#marginalia SPOILERS

[spindrifters]

sopping wet declarations of love

(with a sprinkling of light trauma)

“Moony—”

“You shouldn't be with me, you should be with someone who’s not going to fall to pieces without any bloody warning, who’s not—”

“Stop it.”

It’s harsh, cutting through the mire, and Remus looks up. His heart catches.

Because Sirius isn’t concerned anymore. Sirius looks downright angry.

“Stop that,” he says again, voice low, almost dangerous, grey eyes and cheekbones sharpened to a flint. “You don’t get to do that. Martyr yourself on whatever cross you like, Remus, but you don’t get to tell me who I get to love. Alright? That. That’s not yours. That belongs to me, and you don’t get to decide.”

His heart drops into his gut.

“What?” he whispers.

Sirius reaches out and cradles him by the jaw, a hand under each ear, eyes burning, and Remus doesn’t know if he’s angry—he thinks he is—but it’s more than that. And Remus thinks he may have swallowed his own throat, too, by now, if he’s heard right.

“Maybe I’m the broken one, really,” Sirius snaps, all the conviction of his eighteen years behind it, “because I don’t think about sex. Not really. Not like that. Not unless there’s the person first, and then it’s all just them. So if that’s what you need, if that’s what you want, we will get there. Because I want that if it’s with you. We’re capable of too much else not to manage it someday. But in the meantime, you do not get to tell me I shouldn’t want to be with you. That is mine. Alright?”

Remus stares, eyes wide. He’s breathing hard.

“You love me?”

A moment’s pause.

“You said... you said who you get to—”

“Course I love you, you terrific knob. Isn’t it obvious?”

Grey eyes soften, palms at his jaw go slack, and Sirius almost seems resigned. Like he’s ready for Remus to bolt. Remus, however, doesn’t think he could find it in him to make his legs move if he tried. He feels frozen, there, tucked up at the end of his bed. Frozen, but for the heart banging against his chest. Frozen, but for the hundred million thoughts racing through his mind, because love is something for other people. Something you can have once you’re fed and healthy and physically able and capable of holding your own and safe and—

And Sirius has set his jaw, daring him to run. Daring him to push back, or argue, or brush it off.

Remus feels the heart in his chest, and the golden glow of light that tethers the pair of them, and the wet tracks on his own cheek he hadn’t been quite aware of before. He feels all that, and then it rises, unbidden, the memory Sirius’s voice, a warm July afternoon by a cool mill pond.

Maybe you’ve just got to make it real for yourself, then.

His own voice, directly after that, echoing in the shade.

You’ve got to believe. You’ve got to believe it’s for you.

Sirius is still glaring, for all it’s softer now, and Remus swallows the lump in his throat.

“I love you, too.”

It’s not a whisper. Not this time. It’s loud, and bold, and nothing more than a matter of stating fact because it is that.

He loves him. He loves him. He loves Sirius Black, in all his beautiful, maddening recklessness and high ideals. In all his contradictory edges, loud and brash and painfully posh, queer and unashamed, gentle and bold and harsh when he wants to be. He loves him for his relentlessness, the push and pull that woke him back up to the world, that drove the promise that there’s so much more still to life.

He loves him.

That’s all there is to it.

So he says it, hands grasped round his wrists, and watches with a thrill as Sirius’s eyes widen in shock.

“You—”

“Yeah.”

“You love—”

“I do,” Remus says, and pulls his mouth in to meet his.

[b1odeuwed]

girls when they rip out their own heart to reach a higher power <3

[viasplat]

I finally figured out how to get into the Pentiment game files (after downloading five different extractor programmes lol) and decided to look through the glossary page marginalia that I ignored/missed on my first playthrough.

