Read with extreme caution.
It’s a good time but it lacks the punch that Darkplace has without the the dodgy framing, editing and scene pacing. Making the protagonist an obvious author stand-in is a fun way of making the character of Garth Marenghi more directly involved in the text, but it creates a strange dissonance where it seems like the voice of the text has much more awareness of his own flaws than his self-insert does.
Vols.: Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ, Ⅵ, Ⅶ, Ⅷ, Ⅸ, Ⅹ, Ⅺ, Ⅻ, ⅩⅢ, ⅩⅣ, ⅩⅤ, ⅩⅤⅠ
Today’s musical accompaniment will be relevant further down the post.
Cool interview with the enemy designer of Sonic 3 & Knuckles. I’ve always thought that the badniks in Sonic 3 had a more industrial look to them compared to the enemies from the previous games and I’ve always really liked that about it and it pleases me to hear the intent behind that being articulated. I also love Mecha Sonic’s design and it’s really lovely to hear him appreciate the fan art and reinterpretations of his designs. Also look at this short fan animation, it’s really cool.
Given that setting, since the Death Egg had suffered enormous damage from crashing due to Sonic's attack in "Sonic 2," I thought the mecha production facilities inside the fortress must also have been heavily damaged, making it difficult to carry out production as before.
From there, I arrived at the idea that Dr. Eggman, needing a fighting force to oppose Sonic under conditions where the production facilities weren't functioning properly, would gather up usable parts and hastily assemble machines to deal with the situation.
First of (so far) two posts where Melon breaks down the development of their NES recreation of the “original game” in Deltarune chapter 3.
I had previous experience working on NES games already - at least, I had tinkered a little bit and had enjoyed enormously Pikuma’s course on beginning-to-end gamedev with 6502 assembly on the NES a few years back, so I felt confident I could pull it off! Even if the journey seemed daunting, I just had to go one step at a time…
Oh do I hate algospeak. I stopped talking to a therapist once in part because I lost a massive amount of respect for him for using the word “unalive”.
In my experience, self-censoring adult terminology on that site in particular is a great sign that you're dealing with someone so incurious, with such a limited experience of online conversation, that they don't understand where they are, or who they're dealing with, or who's accountable for maintaining the peace in the community where they're speaking. I do not want to read the things these people write, and I do not want to talk to them. I'd rather not be the person who teaches them to be curious.
An investigation into the origin of a classic, old web GIF.
Perhaps enough time has passed that she is merely an inconsequential sighting to the average webuser, a rarity of a signal overlooked in the noise. There was once a time that she danced her way across webpages all over geocities and brought a small injection of joy and energy to whatever page she graced. Early on, she was a known quantity but the passage of time and memory made her mysterious. Stayed mysterious for a long while since, honestly, who really cares about the provenance of a free-to-use gif that is barely 5kB?
Some fiction for once, recommended by Laura Michet again. Interesting use of HTML as a medium.
This is the story of the most inexplicable thing to ever happen to me. It still keeps me up at night, just rolling it around in my head as I fail to make it make sense. This is the story of how I took a video from inside a recurring dream.
Explainer of Vivan’s very cute little Bad Apple animation using a technique similar to Geocities HTML Chat.
I wanted to show the Bad Apple animation without JS or CSS, with an impressively minimal set of HTML tags, by abusing slow chunked response, forcing the browser to load the page piece-by-piece. That's happening now (unless you're reading some archive) but how can we use it for animation?
Less of an article and more of a cool website: The Crawler Zoo monitors and categorises bots that scrape the site. Visitors can even watch bots wander an infinitely generated maze of junk pages.
Every request that reaches the site is examined at the gate. Bots are identified, named, drawn and filed into an enclosure; people are waved through and counted only as an anonymous daily total. Everything you see is live: the figures update as the bots arrive.
Improving my Irish is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time but found difficult to sustain long-term, but I do still have occasional bursts of enthusiasm. In this case I found this article, and especially the videos linked within, a good crash course in improving my understanding of Irish phonetics.
When learners come across this difference in pronunciation, they are usually looking at words like “bhfuil” (i.e. “an bhfuil”) and “mháthair” (i.e. “mo mháthair”). How you pronounce it largely depends on which dialect you choose.
I’ve written about the Irish translation of Dracula before, so of course I was interested to learn a tiny bit more about the history of the book.
Should the Free State find exciting new literary voices working as Gaeilge and bring them to a wider audience, or should they focus on translating bestselling titles that readers had already heard of?
Finance Minister Ernest Blythe took the latter view. In particular, Blythe was very interested to discover that the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works had a clause at the time regarding translation rights.
Valve Software’s former in-house hat economist weighs in on the consequences of “centrism”.
Everywhere, it is the same mechanism: Parties that called themselves sensible, pragmatic, and centrist have pursued one of the most doctrinaire economic programmes in European history – and pursued it with a rigidity, an intolerance of dissent, and a contempt for democratic contestation that the actual political extremes of the 20th century would have recognised as their own method, even if they had rejected the content.
He has gone to the underworld, and I am here.
A wonderful book. Threads the needle of being both poetic and accessible, modern while not trying to modernise an ancient perspective. Patroclus, perhaps, as our window into the story, does have a more modern outlook on life and violence, but the characters generally understand themselves in a Homeric manner. They are concerned with glory and honour, war and heroics, without self-conscious reimagining in more cynical terms that many adaptations do. And it deftly weaves a story of queerness into this, with Patroclus’ and Achilles’ relationship furtive and endangered not because they are gay (this is ancient Greece) but because of status, because of prophecy, because in the eyes of Gods and kings that the relationship diminishes Achilles, leading to a brutal story of queer erasure, denying them each other even in death. I sobbed my way through the last few chapters.
They knew no relation but possession. They were possessed.
In The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas Le Guin asks the reader to imagine their ideal utopia, as pure or debauched as one likes, but perfect in whatever way one regards it as perfect. If the picture she paints is perhaps too “goody-goody”, then feel free to add an orgy if it would help. But she knows that this idea rings hollow, that such a place feels unsatisfying in its flawlessness, and as such she, famously, adds the suffering child: The rot at the heart of it that somehow fuels the city. The fatal, evil flaw. She does not try to justify this at all—no coherent connection is made between the misery of the child in the basement and the prosperity of the city—but she knows that somehow this absurdity, the most unreasonable thing about her description of Omelas by far, makes it seem more real. We know that perfection and harmony like this cannot be real, and this justifies our doubts of it.
