iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 1h

not that it impacts most of your lives in any major way, but even so: my next regularly scheduled social-media break begins on October 1; until next time, friends and comrades, be well!

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Andrew Ferguson @epikt.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

the sheer number of things i am expected to give a shit about is really crowding my ability to devote attention to the things that i *need* to give a shit about

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I would like to wish all transphobic Dem candidates a very "failure in all of your pursuits forever, go live in a cave"

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

i misspoke from the grave, my bad; ai did not in fact kill me, as so many had predicted; turns out it was ai enthusiasts who killed me by boring me to death

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

a few decades ago I was shocked and appalled to discover that, with every textbook purchase, a university bookstore was shoving a bunch of different credit card approval offers and coupons into every student’s bag; those were the days

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

After I’m done with my Shakespeare reading project, the next one will be to read/reread every Toni Morrison book. I recently finished reading all of Ishiguro, the ancient Greek tragedies, and some others, and am enjoying this “completist” phase of my reading life. Who else’s oeuvre should I tackle?

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

you guys are simply never gonna stop sending traffic to NYT op-eds, are you

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

An informal Shakespeare poll, based on a side conversation @keguro.blacksky.app and I were having over on the mega-thread: Do you like Shakespeare's use of puns? Why or why not? Repost/quote-post if you do; or, if you are wise like me and others and have grown to hate them, smash "like" instead.

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

hey remember way back when we’d talk about “the future”? it’s here!

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

My definitive ranking of every Ishiguro book: 1. The Unconsoled 2. An Artist of the Floating World 3. A Pale View of Hills 4. Never Let Me Go 5. Klara and the Sun 6. The Buried Giant 7. When We Were Orphans 8. Nocturnes 9. Remains of the Day Remains of the Day is a very good book, and it’s last!

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

being an educator with a moral conscience right now is extremely wild

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

And on the unerased whiteboard this word appears:

Somebody left one giant word scrawled on a classroom whiteboard: “arrakis”

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

It’s #BQT #BookQuestionTime again (horror edition): What are the three scariest novels you’ve ever read (and I mean this literally, in terms of genre, and not as in “Finnegans Wake” or whatever)? As always, please feel free to include cover images!

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

‘I never thought JAGUARS would eat my face,’ sobs woman who voted against the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

i must slow the pace of writing this novel i’m writing—the risk that it will completely transform all human society in too extreme and abrupt a manner is much too great to ignore, many other Thought-Leaders agree with me on this

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

ai has killed me by boring me to death

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

just imagine what they’ll be hyping after AI finishes circling the drain

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

It’s #BQT #BookQuestionTime again (heatwave word-association edition): What are your favorite books that come to mind when you hear each of these words? a) sun b) melting c) lethargy d) annihilation As always, please feel free to include cover images!

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

It’s #BQT #BookQuestionTime again: What’s the book you started, stopped, and restarted more often than any other book (for whatever reasons) before you finally discovered you loved it? As always, please feel free to include cover images.

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

i'm new around here but i seem to recall a garden-variety grifter decades ago with the exact same name as this dude who had figured out a plan to stop human aging and mortality and everything, different dude, certainly, he looked way younger than this guy does, anyway it just got me thinking

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

the least surprising human achievement in my lifetime

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Book rec #68: WORLD LIGHT, by Halldór Laxness, translated by Magnus Magnusson. In a time of immiseration and upheaval in Iceland, a destitute lad (ill-equipped to face the burdens of life, labor, or society) struggles to hold on to his grandiose dream of becoming a great poet. A glorious novel.

Front cover of Halldór Laxness, WORLD LIGHT

Excerpt from Halldór Laxness, WORLD LIGHT

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 25/08/2023

Today’s book rec is Thomas Pynchon’s MASON & DIXON. By committing to certain historical and linguistic limits, and reining in some of his madcap narrative impulses, Pynchon manages to craft his most ethically invested novel, while still retaining his exuberant and anarchic signature style.

Front cover of Thomas Pynchon’s MASON & DIXON

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 21/06/2023

Today's book rec is Stanley Crawford's LOG OF THE S.S. THE MRS UNGUENTINE. A man and woman spend their lives together on a strange boat that becomes their entire universe. A landless story about marriage, nature, family, anguish, and time, its lush diluvial ambitions far exceed its slim 113 pages.

