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batmanisagatewaydrug · 4 years

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Sorry if this is a weird question. It’s been awhile, but I think it was your blog that once posted about a list of adult books for YA readers? Did you ever finish that? I’ve pretty much read exclusively YA for years, but as an adult, I’d like to start exploring some books that aren’t about teenagers. Thanks! (And if it wasn’t you, then just ignore this.)

not a weird question, pretty normal question. I don’t know if such a book list could ever be finished, exactly, because more books just keep on coming and there are definitely some I will never know about that are no doubt fantastic, but I have posted two rec lists, which I’ll copy paste here for your viewing pleasure:

The Beautiful Ones (Silvia Moreno-Garcia) - absolutely BUCKWILD romance with a dash of telekinesis; nonstop high society drama and misunderstanding from start to finish, happy ending guaranteed. STRONGLY recommend if you, like me, are a basic bitch who enjoys a bit of Pride and Prejudice.

Binti (Nnedi Okorafor) - a math prodigy runs away from Earth to become the first of her people to attend a prestigious university in space, but shit gets real when a crew of hostile jellyfish aliens attack her ship.

Chilling Effect (Valerie Valdes) - a spaceship captain and her crew take on a series of convoluted missions in order to rescue the captain’s sister, who’s been frozen and held for ransom.

The City of Brass (S.A. Chakraborty) - an 18th century conwoman and a mysterious djinn team up to go looking for a legendary hidden city.

The City We Became (N.K. Jemisin) - a scrappy bunch of Chosen Ones have to band together to defend New York City (which is very much alive) from a huge ass monster.

The Empress of Forever (Max Gladstone) - a lady supervillain gets blasted into space and meets an even bigger, planet-destroying evil space empress. literally WHAT is not to like?

The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Nghi Vo) - high fantasy royal drama about a woman making her way to power in the wake of a political marriage that left without friends or allies.

Escaping Exodus (Nicky Drayden) - a space-faring clan are creating their latest spaceship from the insides of a giant monster when absolutely everything goes to shit (as things are wont to do in science fiction stories).

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars (Kai Cheng Thom) - a trans girl runs away to the big city, where she uses her martial arts skills to team up with other trans woman and form a vigilante gang to defend their own when police look the other way. a fascinating blend of poetry and prose and magical realism.

Finna (Nino Cipri) - two exes working at an IKEA have to team up to save a customer who disappeared through one of those interdimensional portals that all IKEAs have laying around. you know how it is.

Gideon the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir) - come on, you’ve heard about this one. it’s the one with the lesbian space necromancers? yeah, that’s the one. you got it.

In the Vanishers’ Palace (Aliette de Bodard) - a Beauty and the Beast retelling based in science fiction and Vietnamese fantasy, featuring a young woman falling in love with a “beast” who’s actually a motherly dragon after becoming a tutor to the dragon’s two powerful children.

Jade City (Fonda Lee) - urban fantasy gang wars, pitting one magically enhanced family against rivals and a new drug that lets anyone mimic their abilities.

The Library of the Unwritten (A.J. Hackwith) - hell’s librarian gets sent on a quest to find a runaway soul.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Becky Chambers) - aka one of my favorite books ever, essentially slice of life science fiction following an interspecies crew of deep space truckers making the longest and most complicated delivery of their lives. very warm and fuzzy.

Mort (Terry Pratchett) - one of many MANY Discworld books, but a very good one to start with, following the adventures of a boy named Mort after he’s taken on as Death’s apprentice. you know, like the Grim Reaper? that Death.

River of Teeth (Sarah Gailey) - historical AU in which the United States imported and domesticated hippos in the Mississippi River; follows a crew of hippo-riding crooks and hooligans as they plan one heck of a caper.

Space Opera (Catherynne Valente) - a washed up rock star and his old bandmate get roped into performing in an intergalactic singing competition that will determine the fate of the entire planet Earth. full of aliens, attempted assassination, art, and emotional turmoil.