And so Anarres, our ambiguous utopia. Le Guin tries to imagine an anarchist society and imagine it honestly, warts and all. Simply by striking off our chains we will not become new Soviet men, free of flaws and jealousies. People will still be petty and small minded, people will still feel alienated and isolated. I may not be a brilliant physicist (seeing how stressed and miserable my lecturers in university seemed put me off such things) but I related a lot to Shevek; his difficulty with other children and other people, his desire for isolation clashing with his need for community. The story of his struggles with this fallen, conservative anarchism is what first made anarchism seem real to me. That it could happen. That society could be remade. I admit that I do not wish to give up all of my luxuries that the Odonians would consider “excrement”, (I was raised propertarian after all) but the useless work that I do to live comfortably right now certainly does not sit easily in me.
For this world, New Tahiti, was literally made for men.
A very fun read and the anger toward colonialism seeps off the page.
To oppose something is to maintain it.
A beautiful meditation on the divisions that we make up to to pretend that we cannot understand one another; sex, gender, nationhood, genetics.
You can betray someone with a word or an action. You can betray them with silence or inaction too. And in betraying that one person, you can betray a whole world.
I am glad to see a children’s book this angry about climate change and the violence of border maintenance, though the prose feels very simple and bare bones even for something aimed at a young audience and its post-apocalypse jerks very suddenly as the book goes on from ecological parable, to Mad Max to young adult dystopia without having much depth in any part.
You go out of your way to make everyone look at me. Why would I want that? I just wanna be left alone.
Fun and touching little read. It doesn’t generally expect you to have an in-depth knowledge of sports but it does occasionally throw concepts at you with no explanation at all. No, Grace, I absolutely cannot put two and two together on why you would not want to play in the number 23 jersey any more or why 47 would be considered weird. Your Yankee numerology means absolutely nothing to me.
He was staked now totally on one belief: that an honest man cannot be cheated, that truth, if the game be played through right to the end, will lead to truth.
There are one or two places earlier in the novel where Falk has an internal dialogue with himself, perhaps hinting at the protagonist’s eventual plural nature. One might expect that to be developed more thoroughly throughout the book, and such dialogue to be explored in more detail after Falk-Ramarren dual awakening, but in Le Guin’s typical fashion much of the book is a slow journey exploring a character, the world, and their place in it, with a rush of action held off to the every end. Falk-Ramarren does not get much actual interplay in the text before it’s all over and we must imagine what their reconciliation of identity looks like ourselves.
It is also perhaps odd that the liars are defeated not just by truth but also in part by the secrecy, hierarchy and compartmentalisation of Werelian culture, though much like the origin of the Werelian culture itself that can only become useful through it’s joining together of human culture and understanding in Falk, who Ramarren would be lost without just as Falk would be lost without Ramarren.
But who remembers the Year before last?
One people who live only in the concern of the immediate, who cannot look beyond one lifetime except as part of cycle without beginning or end, and another who only look to the past, only able to look to the future by looking at how they could survive together rather than apart.
They can send death at once, but life is slower.
I have previously read three books in Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle: The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed and City of Illusions. Having read through Earthsea a few years ago I’ve been meaning to revisit Le Guin’s science fiction series and decided to start at the beginning.
Interesting to see threads of both the later Hainish Cycle books and of Earthsea starting here, with its heroic high fantasy world and story embedded in a science fiction setting. Le Guin’s prose is always wonderful to read and I really enjoyed the contrast in perspectives between Semley in the prologue and Rocannon in the rest of the novel, though it’s difficult not to judge it against her later works and find it less cohesive.
Sorawo-chan, are you engaging with first contact with Toriko properly?
Once again these characters spend so long avoiding talking about relationships that when they do it is shocking how open and frank they end up being, not just casually acknowledging the idea of lesbian relationships, but of asexuality and aromanticism and how many people’s wants and needs fit outside of societal norms. And this ends up mirroring the exploration of the Otherside in a way that I didn’t expect, though maybe should have been obvious. The alien consciousness on the other side of the Otherside is unknowable, but so are people. To grow to understand someone else requires you to both understand yourself and inevitably to by changed by them.
I also love Sorawo using 鵼, a chimeric monster whose name can be written as a compound of the first character of both of their names, as a name of their relationship. Seems like the kind of dorky shit I would do.
It’s the same cycle, over and over. I don’t know how to get out, and I don’t know how to keep going, either.
I got this as a Christmas present having never heard of it before. From the cover and the premise—the last survivor of a war against necromancers—I was was imaging something much more strange and eldritch than this book provides. The first large hint was the fact that the protagonist was fighting for the capital-R Resistance1. The reality of what I had started reading was cemented when a friend saw me reading and informed me that the book started as a Hermoine/Draco fanfiction. I was honestly less bothered by it being Harry Potter-related than with it being a romance. But I am stubborn and decided to stick with it, leaving it at my partner’s place as something to pick through when at her’s.
The fundamental problem with this book is that it’s over a thousand pages long. I did enjoy much of it, but by the time it stumbles across the finish line I was quite sick of it. There is absolutely no need for it to be this long and even its big structural trick could have been done with half the number of pages. Helena, the protagonist, has amnesia; she doesn’t remember the last two years of the war. Some magical process has blocked out her memories. As the plot picks up and tensions are coming to a head with her and her captor Kaine, Helena starts to remember everything, at which point the novel cuts to an extended (very extended–it’s over half the book) flashback to bring us, and her, up to speed with, before finally returning to the present once we’ve caught back up.
The most obvious possibility as to the source of her amnesia is that she did this to herself to hide things, which the bad guys bring up and them dismiss as impossible. Then later on the bigger bad guy comes in and says lmao she obviously did this to herself you morons. This kind of underwhelming or undermined twist happens a few times. At one point what is basically the Philosopher’s Stone from Fullmetal Alchemist except that it’s white instead of red comes into the plot. Nothing really comes of it for some time other than the characters will occasionally, when talking about Kaine’s inevitable death, remark that maybe the Philosopher’s Stone from Fullmetal Alchemist except that it’s white instead of red might be usable to save Kaine’s life, and then it doesn’t and they do something else that also seems like it was pulled out of Fullmetal Alchemist to save him instead. At one point Helena asserts that the stone was used for something else that I either somehow missed or was completely glossed over and only explained in hindsight. Either way seems like a stone containing the souls of the ancient dead should at be something a bit more than a red white herring.
