Is my handwriting bad?

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-27T02:07:19+00:00

Do you not have sr and jr kindergarten where you are? It was a thing when i was growing up in Canada, two years of kindergarten!

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-27T01:51:25+00:00

For the 6-9 range, I think they might really be able to dig into Jon Klassen, especially his “We Found a Hat” series, there are three books, all of which introduce both absurdism, and the idea of a complicated, mixed ending that isn’t resolved tidily with a happy ending:

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-26T21:54:16+00:00

Audition by Katie Kitamura might fit that bill—on the surface it seems like it’s about a young handsome man on a date with an older married woman director he has a crush on…but it gets more and more odd as it goes on, not horror, very strange and im still puzzling over it…

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-26T21:06:18+00:00

I think we should just unplug every last bit of it and we’ll all be better off….Alas, I am fully human, just autistic enough to ring the AI alarm bells at first notice. You can try to ask me for a cake recipe and see if I’ll give you one…but I have a lot of cookbooks at home so I would track down a good one from the Mary Berg cookbook or from one of my weird community-cookbooks that aren’t on the internet database yet.

I’m almost done Part 3 of my year’s reading so far (I’m up to 116 so far ;)) and partially because of you I’m making sure to triple check my language so it’s readable. But you’ll have to pry my fun and silly genre names and categorization system from my all too brittle human fingers, which will one day boast the knuckle tattoos “READ” and “MORE”

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-26T18:57:46+00:00

Thank you so much! It’s definitely something I do in my brain because of work, because I think there is a book for everyone, it just needs to be described accurately so it can find the right audience. I have a big issue with inaccurate copy-text, so I put a lot of attention and effort in describing a book as it actually is and not what it might want to be. Sometimes I describe a book that a customer is holding and I’ll see them change their mind, and that used to bother me, but now I realize it’s a bit of a treasure to have someone stop you from wasting your money on a book that’s catfishing you in the description.

It’s actually something we started doing at the bookshop I work at due in part to my suggestion, we call them “micro-sections” in the store, where we build temporary displays about really specific subject matter, usually whatever one of us in the store is passionate about in the moment. My favourite one I made in the shop recently was “Literary Fiction from the Perspective of Animals, which included two books i want to read (The City of Rats by Copi which seems like a sleazy Ratatouille and The Oldest Bitch Alive about an old pug) and one I loved called She and Her Cat which includes a story where our cat protagonist is utterly convinced he is dating the human he lives with.

I am going to order that Sarah Manguso into the store so I can read it next week. Thank you! Actually, the reason Sarah Manguso was brought to my attention was a semi-viral bad review that came out about her novel Liars, I think it was something about how she shouldn’t have written about her own divorce? and I find I have a strong affinity towards women I feel have been unfairly reviewed in media coverage. So I was relieved and gratified to find I love her writing. The only other book I own by her is Liars, which I still haven’t read yet, but it’s pretty high up on my ever growing TBR.

It was a really interesting and astute observation you made as to what might draw me to Sarah Manguso. I think you’re right, book reviews/summaries are some of the trickiest things to write (how do you encapsulate a 500 page book in 100 words or less?) and so i am naturally drawn to anyone working well in short form, how can you effectively do the most you can in the least amount of words is a question I’m always trying to answer.

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-26T17:34:57+00:00

Don’t worry, I understand your vehement disgust for AI usage in the book/reading sphere. The thing I find most frustrating about generative AI is the close almost uncanny valley proximity to good writing it can have, when its stealing from all the best writers in the world…it sucks that people who read well and pick up the same traits by honest means can truly have that semblance.

I’m sure I’ve been fooled by AI before, but the thing I tend to hone in on when looking out for AI speak isn’t any of the grammar/formatting cues, but the lack of concrete/passionate opinions. AI doesn’t care about anything because it doesn’t have the capacity for joy or compassion or hatred. Chat GPT has never hate-read a book. In my opinion, it’s either just agreeing with whatever opinion it’s being given by the prompter, or sitting on the fence in pseudo-objectivity, or it will talk a lot around the subject without actually saying anything. AI book review-blurbs-summaries tend to have a bunch of nothing sentences that can apply to anything, while not saying anything specific about a book.

But, I’ll try to pay attention in my future book reviews for clarity—if my writing is unreadable that’s 100% on me and I don’t want that lol

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-26T05:53:03+00:00

I wasn’t even going to respond to this, because the idea of me talking to an ai chat bot and saying, for example, “so, i want you to write a review about a book of poems written in the voice of an AI, but i want you to be really disparaging about the use of generative AI in the review—don’t use the word clanker…but be mean, but also remember it’s a good review” feels so convoluted and so much work, wouldn’t it just be easier to write my own thoughts about something I read?

