Favorite neo-luddite reads? Interpret this as broadly as you want

one last dev update thread before i make changelog: Redid the rich text editor (now uses tiptap v3, same one substack uses). Images uploaded to your content are directly uploaded to our DB, so you don't need to do the janky URL image embed thing anymore. Also just looks a lot better. Jan 11 6:45 PM EST: I just accidentally broke the site a bit for like 30 min because I pushed a premature infinite scroll (for everything) feature. Sorry for the 500s

FYI I will make changelog page. I understand im shitting up the salon Now there is a global "create" floating menu. Dynamically determines if book related content (review, quote, etc) can be made in the page you are clicking from.

Introduced "LLM as a judge" pattern for better book metadata. Now the site intelligently decides which book "edition" to display from Open Library. Rather than using some suboptimal heuristic that consistently puts out suboptimal (or straight up non-english) descriptions, we now use LLM-as-Judge Pattern with better candidate collection to pick the best from all available descriptions from OpenLibrary and Google Books. Only if those result none, do we generate them from scratch.

- Better autocomplete search bar - List is only bumped when you add a book; there was a bug where editing any info (e.g. description) would bump the list. - Lists now have a "recently updated" indicator (teal dot) - Now you can add books to more than one list from the modal; also redesigned modal. - The reorder books flow is revamped; actually draggable 2D grid rather than list view. - Revamped "Pick Favorites" UI - New book page UI - New Book cards + shelf UI

Small UI improvements: - Revamped cover selection modal UI - Revamped user hover card to show content counts - Long comments chain now show "Show more" like Reddit/hackernews to not make width too narrow to read comments - Homepage contrast improvements, added back "recent users" at bottom

If you ever wondered why some books in your shelf, list, etc from the past do not load while all others load, it most likely means OpenLibrary has "redirected" the book. Lit salon now has a scheduled function that cleans up these redirected books over time. The initial clean up (backfill) will take around 48 hours, but after that, they will be done daily.

Just re-hauled the SEO of the site. - Your shelves, reviews, lists, writings, etc should have fully featured metadata for SEO (JSON-LD, Opengraph, Twitter social, etc). After a bit of buffer time, Google Search should be able to surface your content better. - The site's sitemap (https://www.lit.salon/sitemap.xml) is now fully dynamic and hence shows all posts.

Just pushed a massive, massive backend re-architecture - "trending" algo is now hackerrank algo, not reddit. HN algo makes much more sense for our community. - All DB reads and writes should be quite a bit faster - Pagination should be basically perfect + fast now, denormalized data + cursor based pagination - BEST OF ALL: I get to pay a lot less per month 😉 This makes it a lot easier for me to make features. I will keep pumping that shit out at any means necessary. Also, t-shirts coming soon. MERRY CHRISTMAS! 🎄

i love lowiqmarkfisher

Completely re-did autosave feature for reviews/writings, now you can delete drafts to delete saved draft + it will not affect typing speed due to excessive renders. Also navbar has been refactored, so notifications menu should be a lot faster and not cause lag

Some of us in a Salon book club are going to be reading The Iliad by Homer. Mix of first time readers and people looking to break it down more and get others thoughts. If you'd like to join, leave your disc below and we'll get you added. Thanks c :

Do you think reading challenges are silly? I read a decent amount of books this year however the arbitrary challenge I set myself hasn't been met </3

2300 users 💅 Thank you everyone. Sorry for slacking on site dev work

Expert research shows that François Rabelais actually invented modern poetry. Funny how that is.

Bouncing off the user below, here's the transparent SVG logo for the site if you wanna make your own damn poster to get more users. You can edit the color online too so the logo can be darker if the background picture is lighter.

Somebody needs to design a lit.salon poster that I can put up all over my college town

Looking for a reading rec over the Christmas holidays - something pulpy and fun. I usually read a James Bond or a Flashman

no matter what anyone says on the road is not that bad in fact its better than anything that chopped burroughs wroted.

You can now view the top 100 disliked books on the site in the explore page 👁️

Suggestions for good companions to King Lear? I don’t mean scholarly but works that have thematic resonance as “responses” to Lear directly (in the way that Wide Sargasso Sea responds to Jane Eyre, but also even in the subtler senses of how The Sound and the Fury descends from Macbeth, The Secret Agent descends from Bleak House, etc without those works being “responses” per se). In particular I’m interested in Lear’s questioning of what is “natural” and the notion of “reason-in-madness” that emerges out of this.

What are the most beautiful informative non-fiction books you have read? By informative I mean not "literary" non-fiction, but histories, social science monographs, biographies, textbooks, cookbooks, how-to books, etc.

Anyone know books about Knighthood and Chivalry realpolitick? Feudal relationships of all stripes, but, specifically, the experience of those kinds of personal relationships. Esp. weird fiction.

excited to be here, surrounded by people who care about books. request: a book that feels like being suspended in a dream. not excessively flowery prose. the mundanity of being alive. a story about the person sitting next to you on the bus.

I got a job. Back to regularly scheduled programming. Thank you for dealing with the chuddha admin