Not that I wanted it to expand on the ancient lore stuff more than it did. The religious background of the setting turns out to have all been a lie, of course, but then it turns out the lie was also a lie and the main villain is also two different ancient figures whose real history was deliberately obscured and not only does this revelation feel completely disconnected from anything of actual narrative import or emotional weight, it also drags the climax of part two—the giant flashback—to a halt. That might as well have been the climax of the whole book anyway as resetting the narrative again after that and jumping from the end of the war back to the present of Helena’s captivity really takes the wind out of everything again.
The main purpose of the flashback section is to recontextualise the relationship between Helena and Kaine, but even though I certainly could not have predicted the plot I don’t feel like it really reveal as much nuance in the character dynamics as it thinks it does. Even if you weren’t already spoilt, as I was going in, that this is intended as a dark romance, I think that it would be fairly obvious that it was heading in that direction anyway and so by the time we reset to learn exactly how Kaine and Helena really knew each other before she lost her memory, the broad trajectory is relatively clear. I don’t really understand what people find compelling about stories where people who don’t even like each other develop feelings for each other (they do eventually bond over their mutual complete lack of self-worth and instinct for self-sacrifice, but this only comes after they have already fallen for each other for no apparent reason) nor the allure of edgy, dangerous, bad boys so really this book was never going to be for me, but I could have forgiven it that if it wasn’t otherwise so dragged out. Even within the flashback it can’t help but try to do further dramatic recontextualisations of the relationship, with the two revealing secret motivations and layers of manipulation at play in previous interactions that absolutely did not come across as having anything that deep going on at the time nor really explain much of anything that had previously felt mysterious.
And Helena and Kaine’s relationship is the only one that gets developed. Before the flashback we hear the names of various old friends, but even when we jump back in time those relationships have already fallen apart and we never get to spend any time with or learn that much about any of them. Evidently I am meant to give a shit about Soren but the only reason I could conceive that I might is because that in a previous version of this story he was named (I am guessing) Ron Weasley. The story was written with the assumption that you are already bought into these characters and their past relationships but has not been changed to accommodate the references to the source material having been ripped out.
And once Kaine and Helena’s relationship is established (over many, many repetitive scenes) it really shifts gears into feeling like a bad prequel to itself; exhaustively tying everything established in the present back to Helena in some way. Every new invention and technique that gets used on Helena she had a hand in creating, every character that has appeared she had met before, every big event mentioned in passing she had a key hand it. Recontextualising things like this is not bad (it’s the whole point of a flashback like this) but it starts to feel both excessive and like a checklist, with the story having a need to pack in every little idea well beyond the point it has become tiresome. By the time part two finally ended I just wanted the book to be over.
The book, thankfully, does oblige and doesn’t waste too much time in the characters fleeing to the countryside, entering a marriage where they still lie to each other and bicker over it, and letting the bad guy who already had his narrative climax happen back in the flashback die offscreen.
A name that needs to be barred from further use for at least a decade. ↩
Yeah that’s right. It’s Satsuki-san. Your precious monster.
I am a bit surprised how lightly they end up brushing against the fact that Uruma was grooming girls. It’s been acknowledged, and I think it’s reasonable to write characters having complicated feelings about it rather than have them deliver moral lectures about it, but seeing as we are stuck in Sorawo’s perspective and she is terrible at understanding or enquiring into other people’s feelings we never really get that much of an exploration on the impact that it’s had on the people actually affected.
Sowaro and Toriko had better actually fuck now.
Because if you try to do everything yourself, you may find yourself in a situation where you can only do everything yourself.
Very cute for a series that focuses on internet horror stories come to live to have a sort of feature-length special and have it based on a shitpost.
T-san, though, kind of highlights how arbitrary a lot of the monsters in this series can feel. Horror often relies more on vibes than on logic but I am used to horror with more clear thematic thrust in what’s going on than Otherside Picnic tends to have. The trail they follow become a road and then a car full of doppelgängers and then a rollercoaster. Every time T-san “hah!”s people it does something different. There doesn’t seem to be much of a connection to it all other than pulling from different online posts and mashing them together.
This does make more sense for T-san, who is more of a genre than a character as emphasised by his unremarked upon shifting appearance, but it’s how the series has felt for me most of the time, not just in this story.
on the early train today which means I am going to read more Otherside Picnic
Update Septmber 2026: I’ve changed the wording of a few steps based on feedback in the comments.
I usually prefer to read paper books and get them from my local library when I can, but I have an old Kindle Paperwhite that I generally load up with books to read while travelling. It saves a lot of hassle, bulk and weight compared to carrying around several paperbacks.
I had previously looked into custom Kindle firmware and found people saying that such things don’t exist, but with Amazon pulling support for old Kindles I had another look and realised that I’d missed something: There may not be fully custom firmware for Kindles, but there is jailbreaks and custom software. I took me a while to get it working, navigating various Mobile Read forum threads to piece together steps that worked and now that I have KOReader up and running (and can therefore finally read EPUB files on my Kindle) I decided to write up the exact, reproducible steps that I took to get there.
The first thing you need is the serial number of your Kindle to determine the exact model type and compare it to the Mobile Read wiki page on Kindle serial numbers. You can get this on Amazon’s website while logged into the account that the Kindle is registered to or from the device itself.
Confusingly, on my Kindle you must access this by ☰Menu button, selecting Settings, then pressing the ☰Menu button again (which pops up a different menu when pressed from inside the settings screen) and then selecting Device Info. The wiki page does mention this too, but I missed it at first. The device info popup also has the firmware version, which for me was 5.6.1.1, which will also be important.
In my case the serial number starts with B024. Amazon’s site describes it as “Kindle Paperwhite (5th Generation)” and the Mobile Read wiki calls it “Kindle PaperWhite WiFi”, but more importantly the nickname that is used in Mobile Read’s guides is PW (or PW1), which was needed for figuring out which jailbreak I needed.
The jailbreak method I used for my PW1 only works for firmware version 5.0→5.4.4.2, while mine was 5.6.1.1. The jailbreak can’t be installed in version 5.6, but if it was previously installed it can be patched to work again. This meant that I had to downgrade the firmware, install the jailbreak, upgrade the firmware again, and then apply the upgrade patch to fix the jailbreak. And then I also needed the software I want to actually run on the Kindle afterwards, which in my case was KOReader, a Stardict dictionary for KOReader, and Kindle Unified Application Launcher (KUAL) to allow me to launch the reader in the first place.
