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kenthompson

@kenthompson@mastodon.world

I am formerly an artist, librarian, and queer activist, and I still do some of those things when I’m not working my day job. Current project: reading my way through the 'best' novels, and pondering what 'best' means anyway.

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kenthompson , to France
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In Search of Lost Time (book 1: Swann’s Way), by Marcel Proust.
You are thinking a lot about your (late 18th century) childhood, in an astounding amount of detail, where love of various kinds happens all around you, but to your recollection not satisfactorily for you, at least per your memories.
@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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Artist compiles 1,984 copies of Orwell’s 1984 on the small island where he wrote it, commemorating 75 years of publication.
That this story is timeless tells us something about our world.
Via @guardian
@bookstodon

https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/may/05/scottish-artist-receives-hundreds-of-copies-of-orwells-nineteen-eighty-four-in-the-post

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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James, by Percival Everett.
You are a runaway slave, your escape attempt joined by a white child named Huckleberry, and as the Mississippi River (and various white people) try to kill you, it gets harder to keep your truth from Huck.
4 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈.

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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Y/N, by Esther Yi.
You are a K-pop fan fixated on one band member, but you try hard NOT to meet him (as you are vaguely self-aware enough to know that would ruin everything); meanwhile everyone you meet is vaguely connected to him and vaguely tries to help or hinder your quest to either meet or not meet him.
3 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈.

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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Librarians in several states can now be jailed for years for making “pornography” available. Let’s be clear about intent here - it is to limit descriptions of the lives of LGBTQ people, where possible down to the level that we even exist.
@bookstodon

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/04/16/library-legislation-restrictions-protections/

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro.
You grow up in a home for people that some consider sub-human, but your proscribed life is not that different, filled as it is with love, pettiness and acceptance, and an aching hope that there is a secret meaning to it all, if you could just figure it out.
5 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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“The most challenged books in the United States in 2023 continued to focus on the experiences of L.G.B.T.Q. people or explore themes of race…”
Time to buy these books, and/or request your public library purchase if they don’t have them.
@bookstodon

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/08/books/banned-books-2023.html

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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The Trial, by Franz Kafka.
You are a young man with an important bank job, but one day you are told you are accused of a generic crime, and you must navigate an opaque justice system never knowing what you are accused of, along the way discovering the many who work in or can influence the system to your benefit or detriment, but you are unable to tell if anyone is telling the truth about the system.
Warning: misogyny
3 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess.
You are a near future Beethoven-loving teen hoodlum doing some horrorshow ultraviolence on the local villagers until upstanding citizens show up with their own sort of un-personing thumbscrews to try out on yourself. Warning: extreme misogyny and violence.
4 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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Shards of Earth, by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
There is a horrible unstoppable unknowable alien force, which 50 years ago you somehow got to stop destroying worlds by doing a mind meld with their moon-sized ship, but not before it destroyed Earth and disappeared, and now factions of humans and other aliens are at each other’s throats when the superbad alien ships return.
3 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈
@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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Candide, by Voltaire.
You are an optimistic 18th century young gentleman that cheerfully endures many tragedies to himself and friends at the hands of various clerics, philosophers and monarchs.
3 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈.
Warning: antisemitism

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.
Quite improbably, you are rescued from Earth minutes before its destruction, only to find the galaxy poorly mismanaged and under the influence of intradimensional rodents, and everyone looking for meaning where there is none, which rather gets in the way of having a good time.
4 of 5 library cats 🐁 🐁 🐁 🐁.

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce.
You are (per the title) a young man with an artistic bent, growing up in Ireland over a century ago, with dreams that are somewhat of a mismatch to your own and everyone you know’s rigid and unforgiving Catholicism; will you leave all family and friends behind?
3 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈.