This Is How You Lose the Time War (Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone) - time-travelling assassins from rival factions fall in love in a poetic and breathless story that spans centuries and reality.

Under the Pendulum Sun (Jeannette Ng) - fairyland is real, and Victorian England is sending missionaries. a woman and her brother attempt to bring the good word to the fair folk, but start to suspect the queen might just be screwing with their heads. PEAK gothic horror with a creepy fairy twist.

Witchmark (C.L. Polk) - a doctor and former soldier with magical powers of healing is trying to live a quiet life and avoid his controlling, aristocratic family’s plans for him, only to get tangled up in a massive political conspiracy when one of his patients mysterious dies. accompanying him in his investigation is a mysterious and gorgeous faerie man. romance ensues.

(this second part is a list I made specifically focused on trans authors)

The Black Tides of Heaven (J.Y. Yang) - twins with Powers rebel against their politically powerful mother, hell yeah

The City in the Middle of the Night (Charlie Jane Anders) - dystopia sci-fi where The Government is controlling a city’s passage of time and light. sounds like somebody should overthrow that…

Confessions of the Fox (Jordy Rosenberg) - I haven’t read every book on these lists, including this one, but it’s described as “a mind-bending romp through a gender-fluid, 18th-century London” and I personally would love to read that.

The Deep (Rivers Solomon) - mermaids are descended from women who jumped overboard from African slave ships, and one carries the memories of all their collective trauma. what will happen when she decides to explore the surface?

Docile (K.M. Sparza) - sci-f m/m romance story about autonomy and criticizing capitalism; what’s better than that?

The Future of Another Timeline (Annalee Newitz) - murder! time travel! queer ladies! idk, what else do you need?

Freshwater (Akwake Emezi) - a twisty little story about mental illness and being possessed by a god; magical realism ensues.

The Merry Spinster (Daniel M. Lavery, published under the name Mallory Ortberg) - a collection of short stories drawing inspiration from classic fairy tales, Biblical mythology, and more recent works. the way Lavery reimagines “The Velveteen Rabbit” is one of the creepiest things I’ve ever read, and also one of my favorite short stories.

Ninefox Gambit (Yoon Ha Lee) - you like big ol’ dramatic space operas? I’ve got one for you right here!

#queenofseelie

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theradioghost · 5 years

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what books did u get ? i rly need to get back into reading more now school is over

oh man. so I’ll give you what I bought & then I’m also gonna throw in some similar books that I have already read just because I can actually vouch for the quality of those

(brief note that my main qualifications when I was looking for books, besides not wanting YA, was that 1. they were not about straight cis white men and/or 2. they had particular appeal to one of the areas of sf&f that I have a particular fondness for and/or 3. they cost under five bucks. so there’s a lot of diverse lit, and a lot of novellas, and a lot of urban fantasy wizards who are also detectives/rebellious angels and or demons/necromancy/dragons/stuff that is explictly Lovecraftian adaptations but takes the piss out of Lovecraft/anything on this list/anything published by Tor)

new books that I have read:

(coming back to update this as I get through these books)

the Lovelace & Wick series by Jennifer Rainey – this is the Demon Husbands one I’ve been yelling about. Two gentleman demons in love – a Faustian tempter and a bringer of catastrophes – are growing increasingly dissatisfied with the work they do for hell, while also being forced to contend with new and dangerous enemies. Set in a vaguely-steampunk 1890s Massachusetts. Also includes monster-hunting steampunk scientist lesbian wives.

Deadline by Stephanie Ahn – fourteen months after a disastrous failed ritual, disgraced blood witch Harrietta Lee gets offered a ridiculously lucrative job quietly recovering a stolen artifact for a young member of a powerful magical family, and promptly finds out that this is too good to be true. Also she keeps meeting scary, hot women. Instantly the only wisecracking urban fantasy PI named Harry that my heart has any room for. (This one’s a bit Spicier than my usual fare but the author actually includes a list of content warnings including page numbers at the front of each book, which you can view with the preview option on the Amazon page.)

