Matthew Hurst

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 08:30:00 -0400

Read: Calling by Inger Ash Wolfe 📚Scandinoir in central Ontario. Scanadia-noir? Jaded small town detective catches a religious nutjob serial killer. Thoughtful and atmospheric. #booksky #books #readingcommunity

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:36:43 -0400

Read: Next of Kin by Kia Abdullah 📚Aunt kills toddler nephew. It’s and accident. Or is it? Kinda courtroom, kinda psychological, thriller. Fast, tropey read, which is not a bad thing. #booksky #books #readingcommunity

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 13:19:43 -0400

Read: The Age of Wonder by Holmes, Richard 📚British scientists and breakthroughs in the wider culture where they happened, from about 1760 to 1830. Sounds pedestrian but it’s rivetting storytelling. #books #readingcommunity #booksky

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 16:41:23 -0400

Read: Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 📚Gleefully weird and Vonneguts gonna Vonnegut. He seems to slip under the ‘problematic’ radar with some of his language. He’s using it to making a point, but that doesn’t always stop the Bad Word Police. So it goes. #books #readingcommunity #booksky

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 08:30:00 -0400

Read: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 📚Very, very belatedly read this and remembered how weird and good Vonnegut is. Grim, black humour and immensely readable. So it goes. #books #readingcommunity #booksky

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 11:45:06 -0400

Graham Greene made spy novels respectable, but he (probably) never stopped spying himself. I interviewed the director of the Graham Greene Festival about Greene’s writing, spying, and friendship with Kim Philby.

#books #booksky #readingcommunity

spybrary.com/graham-gr…

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 11:13:02 -0400

Quick question. What does ‘the privilege of my life’ actually mean?

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 18:39:50 -0400

Read: Agent Sniper by Tim Tate 📚Real life Zelig-esque Polish spy/defector (and massive fantasist) in the Cold War, clearly written and researched. A good read.#booksky #books #reading

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 12:14:36 -0400

Pulp Asylum has just published my latest short story, The Man Who Said Too Much, which features an ice storm, stealing old chairs, and a Russian genius. Read it here: bit.ly/4y6ypBF #crime #thriller #amwriting #writingcommunity #writersky

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 12:36:23 -0400

Read: Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum 📚 on audiobook, which came out two years ago. So much of what @anneapplebaum.wsocial.eu says about countries run by greedy narcissistic bullies could now be said about the US. #booksky #books #reading

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 12:22:29 -0400

Read: Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark 📚 One of those ‘how autobiographical is this?’ games about a struggling 1940s writer. Snarky and funny and far more tricksy than I expected. #reading #books #booksky

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:15:27 -0400

Read: The Pretender by Jo Harkin 📚Peasant Pretender puppeteered by powerful Plantagenet proponents. Wolf Hall minus the portentousness. #booksky #reading #books

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:20:13 -0400

Read: London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe 📚As in his ‘Say Nothing’, Keefe clearly disentangles a lot of complicated world views and confabulations to illuminate a particular world, though the overarching story isn’t as sharply defined. #reading #books #booksky

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 08:30:00 -0400

Read: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt 📚Cormac McCarthy with a sense of humour and optimism, and also an editor, and all the more likeable for it. #books #reading #booksky

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:31:13 -0400

Read: Last One Out A Novel by Jane Harper 📚Her usual territory: resident returns to Australian small town and insular relationships (often between 3 male friends) which led to a tragedy a few years before. Realistic characters, well observed interactions, but nothing new. #booksky #reading #books

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:30:58 -0400

Read: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe 📚Fantastically researched especially the bits the TV series smoothed over. You do wonder exactly why Adams hasn’t sued over the allegations it makes about him. #books #booksky #readingcommunity

Sun, 31 May 2026 14:16:36 -0400

Read: Pearl by Siân Hughes 📚Hughes is an award winning poet, and it shows, in a good way as her narator writes intensely and immersively about her mother’s death. As someone who felt no cause to grieve my own mother’s death, it was… informative. #books #booksky #readingcommunity

