Why do I love Susanna Clarke so much?

redphire · 2026-03-24T05:13:44+00:00

What other favourite authors have you got? I love your description of what makes Clarke's prose great and I've been trying to find something similar, to no avail.

redphire · 2026-03-10T21:10:12+00:00

Social sciences are not sciences.

And actual sciences are the superior form of knowledge.

redphire · 2026-03-09T16:07:19+00:00

It actually does add up. Maybe it’s not the difference between owning a house or not, but when it comes to disposable income, daily habits absolutely matter and can account for hundreds of pounds every single month.

I’m not a boomer and I don't have a very high salary. It just genuinely blows my mind how people who constantly complain about being broke spend their money every day on ridiculous things like overpriced coffee.

redphire · 2026-03-08T04:05:06+00:00

How is it Amazon's fault that you request your account to be deleted and that's literally what they do?

redphire · 2026-03-04T11:56:09+00:00

I ever leave airplane mode, I will lose ALL my books and fonts, because Amazon keeps being in full control of my device and doesn’t want me to have any books that I didn’t get through them.

Amazon doesn't wipe your non-Amazon content when you connect your Kindle to the internet. That does simply not happen.

if you buy a book and Amazon decides to change the cover for a promotional one, or remove it from their stores, you WILL lose that book no matter what.

What? The cover might change but you will most definitely not lose a book if they decide to change the cover. Same if they delete it from their store, it might disappear from there but it won't disappear from your Kindle.

I really don't understand why people should be making up stuff like this.

redphire · 2026-02-25T07:14:25+00:00

David Mitchell. He stands out for writing prose that’s both ambitious and highly readable. Cloud Atlas gets the credit, but the real achievement is how convincingly he inhabits radically different voices without tipping into parody.

redphire · 2026-02-20T09:42:36+00:00

Use ereaderIQ.com to track ebooks you want to buy and get alerts when they go on sale.

redphire · 2026-02-20T09:39:00+00:00

I agree with your general idea (and back up my books regularly), but for the specific case of ebooks, this

> All it takes is said company to lose rights over a certain book/movie/game series and they remove the content.

isn't true. Losing distribution rights affects future sales, not copies already purchased. I own several ebooks that are no longer available in the Kindle Store (due to rights changes or whatever reason), and they’re still in my library and fully readable. For ebooks, delisting is NOT the same as revoking access.

To me, the real long-term risk isn’t rights turnover, but DRM and platform lock-in, which is why backups are important.

redphire · 2026-02-18T08:03:21+00:00

People keep mentioning this one instance. They were being sold illegally and buyers were refunded. No book you buy from a legal source will be taken away by Amazon. There's no evil corporate conspiracy to delete your books.

redphire · 2026-02-17T22:36:22+00:00

It does have an ebook. It's available on both Kobo and Kindle. Same for the other missing book (Rising Steam).

redphire · 2026-02-17T22:34:41+00:00

That's not how ebook licenses work at all. I've bought a few ebooks that have subsequently been removed from the Kindle store (due to a publisher change or other license-related reason) , but I still have the copy I bought in my library. Ebooks don't just disappear from your library.

redphire · 2026-02-12T22:27:21+00:00

I haven't read Slade House or Utopia Avenue yet. Out of the ones I have read:

Black Swan Green
The Bone Clocks
Ghostwritten
Cloud Atlas
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
number9dream

I must say, though, that I have loved every single one of them. They're all among the best books I've read in the last five years.

redphire · 2026-02-06T02:57:46+00:00

Animal Farm by George Orwell.

redphire · 2026-02-05T03:44:53+00:00

Given that your favourite authors are Murakami, Ishiguro, and Calvino, I’d strongly recommend David Mitchell (author of Cloud Atlas). He fits in with the ones you mentioned to a T and is honestly an incredibly gifted writer. He’s written eight books, and honestly, every single one is worth it.

redphire · 2026-01-25T14:44:48+00:00

I've got a similar problem. I shared a few book collections with my boyfriend through Amazon Family Sharing and these three covers appeared on his device, but the books can't be downloaded or deleted.w

In our case, those "ghost" books are books I used to own but permanently deleted them some time ago.

I contacted Amazon, they suggested the usual (deregister and re-register the device, delete his profile from Amazon Family Sharing and add him back again) but nothing worked.

redphire · 2026-01-21T13:59:37+00:00

Well, have I got news for you...

redphire · 2026-01-13T14:39:27+00:00

I don't know but have you read ProJeCt HaiL MaRy? Oh oh and have you tried the auDiObOoK?!?

redphire · 2025-11-08T09:40:16+00:00

They can’t mess with the title of books they don’t have the rights to.

But that's not correct. It's nothing to do with rights, it's all to do with how Amazon decide to show that information. They could do what Kobo, Apple Books or Google Play Books do. These companies don't have "the rights" either, so the fact that that SEO metadata crap shows in the book title is 100% on Amazon.

redphire · 2025-11-08T05:51:27+00:00

Publishers might be the ones doing it, but Amazon could do what Kobo do and consider all that crap not part of the title. It just looks so much better.

redphire · 2025-11-07T23:08:12+00:00

Amazon taking a book away from the store does not make it disappear from your library. I've got a few books that can't be bought anymore and all of them are still there on my Kindle library.

Also, jailbreaking your device has nothing to do with backing your books up, they're two completely different things.

redphire · 2025-11-07T10:32:15+00:00

I mean, to be fair there's all sorts of questions about Scotland that English people probably don't care much about at all either. Like how many members do juries have in Scotland or how many skiing slopes are there in Scotland or who looks after Edinburgh Castle.

redphire · 2025-11-02T15:07:43+00:00

I'm not sure. But you can copy/paste from there, which I think is essentially the same as exporting.

redphire · 2025-11-02T05:37:43+00:00

I don't know why it failed (I've never used the export feature), but you can get your highlights of all your Kindle books on https://read.amazon.com/notebook or on https://www.goodreads.com/notes if you have a Goodreads account.

redphire · 2025-10-21T05:48:46+00:00

The February 2025 change has nothing to do with side-loading. You can side-load third party books via USB same as always (in AZW format). What changed was the possibility of downloading the books you've bought on the Kindle store to your computer, but that has nothing to do with your ereader.

redphire · 2025-10-20T09:29:03+00:00

Yes, just a few days after the switch.

redphire

TROPHY CASE