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If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

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In the interests of "it's OK to read books about people older than you, i promise," some great SFF titles about 35+ year olds. (I am not calling 35 old, I promise, that's just older than me RN.)

For some of these I don't recall characters' exact ages but I'm including them on the basis of the characters being fully established adults, not young people finding their place in the world.

The Keeper's Six by Kate Elliott

The Mars House by Natasha Pulley

Swordheart by T. Kingfisher

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

The Village Library Demon Hunting Society by C.M. Waggoner

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by S.A. Chakraborty

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i love when fantasy novels are about 35 year olds…why is everyone in books 20 or 16 all the time

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Sam Vimes: I am unworthy of love

Sybil Ramkin: I will tend to this pathetic creature for the rest of my life

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in light of the homestuck show announcement, can i just say that i am sick to fucking death of the idea that books/comics/podcasts are nothing but temporarily embarrassed tv shows. the end goal for every story is not for it to make it to the screen, because the screen is not “better” at or for telling stories. we have all genuinely lost the plot.

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A lot of people seem to be reacting to my urban fantasy post by talking about how much they hate romantasy, and you're by no means required to like romantasy or any genre, but I do wonder how many people hate romantasy because they have actually read enough of it to form an opinion on it, and how many people hate romantasy because they hate the marketing / BookTok / Twitter / fandom trappings around it.

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I drew some characters from 6 popular children’s books in my style!

This was a really fun challenge! 😆 what was your favorite children’s book growing up?

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booty shorts that say "I'd rather be in Ankh-Morpork, which is really more of an indictment of the here and now than an endorsement of one's personal safety and happiness in Ankh-Morpork" on the ass in very small font

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Animorphs books be like

Page 1: I am a child soldier. My every waking moment is defined by fear and paranoia. My dreams are full of unprocessed trauma. The fate of the entire world rests on me and my friends. I failed my geography test because I do not know the difference between Equator and Ecuador. Also, I'm really hazy on the difference between geography and geology. Again, the fate of the world rests on my shoulders.

Page 13: <Now THAT is a sexy monkey>

Page 26: *The dopest animal fact you've ever heard*

Page 27: Do you know about thermals? You do? Too bad, I'm going to explain them again.

Page 36: *fart joke fart joke 90's pop culture reference barf joke*

Page 40: Rachel kills someone with her bear hands. Not a typo.

Pages 3,15,16,25,26,30,33,37,40,44,46,50,55,56,57,60: TSEEEEEEEEEEEER!

Page 47: I willed my bones to melt faster. If there was a single bone in my body in the next ten seconds, everyone I ever loved of cared about would die an excruciating death.

Page 50: Funny alien thinks he's people.

Last page: *The gang goes to Burger King to avoid thinking about their war crimes*

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I made a mistake on Bluesky and now my notifications won’t stop but hey i’ll post it here too!

Anti-Prime sale on bookshop.org until the 11th

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Libro.fm on-sale audiobooks my mom wouldn't like

Following up my "Libro.fm on-sale audiobooks for my mom" post with a second post to highlight books that I love but wouldn't rec to my mom.

(Not because they're vulgar or anything, in most cases, but because my mom just doesn't enjoy SFF the way I do.)

For anyone who's not familiar, Libro.fm is an audiobook service that shares its proceeds with indie bookstores, which is why I like to promote its sales -- audiobooks can be damn expensive!

Unfortunately I don't have the time and energy right now to write up why I recommend the books listed below, but I promise they're good.

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik - adult contemporary fantasy - usually $22.50, currently $6.99

The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin - dark adult fantasy - normally $33.59, currently $9.99

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill (I lied, this one's on my mom list too) - adult historical fantasy, 20th century America setting - normally $22.50, currently $6.99

Hell Followed with Us by Andrew Joseph White - YA postapocalyptic queer horror, mind the CW's here (especially gore) - usually $27.50, now $5.99

Translation State by Ann Leckie - adult sci fi, note that you need to read the first 3 Imperial Radch books to understand this one - usually $33.59, now $9.99

Making Money by Terry Pratchett - adult comic / satirical fantasy, not a bad place to start if you haven't read any other Discworld - normally $33.59, now $6.99

Going Postal by Terry Pratchett - adult comic / satirical fantasy, effectively a sequel to Making Money - normally $33.59, now $7.99

Highfire by Eoin Colfer - only book on this list I haven't read, adult contemporary / comic fantasy by the author of Artemis Fowl - normally $29.39, now $5.99

I feel obligated to mention that there's also an abridged dramatized version of All Systems Red, the first Murderbot book, available for $4.99 right now -- but honestly, if you want to start Murderbot, I'd recommend just getting the regular version, which isn't on sale right now but is only $11.54 at full price.

And I am past out of time, but I'm sure there are more great choices on the full sale page! I know I saw Ursula K. LeGuin, quite a few romantasies, not sure what else.

(Post date: July 10, 2025; sale end date varies by book, I'm mostly seeing July 13-14.)

