Go Knicks, A Better Goodreads, 'Cheap' Killer Films — Roden Newsletter Archive
Roden
Issue 115
June 30, 2026
Go Knicks, A Better Goodreads, 'Cheap' Killer Films
What a summer … !
Roden Readers —
Go Knicks! Or something like that. What a time to be in NYC. (So everyone tells me.) I watched the last game in the courtyard at a Jane Jacobs–designed co-op in the West Village surrounded by kids and crunchy adults and then wandered in a collective stupor through the streets of New York until about two in the morning bearing witness to decades of repressed joy. A few nights later, Matt Rodbard and I were having dinner in Fort Greene and in walked Spike Lee, looking as happy as any a man could look.
They tell me it isn’t always like this but I’ll take it if this is what the city’s giving.
I’m Craig Mod, author of Things Become Other Things (amzn | bkshp), this is my Roden newsletter, and I’ve been busy … attending to about six lifetimes’ worth of life.
#A Good Book and TBOT Fine Art<br>Goodreads is a hot mess. Over on our SPECIAL PROJECTS membership site, we have The Good Place, which is our clone of Twitter but without everything that makes Twitter horrible. It’s my favorite place to post. We tend to blab about books over there but don’t have a good way to “save” book threads (everything on TGP disappears after a week). So I made A Good Book (AGB), a version of Goodreads without the badness. AGB collects “The goodest of good books from the TGP community.” The community has already added hundreds of books. It’s not meant to catalog everything you read but only the best things you read. So no need to post about a book you hated just to assuage completionism pathologies.
I built this with Claude, of course, over the course of five or six days, chipping away at it a few hours a day. A lot of iteration. Since all the books are good books, the idea of “favoriting” was redundant. So popularity is based on engagement: How many notes / quotes a book has, and how many shelves it’s on. I tried to inject some whimsy. The more quotes a book has the more “tabs” poke out of the side. Adding a book to your shelf is quite fun. I encourage SPECIAL PROJECTS members to poke around and contribute a book or two you love.
Adding a book to your AGB shelf
TBOT Fine Art edition reprint is moving along. Sign up here to be notified when it’s available.
I’m also working on another small “product” to scratch my own itch (and maybe yours too) which I hope to announce soon.
On July 19th I’ll run my members-only board meeting looking back at the last six months of work. A bit later than usual but travel and life mean that’s the best day to do it. Will announce on the SPECIAL PROJECTS-newsletter soon.
#Recent Reads<br>I read Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 1 (amzn | bkshp). Am I glad I did? Sure. Will I read another one? No.
I highlighted three sentences in the entire book:
She purred so loud it vibrated my teeth.
“Glurp on that, motherfucker,” I said.
“Are you asking me if I fucked the orc?”
That pretty much sums it up.
The biggest insight I had was that this felt like a perfect format for an LLM-assisted book. Not to be reductive, but the structure is: a series of D&D / video-game-like “fights” with monsters who have abilities / powers, etc, and drop loot boxes. The structure to invite an LLM in to contribute is right there.
I feel like I’m the most broken of borked records, but reading DCC further highlighted how amazing Ursula K. Le Guin’s “genre” fiction is. You can do “dorky” and have it vibrate in the realm of high literature. (See also: Moonbound!)
Speaking of Ursula, I’ve been reading a fabulous collection of her essays: Telling is Listening (which, weirdly, I can’t seem to find available for purchase online anywhere? I nabbed it at McNally Jackson). Smart people committed to strange points of view are all we ask for.
On writing fiction in general:
Because I am not as good at anything else and nothing else is as good. I would rather be writing than anything else.
I still find embodying or identifying most intense when the character is a man — when the body is absolutely not my own.
And on writing Earthsea, which emerged in fits and starts over years, and didn’t really coalesce until it was commissioned (as I always say, external permission is helpful (maybe the most helpful)!):
To be asked to do it was a great boon.
People often ask how I think of names in fantasies … Usually the name comes of itself, but sometimes one must be very careful: as I was with the protagonist, whose true name is Ged. I worked (in collaboration with a wizard named Ogion) for a long time trying to “listen for” his name, and making certain it really was his name. This all sounds very mystical and indeed there are aspects of it...