We all know our man Andreas is a cat fan, so it’s no surprise that there are quite a few drawn throughout the game. But there are also these two cats, which aren’t quite in keeping with the style of the others:

It’s a lovely piece of art, just like everything else in the game and now I can access the texture files I’m one step closer to making a sticker set for my laptop lol. But look at it for a bit longer and then tell me they don’t remind you of one of our fave Pentiment couples…

I think @mintymyths has mentioned before that some of the illustrated frogs share a likeness with Andreas — so I like to think that these animal cameos are a recurring artistic feature of his <3

[imsiriuslyreading]

hey lana! i’ve been following you on tiktok (and insta) for a while. in fact, i kept getting your videos on my fyp when you were just starting to read atyd; i was so happy to see your reactions. now you’ve definitely read a lot more fanfics than i have. anyways, thank you for spreading your enthusiasm, and please post more fanfic recs. i have so many on my tbr but you can never have too many! 💖 -shar

SHAR hi hello howya???

first up, it’s so lovely to meet you thanks so so so much for saying hi!

oh the beginnings of ATYD. poor sweet innocent lana did not know what she was in for ahsiudhwdiwodhowbs. how things have spiralled. i don’t even know who i am anymore, wolfstar are my entire personality.

i will ALWAYS HAPPILY share recs, talking about these incredible stories written by such clever people is my absolute favourite thing to do.

there’s two WIPs i’ve got my eye on at the moment, im watching them like a bloody hawk lemme tell ya:

You Signed Up For This by @solmussa

and

Marginalia by @spindrifters

i am positively FOAMING AT THE MOUTH for these badboys, i literally can’t wait they both look bloody fantastic.

anyways i hope you’re well, drop recs in my DMs ANYTIME PLEASE i love it.

i’ll share more of my faves soon and we can talk about how obsessed we are 🫶🏽

[darlingstarbby]

just got caught up on marginalia today and i...am speechless. it is such a well-developed, thought provoking world and story line i’m in love with it. remus and sirius’ characterizations are beautiful and i cried when remus finally got to see his mum again. IM GONNA COMBUST!

[maester-of-spreadsheets]

My biggest wish for the end of HotD has nothing to do with emphasizing who ended up in power. Mostly I just want it to end before Gaemon dies, because there’s always been something compelling to me about the genuine friendship between the son of Rhaenyra* with the likely son of Aegon. It would be even more poignant in the show, since they would be friends the way their mother and grandmother were before the politics of it all.

*both of them would be illegitimate in the show too so that’s something haha

[thatlittledandere]

PLEASE talk about xoxo droplets omg. im no thoughts head empty rn but tbh just i wanna hear every opinion you have about it,, i love when people share my Extremely Unknown Special Interest

Every time I think about how to explain the main characters to someone unfamiliar with them I can get through Everett and Shiloh just fine, normal short synopses, but THEN. NATE LAWSON. TRAPS ME FOR HOURS. Nate isn't even my favorite but I'm obsessed with him oh my god. This is gonna have spoilers for his route btw hold on

Like. I met him, and thought, in a true JB fashion, hot damn. He, he's easily the most attractive of the bunch to me shrsvhddh (Everett has so many qualities I love on paper but in practice. It's Nate he's the most handsome) Then I started to observe why he's in the Unfriendable Group and deducted that he's got a stick the size of a log up his ass. Simple enough. But WAIT THERE'S MORE

I started his route PURELY because he was hot shhddvhgd even though I disliked him hard after my first playthrough. (Shiloh. I didn't believe the warnings. F in the chat bois.) He's not JUST a stickler to the rules nooooooo he's a PERFECTIONIST. And a SUPERHUMAN. But HE doesn't see it like that nooooo he thinks he's just the only one who puts in any effort at all. People keep telling him his standards are unreachable but ~obviously~ they're not. If he can do it, so can everyone else! They're just not trying hard enough! And he doesn't try to be perfect, no, that's impossible. He just wants to be the best he can!

But it's never enough. There's always room for improvement, after all. Nate could get a perfect score on a test and still be dissatisfied, because he could have elaborated on that point in his essay more, or his handwriting got too close to the marginalia on one line and that is unprofessional, or he thought on that one multi-choice question longer than he should have if he studied adequately, etc, etc.

And because of this he's constantly stressed the FUCK out. He volunteers when something needs to be done, he helps out teachers, he takes it upon himself to make sure everyone else is ALSO acting properly, he puts at LEAST 100% into EVERYTHING he does, and there's always more to do. He has a part-time job at a warehouse as well and while the physical labor can offer a bit of a break for his brain, you can bet your ASS he doesn't stop for ONE second or stay on his break a MINUTE too long. How the hell does he live like this?

