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More books that the library emailed me

A Little Like Waking by Adam Rex

The Girl From Shadow Springs by Ellie Cypher

Jo & Laurie by Margaret Stohl and Melissa de la Cruz (as far as I can tell this is a different take on Little Women)

Rhythm & Muse by India Hill Brown

Silver in the Bone by Alexandra Bracken

Sixteen Scandals by Sophie Jordan

Spice Road by Maiya Ibrahim

The Splendor by Breeana Shields

Love & Luck by Jenna Evans Welch

Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust

Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater (wait is this a repeat????)

Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor

Voices: The Final Hours of Joan of Arc by David Elliott

The Boy Who Dared by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

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Okay so some of these pictures it's hard to read the title, but I'll do my best. Thanks to my library emails.

Red Rising by Pierce Brown

Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas

When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon

The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X. R. Pan

The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware

Within These Wicked Walls by Lauren Blackwood

Frankly in Love by David Yoon

Winter Town by Stephen Emond

The Vanishing Season by Jodi Lynn Anderson

So This is Christmas by acy Andreen

Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

Frost Blood by Elly Blake

Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett

My True Love Gave To Me twelve holiday stories (many authors, edited by Stephanie Perkins)

Winter Solstice by Rosamunde Pilcher

The Resolutions by Mia Garcia

Truce by Jim Murphy (nonfiction... German & British soldiers pausing to celebrate Christmas WWI)

A Winter's Promise by Christelle Dabos

Winter's End by Jean-Claude Mourlevat

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I always get a bunch of email books recs from a library so I'm gonna just start putting those recs here

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“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.”

— Marcel Proust (b. 10 July 1871)

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Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon

This was a "it's weird, but I like it" book for me. This book tackled so much, and it was incredible. I was debating if it counted as magical realism. I think it does? There was some stuff that definitely went over my head, but for the most part, I couldn't put it down.

I don't think I could give an accurate summary of it.

Bottom line: it was good (I am lazy)

And now 3 quotes because if there weren't any quotes would I be the reading roach?

p 27

Going against tended to end more rightly, more justly, than going with. People were wrong. Rules, most of the time, favored not what was right, but what was convenient or preferable to those in charge.

p 212

She liked being reminded of the incomprehensibleness of the world. There was more to life than Cainland, more to earth than its collected sorrows. There was wonder and awe and the allure of nothingness. No one had figured everything out, but there were people who'd made their home in the searching.

p 354

"I like the woods," she said. "In them, the possibilities seem endless. They are where wild things are, and I like to think the wild always wins. In the woods, it doesn't matter that there is no patch of earth that has not known bone, known blood, known rot. It feeds from that. It grows the trees. The mushrooms. It turns sorrows into flowers."

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Some YA Bisexual Books!

Happy Bi Visibility Day! 💖💜💙

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I did another post on this topic last year, but I thought it could use an update with some more books! And yes, the last post had people repeatedly adding on queer books by white people, so I’m a bit salty about it.

Other queer SFF PowerPoints:

Massive queer SFF rec post

Trans SFF

F/F SFF

Bi and Pan SFF

Ace SFF 

I’m not transcribing all the text, but you can find the titles, authors, information on TW, etc beneath the cut.

When possible, I’m linking to my database of queer books. The page for each book includes the synopsis, content warnings under spoiler tags, and links to reviews from queer readers. If it’s not in the queer database at the time of posting (8/24/19), I’ll link to Goodreads instead.

Keep reading

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so.

i guess fanfiction wasn’t a phase….

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me, meeting someone for the first time: yes, i love to read!

also me, internally: jfc please don’t ask about any books i read lately, the only thing i can rec you are 100K AU slow burns

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Me: I have to go to bed early tonight ... Ok, I'll just read a few chapters!

Me at 10 pm: ok one last chapter and then I sleep

Me at 1 am: Damn!

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Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine

232 pages

TW: some ableism, bullying, past death, past violence (school shooting), some self injury (unintentional)

So I picked this out at the library on a whim because 1. the author is from VA (where I'm from) and 2. the main character is autistic, and I work with autistic people/have autistic friends therefore I was ALSO very weary of it because I knew it could easily misrepresent the autistic community and be ableist.

I am not autistic and am waiting to get an actually autistic opinion on it, but I did not think this was the worst that it could have been. Yes, there were some cringey parts. Yes, there was a part where I thought about disregarding the book. However, I also must say there were enough parts that I liked where I thought it was worth the read (again, I am not autistic though).

