robinbird
Alleged writer, winter enthusiast, probably a goblin, never outgrew my desire to be alone in a library after closing.
1249 points
robinbird commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
Apologies if this doesn’t quite fit as a Pagebound Club topic, but I figured that, given how passionate most Boundlings are about libraries and about the broad use of AI, this could be of interest to our community here.
Last week, I attended a conference for academic librarians—the Ex Libris Users of North America (ELUNA) conference—and was disturbed by the amount of AI shilling I heard there. I know a lot of librarians/library workers use Pagebound, and I wanted to hear y’all’s experience with this: is it common for your colleagues to use AI in their work? How is AI generally viewed at your library, or by other library professionals you know? How do you feel about AI use in library services/systems, and do you have suggestions for how to respectfully engage in conversations with coworkers about AI’s negative impacts? (I very much welcome thoughts and observations from folks who don’t work in libraries, too! Especially if you regularly patronize a library.)
Some context: Ex Libris develops/sells library software and management systems. They host an annual conference attended by hundreds of their users—predominantly academic librarians/library workers—which is, of course, a chance for them to push more products on us, but it’s largely a professional conference for academic librarians to network, crowdsource knowledge, and generally talk library shop. Most of the conference is devoted to “break out” sessions designed and led by librarians on topics of their choosing.
Given that Ex Libris itself is basically a bunch of software developers and sales/marketing teams, I fully expected to hear AI shilling from Ex Libris representatives at the conference. (They’ve already deployed AI “helpers” for their various systems.) But what surprised and mildly disturbed me was how many of the librarians leading the break-out sessions were promoting AI in their work. I must’ve attended 15 to 20 sessions over the conference, and I heard AI tools mentioned positively at almost all of them (and I actively avoided the sessions that were specifically about AI tools). Not just Ex Libris AI tools, either: I couldn’t stop hearing about ChatGBT, Gemini, etc. and how much easier they made back-end library work. The overall climate of the conference felt very pro-AI, and I guess it just shocks me that people who are essentially professional researchers/information experts would embrace AI to this degree with zero real acknowledgment of the environmental harm it causes, or the ethical nightmare of AI development and training models.
I’ve been feeling kinda down about this since I returned from the conference, so I wanted to hear from other library Boundlings—what’s your experience been? Have you seen a similar broad acceptance of AI in library services, or was my experience perhaps (hopefully) an outlier?
27Post from the Pagebound Club forum
Apologies if this doesn’t quite fit as a Pagebound Club topic, but I figured that, given how passionate most Boundlings are about libraries and about the broad use of AI, this could be of interest to our community here.
Last week, I attended a conference for academic librarians—the Ex Libris Users of North America (ELUNA) conference—and was disturbed by the amount of AI shilling I heard there. I know a lot of librarians/library workers use Pagebound, and I wanted to hear y’all’s experience with this: is it common for your colleagues to use AI in their work? How is AI generally viewed at your library, or by other library professionals you know? How do you feel about AI use in library services/systems, and do you have suggestions for how to respectfully engage in conversations with coworkers about AI’s negative impacts? (I very much welcome thoughts and observations from folks who don’t work in libraries, too! Especially if you regularly patronize a library.)
Some context: Ex Libris develops/sells library software and management systems. They host an annual conference attended by hundreds of their users—predominantly academic librarians/library workers—which is, of course, a chance for them to push more products on us, but it’s largely a professional conference for academic librarians to network, crowdsource knowledge, and generally talk library shop. Most of the conference is devoted to “break out” sessions designed and led by librarians on topics of their choosing.
Given that Ex Libris itself is basically a bunch of software developers and sales/marketing teams, I fully expected to hear AI shilling from Ex Libris representatives at the conference. (They’ve already deployed AI “helpers” for their various systems.) But what surprised and mildly disturbed me was how many of the librarians leading the break-out sessions were promoting AI in their work. I must’ve attended 15 to 20 sessions over the conference, and I heard AI tools mentioned positively at almost all of them (and I actively avoided the sessions that were specifically about AI tools). Not just Ex Libris AI tools, either: I couldn’t stop hearing about ChatGBT, Gemini, etc. and how much easier they made back-end library work. The overall climate of the conference felt very pro-AI, and I guess it just shocks me that people who are essentially professional researchers/information experts would embrace AI to this degree with zero real acknowledgment of the environmental harm it causes, or the ethical nightmare of AI development and training models.
I’ve been feeling kinda down about this since I returned from the conference, so I wanted to hear from other library Boundlings—what’s your experience been? Have you seen a similar broad acceptance of AI in library services, or was my experience perhaps (hopefully) an outlier?
27robinbird commented on teddydee's update
teddydee started reading...
Tenth of December
George Saunders
6robinbird is re-reading...
The Anthropocene Reviewed
John Green
0robinbird is interested in reading...