Well. What other choice is there? Things need to be done. They need to be done well. And obviously Nate knows the importance of rest to your health and performance, so he certainly eats and sleeps properly, but see these things are also scheduled and measured and optimized for maximum efficiency. But does he get REST, for REAL? Does he RELAX?

Yes, because he's best friends and roomies (the room is spotless At All Times) with Everett "2kool4skool" Gray (who would shoot me point blank for saying something so uncool about him). I Could write another essay on their dynamic but let's just say they balance each other out. Nate gives Everett direction, Everett gives Nate respite. Phew.

But I'm not done. MORE MORE MORE. Because I started talking about my personal relationship to Nate but got sidetracked by character analysis dghfsfh THE THING IS I disliked him heavily even some time after starting his route, and all the characters absolutely SHINE on their dates. But then. The unthinkable happened.

The class trip.

Now of course I already knew Nate was extremely high strung all of the time, but until that point I'd seen it either as an annoyance or a joke. But the class trip was, like, a disaster to Nate. He's spending more time with the group outside strictly defined areas and activities and therefore feels responsibility over their behavior. Obviously a new environment with new activities gives everyone more opportunities to act up. They have a schedule, but it's not in Nate's control, and he can't help seeing himself as like a vice advisor, and nothing goes exactly as planned or at ALL as planned, and everyone's doing it on PURPOSE his life is already hell and they're doing it to SPITE him or maybe they're just completely unfit to the title of human being that's been forced on these demons, and this is STILL SCHOOL they're still bound by school rules and they should LEARN things here and GET SOMETHING OUT OF IT for HEAVENS sake,

So it's no wonder he breaks down. And it was, it was fucking terrible. Nate's stress and anxiety present as anger most of the time, I didn't... I didn't see him as the type who would cry. Kind of figured Nate was one of those boys who didn't remember the last time they cried but guessed it was somewhere around fourth grade? Heartless of me. I really thought he was like. Pardon the expression. Above such vulnerability.

Of course he's not. He's a person, and a highly sensitive one at that. I guess I hadn't noticed it over what a hardass he is;;; And y'all I felt SO bad. And so awkward. Like. What the fuck do you do in that situation? This wasn't supposed to happen. It felt like we were breaking the script somehow. Like. "I'm not supposed to see this. Why am I seeing this? Do I need to? Fucking christ. Is this allowed? When can I leave. Uh. There there? Can't even pat him on the shoulder. Jesus just kill me"

And that scene changed everything. Nate cried in front of the MC and I could never see him in the same light again. I used to think he was kinda just a tough yet guarded guy and a demanding ass but oh wow he's actually just like. This dude has anxiety. This dude has problems. He's burning out at light speed and has been for the past what? Eight years?? Get him HELP.

And I HAVEN'T EVEN TOUCHED ON HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH HIS PARENTS YET. So they're the type who saw having children as just a step that responsible adults take at some point in their lives, and they were not prepared. And Nate was a difficult child too. Not on purpose, obviously, babies don't do anything on purpose, but he was particularity emotional even as a baby. He's just Like That. So his parents ehm eeeurgh tolerated him for a few years. Just kind of. Pushed through it. And then decided to give up and send him to a boarding school. Like they basically abandoned him there because they couldn't handle him.

And Nate is on hard denial about this. He tells himself it was the reasonable choice and the best for everyone, and he's not wrong, but he's also not ready to face the fact that uh. His parents very much just are not good at parenting and they don't actually know each other at all. "I respect them and they respect me" is how he puts it, and again it's not wrong but also christ he was not truly loved as a child and still isn't. Mommy and daddy hear that his grades are top of the class and he's very mature and responsible and respected by staff and students alike, and they're proud of him, but they do NOT know who he is as a person or how fucking terrible he's actually doing.

Not that Nate admits any of that himself. I can see how it would be difficult to face when you're already juggling fifty glass balls on a glass platter while riding a unicycle on hard stone floor.