What I did like was that almost all of the cringey parts were things neurotypical people were saying to the main character - an autistic fifth grader named Caitlin. They do use the word high functioning one time, and there is an interesting part where she screams that she is not autistic because her idea of autism is another student who does not talk and eats dirt. She does know that she has Asperger's though because there is a part where she thinks her school counselor has Asperger's too. This school counselor does attempt to explain the autism spectrum, although she referred to it more as behavioral spectrum. (Again, there is efinitely some ableism going on)

Ah, yes, there is a school counselor who works on social skills with her, and

The third reason I picked the book: Caitlin has lost her older brother, who she was very close to - I was interested in the grief/trauma aspect... As it turns out, her middle school aged brother was killed in a school shooting (the author apparently wrote this book with the VT massacre in mind) thus really making me think about trauma. Oh, and I did quite a bit of crying during this read, just some tears not sobbing. I'm a sensitive soul.

I liked that sensory needs were included in the book, and we see Caitlin's thought process behind them, however her neurotypical classmates find her behavior to be disturbing, and the adults are trying to make her normal (sigh but probably accurate to what would be happening in a school). Stuff like "Looking At The Person" and having to work really hard to understand people and sensory overload and even wanting to be alone are all emphasized throughout.

Two of the main ideas of Mockingbird are empathy and closure.

It's a pretty short book for all the things it tackles, and I would have loved to see things hashed out more (learning about and accepting her autistic identity. It does have a sweet/happy ending that shows the healing happening, which means a lot to me (I like closure... an aspect of this book).

At the end of it: I did not hate this book, but I don't know that it's something I would reread. I don't necessarily regret reading it. I liked the storyline outside of the obvious things, and it's not the worst portrayal of autism I've ever seen. Forever the optimist, I am willing to just look at the good parts of things and ignore the bad. I think the author tried her best** and wonder if she spoke to many autistic people while writing this. I would recommend getting this book from the library and giving it a try rather than spending money on it.

Sorry that that wasn't very eloquent. I'd love to hear other opinions on this book.

** I thought the author's note was horrible, and if I had read the note first before the book, I may not have gone through with reading it.

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The Ex-Con, Voodoo Priest, Goddess, and the African King: A Social, Cultural, and Political Analysis of Four Black Comic Book Heroes (2016)

“Challenging the conception of empowerment associated with the Black Power Movement and its political and intellectual legacies in the present, Darieck Scott contends that power can be found not only in martial resistance, but, surprisingly, where the black body has been inflicted with harm or humiliation.

Theorizing the relation between blackness and abjection by foregrounding often neglected depictions of the sexual exploitation and humiliation of men in works by James Weldon Johnson, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Samuel R. Delany, Extravagant Abjection asks: If we’re racialized through domination and abjection, what is the political, personal, and psychological potential in racialization-through-abjection? Using the figure of male rape as a lens through which to examine this question, Scott argues that blackness in relation to abjection endows its inheritors with a form of counter-intuitive power—indeed, what can be thought of as a revised notion of black power. This power is found at the point at which ego, identity, body, race, and nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated and compromised, without defensible boundary. Yet in Extravagant Abjection, “power” assumes an unexpected and paradoxical form.

In arguing that blackness endows its inheritors with a surprising form of counter–intuitive power—as a resource for the political present—found at the very point of violation, Extravagant Abjection enriches our understanding of the construction of black male identity.”

by William Jones 

Get it  now here

William Jones, the founder of Afrofuturism Network, is a historian, “comic book geek”, writer, and educator. He is a sought-after public speaker on the subjects of the history of black people in America, the image of black people in various forms of media, pop culture and hip-hop music, to name just a few. He has spoken on various college campuses and at conferences both nationally and abroad.

[Follow SuperheroesInColor faceb / instag / twitter / tumblr / pinterest]  

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Beasts Made of Night (2017)

Black Panther meets Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch in Beasts Made of Night, the first book in an epic fantasy duology.  

In the walled city of Kos, corrupt mages can magically call forth sin from a sinner in the form of sin-beasts—lethal creatures spawned from feelings of guilt. Taj is the most talented of the aki, young sin-eaters indentured by the mages to slay the sin-beasts. But Taj’s livelihood comes at a terrible cost. When he kills a sin-beast, a tattoo of the beast appears on his skin while the guilt of committing the sin appears on his mind. Most aki are driven mad by the process, but Taj is cocky and desperate to provide for his family. 

When Taj is called to eat a sin of a member of the royal family, he’s suddenly thrust into the center of a dark conspiracy to destroy Kos. Now Taj must fight to save the princess that he loves—and his own life. 

Debut author Tochi Onyebuchi delivers an unforgettable series opener that powerfully explores the true meaning of justice and guilt. Packed with dark magic and thrilling action, Beasts Made of Night is a gritty Nigerian-influenced fantasy perfect for fans of Paolo Bacigalupi and Nnedi Okorafor.

by Tochi Onyebuchi

Order it now here

Tochi Onyebuchi holds a BA from Yale, an MFA in screenwriting from Tisch, a master’s degree in global economic law from L'institut d'études politiques, and a JD from Columbia Law School. His writing has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction and Ideomancer, among other places. Tochi resides in Connecticut, where he works in the tech industry.

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1 - The Fault in our Stars, 2 - Beige, 3 - So B. It