#bookblogging

[unionize-aromantically]

honestly one of the most bizarre things in the world in my opinion is how people can recommend books where one of the key things driving the plot is romance and not mention it. like "oh this sci-fi book is so good", but in reality it's romance sci-fi.

[aeide-thea]

Yes, that’s right. Apparently, Elliott Roosevelt, the son of Franklin Delano and Eleanor Roosevelt, authored a long-running murder mystery series starring his mother as an amateur detective. This incredible development was brought to my attention by scholar Bill Black (@williamrblack), who in 2020 tweeted about this miraculous series, which spanned seventeen years and twenty novels. The first installment, aptly titled Murder and the First Lady, was published in 1984, and the series continued to 2001. Most of them take place in the White House during the FDR administration, and have titles like The Hyde Park Murder and The White House Pantry Murder. He is also listed as the author of two novels featuring FDR’s own private investigator Blackjack Endicott (I know), one of which is entitled (and get ready for this): New Deal for Death. (I’m screaming.)

[downtroddendeity]

Whole books have been written about the dynamics of gender and sexuality in Dracula, of course, and the way it reflects anxieties about the growing feminist movement and the role of women in society. I cannot hope to compete with them; I am but a humble peddler of Drac Facts. But in my opinion what we’re just starting to get into the meat of is simultaneously the funniest and most infuriating distilled “oh right this came out in 1897″ misogyny in the whole book: the entire cast going to downright absurd lengths to gaslight Lucy’s mom that her daughter who is visibly dying is perfectly fine, just happens to have invited all these doctors over for no particular reason, and is absolutely, positively, above all else, definitely not being eaten by a Dracula.

[mercuryandglass]

can you even imagine people reading a series about the dangers of toxic masculinity and overcoming the evil constraints of institutionalised misogyny/strict gender binaries, wherein the major characters include: 1. an nb gremlin monk psychopath, 2. an angsty eunuch with so much gender dysphoria that ppl die because of it, 3. a woman who’s the very personification of redemption and who's almost exclusively attracted to femboys (and also probably women in general but that might be wishful thinking on my part), 4. an unrepentantly femme straight man who weaponises his gender nonconformity, and 5. a prostitute-turned-empress who somehow manages to weaponise internalised misogyny, and then coming out of the experience obsessed with the blandest man in the entire story? boy i wish i fuckign couldnt

[kathrinesadventures]

PUBLIC RELEASE!!

Since last time I posted something about John, here's something if you choose Elizabeth!

So, the public version of the game is now up! (Also is it me? Or is dashingdon giving me 404 error?)

The game is now 210K words!!! I have heard your complaints about being either too flirty with Blaine, or being too harsh and no in between, unfortunately, I didn't have the time to work on those so erm… sorry The next update will be solely on reworking chapter two, then the other update after that will be working on expanding the book, and the update after that will be working on chapter 3 and so on, so forth. Elizabeth/John have been introduced!! They have been really well enjoyed by a lot of people, so yeah! I hope you guys enjoy as well! <3 (Their portraits can now be seen in the "pinned section") Fun surprise for Blaine lovers! Vale's chaotic nature is shown a little on the game etc!

Annddd yeah, that's pretty much it. I have exams starting on like, the 12th which will go on to the 25th so I may not be able to write a lot, sorry >.< As always, remember that you're loved and that you're amazing!

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<3

[riemmetric]

“Chen could see bits and pieces of the future, “but only in equations.” A frequent lament. Numbers could attack the flesh, the will, but rarely built it up. Morale for them never lay in the numbers. He made poetry out of his premonitions, his equations, because they’d proven useless to him as fact, because he was never sure whether he was actually seeing the past. A past. [...] Chen dealt in probabilities on one side of his brain and impossibilities on the other. Because the probability was always that he would disintegrate into his constituent parts sooner rather than later. He had come to think of himself as a complex equation and a symphony both, and, really, what was the difference? [...] The equation of the Company eluded Chen, perhaps because he had been lost within it once upon a time. Or as he said sometimes, the system abhors source, makes its mapping into a maze, a mockery, and the more you think you understand it, the more you are colonized by it. And lost. [...] Charlie X was on some part of the blackboard that had been smudged and no one could solve the equation now. Just knew the original answer had been incorrect. [...] Chen’s equation was a wall of circles with plus signs between them, and then some basic geometry that proved he was more than the sum of his parts. Held together by math. [...] For Chen, Moss was a wall of circles or zeros tumbling over one another, and from each a different Moss peered out. That kept being divided by themselves until there was no room for the rest of the equation and the parentheses grew into vines and cracked the blackboard and made math into something that could never be solved. While Moss escaped through one of the circles. For Moss could bud another Moss off her big toe if she liked—as she was fond of saying. [...] By contrast, Grayson was a single circle from which radiated calculations like the sun’s rays and a latticework of numbers between each ray. She liked to be as direct as a fist to the face. She had survived that way out in space for so many years that there was no other solution for her. She knew the stakes of their mission because she’d had so few choices before Chen, before Moss. Chen tried not to diagram her or turn her into poetry, even though it was in his nature. Did not want to solve her, for fear she’d tumble like Moss’s zeros, but, not used to it, shudder apart, disintegrate. No matter the grim set of her jaw.”

