#lit tag

[sponge-eating-goblin]

It’s Frankenstein season again which means I’m thinking about the scene where Victor comes out as bisexual

[transsexualjoanofarc]

i will never judge the booktok girlies who obsess over dark/taboo erotic romance i will judge them for it being shit quality though

[brotheralyosha]

'Stap my vitals, Stilton,' I cried, in uncontrollable astonishment. 'Why the fancy dress?'

He, too, had a question to ask.

'What the hell are you doing here, you bloodstained Wooster?'

I held up a hand. This was no time for side issues.

'Why are you got up like a policeman?'

'I am a policeman.'

'A policeman?'

'Yes.'

'When you say "policeman",' I queried, groping, 'do you mean "policeman"?'

'Yes, blast you. Are you deaf? I'm a policeman.'

I grasped it now. He was a policeman.

- Joy in the Morning, by P.G. Wodehouse

[libraryfag]

Wales is to fantasy girlies what korea is to kpop stans.

[ohcaptains]

when haymitch said you could live a hundred lifetimes and never deserve that boy

[chamerionwrites]

Aimé Césaire saying that colonization works to decivilize the colonizer truly lives in my head rent-free

[rachedurst]

so absorbed in the image of sinclaire x demian as 1910s yaoi that the book jumpscares me by telling me that emil has a mustache and glasses

[bocceclub]

One thing I keep circling back to every time I reread the Southern Reach trilogy is how fascinating it is as an exploration of systems of thought and how they might fail us in the face of something wholly outside of our rules and taxonomies and categorizations that we have built up for ourselves.

In Annihilation it is the conventional sciences. In Authority it is beaurocracy, government, the entire idea of "social order". In Acceptance it is so many things – religion, spirituality, language, even time.

A lot of Jeff VanderMeer's work expresses this idea that anthropocentrism and its old systems of perspective are inadequate, dangerous, for the future at hand, that to survive on a planet wracked by climate change and ecological devastation will require a radical reshaping of how we see ourselves and our place in this infinitely complex and strange system of interactions we call "nature". The Southern Reach trilogy says at its core that nothing (no one) is isolated, singular, unadulterated; everything (everyone) is connected, contaminated, intertwined. It doesn't matter if you fight it. It's already here, and always has been.

[tersyne]

jonathan harker had a little vengeance as a treat today!

he was READY. round two, dracula!

something something the power of incredible violence

this is my favorite part: jonathan using the climbing skills he learned as a prisoner to chase after dracula

i’m not sure if the vibes I’m sensing are more james bond or liam neeson character but it sure is thrilling

[theserlingbucket]

Rip Holden Caulfield you would’ve loved Jesse Pinkman

[transsexualjoanofarc]

i read flowers in the attic the other day by the way it ATEEE

[brotheralyosha]

"You know, the longer I live, the more clearly I see that half the trouble in this bally world is caused by the light-hearted and thoughtless way in which chappies dash off letters of introduction and hand them to other chappies to deliver to chappies of the third part. It's one of those things that make you wish you were living in the Stone Age. What I mean to say is, if a fellow in those days wanted to give anyone a letter of introduction, he had to spend a month or so carving it on large-sized boulder, and the chances were that the other chappie got so sick of lugging the thing round in the hot sun that he dropped it after the first mile. But nowadays it's so easy to write letters of introduction that everybody does it without a second thought, with the result that some perfectly harmless cove like myself gets in the soup."

The Inimitable Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse

[saintofdaggers]

anyway here’s a list of weird, messed up and unsettling books I’ve read (and yes I’m aware some of these are problematic or have questionable content. engage with each at your own discretion because some of them are WAY out there and also potentially triggering; I’ve included StoryGraph links so you can check the content warnings for each if you need them)

asterisks to the ones I especially enjoyed

Kathe Koja: Extremities*

Poppy Z. Brite: Wormwood*

Chuck Palahniuk: Invisible Monsters

Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho

Kobo Abe: The Woman in the Dunes

Kobo Abe: The Box Man*

Daisy Johnson: Sisters*

Nick Cave: The Death of Bunny Munro*

Ryu Murakami: Piercing

Borderlands (edited by Thomas F. Monteleone)

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch: Venus in Furs*

Caitlín R. Kiernan: The Red Tree

J. G. Ballard: High Rise

Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange

Han Kang: The Vegetarian*

John Fowles: The Collector

Lisa Tuttle: A Nest of Nightmares*

Oscar Wilde: Salome*

Stephen King: Misery

Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem

Gillian Flynn: Sharp Objects

Sadegh Hedayat: The Blind Owl*

[ohcaptains]

baby girl u need to calm down and read a book by becky chambers and find out that life has meaning despite the turmoil we all face

[chamerionwrites]

"European and American readers, not comfortable acknowledging the genocidal scale of the killing in Africa at the turn of the century, have cast Heart of Darkness loose from its historical moorings. We read it as a parable for all times and places, not as a book about one time and place. Two of the three times the story was filmed, most notably in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, it was not even set in Africa. But Conrad himself wrote, 'Heart of Darkness is experience…pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case.' Whatever the rich levels of meaning the book has as literature, for our purposes what is notable is how precise and detailed a description it is of 'the actual facts of the case': King Leopold's Congo in 1890, just as the exploitation of the territory was getting under way in earnest."

--Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

[rachedurst]