eurocentric norms? This study represents the start of what will hopefully be a fruitful and inclusive conversation of what the Middle Ages did, and should, look like"

Too true, the eurocentricity to the history I have been exposed to is a thing I constantly want to overcome and I look forward to delving into this.

Tibetan Demonology by Christopher Bell

Tibetan Demonology discusses the rich taxonomy of gods and demons encountered in Tibet. These spirits are often the cause of, and exhorted for, diverse violent and wrathful activities. This Element consists of four thematic sections. The first section, 'Spirits and the Body', explores oracular possession and spirit-induced illnesses. The second section, 'Spirits and Time', discusses the role of gods in Tibetan astrology and ritual calendars. The third section, 'Spirits and Space', examines the relationship between divinities and the Tibetan landscape. The final section, 'Spirits and Doctrine', explores how certain deities act as fierce protectors of religious and political institutions.

I have always loved mythology. I remember being fascinated by Greek and Roman mythology and dipping my toe into what I could learn about others. I can still remember visiting Pantheon.org back in middle school and high school reading about mythology around the world. I'm very excited to delve into this one.

Beyond those (and the others I downloaded), I decided to spend some Christmas Amazon credit on two books from MIT Press:

Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction

Essays on speculative/science fiction explore the futures that feed our most cherished fantasies and terrifying nightmares, while helping diverse communities devise new survival strategies for a tough millennium.

In this edited collection, more than forty writers, critics, game designers, scholars, and activists explore core SF texts, with an eye toward a future in which corporations dominate both the means of production and the means of distribution and governments rely on powerful surveillance and carceral technologies.

Unboxed: Board Game Experience & Design by Gordon Calleja

An in-depth exploration of the experience of playing board games and how game designers shape that experience.

In Unboxed, Gordon Calleja explores the experience of playing board games and how game designers shape that experience. Calleja examines key aspects of board game experience—the nature of play, attention, rules, sociality, imagination, narrative, materiality, and immersion—to offer a theory of board game experience and a model for understanding game involvement that is relevant to the analysis, criticism, and design of board games. Drawing on interviews with thirty-two leading board game designers and critics, Calleja—himself a board game designer—provides the set of conceptual tools that board game design has thus far lacked.

Both just sound like interesting reads. I'll get to them eventually. For now, I'm off to bed where I'll read a bit more of Africa Rising's short stories.

My 2022 Books

January

• Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik [Fantasy, historical fiction] - Audiobook that is the 2nd in the series of historical fiction about a British sailor and his pet dragon.

February

• Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell [Sci-fi, mystery, LGBTQ+] A story involving politics and personal romance between two men. I quite enjoyed it.

March

• The Hail Mary Project by Andy Weir [Sci-fi] - I absolutely loved this book by Weir, have been recommending it to anyone who would listen.
• The Storyteller by Dave Grohl [Autobiography, music] - I really enjoyed this autobiography, and I think the audiobook made it even better.

April

• Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel [Sci-fi] - A sci-fi audiobook about Earth discovering significant alien technology on the planet and how it changes the world.
• The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek [Business, self help] - I like the clips of Sinek speaking, but I fell out of the book about a quarter of the way through.

May

I bounced off a number of books without committing to any of them as I focused more heavily on various projects and other things this month.

June

• Good to Great by Jim Collins [Business] - An interesting business novel looking at cases where companies raise to the next level.
• How to be Perfect by Michael Schur [Philosophy] - A philosophy book written by the guy behind The Good Place, inspired by and derived from the work he did learning philosophy and studying it in preparation of that show. It's good, I didn't finish it, but I did enjoy it.

July

• There are Places in the World Where Rules are Less Important than Kindness by Carlo Rovelli [Essays, non-fiction] - Overall it was fine, I ended up dropping the audiobook after the fifth essay or so I think.
• Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell [Philosophy] - I was curious to check it out as I have only read excerpts of his writing. Unfortunately I found his writing long winded and bloviating, as well as out of date socially. Unquestionably brilliant, but I decided I had better ways to spend my time.

August

• Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Curreyy [Nonfiction] - Short pieces about the various daily habits of various artists.
• Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away [Nonfiction, history, Cold War] by Ann Hagedorn - I really enjoyed this book as an interesting look at US history.

September

• August Kitko and the Mechas from Space by Alex White [Sci-fi, space opera, LGBTQ+] - Alex is a friend of mine and I loved diving into their book. It was like reading neon pink colors mixed with giant mech robots. All for it and can't wait for their next book.
• The City & The City by China Mieville [Fiction, mystery] - I like it, but I think it's an example where I want to read this one in paper and I have it as an ebook.

October

• The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson [Sci-fi, near future, climate change] - It was a hard book to get into, but I'm very glad I stuck with it and finished it as I found it a very rewarding and enjoyable book once I got into it.

November

• Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid [Fiction, music] - A quick read, written like a transcript from a documentary about musicians and their story.

December

• Slouching Towards Utopia by J. Bradford Delong [Nonfiction, economics, sociology] - I'm still reading this one, but I found the preface / intro very interesting and compelling for how it frames the Industrial Revolution in the history of the world.
• The Decline of Magic by Michael Hunter [history] - Just started this last night, it's interesting so far. Curious to get further into it.

Edit: Added August Kitko by Alex White, which I missed in my initial review of the year.

StandardEbooks.org - High quality free Epubs of classics

But seriously I think I'm close to triple digits. I love the act of acquiring books and lack the necessary time to read them all.