A good book and a good piece of music have a lot in common. Both will often tell a story, and both will drive emotion. But perhaps more than anything else, both have the ability to teleport human awareness from one’s immediate environment to the setting of the book or song. It’s hard to explain what that feeling is, yet anyone who has ever enjoyed a story and felt like it wasn’t supposed to end knows it only too well. The feeling that makes you want to get up and look for another book just like that one. It is something akin to need, a certain type of depression even, though not quite. And if a book is very good, that feeling may last for days after the last page.

A good book is therefore, just like good music, a gift to humanity. How else would we ever hope to straddle ships to Mars and explore worlds beyond our Sun? Or meet fantastical creatures with inhuman intelligence, both daunting and majestic? Or fall in love in ways only Cinderella might otherwise have? Or travel back in time to our forefathers? Or better still, find profound joy and meaning in the most commonplace of routines? Good books are a necessity of life; good stories are a necessity of life.

But in the age of AI, it has become nearly impossible for good books to reach the people who want to read them. It used to be that you heard of a good book from a friend or family, or just stumbled upon one at the library. Love by chance, just like the fairy tales promised. Today, information overload has made a daunting task out of finding stories to read. No one can judge a book by its cover anymore, and everyone seems to have chronic anxiety – merely walking into a bookstore is too much work. It’s funny how life gets harder the simpler we try to make it.

The point is, there is an inadvertent war taking place against literacy, against the freedom that stories grant to us and the values of democracy that many of us so proudly associate with. It may not be an active war, but there is a struggle going on, and the stake is our collective minds and souls and the human imagination, which is the source of all innovation. And if we don’t fight back by passing on good stories to those who need them and stimulating imagination, if we don’t keep the soul of the oral and written tradition alive in this digital age, we could very well loose something in us. Something that we ought not live without. That is why we created Sable.

We are not here to curate a best-sellers’ list, we review books extremely randomly, we are not interested in literary self-gratification, and we do not care for cultural correctness. The only thing that drives us is stories; to talk about them in musical ways, those we’ve read and liked (or didn’t like so much). We are here to assist the agents of oral and written tradition, to amplify the voices of narrative and have fun while doing it. We are here to tell you which books, in our stubborn opinion, will give you the most lick for your money. We are here to take the kicks from the really really really bad ones so you don’t have to (unless you choose to). We are here to upset you into reading, one book at a time. And we begin in Cameroon. In a ruin christened Mount Pleasant.

Drink lots of water, take your anxiety medication, and let’s talk books like it is music!