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 14/11/2023

Book rec #40: THE ODYSSEY: A MODERN SEQUEL, by Nikos Kazantzakis (trans. Kimon Friar). An unparalleled achievement, it somehow honors Homer's epic and grows from its soil in a wholly organic way, while at the same time completely critiquing and unweaving every fundamental value of Homeric culture.

Front cover of Nikos Kazantzakis' THE ODYSSEY: A MODERN SEQUEL, translated by Kimon Friar

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

Book rec #72: LOSE YOUR MOTHER, by Saidiya Hartman. A bracing journey to Ghana in search of the vestiges of ancestral slavery; a meditation on how the present doesn’t obliterate the past but often overwhelms it; a conscious and desperate act of resurrection of vanished ghosts and forgotten lives.

Front cover of Saidiya Hartman, LOSE YOUR MOTHER: A JOURNEY ALONG THE ATLANTIC SLAVE ROUTE

Excerpt from Saidiya Hartman, LOSE YOUR MOTHER: A JOURNEY ALONG THE ATLANTIC SLAVE ROUTE

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 27/07/2023

Today's book rec is Emil Ferris' MY FAVORITE THING IS MONSTERS. Her haunting work grapples with childhood, family trauma, the political crises of the 1960s, and the legacy of the Holocaust, drawn in a style that feels like a fresh amalgam of Robert Crumb, pulp horror, Lynda Barry, and George Grosz.

Front cover of Emil Ferris' MY FAVORITE THING IS MONSTERS (Fantagraphics, 2017)

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 15/07/2025

Book rec #70-71: TEHANU and THE OTHER WIND, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin returns us to Earthsea, writing two novels that deepen and enrich the trilogy, with even greater sharpness of prose and greater political and social nuance and subtlety. In place of its great heroes? Two remarkable heroines

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

Book rec #66: THE GOLDEN AGE, by Michal Ajvaz (translated by Andrew Oakland). A man visits an island whose inhabitants are rewriting the relationship between reality and fiction, between individual lives and the collective “Book” of life, an eruption of uncontainable literature, history, and memory.

Front cover of THE GOLDEN AGE, by Michal Ajvaz (translated by Andrew Oakland)

Excerpt from THE GOLDEN AGE, by Michal Ajvaz (translated by Andrew Oakland)

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

Book rec #75: THE BLUE CLERK, by Dionne Brand. This ars poetica in 59 versos encompasses a lifetime of thinking with poetry; bearing the burden of memory and knowledge; navigating time, and history’s terrors; and reviving language at its limits. A ceaseless thirst for truth, and the heart’s renewal.

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 23/09/2024

Book rec #47: Jeff Griffin, LOST AND. Griffin roamed the abandoned dwellings of the southwest deserts, found brittle remnants of lost lives and desperate struggle—photos, love letters, poetic fragments—and assembled them in this raw, anguished, deeply affecting volume of historical recovery.

Front cover of Jeff Griffin's LOST AND (Kuhl House Poets, University of Iowa Press, 2013)

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

Book rec #67: THE FIRE NEXT TIME, by James Baldwin. A direct, clear-sighted, scorching indictment of white America’s longstanding unwillingness to face the truth of itself; an investigation of the lies and delusions that continually keep true love and liberation at bay, generation after generation.

Front cover of James Baldwin, THE FIRE NEXT TIME

Excerpt from James Baldwin, THE FIRE NEXT TIME

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 08/08/2023

Today's book rec is Willa Cather's DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP. In it, a 19c. Catholic bishop tries to build a diocese amongst the indigenous peoples of the southwest. Cather's prose is ecumenical, sun-blasted, quietly moving; & her authorial openness and empathy extend in many subtle directions.

Front cover of Willa Cather's DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Book rec #52: OLIO, by Tyehimba Jess. A genre-defying medley; a malleable material artifact; a poetic project of Black archival recovery, lending polylingual voice to the unvoiced, summoning a haunted syncopated music from the unrecorded pockets of sonic history. A collectively sung freedom dream.

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Book rec #62-64: Ursula K. Le Guin's EARTHSEA trilogy. Imagine a story about a boy learning how to become a great wizard, except the books are actually good. Le Guin's language, characterization, and world-building at their peaks. A world of complexity, ambiguity, ethical duty, wisdom, & mutual aid.