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
You are a young woman, unfortunately accused of adultery - unfortunate because you’re in a Puritan village in 1642 - and so you raise a daughter alone from the world while contending with the devilish acts of the godly.
5 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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Long Division, by Kiese Laymon.
You are one, or maybe two, Black teens named City, living with your Grandma in Alabama, when you find a book (or maybe two) with no author, called Long Division, which when you read it is sort of about your life but not the one you thought you were living.
4 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈.
@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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Chain-gang All-stars, by N K Adjei-Brenyah.
You would be in prison for murder, but you signed up for a Hunger Games-like reality sports entertainment show where you kill another prisoner every week in hopes of winning your own freedom, though you’ll need to beat a rigged system.
1 of 5 library cats 🐈.
@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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The Magician’s Nephew, by C.S. Lewis. You are a nearly orphaned pre-teen multiverse traveler who unleashes an egotistical tyrant from their world, who tries to take over ours but you divert her to a brand new world created by a singing cat, thus creating a multi-generational (and multi-book) conflict in Narnia.

3 of 5 library cats 🦁 🦁 🦁.

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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Blackouts, by Justin Torres. You are a youngish gay man who finds an elderly, dying gay man who was also in the asylum you were put in as a teenager, and as you talk about his life and yours, you are guided by a poetically erased volume of mid century scientific case studies of homosexuals, which helps him die and you live, though fact and fiction here are intertwined as lovers.
5 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈.
@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner. You are part of a deteriorating Southern family, whose remaining unredeemable members pick over the bones or try to plot their escapes. 1 of 5 library cats 🐈. Warnings: racism, antisemitism, hate speech.

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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, anyone? Perfect example from publishing. A publisher is using AI to write crappy nonfiction, then assigning author names that almost match leading experts in that field (to trick search engines). No doubt other AIs will now search those texts as authoritative. This is done solely to make money and only makes the world a worse place.
@bookstodon @pluralistic

https://www.washingtonpost.com/newsletters/book-club/

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray.
You are an Irish family, falling out of the middle class, but that’s the least of your problems seemingly, because the house of cards the parents have built was based on a foundation of self-deception. 3 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈.
@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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Dayswork, by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel. You are a writer fascinated with Melvillians and the many biographers of the famous author and the ways their own lives, and marriages may all be echoing each other across the centuries. 4 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐳.
@bookstodon

kenthompson , to France
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Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. You are an early 19th century Frenchwoman, a farmer’s daughter who becomes the wife of a boring doctor, but when you want more to life than that offers, your options are limited (by men). 2 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈.
@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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The Famous Magician, by Cesar Aira; trans. by Chris Andrews. You are an older writer of some renown, who is convincingly offered omnipotence in exchange for never writing, nor reading anything again; unfortunately you are not good at making decisions. 3 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈.
@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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System Collapse, by Martha Wells. You are a sentient construct that can pass as human, but you really don’t like humans much (other than their TV shows) but nonetheless endeavor to keep them from dying at each other’s hands in the f***ed up world they created. 4 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈. (Series)
@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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Lost in the Moment and Found, by Seanan McGuire. You start out as a 6 year old girl where things go rapidly wrong at home; you escape to a world for lost things, but at an unknown cost. 4 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈.
@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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Spadework for a Palace, by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, trans John Batki. You are a librarian with a great plan to create a Permanently Closed Library, which you record with other thoughts in a single sentence that stretches 100 pages. 5 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈.

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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Eastbound, by Maylis de Kerangal, Trans. by Jessica Moore. You are a French woman and a 20 year old Russian conscript thrown together on the Trans-Siberian Express train, as you both try to escape your fates, together, but without a shared language. 4 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈.
@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame. You are a mole who wears a vest and hangs out with other smallish mammals by the river, where you seek an equilibrium; only to be thwarted by Toad, a wealthy landowner and agent of chaos in your friend group. 3 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈.

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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The Underground Railroad, by Collin Whitehead. You are an escaped slave that finds herself not transported to safety, but to alternatives to enslavement that still aren’t freedom (then or now). 4 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. You are a riverboat captain, sailing up an African river to meet the colonizer of all colonizers, a task you seem to both relish and hate. 2 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈. Warning: hate speech.

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. You are a pilot who crash lands in a desert, where you meet an alien child who lives on his own asteroid and dispenses cryptic stories about his travels on earth and elsewhere. 3 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈.