These can all be grabbed here:
kindle-jailbreak-1.16.N-r19426.tar.xzKUAL-v2.7.37-gfcb45b5-20250419.tar.xzUpdate_hotfix_universal.binkoreader-kindle-v####.##.zipdict-en-en.zip (not the one labelled Kindle)To ensure that these steps worked from a blank slate I repeated them after doing a factory reset on my Kindle. As Amazon are ending support for older Kindles if you do a factory reset after the 20th of May 2026 you will not be able to re-register your old Kindle and it will be effectively bricked. I intend to keep mine on permanent aeroplane mode from now on to ensure Amazon don’t do anything else funny to mess it up.
If Amazon haven’t turned off the servers yet and you are logging into an old Kindle and you have two-factor authentication enabled then login will fail if you try to log in with just your username and password, but you can append your six-digit authentication token to the end of your password and it should work.
Update Septmber 2026: Helen in the comments has said that this process did work after a factory reset. I have not verified this. Do at your own risk.
update_kindle_5.4.4.bin to the root directory of the Kindle.kindle-jailbreak-1.16.N-r19426.tar.xz. Within this is another compressed file called kindle-5.4-jailbreak.zip. Unzip that second file and move its contents into the root directory of the Kindle.kindle-5.4-jailbreak.zip (including Update_jb_$(cd mnt && cd us && sh jb.sh).bin) are still in the root directory of your Kindle (copy them over again if not) and try again.koreader-kindle-v####.##.zip to the root directory of the Kindle./koreader/data/dict/ and extract the contents of dict-en-en.zip to it.KUAL-v2.7.37-gfcb45b5-20250419.tar.xz extract KUAL-KDK-2.0.azw2 and copy it to /documents/ in the Kindle root directory.update_kindle_5.6.1.1.bin to the root directory of the Kindle.Update_hotfix_universal.bin to the root directory of the Kindle.All going well there should now be a Kindle Launcher/KUAL entry on your Kindle homescreen amongst the books and when pressed should take you to a screen that will let you launch KOReader (or any other homebrew software that you install). KOReader itself should give you a file browser that you can use to read EPUBs, PDFs and other formats that your Kindle couldn’t natively. You can transfer books over just by copying them over with a USB cable the same way as any other file.
I use Calibre to organise my e-books and it can handle transferring them over to the Kindle too, though by default it only sends books in formats the Kindle can natively read. You can change what formats it will transfer over as well as the folder structure it uses from the settings for the Kindle plugin under Preferences→Plugins.
Could I accept this much affection?
The first few stories in this series really made it seem like the Otherside both had far more people stumbling into it and dying all the time. They run into a lot of people early on and Toriko makes it sound like she found guns lying around all the time, but that has tapered off into more general weird events. Even Satsuki’s overarching presence has started to ease off to give the girls a break and the relationship develop a bit more and make the Otherside their own a bit.
It is also feels almost bizarre at this point to suddenly have characters openly and casually discussing the idea of women dating each other when the series has skirted around it for so long. But it is in service of continuing to push Sorawo to open herself up to these possibilities and allow herself to be loved. It is quite sweet, even if she can be frustrating.
Though I am sure that as soon as she does all of that danger and the weight of Toriko’s own personal history that have been pushed aside for the moment are going to come crashing down on the both of them.
It always took me a lot of courage to go to the next step in this train of thought.
I didn’t intend to keep ploughing through these, but I was travelling again and had several hours to kill on trains. The development of the relationship between Toriko and Sorawo is very slow, but there is always some degree of forward momentum to it, in spite of Sorawo’s cluelessness. She is like a protagonist in a zombie movie where the world is the same as it is now except that none of the characters have ever heard of the concept of a zombie, except instead of zombies it’s lesbians—though she is the only person like this as everyone around the protagonists clearly think that they are already a couple. This volume does make it clear that that ignorance was somewhat willful; she is too scared to open herself up, even in her own internal monologue, to the possibility of someone loving her. Still, we asymptotically approach lesbianism.
And I know that tattoos are associated with the Yakuza in Japan but her being scared of Migiwa’s Mayan tattoo sleeve he probably just got while drunk on holiday in Central America is very funny.
Just how many underage girls has she laid her hands on?
I am surprised that the story seems to actually be angling Toriko as a victim of grooming and I am curious where it goes with that.
Very funny that the only thing physically wrong with Sorawo after so many supernatural near-death experiences is that her liver is not in great shape from going out and getting hammered to celebrate every time they survive a trip to the Otherside. She also seems to have some sort of medical condition that causes her mind to fail to comprehend the existence of lesbianism or any information pertaining to it and is too socially awkward to every ask anyone to clarify what they mean by anything.
I had was wondering why the translator decided to use both Luna and Runa for transliterating that character’s name and it looks like in the original novel her name was also written two ways depending how it’s being used, with Luna in the translation standing in for ｢ルナ｣ in katakana and Runa for ｢るな｣ in hiragana. I like to try and get an understanding of little translation tidbits like that even when I can’t read the original text at all. Language is fun!
Alcohol is scary…
Whomst among us has not gotten so drunk that we blacked out and maxed out our credit card buying agricultural equipment?
The recaps in each story can feel a bit excessive sometimes for something that, as far as I know, wasn’t serialised on story-by-story basis. Could also do without the US marines field-modifying an armoured vehicle explicitly in line with IDF vehicles specifically designed to kill Palestinians in order to fight monsters which is a thing that actually happens in this book.
I enjoy Sorawo getting jealous without realising that that’s what’s happening and her hiding things from Toriko adds an interesting wrinkle to the relationship.
They say that being accomplices is the closest kind of relationship in the world.
Quite funny to take Roadside Picnic but reinterpret the title to just be about it being nice to have a picnic in the Zone, as is the how it wears its inspiration on its sleeve with Sorawo and Toriko meeting a guy who is basically a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. stalker on their second outing.
The prose and dialogue are frequently awkward which I will put down mostly to translation problems, though I think that the descriptions are also very visually focused in a way that I think doesn’t use the advantages of prose as a medium.
But I was looking for a fun, light read while travelling and it provided that quite well. Toriko and Sorawo are endearing and watching their relationship evolve is compelling, from Toriko calling Sorawo Twitter-brained on their first meeting to them looking out for each other as they become accomplices. Using actual modern ghost stories and having a bibliography that cites 2chan threads in very specific detail is also quite charming.