Hammers on Bone by Cassandra Khaw – A kid hires London PI John Persons to kill his stepfather. The first catch is that the stepfather is a Lovecraftian horror. The second catch is that Persons is too. This is like, the noir-est horror I’ve ever read and that’s something I am very into.

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djeli Clark – An urban fantasy police procedural set in an alternate 1912 Cairo, in which two government officials are sent to deal with a strange, malevolent spirit in the midst of political upheaval as Egypt’s women demand universal suffrage. There’s a free short story prequel to this on tor.com called “A Dead Djinn in Cairo“ that’s worth reading first.

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone – high fantasy with a black protagonist, in which Tara Abernathy, a disgraced magic user and rookie associate in an internationally renowned necromancy firm, is assigned to resurrect a city’s murdered patron fire god – but first, with the help of a chain-smoking priest and a vampire-addicted servant of Justice Herself, she has to track down his killer.

River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey – in an alternate history where the 1910 “Hippo Bill” passed, Winslow Remington Houndstooth, an ex-rancher out for revenge, is hired to travel north with a ragtag crew – a con artist and pickpocket, a demolitions expert with a proclivity for poisoning, the most dangerous contract killer in the country, and the very man who ruined his life – and take on the dangers of the massive swamp that was once the Mississippi river, a place ruled over by deadly feral hippos and a homicidal riverboat gambling king.

or, essentially, a swamp-based heist Western with a cast including a British-East Asian bisexual man, a black nb person, an unashamedly fat woman, and a pregnant Latina lesbian, and also their pet hippos. Listen just go ahead and get the version with both stories in it

Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh – Tobias has lived in the woods as long as anyone can remember; long enough that the nearby town tells stories of the Green Man, the spirit-king of the forest, who dwells in the trees. These stories are truer, and far more dangerous, than anyone but Tobias knows – so when friendly, handsome, curious Henry Silver buys up the neighboring Greenhollow Hall and starts investigating the local folklore, Tobias will have to decide whether to sacrifice the only life he has known for centuries, or the first person he has loved in all that time.

not-new books that I have read:

idk if you don’t know about the Wayfarers series, the first of which is The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, but it is an absolutely stellar bit of sci-fi very much based around ideas of found family and discovering your own identity and place in the universe and love and compassion and stories based around sweet slice-of-life stuff in a scifi universe with lots of fun aliens and it is so very queer and so very heartwarming and all three books (which each have different casts, although the characters in all three are connected to one another and sort of cameo across all the books) are fantastic.

Urban Dragon by J.W. Troemner – Dragons are supposed to be ruthless, unpredictable, deadly, selfish creatures. So why is it that Rosa Hernandez seems to be able to keep her best friend Arkay in check? How did Arkay, a shape-changing dragon with lightning at her command, end up being found alone and starving and with no memory of her past by a homeless woman? And as evidence mounts that someone is hunting down supernatural beings, who can they trust? (I stumbled across this while looking for urban fantasy on TV Tropes and BOY am I glad I did. Good if you like close friendships between queer women or the enemies-to-lovers trope)

The Merry Spinster by Daniel Mallory Ortberg – of course I was going to read Daniel Ortberg’s short story collection, are you kidding me. Not “””darker””” fairy tale retellings, but fairy tales as often very surreal, psychological horror. Read this if you want to totally ruin “The Velveteen Rabbit” for yourself.

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker – historical fantasy set in the early-20th-century Orthodox Jewish and Middle Eastern immigrant communities of NYC, about the strange friendship that springs up between a bitter jinn trapped in a mortal body and a masterless golem living among humans. and it gave me feelings.

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle – a retelling of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Horror at Red Hook” from the perspective of a black man. One of the better pieces of horror I have ever read.

