Folks, I’m gonna be abandoning the pretentious thing I’ve been doing with these posts—you know, the whole “the department” and “the institution” routine—because it was never particularly funny, and it’s a strain on the basic purpose of these posts, which is to just be like “hey, look what I got myself to read!” Cue half…

Nice that the seasons have shifted sufficiently that there’s now natural light by which to photograph newly accessioned items, eh? Pilates for Men: presumably self-explanatory, especially if one is reminded that the institution’s head is a man in his late 40s who recently quit nicotine, and who does not want to buy a whole new…

North’s House of Odysseus: the institution has been stanning Claire North ever since Notes from the Burning Age—“the best solarpunk novel which has never been slapped with that label”, if you want the capsule plug—but also loved Ithaca, the predecessor to this new novel. Retelling the ancient epics in new voices and/or from the point…

The accessions department notes with some discontent that the following were ordered a full calendar month previously. Such are the hazards of buying titles from outside of the current top fifty English-language non-fiction bestsellers list in Sweden: it is presumed that such must be obtained from suppliers overseas before the local supplier (Adlibris) can fulfill…

The department notes, without judgement, that the institution is reviving old habits with regard to acquiring texts more quickly than it reads them. Zindell’s The Remembrancer’s Tale: the Requiem for Homo Sapiens sequence had a profound and formative effect on the institution, despite its being discovered almost a decade after its initial publication. (Indeed, with…