Not every time, but most times I send books to my Kobo from Calibre, after ejecting the Kobo it freezes, only displaying the cover of whatever I was last reading, and I have to force a restart to make it work again.

Sometimes it doesn't happen immediately; the Kobo is ejected, opens normally, loads the new books fine. But the next time it goes to sleep, it doesn't wake up properly - lights up, but only shows the cover of what I was reading, until I force a restart again.

I saw the same problem in this post from last month on the Calibre subreddit, but nobody shared many details there.

Can everyone who has had this problem chime in? I have a thread on Mobileread where the experts there are trying to help me, but if this is happening to more people than just me (which last month's post proves I think), then we need to gather data to figure out what we all have in common.

What Kobo do you have? What firmware version are you running? Do you have any patches in use? Have you always had this issue, or did it start happening long after you got your Kobo?

I'm using a Clara Colour, running 4.44.23552, and I'm using a line space and orphan/widows avoidance patch. I'm pretty sure this has been happening since I got my Kobo just a few months ago. It definitely started before I updated to the latest firmware.

Not every time, but most times I send books to my Kobo from Calibre, after ejecting the Kobo it freezes, only displaying the cover of whatever I was last reading, and I have to force a restart to make it work again.

Sometimes it doesn't happen immediately; the Kobo is ejected, opens normally, loads the new books fine. But the next time it goes to sleep, it doesn't wake up properly - lights up, but only shows the cover of what I was reading, until I force a restart again.

I saw the same problem in this post from last month, but nobody shared many details there.

Can everyone who has had this problem chime in? I have a thread on Mobileread where the experts there are trying to help me, but if this is happening to more people than just me (which last month's post proves I think), then we need to gather data to figure out what we all have in common.

What Kobo do you have? What firmware version are you running? Do you have any patches in use? Have you always had this issue, or did it start happening long after you got your Kobo?

I'm using a Clara Colour, running 4.44.23552, and I'm using a line space and orphan/widows avoidance patch. I'm pretty sure this has been happening since I got my Kobo just a few months ago. It definitely started before I updated to the latest firmware.

I was thinking about how much I love the Raksura series by Martha Wells, and one of the aspects I most enjoy is - there's no humans in them! Anywhere!

It's such a fascinating thing, and so rare. Less rare if you're okay with the not-humans being real-world animals - Animal Farm, Watership Down, The Bees, that's a bit more common. (A bit.) But books where the not-humans are fantasy creatures or aliens? I'm having a lot of trouble finding examples!

But that has never yet meant that The Thing doesn't exist, only that I haven't come across it, so! Recs? Very much specifying Adult SFF; I know it's not so uncommon in books for younger readers (the Firebringer trilogy and Wings of Fire series spring to mind).

Ones I can think of;

• Raksura by Martha Wells
• Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton
• Goblin Emperor + spin-offs by Katharine Addison

There MUST be more than three examples...!

:edited to add: Can't believe I forgot Goblin Emperor! But yes I'm aware of it, it gets its own bullet point.

Just got my first kobo - the klara colour - and struggling with the footnotes

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So, I'm using epub, not kepub. (Spent a few days sorting that out so I'm very sure.) Everything is sideloaded through Calibre.

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I tapped a footnote and it took me to a bibliography at the back of the book - but there's no back button like there is on a kindle, so I completely lost my reading place. Same thing in a second book, except that time the footnote took me to the end of the chapter.

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Is there some setting that will make the footnote a popup or something? Are all footnotes like this, or are they arranged/formatted differently in different books? This seems a very bad way to manage footnotes, so I feel like I must be missing something...?

:edited to add: yes Calibre automatically turns epubs to kepubs when it sends to a kobo, but you can switch that off and I have done so, and re-added all my books so they are all in epub not kepub. That was what I meant when I said I spent days sorting that out.

I recently learned that some fonts add space around (or after?) an em dash, but I haven't been able to find a list of fonts that do that, and more importantly fonts that don't.

For context: I want a font I can put on my Kobo that will display em dashes the way the authors intended, ie without spaces if there's no spaces in the ebook file, with spaces if there is.

Is there a resource somewhere that I can check? Or some way to look up fonts that do/don't do this?

Figured this was the best place to ask!

I read an unholy amount of books; 200+ a year. Calling me a bookworm is understating it massively. I've been like this since I was quite little.

After reading about how many people with ADHD are 'addicted' to their phones, I've been wondering if my being a bookworm is kind of...me self-regulating? In a way that's maybe a result of my auADHD (because ADHD alone usually means people have trouble reading for pleasure, or so I've been told).