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff – a very different take on a similar concept to The Ballad of Black Tom, wherein a mid-century black Midwestern family find themselves mixed up in the plans of a bunch of cultists and set out to disentangle themselves from this whole cosmic-horror mess. Apparently Jordan Peele is adapting this into a TV show, so I’m stoked for that.

new books that I have not read:

(& also a couple that are just books I want, and some that I just haven’t read yet but got free from the Tor monthly ebook club, which is very much worth joining)

Armed in Her Fashion by Kate Heartfield– I’m just going to let the official blurb speak for this one because there is absolutely no way I could improve on it

The Black God’s Drums by P. Djeli Clark – New Orleans-based steampunk fantasy about an airship captain and a stowaway who talks to orishas.

Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef by Cassandra Khaw – Apparently several authors have written standalone works in this series, and Cassandra Khaw’s aren’t chronologically the first, but I love Cassandra Khaw and “chef for ghouls and pencil-pusher for the Ten Chinese Hells is forced to solve an inter-pantheon murder mystery” just sounds so good to me.

Bones and Bourbon by Dorian Graves – Cursed half-huldra PI is forced to help out his little brother and the demon who shares his body, and then everything goes wrong. Feat. carnivorous unicorns.

Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Cordova – reluctant bruja attempts to rid herself of her magic and instead plunges her entire family into magical trouble. YA.

Robbergirl by S. T. Gibson – WLW retelling of The Snow Queen from the perspective of the bandit princess. YA.

Passing Strange by Ellen Klages – slightly-fantastical historical lesbian noir novella set in the burgeoning 1940s gay club scene in San Francisco.

The Black Tides of Heaven by JY Yang – admittedly caught my eye because the cover art reminded me of Moribito, which I adore. East-Asian-inspired epic fantasy which I believe has a nonbinary protagonist.

Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire – I’ve been neglecting getting around to October Daye way, way too long considering how much I love Seanan McGuire and urban fantasy, but my mom started reading this and that pushed me over the edge because damn it, yes I want to read her take on the Wizard Detective genre that I have such a weakness for.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson – this was recommended to me in a Tumblr post listing interesting, diverse fantasy, and I’ve been into high fantasy political intrigue lately.

The Paper Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg – came across this in a Twitter thread about fantasy worlds with unconventional and interesting magic systems. A newly graduated student of magic is bitter about being sent to learn paper-crafting magic rather than working with metal, until Murder Stuff Happens. YA.

Miranda in Milan by Katharine Duckett – queer fantasy sequel to The Tempest, with Miranda as protagonist.

Witchmark by C. L. Polk – post-WWI gaslamp fantasy MLM romance about a male witch in hiding, working as a doctor; the reviews seem to indicate people think it’s more ‘delightful’ than ‘literary’ but apparently it is pretty fucking delightful.

In the Vanisher’s Palace by Aliette de Bodard– East Asian WLW retelling of Beauty and the Beast and also one of them is a dragon.

Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys – another one of the rash of new Lovecraft adaptations that are turning perspectives around, this being one where the citizens of Innsmouth are the protagonists. Also has a really good short story prequel you can read for free on tor.com.

also I just feel like mentioning that I’m stupidly excited for Gideon the Ninth by Tamsin Muir to come out this fall because the review they’ve decided to put at the top of every blurb is “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!” (not my exclamation mark) and I don’t know how anyone could more perfectly craft something to my tastes.

#bobbie recommends things #astronauticality #asks #my posts

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morgan--reads · 6 years

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The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror - Daniel Mallory Ortberg

Summary: A collection of darkly funny fairy tales with a modern slant.

Quote: ““Yiiiiikes,” the boy said slowly. He thought of his father’s words: You are responsible for your beauty. “Well,” he said. “I could promise all this to you, if you brought it back to me.” He hoped that maybe the frog was joking, although he had no reason to believe it was; people rarely joked with him. He thought, as he often did before making a promise, that perhaps he would not have to keep it, or that maybe the promise would not be so bad in the keeping as it had been in the making.”