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Libro.fm on-sale audiobooks for my mom

Libro.fm is having another big audiobook sale! Great chance to pick up discounted audiobooks for anyone who wants to support indie bookstores instead of megacorporations (which should be everyone).

Earlier I started writing an email to my mom with book recommendations, then realized that it might be cool to share those recs with the rest of the world, too.

So these books are a bit outside of my usual SFF wheelhouse -- my mom likes more general fiction and nonfiction, especially history, nature writing, and themes around women's experiences; more genre-y SFF is usually out.

if you or someone in your life has similar tastes, maybe check out these books?

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill - one of my personal favorites, a literary fantasy about a girl growing up in the 60's in a version of America where sometimes women literally turn into dragons. But, due to the association with women, these transformations are seen as vulgar, unspeakable, like menstruation. Really good exploration of gender and gender roles, though with heavy depictions of child neglect -- the narrator's father basically abandons her as a teenager to raise her younger sister alone. Usually $22.50, currently on sale for $6.99.

Lulu Dean's Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller - I haven't read this one but it looks really good. A conservative woman campaigning for the removal of "pornographic" books from her small town's library puts a lending library of what she considers "worthy literature" in front of her home -- but then someone quietly replaces her stock with the books she's trying to ban, switching the dust jackets. Neighbors who take out the disguised books find their lives changed in unexpected ways ... Usually $28.34, currently $6.99.

The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger - bestselling, critically acclaimed science book about plants, upending the notion that they're mindless things that just passively wait for animals to act on them. Sounds fascinating! Normally $29.39, now $4.59.

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson - haven't read this one but it's on my list; a famously thoughtful speculative fiction novel that uses fictional eyewitness accounts to depict the effects of climate change on humanity. It's an older book, appeared on Obama's 2020 summer reading list. Marketing copy suggests that it's serious but not bleak. Usually $47.24, now $9.99.

Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History by Philippa Gregory - huge nonfiction book by a famous historical fiction author, tracing 900 years of English history with a focus on women and their agency, all the things women did that weren't "got married" or "had babies" -- everything that usually gets erased. Usually $23.09, now $12.99.

I don't have the energy to write out more but you might also want to look at The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides and The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams.

(Post date: July 10, 2025; sale end date varies by book, I'm mostly seeing July 13-14.)

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me, every single time i see people (especially women) talking about the divine feminine energy, or the sacredness of the womb or whatever it is now:

[image description: a two-panel photo of a person dialling a number and then placing the phone to their ear. the contact is saved as ‘Ursula K. Le Guin’ /end ID]

context is this quote by her:

But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?

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The point about the permeability of the soul is at least in part that we cannot separate love and consumption. You almost always can’t say ‘this is because of the soul juices mingling’ vs ‘this is one of the horrors of love’ and that’s the point.

Is Naberius haunting Ianthe because they grew up together, because they were trained to be two halves of the same whole, because she knew him inside out and there’s a love in that, however violent? Or is it because she’s been using him like a battery and a hand-puppet and a computer program and now he’s threaded up through her. She can’t know! She doesn’t want to know, she refuses to look.

Did Gideon v1 become more militaristic after Pyrhha’s death through osmosis? Or was it because he loved her and trusted her and his first thought in a crisis was What Would Pyrrha Do. Did he love Wake because their programming got jumbled or was it because he met a awful redhead and thought oh, my best friend would have been so stupid for you, she would have been such a wreck…

Did John make the earth angry or did the earth fill John with anger or was it both? Did the love come first or the fury? Does Mercy love her god because Cristabel did or does she do it for the sake of Cristabel? The lyctors all view themselves as living memorials to the dead, of course they’d voice the dead’s thoughts, act out their habits and carry on their infuriating quirks. How else do you remember? You can’t peel apart the analogy and make it all magic or all mundane because soul-permeability coexists with the everyday manacles of affection.

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this is how harrow the ninth went right?

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Imagine telling Gideon and Harrow from the beginning of Gideon the Ninth that in less than two years Harrow would be a lyctor and have restored the population of the Ninth House, and Gideon would be claimed by the Emperor as his long-lost daughter and appointed to lead the Cohort at the front

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NECROBANE

Cover art I did for 'Necrobane' written by Daniel M. Ford, and published by Tor Books. This is the second book in the swords and sorcery series following Aelis De Lenti. She's journeying deep into the snowy wilderness with Maurenia, the mercenary she's fallen for, and Tun her half-orc friend, to find an immense necromantic power to stop an undead army, and prevent a war. Tun is a returning character. A fur trader, naturalist, and close friend of Aelis. I again had to interpret what he was going to look like based on my reading of the text. Admittedly, I didn't get to read this one because of the schedule, but he is described in the first book, so I had it. Tun is a Nordic word and given he comes from the snowy mountains of the North and has braided hair I read him as a viking orc, which sounded cool to me and hopefully it is to you too. Thanks to AD Esther Kim!