Because - in school, I always had a fiction book on my desk. The moment I was done with whatever work we'd been assigned, I dove into my book. If there was even one minute of free time, I picked up my book. Long car ride? I took a STACK of books and kept them on the seat next to me in the car. These days even if I'm waiting one literal minute for the microwave to ding, I'll go into the next room to grab my ereader (where I'm always reading 10+ books simultaneously, jumping back and forth all the time) rather than have to stand there waiting doing nothing. My ereader comes with me even to situations where it's ridiculously unlikely I'll have any reading time. Because even a minute with nothing to do or focus on is awful. I'd rather read just a sentence or two than have to WAIT.

Does that make sense? Does anyone else experience this? There's no way I'm the only auADHDer bookworm out there!

I am here to tell you about a book you probably have not heard of, but which I think MANY of the readers here will love, so!

It's called MAEJ, and it's by Dale Stromberg. And I shall pitch it to you as *'*Lord of the Rings meets Shakespeare in a matriarchy.'

What I mean by that is not that it's a quest, but that we are talking about god-tier level worldbuilding, written in English that is semi-Shakespearean. And the setting is a matriarchy, ofc.

Bear with me.

Here is the official description, bolding mine;

>Hundred-day children are stolen from the Ilasghra every week. No one can stop it.

>Madma and Tantli have grown up like sisters in the tentslum of the Ilas, where their people are starved and beaten. All their lives, they’ve powerlessly witnessed the regular abduction of hundred-day babies born with too much mæj. Just before an Ilasi boy is killed by djanizaries for daring to venture beyond the tentslum walls, his final words lead Madma to the Gaol where the boy’s stolen sister is locked away—a place from which Ilasi children never return. Burning to act, Madma vows to free the imprisoned girl, setting off events that will ignite a revolution and convulse the Sforre-Yomnic matriarchy from its squalid dungeons to the labyrinthine paths of its scheming elite’s hovering parliament.

>Delicately plotted, sumptuously set and vibrantly worded, MAEJ is a lavish standalone high-fantasy epic, perfect for fans of A Stranger in Olondria or The Spear Cuts Through Water.

This is a world where there are birds that turn into fish for half the year. People keep tiny griffons as pets. The years are 181 days long, so a 30yo is 15 in our terms. The country Hwoama is a matriarchy; the book is set in Sforre Yomn, the capital of one of its provinces. Not far away is Enn, which is a patriarchy. There is virtually no conflict between the two; that is not the source of the plot. Almost everyone in Hwoama produces maej (magical energy), though relatively few people can do much with it. Even so, maejwork has made Hwoama advanced and rich.

Within Sforre Yomn are an oppressed group called the Illasi. They are forced to live in an enclosed slum, the law prevents them from having or using money, they can be beaten or killed at whim, and when they give birth to 'hundred-day children' - who have lots of maej but will not live very long - those babies are confiscated and taken away, no one knows why.

The Illasi are the heart the book revolves around. The cast is fairly large but the main characters are two Illasi, Madenhere, who has secretly learned some basic maejwork, and Taraentlere, her best friend who does sex work under a false identity. Over the course of the book, they get drawn into the struggle for Illasi freedom - but we're also following politicians and warriors and someone who caches her maej into a form others can buy and use. There's an embassy from Enn, come to Sforre Yomn in the hopes of acquiring the secrets of maejwork. There are tons of minor characters, who we only follow briefly or rarely; gamblers, this world's version of police officers, slaves, ghosts, all sorts.

MAEJ is a standalone, but I think it's perfect for the sorts of readers who love Wheel of Time and Malazan and Cosmere, the kinds of readers who are well-practiced at patience and keeping track of multiple plotlines and dozens of characters with very not-our-world names. MAEJ is intimidating from the first page, but if you've already conquered WoT or Malazan then you can't possibly balk at an intimidating standalone, can you?

Do you love the linguistics of Middle Earth? Then you should have SO MUCH FUN with this book. Before the story even starts, the author's note gives us the head's up that the different languages are presented in different forms of English. Tell me that's not genius, not the PERFECT way to place us in the same position as a native of this setting, ie able to tell one language from another immediately!

That's the dialogue, but the rest of the prose goes hard as well. It's AMAZING. Remember I called it semi-Shakesperean? There were so many FABULOUS words I'd never heard before, that were a delight to go and look up (even though mostly, looking them up confirmed that they meant what it sounded like they meant from context). MAEJ is full of slang and insults and proverbs, some of which I actually started using without noticing in normal life ('she mads me' to mean 'she drives me nuts', for example. I just think it's more fun to say!)

>"I am sore ashamed that such a chalk-hearted, ague-shivering, hontish, twittering, rort-boasting go-astern miscreant--aye, that such a ruffing, teatless, slabbering, thrice-feagued, tettle-scratching, crizzle-pated broke-branch-rampike of a blackguard hath had her ticket chopped beyond our wall and not within it!"