My rating: 4.0/5.0 Goodreads: 3.38/5.0

Review: The stories are handled with a light, humorous touch but they are dark at their core. Ortberg gets to the heart of old fairy tales but updates them with fluid gender roles, a knowing meta element, and a modern style. The adaptations are not always a successfully meaningful re-imagining. The strongest stories in the collection are the ones that warp the original stories the farthest, such as the adaptation of the Velveteen Rabbit, which was genuinely terrifying, and the adaptation of the Six Swans, which was subtle but powerful. The adaptations of Beauty and the Beast and the Little Mermaid stick closer to the original stories, with Ortberg’s style being the central change. They’re still enjoyable but not revelatory. The writing is confident and witty but Ortberg’s internet pedigree is obvious, which may irk some readers.

To-read: You try a taste of the collection by reading Ortberg’s adaptation of the Frog Prince.

#the merry spinster #daniel mallory ortberg #fairy tales #book reviews #book recommendations #horror #short stories #the little mermaid #cinderella #the velveteen rabbit #beauty and the beast #the frog prince

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elexmedia · 7 years

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From @sofiadheril - // “Kdg rumah adlh tempat yg paling berbahaya.” – Jennifer L. Armentrout (#TheProblemWithForever hlm. 285) . . Day 3 #ObrolinBuku Akibat kekerasan pada anak adlh tema utama setelah teenage mental health & dealing with post traumatic yg diangkat dlm kisah Mallory-Rider ini. Tema ini jd poin plus tersendiri buatku. Berkali-kali aku sudah bilang, kalau aku cukup bosan dg konflik remaja yg cuma cecintaan & kepopuleran di sekolah. Dunia remaja & anak lebih luas dr itu, meskipun romance tetap jd micin yg paling digemari. Konflik berawal di sebuah rumah. Rumah yg ternyata tdk cukup aman utk anak-anak. Dulu aku yakin, rumah adlh tempat paling aman utk anak-anak. Tetapi sebagian dr anak-anak pernah & mungkin masih bernasib seperti Mallory & Rider dulu. Pernah hidup di panti asuhan & ketika memiliki orangtua asuh, mereka justru mendapatkan orangtua asuh yg kejam. Keberuntungan. Itu yg anak-anak seperti Mallory & Rider butuhkan. Mereka memang tdk berdaya tapi tdk bodoh. Mereka BELAJAR dr kehidupan yg sulit. Itu yg membuat Mallory & Rider mendapatkan kembali kekuatan & haknya utk Menjd Nyata. . . Rider mungkin akan jd book boyfriend goal-mu. Kenapa? Selain dia tampan bla bla & punya sisi misterius, dia berbakat melukis. Agak berandalan. Dia juga suka baca. Terlebih membacakan buku dongeng ‘The Velveteen Rabit’ utk Mallory.‘The Velveteen Rabit’ ternyata buku nyata & beneran ada. Booknerd girls, kalian pasti pernah kepingin ada yg bacain buku buat kalian terutama kalau itu book boyfriend impianmu, kan? . . “Aku tdk pernah berhenti memikirkanmu,” kata Rider dg suara pelan. “Tdk satu hari pun, Mallory. Buku itu... entahlah, buku itu adlh sesuatu yg mengikatku padamu.” – Jennifer L. Armentrout (#TheProblemWithForever hlm. 289) . . Siap-siap review terakhir + writing tips & giveaway-nya! . . What's your daily bookworm recharge potion? Today mine is white coffee 😋 . . #ElexMedia #gramedia #elexinstagram #booklover #bookaholic #buku #pecintabuku #bookstagram #booknerd #bookworm #goodreads #instabook #instagood #photooftheday #follow #followme #picoftheday #instadaily #instalike #bestofthedays - #regrann http://ift.tt/2xAAAT5

#IFTTT #Instagram #elexmedia #gramedia #buku

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