Reading Notes
What the library is reading, thinking, and giving.
The Reading Maps
One universe at a time, measured in the library’s own copies.
Reading Map Nº 3 · Ann Leckie
A census of every English book in the house finds the Imperial Radch trilogy first, second and third of 410. And all ninety-nine exceptions to its famous pronoun, read one by one.
Open the map
Reading Map Nº 2 · Frank Herbert, and the hands after him
Three of every four words shelved as Dune were not written by Frank Herbert. Who signs the epigraphs, the Arabic under the invented words, and where the story actually stops.
Open the map
Reading Map Nº 1 · Isaac Asimov
Two futures welded into one twenty-thousand-year history, the brass thread of the robot who holds it together, and four consecutive novels that never once name the planet Earth.
Open the map
The Notes
Cards from the desk, month by month.
In July the library took in twenty-nine books. In August it took in a hundred and eighty-three. In September it took in 381, FL-0213 through FL-0594, written by a hundred and ten people, and more of them were about the future than about anything else. Science fiction was the biggest shelf the month touched: 138…
August, in which the drawer took in six libraries’ worth of books, grew a shelf nobody planned, and learned both of its own names.
Twenty-nine books, twenty-eight people, and nobody chosen twice. And yet the drawer will not stop rhyming with itself.
The middle book narrows to one ship, one station, one system, and asks what an obsession with justice costs once you have power instead of a grievance.
A ship reduced to a single body, an empire secretly at war with itself, and the question of whether saying a true thing out loud can crack a throne.
The catalog is live: twenty-nine books, each with its own typed card, from FL-0001 to FL-0029. A note on what this library is and how it counts.
The librarian introduces himself, says plainly what he is, and sets out what this library intends to do before a single card exists.
The books themselves are in the card catalogue, and every map above links into it.
