#guess what book I want to read again

[nat-seal-well]

Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dim-lit halls of other places forms that could never be writhe for the impatience of the few who have never seen or been seen. If you even care.

[shadowofaghost5]

Give it up for everybody’s favourite street rat!!!

-

Fanart of Aaron from Fox’s Tounge and Kirin’s Bone, an incredible book by @muffinlance

I worked hard on this an am incredibly proud of how it turned out. If you wanna hear about the process, feel free to check out me rambling in the tags.

[pothospant]

silly lil designs for pf ez and aphelios blending into piltover :]

[kingdomoftyto]

...BIG FEELS AND BIG PLOT DEVELOPMENTS AT THE END OF THAT BOOK, HUH

[panicbones]

ive been reading books with AI characters in it and i keep finding again and again that nobody does it like murderbot. also why are ppl so desperate to put the ship AI in a body bro the purpose youve defeated it BOO

[b4kuch1n]

seems I’ve taken the wrong turn

[carcarrot]

i guess im being offered the job lol

[coquelicoq]

okay, i give up. i'm calling it, time of death 11:02pm. i hereby officially unsubscribe from the l0tr newsletter. it's funny because whenever anyone asks me if i'm the type of person who always finishes a book even when i hate it, i'm like, "yes, except this one time i gave up on the fellowship otr after the first 50 pages when i was like 10." here we are decades later and i'm doing it again. and the best part is, i did actually successfully read this book and the other two in the series at some point in those intervening decades. i tried to read this book three times and only succeeded once. 33% hit rate, compared to my rate of 100% for every other book i have ever seriously tried to read. i really want to get it but i just don't. i'm giving myself permission to move on with my life. i'm not ashamed! i will say it since everyone else is too chicken apparently: some people find this seemingly universally beloved book series very boring and i am among their number!

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads // twitter thread

Zombabe

paranormal YA set in a small town in 2003 where weird things happen that mostly get ignored

a boy is resurrected by his best friend after dying just before graduation. but he’s maybe a zombie now and if he ignores his hunger for flesh an ancient evil might start causing bigger problems

thankfully one of his friends’ aunt is a cop who has no problem helping get rid of some of the local nazis

queer teen friend group, m/m

[oflgtfol]

he was only nineteen???? he should've been at the clubbbb

[writeouswriter]

Psychically deduce what books I randomly own stacked up in piles in my room and the back room and tell me which one to read next, I have the decision making capabilities of someone who is not good at making decisions nor analogies

[jesterwaves]

my experience with percy jackson is kinda funny in hindsight because reading the first book for the first time i was like 'no way...thalia mentioned!!!!'

[hazeism]

hi!! wanted to ask if you have any favorite books, either that you've read recently or of all time. Your prose is insane and I need to broaden my own vocabulary so if you have any book recs, fiction or nonfiction, I'd love to know :')

Hii :D ! ahaha, what a well-timed question; lately I've become the kind of guy who just really wants to talk about what people are reading, or are planning to read, and responding in kind, so thanks for giving me an opportunity to indulge that, haha. What a wicked invention the printing press was!!! (Also--thank you!! I'm glad my prose is to your taste. I'm happy !💕)

If you don't mind, I'll put a cut on this right away, because I know I'm very talkative, but let me put a TLDR above for all the novels/authors I mention here. Disclaimer also that I am kind of a dunce (I think you know this) so I like silly shit a lot of times . please be nice to me adfhbjkdg. :D

(No nonfiction also because I'm a frivolous and unworldly little sprite or something but if you want straight philosophy [which counts] come back and I'll do my Top Ten Epic Platonic Dialogues Compilation for you .)

TLDR: Read any UKLG you get your hands on, Cain by Jose Saramago, or any Saramago (though maybe not Skylight, which is not a good introduction to Saramago), very much enjoyed Sartre's The Age of Reason recently, Shadow & Claw or The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe. If you feel like it, come off anon and tell me what you like, so I can give more tailored recommendations!!

Now if you're asking for favorites, like just the particular and arbitrary objects of my partiality, that stir my stupid little heart, the true answer is probably UKLG's The Farthest Shore, just because it is very special to me. I can't, of course, in good conscience, recommend the third novel of a six-novel fantasy series to someone (but of course read Le Guin, everyone should be reading Le Guin, it's dire for universal soteriology that we all read Le Guin; You'll probably get told to start with Left Hand of Darkness, and that's pretty solid. I liked The Lathe of Heaven as well. And if you read any Le Guin it doesn't hurt to pick up a copy of the Tao. I love the Tao man.)