Crying in H Mart
Michelle Zauner
0robinbird commented on teddydee's update
teddydee finished a book
When the English Fall
David Williams
3robinbird commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
I wonder if you’ve ever encountered people who say they never read fiction because it has no application in life. Twice in my life I met such people. Their reasoning simply is that fiction is not real, made-up, so they won’t be able to use it in their lives. Therefore, they are not spending their time reading it. At the same time, they both like to read, one of them is a lawyer, another — an academic. They just only read books containing facts. I think it’s a very peculiar type of thinking. As someone who sees so much value in reading fiction, I think they are missing out on so much.
94robinbird commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
did a lil search and couldn’t see anything in the club for this so hopefully I haven’t missed it🥹
what are your comfort tv shows? i’m a big fan of a tv show but rarely watch new ones and most new ones that i start, i tend to not finish lol. i just rewatch the same ones again and again. comfort is joy for me✨
super interested if anyone else loves similar shows to me and if so, if our reading taste is aligned too!
my top shows are the vampire diaries, supernatural and brooklyn nine-nine. these are my go to rewatches and i feel like they all work well depending on what mood im in!! tvd is my firm favourite though and holds such a special place for me i think cause i watched it when i was a teenager?? (nearly 30 now though and watching it was a i post this lol)🧛
what are your comfort shows??
edit: spelling cause i can’t spell for shit
299robinbird started reading...
Death Does Not End at the Sea (The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)
Gbenga Adesina
0robinbird wrote a review...
Caffall had an uncle who kept a photo album full of friends who had died from HIV/AIDS, which he referred to as his “book of the dead.”
I think, ultimately, that’s what The Mourner’s Bestiary is too: Caffall’s own book of the dead, a tribute to family—father, grandparents, uncles and aunts—who died from kidney disease, a tribute and meditation on what they suffered, and a kind of reckoning with everything she herself lost to genetic kidney disease. It’s a memoir about her life with the disease, but in so many ways it feels like a tender eulogy.
Caffall’s prose is skillful, peppered with lovely passages, and there’s a confidence to her voice that can only come from a seasoned writer. That said, I found the conceit of the book—the way it continually pairs Caffall’s experiences with phenomena in the natural world—to be a bit forced. About halfway through the book, I found myself almost bracing for the sections that would force a metaphorical meaning from a marine biology fact, or extrapolate on a connection until it felt so stretched it could snap. I’m not conceptually opposed to this kind of structural conceit—I’ve seen this done masterfully in books like Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass—but in The Mourner’s Bestiary it at times feels heavy-handed and clumsy rather than organically emerging from the events Caffall describes. I could feel Caffall pulling on the strings, so to speak, which took me out of the book sometimes. That’s why the 3.5 rating rather than a 4 or higher.
(Listen, I know all literature is artificial in the original sense of the word: it’s artifice, it’s craft, it’s in no way organic because it must necessarily be formed, structured, refined, etc. etc. It’s just that in my estimation, excellent writing makes you forget that reality—the artifice is so good you can mistake it for something naturally-occurring, y’know? My issue with The Mourner’s Bestiary is that I too often felt the artifice.)
However, this book is definitely worth picking up if you’re interested in literary memoir, or reading firsthand accounts of life with chronic illness/disability!
0robinbird finished a book
The Mourner’s Bestiary
Eiren Caffall
0robinbird commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
did a lil search and couldn’t see anything in the club for this so hopefully I haven’t missed it🥹
what are your comfort tv shows? i’m a big fan of a tv show but rarely watch new ones and most new ones that i start, i tend to not finish lol. i just rewatch the same ones again and again. comfort is joy for me✨
super interested if anyone else loves similar shows to me and if so, if our reading taste is aligned too!
my top shows are the vampire diaries, supernatural and brooklyn nine-nine. these are my go to rewatches and i feel like they all work well depending on what mood im in!! tvd is my firm favourite though and holds such a special place for me i think cause i watched it when i was a teenager?? (nearly 30 now though and watching it was a i post this lol)🧛
what are your comfort shows??
edit: spelling cause i can’t spell for shit
299robinbird commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
I woke up today thinking about this because I have read and hear comments that say that people won't read certain books or finish them because they felt like the book was "stupid" or that it gives them a headache because the book is "so simple". In my case, I enjoy most books I read and I can even give it a 5 star rating because it either brought out a strong emotion in me (rage, sadness, etc.), or I just enjoyed the story of the book and could appreciate the way it was written and I did not analyze it or thought that the story or narrator was "dumb" or something. In general I do not do the analyzing books thing, specially with fiction, and I would like to hear from people how do they approach reading. Is it something that needs to be like studying, is it for enjoyment, is it for critique? I'm genuinely curious.