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque. You are a teenage German boy who signs up to fight in WWI with your classmates, and you never find anything worth fighting for, just mud and death in the trenches, as any sense of yourself or any recognizable future fades. 4 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈.

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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A Shining, by Jon Fosse. You drive to the end of a road and hike into a Norwegian forest in winter, where you become lost and may die but your brain meanders casually over many topics until some presences show up which really don’t help much, so your brain keeps thinking random thoughts. 4 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott. You are the most iconoclastic/‘tomboyish’ of four young sisters, and it looks like you may chart a path as a writer, but as your sisters fall into the roles allocated them by the 19th century patriarchy, you too may be deprived of the dull spinsterhood you aspired to.

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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When cultures differ on what it’s okay for kids to know (or see), what ends up in a book? Publishers self-censor to be safe…and to assure profit. Interesting POV from a translator of children’s books.
@bookstodon

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/10/books/review/childrens-lit-taboos.html

kenthompson , to cars
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On The Road, by Jack Kerouac. It’s the late 40’s, and you are a young man trying to dig America and its many people and pick up chicks, so you spend a lot of time trying to meet up with your whacked out best friend by hitchhiking and busing repeatedly across the US, but whether you learn anything is debatable. 3 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈.

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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We The Animals, by Justin Torres. You are a child, the youngest of three brothers who stick together, against the unpredictable world of adults and your parents, providing security until you are found to be different, so different that what ties is unbound.

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson. You are a woman in your 30s who was never loved by anyone (in particular, your Mother), and when she dies, you get a vague invitation to spend time in a haunted mansion with complete strangers, so you go of course, and it’s the best time of your life, which is not good news, however. 3 of 5 library cats 🐈‍⬛ 🐈‍⬛ 🐈‍⬛.
@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift. You are an early 18th century ship’s surgeon who is repeatedly Washed Ashore on various never before seen islands, whose inhabitants find you Unaccountably Strange due to differences in Size and Temperament, but nevertheless teach you several Important Lessons about merry old England, particularly its Superior Personages. 4 out of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈.
@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstadon group
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The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing. You are a mid 20th century writer with one successful novel, but also and communist and mother who struggles with all these things, but in particular with men; you keep separate notebooks trying to sort the parts of your real and fictional lives, but it doesn’t seem to be helping. 5 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈

@bookstadon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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This book club has been reading the same book for 28 years. One page a week.

@bookstodon

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/28-years-ago-a-book-club-began-reading-a-novel-its-finally-reached-the-end/

kenthompson , to Art
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon. You, alone of your family escape the holocaust as a teenager, and parlay your drawing skills into a lucrative career cartooning superheroes in America; but even with a side gig as a magician, you can not escape the past, can not avenge it, and struggle to keep it out of your future. 3 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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The English Understand Wool, by Helen Dewitt. You are an extremely wealthy young lady who does not blink an eye when everything you thought was true turns out to be a lie, and by avoiding actions in bad taste, defeat some who would take advantage of your situation. 5 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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Trust, by Hernan Diaz: you are an early 20th century woman who may have really impacted history, but you never got to tell your own story (mostly) and so less talented writers did so. 2 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. You live 600 years in the future, as imagined 100 years ago, which is still racist and sexist, but especially classist by design through genetic and social engineering, so that everyone is happy in their assigned caste, yet you are still somehow vaguely unhappy. 2 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈


@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara. You are part of a group of 4 friends who meet in college and stay connected for decades, only you are never able to tell them about your childhood as an ophan who was betrayed by every adult you met, and what that means for the adult you that now must make sense of others’ expectations that you could love anyone, including yourself. 5 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈.

@bookstodon

kenthompson , to bookstodon group
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Charlotte’s Web, by EB White. You are a kind spider who befriends a naive piglet, and concocts a plan to weaponize human religious beliefs against your friends owners so they won’t kill and eat him. 5 of 5 library cats! 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈 🕷️

@bookstodon

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