This is the body that was given for you—look at it, torn and bleeding, throbbing still with the tortured life, quivering from the bitter death-agony; take it, Christians, and eat!
Came on my radar a couple of months ago when it was in the news as a book that Micheál Martin and Xi Jinping bonded over and sounded interesting. Compelling, tragic, quite racist in the middle, and ends with a fierce anti-Christian polemic that my inner ratheist is perhaps a tad too fond of. I particularly enjoyed Montanelli trying to pass on the choice of what is to be done to a condemned man to the man himself—as if it were a mercy—washing his hands of guilt and sin by refusing to face his own choice, and being told to fuck off and stop pretending that the hangman is the real victim of an execution.
I have not kept up with wrestling since the 2000s but I have been recently been getting slightly back into it through my girlfriend (after her flatmate got her back into it), so Alice Bell’s new supernatural murder mystery being wrestling-themed was a nice little bonus on top of a book I was going to read anyway. Might beat out the first one for my favourite in the series so far, though I did cop who the murderer was a while before the protagonist and got slightly impatient waiting for the penny to drop.
[You cannot] detect your personality and its decisions in the course of being created by your experience. You know only that you ingest the present tense and excrete it as a narrative in the past.
I have never read anything this dense with wordplay, puns and sheer linguistic playfulness. I did not understand close to all of it but all I need to continue reading to the next paragraph and experience Brigid Brophy doing something else charmingly unspeakable to the English language (and sometimes other ones as well). There is almost a tactile physicality to the prose in some parts. Is this felt joy like what people who like Joyce feel? I feel like the insufferability of my writing may increase just by having read this. The text rending the rendered text on my website unreadable. I flail to imitate it, my sincerest fattery.
Okay, I’ll stop with that. The novel starts very philosophically, with the narrator—born in Ireland but moved to Britain when they were young—wandering around an airport lounge as their mind similarly wanders, basking in the most liminal and modern of public spaces to muse on the concept of being “in transit”. Of a space of movement, of transition, of the crossing of boundaries, a space international in character and (the novel being written in the 60s) a state of being that is starting to be opened to more than just the upper classes.
In this state several peculiar things start to happen to our narrator. They undergo what they describe as “linguistic leprosy”, a state that mostly results in a flood of multilingual puns in major European languages. The relationship with the Irish language and Irishness here is interesting. The narrator is not comfortable with the language. They can not wield it deftly or easily and are reduced to making the old tired jokes about how odd the spelling conventions are. There is a lamentation in this. They have had exposure to it to think they should perhaps know it a bit more. This is put out to leaving at a young age but this rings quite true as someone who has lived in Ireland her entire life as well. Along with the leprosy there is the pain of a phantom tongue that was never really known. Joyce comes to mind again, though from reputation more than experience. The only Joyce that I’ve read is one or two stories from Dubliners. But with Joyce, Brophy and Ireland’s general reputation (or at least the reputation we tell ourselves that we have) for great works of English poetry and literature, does the ungaelicised mind seek to master its foreign mother tongue, to turn the tables on the colonisation of language?
The novel takes a turn towards farce in the second part, when the protagonist (gender previously hidden, as the book points out itself, with the use of the personal pronoun I) realises that somehow, ridiculously they have forgotten what sex they are, and tries to–within the bounds of polite public behaviour—figure out what’s going on downstairs. The sex marker on the passport has been (in)conveniently blotched by a coffee stain, their clothes are oh-so-modern, gender neutral and loose fitting, if they have breasts they are too small to be noticeable, reading the porn novel that they had in their bag and seeing if they relate to the Story of Oc’s Tongue as voyeur or self-insert and then stop just short of groping themselves in public before they realise that the man sitting across from them in the airport café is starting at them like they are a lunatic. This results in an escalating series of misadventures up to and including ending up on a gameshow where they have to guess someone’s kink live on air.
One might expect the exploration of gender to have aged poorly, but other than (admittedly fairly gaping from a contemporary perspective) lack of consideration of the concept of being trans or intersex I think it’s great and, more importantly, very funny. What has aged somewhat more poorly is the language around race that the book uses. It’s not hateful, but the earnest use of the word “oriental” and the in-passing exoticisation of the few non-white characters in the book is less than ideal.
The book transforms itself again towards the end, splitting our narrator into the dual personalities of Patric{kia} and then branching further off to focus on the experiences of various other characters as a socialist, egalitarian revolution takes control of the airport lounge. I must admit I didn’t like this section as much. It feels like the novel over-stays its welcome a bit, which is a shame, but I did enjoy the choose-your-own-adventure ending.
I picked this up on a whim in a bookshop in Copenhagen. The start was interesting, though a dense read, but quickly started to feel very meandering and directionless, full of its own cleverness and unfunny comedy. But I am nothing if not stubborn and decided to stick it through to the end, if only to experience what a reviewer in The Irish Times would call “a dazzling, poetic triumph” in 1968. The answer is, of course, constantly misogynistic, frequently racist and occasionally homophobic. It does manage to pick up in the back half and get some sense of momentum and direction going and eventually a meaning actually starts to coalesce around a man trapped in a capitalist nightmare that traps even those would would notionally be its masters, a self-perpetuating system from which the author seems to imagine there can be no true escape or break from. Or perhaps that escape is saved for Nunquam, the novel that is apparently the second half of the story started in this one, though I don’t think that I will be reading it.
I feel so grateful to the man who invented the “Traveller’s” typewriter.
Mina Harker, expressing her love for her laptop.
Applying modern labels and understandings of people to the past is iffy and and remains so when applied to fictional characters who were certainly never written with those as-yet non-existent concepts in mind but also it’s fun so I’m going to do it. Mina Harker (née Murray) is an autistic, bisexual, and cool as hell.
None of what I’m going to say is a particularly original idea and much of what I’m drawing from here is from the general milieu of the Dracula Daily fanbase. This was, of course, a large part of the appeal of Dracula Daily; not just a novel way to read a classic book but also a participatory exercise in going through that work and evolving a fandom understanding of it as it progresses, with all the tenuous headcanoning that such things involve.
Dracula is Gothic fiction wherein the ancient horror is defeated and soundly routed by modernity. Our heroes are doctors and solicitors (and a rich Texan who fancies himself a cowboy) and an important weapon in the arsenal used to defeat the count himself is meticulous note-taking. And it is Mina who transcribes, edits, organises and distributes these notes. Within the fiction it is she who creates the manuscript that is the text of the novel itself and makes carbon copies to provide to the other protagonists. She habitually organises and sorts information and while she often frames it as making herself useful to her husband1 she displays a clear knack and enthusiasm for doing so.