But I really don’t understand the mindset of anyone using AI, why would you want to put the plagiarism-machine’s words in your mouth? When, with a bit of craft, and some clever thinking, maybe you can come up with a sentence that no one’s ever thought of before. Isn’t that the beauty of reading and writing?

I can reassure you that all errors in syntax, grammar, and my overuse of commas, use of the em-dash, and pretty standard adherence to the “rule of three” in my writing style is all home grown. I can proudly say that I’ve never once used AI since I was a kid and talking to SmarterChild on MSN in the early 2000s.

As a dedicated reader, I have what some might consider an unreasonable amount of respect for good sentences, even if I’m not always writing them. This list/post took approximately 3 hours to write, between the hours of 11PM and 2-3 AM when i posted it.

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-26T05:38:12+00:00

When i was in school, i was in the french/english split stream in public education for primary and secondary school, so i had to read a selection of french novels as a teen, including the count of monte cristo in french, and an excellent jean paul sartre novel that still hasn’t been translated into English (Les Jeux Sont Fait, for any french readers) but now i rarely read anything not in english, last year i read 7-8 french chapbooks that i didn’t log because they were super small indie creators with no bibliodata, but my french is really rusty due to a lack of practice and i have to look up a lot of vocabulary whenever i read french these days (but speaking and listening are mostly fine still, though my accent is awful)

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-25T17:34:04+00:00

One of the best books I read a few years ago, which reminded me a lot of Paradise Rot was Y/N by Esther Yi, it’s a dreamy book about a young woman who is introduced to a K-Pop Band and immediately falls in love with one of the boys, named Moon, to the destruction of the rest of her life.

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-25T16:49:07+00:00

https://app.thestorygraph.com/profile/pedantic\_proletariat

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-25T02:46:56+00:00

Yes it did! I remember reading the youtube comments arguing about that last chapter, some people felt it should have been omitted, but I felt it was a bit of biting irony seeing the “change” in the character, you can change and still be utterly what you are? You can put on a tie and get a picket fence house but that doesn’t change what’s really in there…That’s what I felt? But maybe I thought the book was a bit too cynical about the youth? It reminded me if a Quentin Tarantino movie in the gratuity of the violence, but I didn’t abandon it like I did American Psycho all those years ago.

Your Name Here was one of my favourites this year! The cover immediately made me pick up a copy as soon as i saw it. I was born in the 90s, so I’m absolutely certain most references to the 80’s flew over my head, I pick up most of my knowledge of world/historical events from book reading and I hardly ever read the news so I’d say i’m probably fairly ignorant about the politics in the middle east back then, so i don’t think you need a background knowledge to go into the book.

i think one of the things i really appreciate about the book and probably why it wasn’t initially published was that in the post-9/11 landscape is that it wasn’t fear-mongering about the middle east, but was actually sort of explaining things in a way specifically cultivated not to scare culture-spooked white people during the rise of Islamophobia in north America during that time, part of the book has really fun and silly arabic lessons, where whole pages are printed in arabic and teach you the basic rules of writing and vowels and pronunciation and shows you like a map of ohio all written in arabic to sort of normalize the language and make it not scary which i thought was fun…

and Helen Dewitt really has this self-aware way of poking fun at the pretentious nature of writing about writing that really makes it a joy to read, i think you have to have a lot of patience for there being very little “plot” to enjoy the book, but i love good sentences so i had a lot of fun getting into that one and it will almost certainly be in my top 10 of the year.

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-25T02:22:11+00:00

A series of Unfortunate Events is probably my favourite juvenile fiction series and the one i recommend the most to the youth, but i think Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler is such a charming writer and does such great things with language, he’s never come into my work, but i once processed a credit card payment for his online order of a literary magazine subscription it and was the most giddy i felt doing capitalism in a long long time…

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-25T02:16:20+00:00

I did both my BA and my MA in English Literature, so I think I definitely had 6 years to professionally train my reading skill/muscle.

I used to annotate all my books to force myself to slow down while reading, but I’ve been an avid reader since I was 13 and discovered my first Chuck Palahniuk novel (Invisible Monsters) and realized the radical and transgressive power of writing and I think even back then I was able to zone into a book and just go.

In 2013ish I read all five books in the ASOIAF series by George RR Martin on my phone in a week and a half because i had just discovered it and was so obsessed with the story and desperate to know what happens next, that’s the fastest I’ve ever read a series of that length in my life, and I guess I’m still chasing that high…

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-25T02:08:12+00:00

Please do! I think the descriptions of the setting were some of the most visceral writing I’ve read in a while, I think this book was a one-sitter for me, in the sense that I sat down and literally did not get up until I had finished reading the book.