Thu, 21 May 2026 08:30:00 -0400

Read: Azincourt by Bernard Cornwell 📚Big, detailed, accurate and gruesome. Also a cracking story (though not exactly genre-expanding). Great for immersion… #booksky #books #readingcommunity

Tue, 19 May 2026 08:30:00 -0400

Read: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow 📚Freshman outrage at the shock of big companies being unscrupulous about how they make money. Nothing you can’t hear him perform any day of the week for free. #books #booksky #readingcommunity

Sat, 16 May 2026 10:09:48 -0400

Guardian top 100 novels of all time I’ve read 25/100 and given up on a lot more on the list. Maybe I tried them too young. Also… no Hemingway? And I really don’t think Middlemarch (one of my DNFs) is the best novel of all time. #booksky

Thu, 14 May 2026 10:12:15 -0400

Read: Agents of Innocence by David Ignatius 📚Drips realism and apparently the CIA uses it as an exemplar of Middle Eastern espionage. The detail draws you in and the conflicts between ethnicities and sects is tragically still relevant. #booksky #books #readingcommunity

People complained that the printing press meant people wouldn't put in the effort to learn things off by heart.

Tue, 05 May 2026 16:08:08 -0400

I mean, that’s a slightly different thing than writers not using LLMs and there are reasons like the environmental impact and putting people out of jobs for not using LLMs, but the biggest one is that it will only ever produce derivative retreads.

Some books have always been derivative slop of course - they were called ‘pulp’ for a reason - and really the only reason for not using LLMs to create more is that even hacks deserve bread on the table (speaking as a hack).

LLMs are only ever going to come up with the most likely version of the next word given its instructions, and that probability is based on what’s out there already. So, always derivative shit. That’s why not to use AI.

Mon, 04 May 2026 11:23:08 -0400

Read: Golden Hill by Francis Spufford 📚Dark smart pastiche of Fielding, Sterne, etc, in late 18th century New York, but there’s more to it than just quality fanfiction. The characters are ludicrously alive and you can smell the horse shit and ambition. #booksky #books #readingcommunity

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:12:14 -0400

Read: The Unwanted Dead by Chris Lloyd 📚 Juicy atmospheric procedural set in Paris just after the Germans marched in during June 1940. Not spies, but feels like Furst, Gerlis, Robert Harris. #booksky #books #readingcommunity

Baseball. Invented by BF Skinner

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:02:06 -0400

I’ve stumbled into being a sportsfan for the first time in my life, as a 57 year old Brit. Mostly, I’m in it for the incomprehensible commentary.

Recently moved to Canada, just in time to latch onto the Toronto Blue Jays getting narrowly beaten in the final of the World Series, and then my wife announced she’d got a Sportsnet subscription. And now I know what stacking your bases and platooning is.

But 90% of the commentary still sounds like

And here comes Bravetti to the plate, sets his flonkers, gives the wrist-crank, and delivers — oh, that’s a high floopster, drifting toward the schnozz zone, and Palumwick gets under it, tracks it back to the warnle, makes the snab! Beautiful snab by Palumwick, who’s been snabbing everything in the deep dubris tonight. Two gromps, one blurtle, and the count sits at three-and-wumble.

It’s like Debussy writing sports coverage, or Monet in his late ‘lost my glasses’ phase. The details swoosh past in an infinite scroll of pleasurable enough to keep going.

It’s setting the audience (fans? crowd? My arts background still pokes through here and there) up for a massive dopamine spike. Depending on a largely random contact between ball and bat, my alloted champions might go four ahead, or they might lose the series.

I’m pretty sure the rules were written by BF Skinner. A pitch becoming a ball or a strike is the definition of intermittent reinforcement - sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t, based on no consistent criteria I can divine. Trying to figure out the rules is enough to keep me pulling the lever for more cheese.

And in the meantime, I’m going to figure out whether a floopster in the schnozz zone is a good thing or a bad thing.