“When does the next train start for Galatz?” said Van Helsing to us generally.
“At 6.30 tomorrow morning!” We all started, for the answer came from Mrs. Harker.
“How on earth do you know?” said Art.
“You forget or perhaps you do not know, though Jonathan does and so does Dr. Van Helsing that I am the train fiend.”
“I am the train fiend”?! This girl autistic as hell.
Mina is also the one who sits down and logically deduces Dracula’s escape plan from everyone’s scattered notes and observations, writing it out her evidence and conclusions point by point.
Ground of inquiry. Count Dracula’s problem is to get back to his own place.
(a) He must be brought back by someone, This is evident; for had he power to move himself as he wished he could go either as man, or wolf, or bat, or in some other way. He evidently fears discovery or interference, in the state of helplessness in which he must be confined as he is between dawn and sunset in his wooden box.
(b) How is he to be taken? Here a process of exclusions may help us. By road, by rail, by water?
[…]
Van Helsing says that Mina has a man’s brain and a woman’s heart1. While this is meant simply as a compliment of her faculties1 the fact that her analytical nature is framed as inherently masculine reminds me of the (nonsense) extreme male brain theory of autism which is rooted in notions of men being naturally more systemising and women being naturally more empathising. This is starting to bend towards me just documenting some free association so I will move on to Mina being gay.
Mina and Lucy in the book have a classic romantic friendship, gushing and fawning over each other to a degree that is difficult not read as somewhat sapphic to a modern reader. Mina takes care of Lucy while she is being secretly preyed upon by Dracula, and while she sleeps Mina notes how beautiful she is, thinking about how it could make someone fall in love with her, about sex outside of marriage, and about the idea of women being able to make marriage proposals1.
Lucy is asleep and breathing softly. She has more colour in her cheeks than usual, and looks, oh, so sweet. If Mr. Holmwood fell in love with her seeing her only in the drawing room, I wonder what he would say if he saw her now. Some of the “New Women” writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the “New Woman” won’t condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too! There’s some consolation in that. I am so happy tonight, because dear Lucy seems better.
Later, not having seen Lucy in some time and unaware of her rapid deterioration, Mina sends a letter to Lucy that directly compares the love between her and her husband to the love between her and Lucy and that she could, would, has, does and will love her.
Jonathan asks me to send his “respectful duty,” but I do not think that is good enough from the junior partner of the important firm Hawkins & Harker; and so, as you love me, and he loves me, and I love you with all the moods and tenses of the verb, I send you simply his “love” instead. Goodbye, my dearest Lucy, and all blessings on you.
The novel—the manuscript compiled by Mina herself—emphasises the tragedy of this goodbye and this expression of love by noting that this letter was not opened by Lucy before her death.
Also her favourite spot to hang out in on her holiday in Witby is the graveyard so she’s pretty goth, too.
Perez’s writing can be extremely powerful—I have some of her words tattooed on my arms—but while individual passages in this novel might be very powerful I didn’t feel like it cohered all that much and the purpose of most of the stylistic flourishes felt opaque to me: The second-person narration, the unjustified text, the segments in all lowercase. I don’t know what really they were in service of. Perhaps, being someone pretentious enough to format blog posts as if they were formal writing, I shouldn’t be so judgemental of someone formatting a novel like a blog post, but the only trick I found particularly affecting is the big, blunt, obvious one: The blacked out text for the things that don’t want to be remembered or voiced.
This was given to me as a present, purchased as a “blind date with a book,” wrapped in parcel paper with just the first line of story adoring the cover.
A large, 24/7, unethical supermarket, late on Friday night.
Enticing. In what way is this supermarket unethical? Is there something sinister going on here? Is the meat at the butcher’s counter not what it seems? Probably not, we never really learn anything much about the supermarket. It seems to be unethical merely in the way most businesses are. Every chapter in the book, and they are 124 of them and most of them are about three pages long, starts with a similar bit of scene-setting that is utterly irrelevant to anything that actually happens. And in the end what happens is not terribly a lot to a protagonist that I never really found myself caring about.
People from a bunch of different alien species stuck at a space truck stop due to a natural disaster. I don’t have much of a review here, honestly. Great book. Fantastic series.
I have posted about how one of Dracula’s funniest moments is from it examining its own format as an epistolary novel but a another amusing use of the format is the inclusion of newspaper articles that give a perspective of some of the events of the novel from the detached perspective of (absurdly verbose) newspaper clippings whose writers have no inkling of the broader events of the story.
A correspondent from The Daily Graph recounts, on the 8th of August, how a freak storm crashes the schooner Demeter into Whitby Harbour with the only living soul on board being a great, black dog1 that leaps from the ship as soon as it beaches and runs straight to a cliff where it “disappeared in the darkness, which seemed intensified just beyond the focus of the searchlight.”
The reporting continues the next day that the cargo of the ship (boxes full of Transylvanian soil) being consigned to a local solicitor and, more importantly, the Whitby SPCA putting out a desperate search for the poor dog who fled the ship, who is imagined to be terrified and hiding in the moors and definitely not a murderous vampire in the guise of a gigantic, ferocious, black wolf.
The newspaper clippings end with the paragraph:
No trace has ever been found of the great dog; at which there is much mourning, for, with public opinion in its present state, he would, I believe, be adopted by the town. To-morrow will see the funeral; and so will end this one more “mystery of the sea.”
I picked this book up on a whim in a bookshop when I realised that I had forgotten to bring anything else to read during a trip I was taking.
It is prefaced by the worst map I have ever seen in a fantasy novel and it sets the tone for the rest of it. A bunch of fantasy and romance tropes ground down into an easy to swallow slop.
It seemed like it might have been going in interesting directions early on, with the fairies (I do not respect anyone using the term “faerie” or “fae” because they’re afraid of being silly by just saying fairy) being depicted as these ancient, horrible, shapeshifting beings who cannot lie and whose food you must not eat. Still drawing from standard tropes but ones had me second guessing them and the story constantly. But no, it turns out that all the stories humans have about fairies in this setting are just wrong and they’re really just standard fantasy elves.