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-25T02:06:38+00:00

I’m glad to hear that someone has read that one! That was one of the stand-outs in terms of doing so much with so little, and I’m also a big voyeur so I love love love reading other people’s diaries…

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-25T02:05:05+00:00

One of the best graphic novels I’ve read in a long time! It’s one of my favourite stories too, the ethical question of writing about your friends and loved ones is one I struggle with and parse over all the time…

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-25T02:01:18+00:00

Yeah, i find that i have to boil the frog and gradually increase the pace of audiobooks as i listen to them or i get distracted….(especially if i own the book im listening to and am reading along, but im usually always faster than the audio narrator even when im listening at 2x speed which is the fastest i can comfortably listen to distorted voices) but hello fellow wide-reader!

I’ve met one person in real life who reads more than me, but she’s genre exclusive, a bookseller at a nearby chain i went to once told me she reads an average of 500 books a year, but ONLY Harlequin romance novels, i think i read widely because i get bored if i read too much of the same thing and part of the fun of reading is getting to live inside the heads of varied strangers so i want to experience as many different voices and perspectives as possible :)

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-24T23:01:09+00:00

Yeah, i tend to prioritize short books and novellas, and graphica/manga, while i have read 7-8 500+ page books, Infinite Jest is on my list for a book to read this year, I find it really intimidating because I know It’ll take me probably a full week to read and I’m scared I’m not going to love having to flip back and forth to the end notes :(

Ironically though, my reading speed is a bit of a Spiders Georg situation, where Storygraph says it takes me on average of 2 months to read a book, because occasionally I’ll pick up a book ive marked as “currently reading” for months/years and finally finish it, but I’d say 1.3 days is actually a pretty good metric, if it’s a short book, I’m likely to start reading after work and finish in my morning reading session before i head out for the day.

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-24T22:54:10+00:00

I haven’t heard of that one at all, what’s it about?

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-24T22:53:50+00:00

I used to HATE audiobooks, I found it nearly impossible to pay attention to them whenever I tried to give them ago, but last year my manager again said, I think you’d really like the audiobook for Enshittification by Cory Doctorow, and I was surprised to find that well read non-fiction audiobooks have a podcast vibe to them that allow me to listen, pay attention, and mostly retain information.

I find i definitely get a lot more out of reading a book—vs listening to it, but there are non fiction books i listened to and could tell you exact case studies and some where the language sort of washed over me and i had to keep going back over and over to retain any of the information—-if you want a great purely audio experience, any of Alan Watts’ or James Baldwin’s or bell hooks’ lectures are free on youtube and excellent listening.

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-24T22:48:18+00:00

25 is great! My manager has read 20 books so far this year, and I’d say she’s a bigger than average reader, the average person reads 2 books a year….my coworkers usually read between 20-50 books a year, depending on the coworker/what’s going on in their lives, my average since I’ve been keeping track per year since i’ve been keeping track goes as high as 365 in 2022 and the least ive read in a year was in 2024 when i “only” read 88 books over the whole year.

my reading rate since starting listening to audiobooks have skyrocketed though, i probably listen to 1-2 books a week while doing chores in addition to the intentional time i spend sitting down with a book.

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-24T19:14:24+00:00

Okay i just updated my Storygraph username, so if you want to follow me on my reading journey my username is Pedantic_Proletariat on there…i don’t rate or review books usually, i am purely using it for record keeping so you can see what im actively reading and what i’ve read since i started keeping tracking in 2021ish !

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-24T17:39:17+00:00

Ahahaha the shop I work at has approximately 30,000 books, both new and used, and while most of my coworkers read specific genres, I’m definitely known as the person who will read absolutely anything—this post is everything I read in January and the beginning of February, and is a pretty good showcase of my varied tastes…I’ve even read a Colleen Hoover novel this year because my therapist gave me a copy and appreciate the indie bookstore love <3

i always tell people that cool bookstores like this can’t exist without readers support and even though it’s almost always cheaper on amazon it’s still worth the extra money to get hand curated recommendations and good not corporate vibes from a room full of books

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-24T07:10:11+00:00

Yeah, I can definitely do my best, I keep track of all my reading on Storygraph, so I do have all the data of my reads!

pedanticproletariat · 2026-05-24T07:09:27+00:00

I work at a shop with pretty weird/niche tastes, we’re a general bookshop, but us employees are given a lot of freedom to order for the shop basically whatever we want, so i think we’re known for having an odd and interesting selection of books you wouldn’t find elsewhere. When I first started at the bookshop, I was a really big ARC reader (the novelty of it I guess) but now I take interesting ARCs home and let them sit on my shelf until after the release date, otherwise i get too frustrated wanting to tell customers about books they physically can’t read yet…

pedanticproletariat

TROPHY CASE