gcantread

[gcantread]

Adam Simpson’s illustrations of Othello characters for Shakespeare-themed playing cards.

[gcantread]

favorite reads of 2022: we have always lived in the castle by shirley jackson

"we wait for something to grow and then we eat it."

[gcantread]

there’s always time to be cozy // watercolor, ink, gouache & colored pencils on paper

[gcantread]

Every 21st century piece of writing advice: Make us CARE about the character from page 1! Make us empathize with them! Make them interesting and different but still relatable and likable!

Every piece of classic literature: Hi. It's me. The bland everyman whose only purpose is to tell you this story. I have no actual personality. Here's the story of the time I encountered the worst people I ever met in my life. But first, ten pages of description about the place in which I met them.

[gcantread]

oh man i can't wait

[gcantread]

A dragon encircled

From “The Sherborne Missal” (Add MS 74236) c.1399-1407

[gcantread]

read in 2025: in other lands by sarah rees brennan

Does it get easier? Elliot thought, looking at her still pale face. Or is it just that you shut doors in your own heart and never open them again for fear of what is behind them?

[gcantread]

But like a cloistress she will veiled walk (illus. for Twelfth Night), 1908 by William Heath Robinson (English, 1872–1944)

[gcantread]

read in 2018: the expanse series by james s. a. corey

Saving humanity from itself is a group project.

[gcantread]

Jonathan Harker and Count Dracula have very realistic employee-customer interactions; every response from Jonathan is like this

[gcantread]

welcome to my epic fantasy world. we have many developed fantasy kingdoms with 2000 years of rich lore and history. and to the south you can see the evil sand people and to the east theres japanchina.

[gcantread]

@gcantread did this challenge, so here is my version

✿ my first oldest ARC: I actually got City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty as an ARC back in college and proceeded to ignore it until pretty recently. Very much worth the wait.

✿ last ARC I read: The Magic of Untamed Hearts by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland

✿ ARC I'm currently reading: The Swan's Daughter by Roshani Chokshi

✿ my next ARC: Either The Maiden and her Monster by Maddie Martinez or Forgive Me Not by Mari Costa

✿ most surprising ARC approval: I have an ALA number so I get approved for everything. I got approved for Katabasis by R. F. Kuang!!!

✿ most exciting ARC approval: Angelica and the Bear Prince by Trung Le Nguyen

[gcantread]

Books I Read in 2024: Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher

…people didn’t take you seriously as a warrior when you were knitting. He’d never figured out why. Making socks required four or five double-ended bone needles, and while they weren’t very large, you could probably jam one into someone’s eye if you really wanted to... And god forbid the tide rose and he went berserk. You never got the knitting untangled after that…

[gcantread]

@booksociety’s Breaking the Curse Event: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

“The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.”

[gcantread]

read in 2022: the secret history by donna tartt

I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.

[gcantread]

T H E   L I B R A R Y:  The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”

[gcantread]

got an utterly wild email at work today from someone accusing us of violating the city's status as a trans sanctuary bc we're “pulling award winning and bestselling LGBTQIA+ texts from our online library”.

because of predatory capitalism, libraries do not own their digital collections. we're purchasing a license for that content, and there's many different kinds of licenses. many of them are only available for one to two years, or a certain number of checkouts. audiobooks are more frequently unlimited loans and don't expire, but not always. the books in question that this patron was concerned about are "metered access" titles. they automatically get weeded when the license duration expires (for digital collections: weeded titles are hidden from our collections when there aren't any more copies in our collection).

hundreds of titles expire every week. we have 35,000 titles on OverDrive that are weeded atm -- we're not manually weeding them, it's purely automated. we cannot repurchase every title that gets weeded, especially when, say, the eBook you can buy for $7 costs us $75 and we can only keep it for either one year or 26 checkouts, whichever comes first. i look at the report of weeded titles when i get the email telling me what titles were weeded, and i prioritize rebuying titles that had holds on them when they expired -- if no one was on the hold list for Pageboy or A Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School when they expired, I have zero clue they expired in the first place! and when we purchase a cart of queer books all at once, say for Pride Month, they're all going to expire at the same time. so it's scary to see a bunch of books disappear all at once, but it's not because we're villains yanking them away from you.

we need activists fighting for the freedom to read. so please speak up if you have concerns about your library caving to book challenges! i appreciate that this person is fighting the good fight! but also: ask your librarian what's going on first. and submit patron requests for titles that you notice are no longer in the collection. we will rebuy them! (budget depending. we're the library of last recourse so we get a much more generous budget than most other libraries. still got our budget slashed this year, and other libraries are in very dire straits. so i would also encourage people to write their senator, especially during spring when budgets are being considered for the new fiscal year, and tell them to allocate more funds to libraries!)