Our protagonist’s point of view often doesn’t feel informed by the world and her life in it and just based on fantasy tropes. The assumptions she makes, the things she takes as facts or how she understands the things around her often seem out of nowhere. She is barely literate but can somehow infer a detailed history of the world from a mural. She seems to just intuitively understand so much about magic and fairies as the plot goes on despite having previously established basically everything she was raised to think about them is wrong. When she is trying to practise reading she makes note of words to look up the pronunciations of later. How is she going to do that, exactly? Does the fairy library have Google? Nothing seems at all thought through.
Some of the later revelations and resolutions seem like something that everyone involved should have some extremely complicated feelings about at the very least but these characters have no emotional depth at all so I am not going to waste time trying to unpack them myself when no one else involved is bothering to.
I don’t respect it at all but I can’t say that I had a bad time reading it either. It did get a bit tedious when the romance completely took over for a few chapter but thankfully the plot did pick up again after that. It filled time.
I think this might be the worst map in any fantasy novel I’ve read
Borders that could only have been drawn by an American.
This post contains spoilers for Dracula, which is 128 years old.
I have not been keeping up with Dracula Daily as I had intended1 but I wanted to make a post about it today. One of the features of the original Dracula that is often forgotten in adaptation is how modern it is. As an epistolary novel the story is mostly a series of diary entries and in the case of the character John Seward his diary, starting on the 25th of May, it is recorded on a phonograph—an invention that was only twenty years old at the time of the novel’s publication in 1897.
The book heavily involves the collision of the very modern and scientific with the ancient evil that is Count Dracula. The novel opens with Jonathan Harker, a solicitor, travelling to Transylvania in order to sort out a property deal for the count. This journey involves going from the comfort and regularity of well-timetabled trains to a treacherous carriage ride through the old, wild Carpathian mountains. With him, as well as the needed legal documents, he has photos taken on his Kodak2 camera, which is far from the only piece of prominent technology.
The weapons used to fight Dracula are not just wooden stakes and crucifixes3 but also blood transfusions4, hypnotism5, next-day flower delivery from Haarlem to London6, shorthand7, meticulous note-taking, and in-depth knowledge of train timetables8. While it goes unremarked on in the book itself I like to imagine that Count Dracula’s statement that “to live in a new house would kill me” is due to a vampire’s inability to cross running water not playing very well with indoor plumbing. Abraham Van Helsing is not a young, sexy vampire hunter in this novel but an polymath professor with at least three doctorates9. Dracula is not that out of step with Buffy the Vampire Slayer answering the question of how to deal with a terrible and ancient demon with blowing it up with a bazooka.
But there is something else important about John Seward’s phonography: It ends up being extremely funny. Even just reading this and thinking that he is speaking this out loud to be recorded on a wax cylinder it seems incredibly obnoxious:
I questioned him more fully than I had ever done, with a view to making myself master of the facts of his hallucination. In my manner of doing it there was, I now see, something of cruelty. I seemed to wish to keep him to the point of his madness a thing which I avoid with the patients as I would the mouth of hell. (Mem., Under what circumstances would I not avoid the pit of hell?) Omnia Romæ venalia sunt. Hell has its price! verb, sap. If there be anything behind this instinct it will be valuable to trace it afterwards accurately, so I had better commence to do so, therefore R. M, Renfield, ætat 59. Sanguine temperament; great physical strength; morbidly excitable; periods of gloom ending in some fixed idea which I cannot make out.
One presumes that he is saying “memorandum” out loud and not just “mem” as is transcribed. Later, when he records his conversations with Van Helsing he includes the full back and forth dialogue, with all of Van Helsing’s disfluencies, grammatical errors and strange turns of phrase. One has to wonder is Seward imitating his friend’s Dutch accent while recording this? Is he doing voices whenever he is making his diary? What does his Mina voice sound like? We are reading, within the fiction, a transcription of him speaking out loud. And we know who does the transcription because it happens during the course of the plot. The later part of the novel involves the protagonists meeting up and compiling all of their notes together into what is the text of the novel itself.
This is done by Mina Harker and the reason she starts doing this is, again, extremely funny: She walks in on Seward recording on his phonograph and asks to hear some of it. He initially agrees but then starts deflecting awkwardly that most if is about his medical cases. When Mina asks specifically to hear about the last few days of her friend Lucy Westenra’s life he admits that he has no idea how to find a specific diary entry in his phonograph recordings. He has been using this for at least the last four months and he just never thought about it at all. He has not labelled anything. He has no system of any kind. He has just been talking into this and never reviewing it in any way! This is what prompts Mina to start transcribing the entries for him, as well as typing up her and her husband’s shorthand diaries for everyone else to read and compiling all the other letters and newspaper clippings that make up the novel. Going back to the modernity of it all the most in-spirit adaptation of Dracula set in the modern day would surely be composed primarily of screenshots of social media posts and podcast segments.
There is one more interesting angle on the fact that Mina is the author, or at least the typesetter, of the book within the fiction: How she types up the dialogue of Renfield, Seward’s patient and devoted servant of Dracula. Renfield’s dialogue capitalises He, His, You, Your and Master when he is speaking of Dracula, something that is only proper to do when referring to God10. This is obviously meant to ascribe a blasphemous devotion to Dracula to Renfield, but within the story it is Mina who is choosing to capitalise his words in this manner and Mina is also, at this point, partially under Dracula’s influence. While I don’t think that this was Bram Stoker’s intent we could read this an an unconscious sign of Dracula’s influence over Mina’s mind.
I think that in light of recent personal events that should be pretty forgiveable. ↩
Kodak had been founded 1892, five years prior to the publication of Dracula. ↩
Amusingly as an Anglican Jonathon Harker finds the whole crucifix thing all a bit Catholic for his taste. ↩
Some successful blood transfusions had been recorded for decades prior to the novel’s publication, but it was a very risky affair and blood types were not discovered until a few years later. ↩
Hypnotism, a word coined by James Braid in 1841, was very much in vogue as a serious path of medical exploration in the decades prior in both Britain and France. ↩
Van Helsing uses garlic blossoms to ward off Dracula in the novel, not strings of garlic bulbs. ↩
The Pitman shorthand system was published in the 1837 and the Gregg shorthand system in 1888. ↩
Please look forward to a post about the train fiend in a few months. ↩
He signs his letters “Abraham Van Helsing, M.D., D.Ph., D.Lit., Etc., Etc.” ↩
Within the cultural context of the novel. I am not religious. ↩
I’ve made some tweaks and corrections to this post, including fixing some confusion I had about Arthur Holmwood’s name.