Some friendlier recommendations, though:

José Saramago is someone I really consider peerless; There's no way to pick up a Saramago and not know who's written it. Cain is a bit drier, a bit more abrasive (almost accusatory, in that particular way you'll find in a Buddhist parable) and bleak than some other Saramagos, but it's one I like (perhaps for the trite reason that I like bucolic atmospheres and Classical antiquity as a setting) so it's the one I'll put forward.

Uhh, I've also been enjoying Sartre's Roads to Freedom lately, starting with The Age Of Reason. I'm partway through the second novel and umm... despite all the other things you could say about Sartre, lmfao, let it not be said that he is not a serious literary force. Serious is maybe the only word for it. Dire, too. I keep a commonplace book, so usually I take excerpts, but this was the first time in memory that I felt compelled to commit entire pages, ahah (I just took pictures though, fuck copying all that).

If you're itching for esoteric language, Shadow of the Torturer (as usually collected with Claw of the Conciliator in a single omnibus edition titled Shadow & Claw; the first of the give-or-take five volume Urth series) by Gene Wolfe will scratch you BLOODY. If you're particularly fussy, you might be irritated by your compulsion to Google, but I find it really makes the experience when you type in a word and the only results are "what the fuck did Gene Wolfe mean by this?" hahaha; Honestly, though, those kinds of complaints are borne from a lack of immersion, but you'll notice pretty quickly that the verbiage is a pretty crucial vehicle OF the immersion.

It may or may not become a commitment, though, if you like Urth enough to want to read through, so if you want Wolfe without the strings--though less of the exciting vocabulary, which is pretty necessarily constrained to Urth--I'd really highly recommend The Fifth Head of Cerberus (the novella OR the novel, I mean the former is volumized in the latter so just start it and if you feel like stopping then stop, haha). Mr. Terminal E is incredible but I scrape enough time out of my daily life to gush about his crazy literary density so I won't do it again here (you should ask my coworker, lmfao, who one time went "stop, hold on, hold on." because my face started getting really red while I was explaining to him some Wolfean gesture). If you read any Wolfe, and I mean ANY Wolfe, because his permatypes and his manipulations of them are endlessly interesting, feel free to come back and chat with me over it!!!

I guess I have to disclaim that my habit is mostly to pick through an author's corpus over a course of, usually, a couple years, and then sometimes I'll read things that will inform my understanding of the genre conventions or currents that the author is writing in (been enjoying Golden Age sci-fi recently)--it's not really as deliberate of a process as it sounds, but I think if you were to map my habits, that's the landscape of it. This means, though, that my reading is actually pretty narrow in scope, and I am not very well read or very knowledgeable in general (who is, in this economy) but it does mean that of the authors I do like, I can probably find the novel that'll work best for your taste.

If you want to come off anon, or I guess just leave another message, haha, (or if someone else wants to, idgaf, we're all friends here at tumblr user hazeism) describing the things you like or look for in a novel I can probably give you a more relevant recommendation. I've been dosing people up a lot lately tbh, it's like a parlor trick I've been doing; I have a conversation with someone and afterwards they'll have a PDF with a relevant Asimov story in their messages, hahaha. I can't help myself sometimes.

Come back anyway, though, if you read anything I talked about, okay? I want to hear about it 🥺

And alsooo (turning to face the audience) if anyone ever wants to put recs in my inbox (or my dms : ) slow replies though sorry I'm a hermit) I'd be happy to take 'em down. Can't guarantee I'll read them in a timely manner, or that you'll ever find out if/when I do, but it's good for me to leave my comfort zone.

[neonacidtrip]

No joke Mycroft Holmes founded a society where you’re not allowed to talk to each other. It’s called the Diogenes Club. It’s for “unclubable men”, meaning men who abhor social interaction or are just poor at it, that normal social clubs are nightmare! So it’s a location for people to just exist in silence and not have to engage with others with no judgement. And also comfy chairs and books. There is a game room but no talking allowed. I expect the complete silence but for the clicky clacky of billiards is very appealing to people.

He lives there, at the club. He leaves for work every morning where he looks over government finances and returns in the evening to his curated sensory safe room. He’s living his best life.

My gosh, that sounds like heaven. It's like he turned a library into a club. I'm in love

[otterandterrier]

between the r*ylos and the sw*fties y'all are really gonna make me stop reading romance huh?

[fingertipsmp3]

I’ve just realised another reason why Edward Cullen is an idiot. He acts like provoking the Volturi is the only surefire way to die, but surely he could’ve had a similar effect by provoking some random nomads, and brought way less danger on the rest of the family? Sure, it would’ve taken longer, but he wouldn’t have had to go all the way to Italy or deal with a possible refusal, or Aro’s creepiness. Idk, just seems like a better way