#ANYWAY WHAT A BOOK GO READ IT PLEASE

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2025: METAL FROM HEAVEN by August Clarke.

This is pitched as For Fans Of GIDEON THE NINTH (by which they mean: ow, and messy lesbians, with a side of immersive worldbuilding) and THE PRINCESS BRIDE (by which they mean: Inigo Montoya and Fantasy Politics). Personally, I would also comp it to ARCANE, for the aesthetics and Loadbearing Mysterious Malleable Resource and class warfare and explicit sex scenes lol.

The titular metal from heaven is ichorite, a weird and versatile substance that's kicking off an industrial revolution. The book opens with the brutal strikebreaking massacre that sets young Marney (our hella dyke--sorry, crawly--MC) on her quest for revenge: She's going to kill the foundry owner who had her entire family of striking workers gunned down. She gets adopted by crawly bandits and becomes a notorious highwayman and prepares for her revenge (because we hate capitalism in this house, and we're working for our Hereafter beyond it).

I loved the prose, I loved the POV fuckery, I loved the worldbuilding and religions and names and community and colors and aesthetics and the ichorite weirdness. I loved the exploration of gender and of grief, of revolutions and of cycles of violence. As soon as I finished, I immediately reread the first paragraph, and holy shit it broke my brain a little (affectionate, astounded).

If you're looking for a messy, raw, tragic, brutal struggle with grief and takedown of capitalism, this might be the book for you--it's definitely not for everybody, but it sure was for me!

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[emariedraws]

This man is NEVER beating the dog allegations

[egophiliac]

CROWLEY SSR THOUGHTS

there is zero basis for this, but I can't get this thought of my head

I don't know why I decided to draw it this way

[magpie-trove]

If Hunger Games is about the innateness of human dignity and what happens when you try to strip people of their humanity, BoSaS says an innate part of human dignity is responsibility for others and for your choices and is about the dehumanization that happens when you lose that

[xxplastic-cubexx]

im forcing you all to look shady-car-salesman erik

[What If Magneto Had Formed The X-Men With Professor X?]

[everythingwasnormalhere]

Hospital AU you say?😼

HOSPITAL AU I SAY >:3

its very much inspired by 1. In Another Life, 2. Rainbow Veins, and 3. Six Feet Apart. yeah yknow the drill 😭 (if you havent read these please dont unless you wanna get depressed forever, mainly the first two, which are fanfics and they destroyed my mental and emotional health completely lmao)

i am making these fuckers ill<3 im not 100% of what conditions im giving them, but i know butters is gonna have a progressive vision loss thing, kenny some sort of muscular dystrophy (what did u expect), and kyle some other permanently-a-hospital-kid illness im not sure of which

cartman is probably gonna be an ex patient who remained friends with these guys even after he got discharged, and stan is. yeah no stan is stan actually. he either went to the hospital for something relatively minor or went to visit a family member, but whatever it was, he somehow ended at kyle's room. aaand that's where the plot starts~

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Replenishing the Nonfiction Stack; or, We're Calling the Book Buying Ban a Wash, Officially.

I am not, apparently, immune to coupons for niche nonfiction that's directly up my alley (octopus minds and RUSSIAN OWLS, hello??? Thanks, bookshop!).

I thought perhaps the BURGLAR'S GUIDE would also be covered under said coupon, since it was publisher-specific (alas: it was Not, but we might as well bundle for shipping purposes). And then while I was shopping IRL for gifties I found a copy of ROOM, which has been on my list for...ever? So! Hopefully these will hold me over on the nonfiction front for a minute!

[the-heron]

absolutely sucks when youve gone out of your way to watch as many movies as possible and find interviews and read books from your favorite actor and yet all anybody knows about you is the guy who spam reblogs and barks in the tags of pictures of him. its a shame. none of you know i am even less normal than you already think i am

[tenrose]

About to start the second Malazan book and it's taking place in another continent so I'll basically have to once again be lost 😭

[penumbralwoods]

sighs. anyone got some book recommendations

[quatregats]

This is probably Bush and also Pullings's native dialect (though I have many MANY doubts about what exactly the methodology being used here was)

[sillywizardfrog]

13.05.25

Feeling gloomy, having trouble to concentrate on work so we read

[age-of-moonknight]

Night Moves. Marvel Superheroes: Official Game Adventure (Vol. 1/1990), pg. 19.

Designer: Anthony Herring; Editor: Karen S. Boomgarden; Illustrator: John Statema

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2024: ALWAYS COMING HOME by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The people have Spoken, so I'll be reading this 618-page brick next! The cover page credits the author, an artist, a composer, a geomancer (??), and the author of the intro, so. I suspect I'm in for a Ride™. I am both Excited and Intimidated--will report back on how this goes!

[conspiracydawg]

had this image in my head for some years but could never commit to the amount of architecture drawing involved, so I finally sat down and cobbled it together in 3d with various assets I've acquired over the years

(psst most of the carnacki stories are available for free on gutenberg in the format of your choice)