I first read Dracula in 2022, following along with Dracula Daily, a newsletter that sends out sections of the book on the date in which they occur1. One of my posts about it on Tumblr actually ended up in the print version. The following year I read it again, this time following along with two other versions of the book: Powers of Darkness and Dracula in Istanbul, English retranslations of Icelandic and Turkish translations of the original novel respectively. It was interesting to compare the changes made in each version. I made a graphic showing how both version abridge the story compared to the original. That year I also read the comic book adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Last year I did not read Dracula again but this year I had a notion: To pick up an Irish translation and follow through the book simultaneously with my print copy of Dracula Daily2. This has immediately got off to a bad start: I was busy yesterday and so didn’t even start on the 3rd of May, the date of first entry of Jonathan Harker’s journal. The other, much larger and in hindsight very predictable problem is that my level of Irish is not really up to reading this. I had intended to get more practise in on simpler books before this but I have but limited time upon this Earth and a condition that results in poor executive function.
Still, there are some interesting things here even at a glance. I am always curious about how proper nouns are handled in translation. Here there is a mixture of Gaelicisation and leaving things as is. Jonathan Harker is Seon Ó hEarcair3 but Dracula remains Dracula (with his title of count translated as cunta). Most placenames use their standard Irish names—Transylvania is Transalváin—but Munich is actually reverted to its native München.
Flicking ahead I can see that Mina Murray is Mín Ní Mhuirí4 and John Seward is Seán Suaird5 but other names are left unchanged or only partially translated. Lucy Westenra is now Laoise6 Westenra and Arthur Holmwood is Artúr7 Holmwood. Abraham Van Helsing and Mr. Quincy P. Morris are unchanged, with the English honorific still being used sometimes in the text. Other minor characters like Renfield seem to keep their English names. I can’t really tell what the basis was here for deciding which names to translate or not.
Returning to section for the 3rd of May there are some abridgements. The section on the various nationalities of Transylvania is cut entirely8 and more tragically Jonathan’s little memoranda to get the recipes for paprika hendl, mămăligă and împănată to give to Mina are cut as well.
Bram Stoker himself was an Anglo-Irishman from Dublin and a lot of people say that the choice of the name Dracula for the eponymous vampire was not only inspired by the historical Vlad the Impaler but also because it sounds vaguely like “droch-fhola”, a phrase that could be read as “evil blood” in Irish. It’s not true at all, but people say it!
One last thing to note about this translation is that the cover is quite funny.
Dracula is an epistolary novel; it is made up of fictional letters and diary entries written by the characters. ↩
The title of this post, Dracula an Lae, is Dracula Daily in Irish. ↩
Pronounced something approximately like ”Shown O’Harker”. Irish does not natively use the letter J and Gaelicisations tend to use a slender s sound in it place, which is similar to an English “sh” sound. ↩
Something like “Meen Nee Woor-ee”. Murray is an Anglicised Gaelic surname in the first place. The male form is Ó Muirí, something like “O Moor-ee”. She of course later in the novel becomes Mín Uí Earcair, “Meen E Arker”. ↩
”Shawn Seward”. ↩
“Lee-sha”. ↩
“Ar-toor”. Once his father dies Artúr inherits the title of Tiarna Godalming. ↩
Perhaps the translator, in 1933, did not wish to have to research (or invent) Irish or native names for Wallachs, Dacians, Magyars, Szekelys and Huns. ↩
Didn’t have me bawling the way the first two books did but it did make me cry.
This novel consistently delivers on providing truly baffling adaptational choices. From a ghost story about Franz Ferdinand’s car, to daring the reader to find and visit its fictional locations, to Kayako keeping her diary updated after her death or her hatred being compared directly to 9/11 this book had me shouting utterly incredulously at its pages at least once a chapter.
I am not normally one for romance stories and I rolled my eyes a bit at the early flirtations, but this story got its teeth into me. A beautiful story about love and how the people you love affect you, infect you, change you and become part of you.
I reserved a copy of This Is How You Lose the Time War in the library in July of 2023 and it is finally available to pick up
Strange to read at the same time as A Closed and Common Orbit. It takes a few notes from towards the end of A Closed and Common Orbit and builds a smaller, neater narrative to lead up to specifically them. On its own it might have felt more interesting, coming off the back of the larger book it ended up feeling a little empty. And the fantasy of Panga as the world that successfully pulled back from collapse didn’t feel hopeful to me, it just made me feel bitter about the world. A miracle happened and it made everyone realise that rampant, endless, consumption and destruction was bad. How convenient.
I was sobbing in public multiple times reading this in a way I haven’t since reading Earthsea. I love Sidra and Pepper so much. I see a lot of myself and people who I love in them.
the great Sage, equal to Eggman
getting every vaccination I can so I get quintuple autism like Sun Wukong
Léaráid difríochtaí idir aistriúcháin Dracula.
A diagram of differences between translations of Dracula.
Cuimsíodh póstáil a rinne mé ar Tumblr i Dracula Daily.
A post I wrote on Tumblr was included in the margins of Dracula Daily published by Andrews McMeel Publishing.
Is úrscéal le Eudhmon Ó Dúnadhaigh (ainm cleite “F. M. Allen”) é Clashmore. Foilsíodh ar dtús é sa bhliain 1903 agus tras-scríóbh mé é i rith 2021 agus 2022.
Sa scéál téann Francis Aylward ó Londain go dtí Trá Mhór chun a uncail, Henry Aylward (Tighearna na Chlaise Móire), a chuardach mar a d’imigh Henry as radharc. In Éirinn foghlaimíonn Francis stair a theaghlaigh.
D’úsáid mé cóip as ab Leabharlann Chontae na hIarmhí agus scanadh cartlainne nuachtán The Pittsburgh Catholic, a an úrscéal a foilsiú mar shraith. Óstáil Duquesne University an chartlann seo.
A novel by Irish author Edmund Downey, a.k.a. “F. M. Allen”, originally published in 1903 that I transcribed and compiled digitally over the course of 2021 and 2022.
Clashmore concerns the journeys of a man named named Francis Aylward as he travels from London to Tramore in search of his uncle, Henry Aylward (Viscount Clashmore), who has suddenly vanished, which leads Frank to learn about his family history and its relationship with Ireland.
I used a from a copy from the Westmeath County Library and archive scans of The Pittsburgh Catholic newspaper, which the novel was serialised in, hosted by Duquesne University.