Beautiful math based metaphors in Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

virginia woolf, orlando

[petercalamy-bluealbum]

transgenderism

[nerice]

the big unread shelf readening of 2023

aka elia reads every single bought-but-unread book before being allowed to get into gtn/tlt

a conservation of shadows by yoon ha lee

american originality by louise glück

black leopard, red wolf by marlon james

breaking legacies by zoe reed

chinese folk tales anthology

chokepoint capitalism by rebecca giblin & cory doctorow

devotions: selected poems of mary oliver

divine felines: the cat in japanese art by rhiannon paget

epistemology of the closet by eve kosofsky sedgwick

female masculinity by jack halberstam

heikemonogatari

if not, winter (fragments of sappho)

korean folktales anthology

making sense of japanese by jay rubin

moby dick by herman melville

his dark materials by philip pullman

paradise lost by john milton

queer games avant-garde by bonnie ruberg

representation in steven universe (anthology)

revision by david michael kaplan

routledge handbook of japanese media (anthology)

russian folktales anthology

seven blades in black by sam sykes

sissies and tomboys (anthology)

the bear and the nightingale by kathryn arden (3 books)

the book of disquiet by fernando pessoa

the copyeditor's handbook by amy einsohn

the fifth season by n.k. jemison (3 books)

the grace of kings by ken liu

the promise of happiness by sara ahmed

the invisible library by genevieve cogman (8 books)

the japanese language by haruhiko kindaichi

the locked tomb by tamsyn muir

the queer art of failure by jack halberstam

the queer child by kathryn bond stockton

time is a mother by ocean vuong

turtles all the way down by john green

undoing gender by judith butler

welcome to night vale (the novel)

what if by randall munroe

wonderbook by jeff vandermeer

[thorin-is-a-cuddler]

Four books that have made me feel understood as a woman. Raw emotions, struggles, incredible psychological depth. 10/10 recommend!

[unionize-aromantically]

I'll probably read a bit from the top 3, depending on the results & most of the winner.

I'll probably not say the titles or authors of any of these unless you really want to read one of them.

[aeide-thea]

unfortunate that i've forgotten anything i'd ever half-started to learn about writing fiction, and also about creating anything at all, because the more i read recently published books, even books i largely quite like, the more i realize that what i actually personally want, i think, is for a SFF story to take things like eg transness for granted in certain ways, without feeling the need to set up any kind of clumsy, explanatory scaffold for shoehorning our modern, liberal notions of gender into genre?

that's not very clearly phrased, but i mean something like—the book i'm reading right now is pretty clearly Trying to Include Representation in a variety of ways, including trans rep; and it's more smoothly done than some things, but all the same, you can very clearly see the shapes of our modern touchstones and discourse and whatnot, reskinned and smoothed a little to fit the world of the text; and that's valid, absolutely, but really what i want from fiction (in this particular regard, at any rate; there are a lot of other things i want from fiction more generally!) is for people to just—be trans. just have whatever names and bodies and histories they have, and for those to come up as they come up, not defensively or otherwise preemptively, but for it to just be the truth of the characters, and arise in whatever way makes sense for them, whether it's clear on their faces or held close to their chests.

like—i don't know. i want to visit a world that's meaningfully different from the ground up: i want it to feel genuinely alien, a little, and expand my mind and my imagination in the way that engagement with something alien can, sometimes, if undertaken with open eyes and an open heart. and i want that to feel as true for that world's visions of transness and queerness and interpersonal relationships as it does for its visions of things less consciously fraught.

[downtroddendeity]

On a related note, I would like to state for the record that I am waiting with gleeful anticipation for the day Tumblr dot com meets the man who is remembered in pop culture as the coolest, most badass vampire hunter ever.

[mercuryandglass]

honestly one of my favourite things about this series is how cleverly it plays upon translations subtleties. i mean, ppl have talked about the way certain verbal tics are presented in that awkward sort of stilted half-translated way ("turtle egg" instead of "bastard", etc), but not enough ppl talk about the wordplay in one of the central topics of the story: destiny, fate, and the mandate of heaven.

like, of course zhu has the mandate of heaven, of course she manages to use her mandate in ways no others before her have ever managed—the very core of her being has been built upon the mastery of her own fate.

and it's just so perfect too, that this idea of fate and destiny that so many characters in this story are so fixated upon, the life that the heavens have allotted you—天命, also translatable as (of course!) the mandate of heaven.

there's just something so satisfying in a deeply huaqiao diaspora sort of way that this rather chinese fixation on the "intended path" could be separated, when depicted in english, into the two distinct concepts of 1. fate or destiny and 2. mandate of heaven, when in chinese they would more often than not be conflated into the singular (homonymous) term of 天命. there is the fate you resign yourself to, and then there is the fate you master.

[kathrinesadventures]

Okay! Update time!

Integrating River into the game has brought it’s own challenges but I’ve been tackling them quite nicely. 3K words have been added into the game.

I still keep falling into the trap of looking at a sentence and thinking it doesn’t sound right, then spend hours trying to see if it’s okay or not, reorganizing them, finding synonyms etc etc.

20K words have been read through which means that I’ll complete chapter 2 today. Chapter 3 has been updated a little as well on Noah’s part, and another goddess has been introduced. The goddess of forest. I migghhtt add the option to romance a goddess, but fingers crossed. It’s either that, or introducing another character after River and then that would the entire Roster. You could choose to romance all of them of course. (I’ll keep the degeneracy limited lmao)

That’s pretty much it, have a great time you guys!!