Front covers of Ursula K. Le Guin's EARTHSEA trilogy: A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA, THE TOMBS OF ATUAN, and THE FARTHEST SHORE

Excerpt from Ursula K. Le Guin's EARTHSEA trilogy

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 26/09/2023

So today's book rec must be Jan Morris' HAV. If you combined Borges' encyclopedic whimsy with Sebald's melancholy peregrinations, you might begin to get an inkling of this incredible faux-travelogue, which crafts an ornate, two-stage alternate history of the Mediterranean in the last ten centuries.

Front cover of Jan Morris' HAV, along with the original purchase receipt

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 04/10/2023

One of last week's book recs was Jan Morris' HAV. Today's rec is another @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social gem: Vasily Grossman's LIFE AND FATE, an incredible novel that radiates out from the siege of Stalingrad to encompass an entire human epoch. Grossman was, without exaggeration, a 20th-century Tolstoy.

Cover of Vasily Grossman's LIFE AND FATE (translated by Robert Chandler)

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 15/04/2024

Today’s book rec is Virginia Woolf’s ORLANDO, an exuberant, epic, radically inventive tale of a poet. His (and/or her) life unfolds across multiple centuries—a life filled with rich exploration, love, art, romance, politics, intellectual inquiry, adventure, and so much more. A groundbreaking work.

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

Book rec #56: Rebecca West, BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON. If I say it's a 1200-page book about old Yugoslavia, that doesn't begin to capture its literary beauty, historical complexity, sharp characterizations, ornate idiosyncratic wonders, or its ongoing relevance in 2025. Captivating and strange.

Front cover of Rebecca West, BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON: A JOURNEY THROUGH YUGOSLAVIA

Excerpt from Rebecca West, BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON: A JOURNEY THROUGH YUGOSLAVIA

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 17/04/2024

Today’s book rec is Hilary Mantel’s BEYOND BLACK. I don’t usually find stories of psychic phenomena and restless ghosts interesting, but her novel about a tormented medium taking her psychic-communication-with-the-dead show on the road is fresh, moving, and often incredibly disturbing.

Front cover of Hilary Mantel’s BEYOND BLACK

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 26/04/2024

Today's book rec is Patrik Ouředník's EUROPEANA (trans. Gerald Turner). It's like taking Sebald's historical melancholy toward modernity, blending it with Vonnegut's withering indignation at human cruelty and stupidity, and packaging it as a brutal primer on 20th-century technologies and values.

Front cover of Patrik Ouředník's EUROPEANA, translated by Gerald Turner

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

Book rec #74: THE GOLDEN STATE, by @lydiakiesling.bsky.social. One of the best novels I’ve read about motherhood; a primer on US anti-immigrant fervor and homespun authoritarianism; and the truest depiction yet of the real California of my youth: dust, God, poverty, reactionaries, and rural despair.

Front cover of THE GOLDEN STATE, by Lydia Kiesling

Excerpt from THE GOLDEN STATE, by Lydia Kiesling

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 13/07/2023

Today's book rec is Paul Beatty's THE SELLOUT, which possesses in great measure what all powerful satires possess: beneath its comedic madcap zaniness there is a scratching, a tearing; an overwhelming sense of the terror of history bubbling up from below; a profound and wholly justified cosmic rage.

Front cover of Paul Beatty's THE SELLOUT

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Book rec #50: 2666, by Roberto Bolaño. Best known for its unrelenting and gut-wrenching fourth chapter, the book as a whole is a remarkable achievement, its five disparate parts ultimately linked through the thread of violence that serves for Bolaño as the defining feature of the twentieth century.

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 09/08/2023

Today's book recommendation is David Markson's WITTGENSTEIN'S MISTRESS, an extraordinary novel about a woman who has nothing left on earth except her own thoughts and (perhaps) the things we call memories. It's a work of indisputable brilliance that still doesn't get the recognition it deserves.

Front cover of David Markson's WITTGENSTEIN'S MISTRESS

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Brian Thill @brianthill.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

more and more people out there lately having a hard time knowing how to Post well post about books; books are Good to Post With

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Ordinary Notes @hystericalblkns.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Yes. They hounded him to death. Days and days of breathless undoing. Damn them all.

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