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📚 His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass (Book 1) by: Philip Pullman

A war is brewing in Lyra's world between those who would keep people in ignorance and those willing to fight for freedom. Lyra is thrust into the middle of the conflict when her uncle Asriel comes to Oxford, fomenting rebellion, and wh...

https://bookblabla.com/book/his-dark-materials-the-golden-compass-book-1

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A war is brewing in Lyra's world between those who would keep people in ignorance and those willing to fight for freedom. Lyra is thrust into the middle of the conflict when her uncle Asriel comes to Oxford, fomenting rebellion, and when her best friend, Roger, suddenly disappears. Lyra learns that Roger was kidnapped by a shadowy organization that is rumored to experiment on children. To find him, she will travel to the cold, far North, where armored bears and witch clans rule—and where Asriel is attempting to build a bridge to a parallel world. What Lyra doesn’t know is that to help one of them will be to betray the other—and that her actions will have consequences not just in her world, but in all the worlds beyond. Look for the modern fantasy classics of HIS DARK MATERIALS: The Golden Compass. The Subtle Knife. The Amber Spyglass And Lyra’s adventures continue in THE BOOK OF DUST: La Belle Sauvage. The Secret Commonwealth. The Rose Field DON’T MISS THE EPIC FINALE TO LYRA’S STORY: THE ROSE FIELD, AVAILABLE NOW! Discover the modern fantasy classic that kicked off the epic trilogies His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust—a world where humans have animal familiars and parallel universes are within reach.

The Millions has put together a list of 100 books being published over the next couple of months which have caught their eye, and as usual are highlighting some very intriguing titles. They include new books by Deepa Anappara, Elisa Shua Dusapin, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, and Maria Stepanova; plenty of newly translated older books, and 'rediscovered' books.
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https://themillions.com/2026/01/the-millions-great-winter-2026-preview.html

This week's at the library:
- I bought a second-hand copy of : Principles and Applications, published by Wiley. Isotopes are hugely important in various branches of science, and I have it in mind to get to grips with the finer details at some point.
- I found a copy of Simon Lamb's Devil in the Mountain: A Search for the Origin of the Andes at a local charity shop, a classic from @princetonupress
- And I bought a copy of Paul Thagard's Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart? from @themitpress for basically the price of a packet of crisps.
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A photo of three books standing on a small, brown, wooden table. The out-of-focus background shows black shelves full of books and part of the beech-coloured laminate floor. On the left, Isotopes: Principles and Applications, showing a chunky hardback book with a bluish-black cover. A band of large ochre and brown pixels is running diagonally across the bottom-left corner. Though no explanation is given on the cover, this is a close-up of a colourised schematic plot that shows nuclides and their decay products In the middle, Devil in the Mountain: A Search for the Origin of the Andes, showing a colour photo of a group of small, single-storey concrete buildings on a barren hillside with a huge mountain range with snow-covered peaks in the background. This photo is reproduced in the book, with the legend explaining that this is a small cemetery on the road to the Zongo Valley in the Cordillera Real, just north of La Paz. The peak in the background is the 6088 metre high peak of Huayna Potosi. On the right, Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart?, showing a colour photo of three figures, a small white robot, a woman, and a dog, in a grassy field facing the viewer, the out-of-focus background showing a blue sky.

Who Was the Inspiration Behind the ‘Gibson Girl’ Illustrations? The Artist Said She Was Every Woman

Charles Dana Gibson’s archetype became the original American “it girl” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and helped transform fashion and beauty

by Michelle Mehrtens

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/who-was-the-inspiration-behind-the-gibson-girl-illustrations-the-artist-said-she-was-every-woman-180988014/?utm_source=smithsoniandaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial&lctg=93133550

Charles Dana Gibson at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/26456

Engraving after the pen and ink drawing of the Gibson Girl by illustrator w:Sarah Kaplan It depicts a voluminous, upswept hair styled in the signature "Gibson Girl" pompadour with soft curls; long, elegant neck; delicate, refined features with a confident, somewhat aloof expression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dana_Gibson#/media/File:Gibson_Girl.png

Post by Tara Wine-Queen It's not that I *can't* read all of the books I already have, it's that once a reader finishes all the books in their possession, they transcend into their final form and I'm just not ready to become a librarian yet.

Jan 16: Name a non-anglophone writer who has really lit you up.

Samit Basu is my guy right now. Last year I read The City Inside, and I just finished The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport. Both were an interesting combination of pop lit and dystopian surveillance sci-fi. Jinn-Bot is so cinematic - I'd love to see it on the big screen.

Edit: This post is funny b/c Basu is totally an Anglophone writer and I knew that. In that case, I nominate Shen Fu, who wrote Six Records of a Floating LIfe (浮生六記), the lyrical documentation of a life during the Qing dynasty.

George Jones - I Lived to Tell it All. Was hoping to learn something about America via country music here. It's really a book about cocaine and alcohol abuse. George was not a great guy. Not paying his band, firing guns in the tour bus. Early he tells a story of how his wife took his keys so he wouldn't drive 8 miles to buy booze, so he drove his riding lawnmower. That's about as much mirth as you're going to get here.

George Jones - I Lived to Tell it All book

This is really cool! Last year I read William Dalrymple's "The Golden Road" and central to its narrative are these trade routes. This was an experiment to reconstruct a lost 5th century CE ship design based on drawing in the Ajanta Caves. According to Dalrymple, images in the Ajanta Caves provide some of the best info for the period.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyn15110gvo

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