45robinbird commented on a post
And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
when i was younger and full to the brim with rage, i loved this poem for its raucous rebellion – a call to arms against the inevitability of death.
wise men, good men, wild men, grave men – all equal in the face of the good night, and none of them ready to go.
now i read this with slightly different eyes, a little more weary, a little (but not much) wiser. i know now that there’s a time to fight, and a time to go gently, after a life fully lived and all strength to suffer depleted. now i know how to let myself let go, though it is never easy.
now this poem feels less like a universal manifesto and more like a son’s last plea to a dying loved one. sometimes it’s easier to believe that we’re part of a bigger story, a grander idea, but grief swallows these whole and leaves us just a child, not ready to let go. one more curse is a blessing is one final swell of life.
not all men need to fight, just you, just a little longer.
2robinbird commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
(Maybe pt 1. I might have another confession for another day. 🫠)
I have a confession: I have never, not once, in my life (and I was born in the 1900s, and not the 90s either) DNF’d a book. I just can’t do it. I have to finish every book I start.
Some books turn into full blown hate reads because I refuse to quit, because then the book somehow “wins.” 🤦♀️🤷♀️ Other times, I convince myself there’s still a chance the book could redeem itself at the end, and I refuse to risk the FOMO. And then there are the ones that are so bad they loop back around to being entertaining, like accidental comedy, again, I have to see it through.
There are a lot of reasons, but at the end of the day, I simply cannot DNF a book. Like, something in me will not allow it. Do I need to unpack this with my therapist? Maybe. Might just bring it up next session. Lmao.
Alright, your turn, what’s your bookish confession? I want to hear them all.
86robinbird commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
Just a fun simple question I don’t think I’ve seen someone ask yet on here!
I just read Katabasis, and Peter Murdoch made me kick my feet and go “heeeheeeheeeeee” ✨🐎🧚♀️ I love a nerdy and gangly guy. I also, however, would die for a glimpse of Cassian (ACOTAR) in real life. A CRUMB of attention from him.
It’s so fun when a character feels so real that you can’t help but blush when they do something! Who makes you fangirl??? ✨🩷🤪🫶
175robinbird commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
From the top of my 🗻 hill, with my last dying breath, I shout “Floppy little paperbacks are a superior to hardbound editions in every way!”
And “Keep your filthy movie/tv adaptation covers off my books! The OG cover is ALWAYS better than whatever capitalistic Hollywood veneer they slap on the front!”
👉🏻 All right, tag, your it!
Silly, serious, unhinged. Let’s hear them all! 📢
252robinbird wrote a review...
I've been a fan of George Saunders' work since I first read his short story collection, Tenth of December, back in 2016. (I've had it in my "Forever Favorites" list on various book-tracking apps ever since.) After it fundamentally changed my brain chemistry, I immediately sought out Saunders' first short story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, which then confirmed me as a true George Saunders fan. For the last decade, I've eagerly followed his career and read every book. His first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, deserves every accolade it has received. I won't even start discussing the masterful craft evident in his 2020 short story "Love Letter"—which in my opinion is his best work of short fiction to date—or we'll be here all day. I've always loved Saunders' skill in balancing humor with emotional poignancy, brutality with grace, the mundane with the surreal. His writing style is rife with "wit-to-power," as Dwight Garner puts it, but that wit has always been grounded in real heart: in an evident love and respect for humanity, for everything we are, despite a clear-sighted understanding of our capacity for harm. I've always come away from a piece of George Saunders fiction with a sort of grimly hopeful awe at the human capacity to change, to shift gears, to reorient ourselves towards something better.
So as you might expect, I went into Vigil with eager anticipation.
To be blunt: I felt let down.
While Vigil still has whiffs of classic Saunders—the surreal premise, the borderline slapstick humor lightening otherwise morbid scenes, the attention to interior character voice—the story feels anemic, incomplete. It flirts with hefty subjects like greed, free will, and atonement, but it says nothing substantive about them. The conclusion of the novel, in particular, feels hollow to me, a hurried and muddy ending to a book with little direction.
Vigil is the story of K. J. Boone, a wealthy 87-year-old oil tycoon dying of cancer, who, upon the night of his death, is visited by a spirit (or angel, perhaps) named Jill "Doll" Blaine. The reader will not be surprised to learn that Boone is less than repentant for the harm he caused in life (an antithesis to Dickens' Scrooge), and the entire novel is Jill grappling with this.
But here's my problem: Jill grapples to no purpose. Because while the story gestures at interesting themes around human selfishness and mortality, determinism and free will, they are ultimately empty gestures that lead nowhere. There's no movement toward any denouement, no sense of turning or of change. Jill remains, in my opinion, entirely unchanged by the end of the story; the only scene that arguably represents meaningful character change is narratively de-fanged, treated as impotent and meaningless. The story remains one flat line from start to finish, which is not only emotionally unsatisfying, but also muddles the themes Saunders attempts to craft. I was left with the feeling that this 175-page novel had nothing much to say.
Where George Saunders' older work has heart and movement, Vigil is a shrug, a half-finished gesture. I'd hoped for more from a writer who's consistently shown better skill than this.
0robinbird commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
HAVE YOU SEEN THE DOCUMENTARY TRAILER???
Airing May 27-June 9 on PBS 😍 Now if they'd just release a box set...
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