Stromberg's linguistic genius is far from limited to insults: he uses obsolete words (guilesome, antient) and rare or archaic ones (pietism, irrefragable, glacid) with abandon, and I'm very suspicious that some terms are entirely his own invention (properly Shakespearean). I found this a joy: some readers are going to find it a challenge. But I truly think the same skill that lets you roll with the math-magic in Yoon Ha Lee's Hexarchate, or keep up with Tolkien's linguistics, is able to cope with this. I get that it's an adjustment for most readers, but I'm positive that r/Fantasy is full of the kind of readers who'd rock at this, if they just stuck with it for a chapter or two. We've been trained on Malazan, for crying out loud! Seriously, we can take this!

And I hope I'm not the only reader who revels in it. Every single word is exactly what and where it should be, has been placed in its sentence like a jewel in its setting, with full awareness of all its potential implications for the meaning. A brilliant example is that in Hwoama, they don't say 'woman' - they say 'wife'. Because it's a matriarchy, and 'woman' comes from 'man', and why would a matriarchy use a word that comes from 'man'? (Whereas in English, 'wife' originally meant something like 'female human', so it's perfect for this.)

That's the kind of detail that so many authors wouldn't think of, but Stromberg is, as I said, a GOD-TIER worldbuilder. And not only will you never catch him out on a detail like that, but he also scatters little delights throughout the book, irrelevant to the plot but which, I feel, will bring joy to anyone who reads Fantasy because it's the genre of wonder: geckos that teleport in a puff of smoke, lantern bats, opalescent sharks, rivers of air. I love how casually he lets fall things like this; the reveal that the police force have SKYSHIPS is presented as no big deal - because of course it isn't, to the characters we're reading about. The things they take for granted, they don't make a fuss about to flag them for the reader. And so when we do learn about them, it's a mic-drop, and you can FEEL how much fun the author had with all the little beasties and magics and things, how much he ENJOYS sharing them with readers who absolutely were not expecting them!

One (of many) things that had me in awe about this book was how often later events dramatically changed the view of earlier ones. It wasn't constant, but a bunch of times I was left rapidly re-evaluating what I thought had happened; or even if the facts of the matter were unchanged, I'd realise things that looked like coincidence were nothing of the sort, and that completely altered what I thought about some characters, some actions. I'd look back and realize this stirring speech in that one scene was actually deeply ironic, or that some innocuous thing was actually grim foreshadowing. It was like Stromberg wrote multiple versions of the scene and had me read all of them, and each one gave me a wildly different perspective on plots or characters.

Just. I cannot oversell how incredible this book is, on every possible level. As a reader who often feels like I've read everything there is to read, MAEJ made me so excited. It's rich and heady and complex, it's loving and dark, it's so incredibly unique. You should read it just for what Stromberg's doing with language in it - but if you do, you'll absolutely get pulled into the story of these fully fleshed-out, vividly alive characters, all of them flawed, all of them Doing Their Best (whatever Best means for them).

I don't want MAEJ to sound intimidating. It's an infinitely easier read than Wheel of Time or Malazan or anything like that. It's only one book, not a series. It doesn't feel like a slog, like work to read; it feels like it's reveling in and celebrating everything Fantasy readers love about the genre, and it wants us to come revel in and celebrate that too. Speaking as someone who's been obsessed with Fantasy since I was tiny, who reads 200+ books a year every year: this is not just one of the best things I've ever read, it is also one of the most gloriously fun.

I will wrap up with what I emailed a friend about this book after I finished it;

>I kind of want to WAIL at how unknown MAEJ is, it should be FAMOUS, it should be STUDIED AT UNIVERSITY. I feel such contempt for anyone who doesn't finish it, what cowards, how could you, how dare you! But also I feel so sorry for people like that, because wow, you were lucky enough to discover the kind of book we get MAYBE once a generation, and you didn't stick with it. That is a tragedy. It's like seeing the face of god and turning away. You have my heartfelt pity.

>I have never had a book hangover this intense. Rationally I know I will be able to read novels again in a while, but right now it feels like I can never read another word of fiction because WHAT COULD COMPARE TO MAEJ??? What book would not be a letdown after reading THIS?! I have been ruined for all other literature! All that is left to me is non-fiction. Farewell, novels, I did love thee so, but now I must abjure to the shelves of non-fiction only, for it cannot be borne that any novel I try is not MAEJ.

If you want to read a true masterpiece, something genuinely unlike anything you have read before, I am BEGGING you to give MAEJ a try.

Applicable bingo prompts: Cat Squasher (hm, Storygraph claims the digital edition is just over 900 pages), Trans/Nonbinary Protag (hm), Small Press (hm), Unusual Transportation (hm), One Word Title (hm), Politics (hm). Arguably also hm for Older Protagonist (the MCs are in their 90s or something because the years on their planet are shorter than ours, though they'd be middle-aged or so on Earth) and hm for Afterlife (one of the characters does a lot of speaking to the dead).