Why is NATE is the one I give a private Ted Talk on regularly when none of the jerks are doing much better. He's just for fucks sake he, he's doing so bad. So bad. Maybe it's the incredibly harsh wakeup call I got? I cannot overstate how impactful that one scene was. HE CRIED. HE CRIED IN FRONT OF ANOTHER PERSON? HE BROKE DOWN?? NATE LAWSON HAS WEAKNESSES??? LIKE HE WASN'T JUST DOING ALL THAT FOR THE SAKE OF OBLIGATION OR TO LOOK GOOD ON A RESUME? HE'S REALLY THAT CRUSHED? I wasn't supposed to be there. I know it's a scripted event but I wasn't supposed to see that it feels not allowed. Are you still there? Thank you for reading go to sleep

[chai-n-ivy]

01/01/2024

Day 3 of reading S by J.J. Abrams/Doug Dorst:

SPOILERS AHEAD

I've finished the actual text of the novel by V.M. Straka, which was a slog not gonna lie. It's got so much mystery to it that I find it frustrating, and it annoys me that the main character doesn't complete either of his two missions (figuring out who he was and killing Vévoda).

Wish me luck for the first wave of marginalia!

[ghaniblue]

HP Rec Fest: days 10-13

I neglected my reccing duties. This happens when you don't prep and queue all posts beforehand. Did I prep and queue the upcoming posts yet? Of course not. Onwards!

@hprecfest prompts: A fest fic, a dark fic, a WIP I'm following and a fic with >100k words. 2 Drarry and 2 Wolfstar recs.

Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage (21014 words) by @goblinmatriarch (Drarry, Explicit)

Lord Draco Malfoy may be a young man spending time in Dumbledore’s summer court, but that does not mean he needs to succumb to its licentious frivolity. He carries the burden of his lineage, the shadow of rumours, and the dignity of his betrothal to a good match. He is certainly not fool enough to be distracted by the dark curls and ready grin of the court’s stableboy, who seems to have taken up with every courtier who looks his way.

For the fest fic, I give you my favourite story from this year's @hp-bodiceripper fest. It made me laugh so much every time a bucket was mentioned. I need more stableboy!Harry fics in my life. Or to say it in Draco's words: "Surely, Draco had the self-control to be around a saucy drop-trou and his hypnotic bucket-related coquetry without succumbing." Spoiler: he did not.

Do not miss the embedded 12th century rimming debate. It is glorious.

Railway Lands (65012 words) by Maelipstick (Drarry, Explicit)

Draco finds his own way to cope with being a failed Death Eater at Voldemort's headquarters. Voldemort finds a way to destroy the wizarding world even after his death. Harry is trying to hold the world together while his mind quietly comes apart. Warnings for graphic drug use, depression and suicidal ideation, Draco being an arsehole, sex work, criminality, non-con sexual situations, shifting POVs, ofc werewolves, self neglect and self harm, general unprettiness, unplanned parenthood and references to other works of fiction.

This dark fic got its hooks in me during my last time in Drarry fandom. It's pretty unrelenting. I haven't re-read it in a long time but it's still rattling around my brain.

Gathering Home by Quietlemonhush (Wolfstar, 20/?, 74k, Explicit)

Remus flipped the light on and sucked in a breath as he looked over his classroom, as neat and tidy as he had left it the day before. The room exuded warmth, colorful and bright, playmats on the floor and books stacked up along the walls, little boxes of crayons on all of the tables. By the end of the day, ten kindergarteners would arrive to what was functionally their second home, to once again tear it to smithereeens. Eleven, Remus corrected himself—four months into the school year, a new student was joining their class.

Remus shouldn’t be attracted to Sirius Hill, not when Remus is responsible for teaching his five-year-old little brother to read and count, and especially not with that mysterious baby strapped to Sirius’s chest. He shouldn’t. He isn’t. He is not.

Really.

This canon-divergent, trans!Sirius raising Regulus und Harry fic is both a comfort fic and a story hurting my heart in the worst ways. Every single thing this little Reggie says hurts every one of my feelings, and Sirius is trying so damn hard to take care of his boys, and then there is Remus and his mother, who are both so bloody lovely I can't stand it.

marginalia (266547 words) by @spindrifters (Wolfstar, ensemble, 52/59, Explicit)

This story began a long time ago. That part is already written. Nothing can be done about it now. It began with two young men—barely more than boys—who upended the world, magical and mundane alike. Grindelwald and Dumbledore, glorious leaders of the revolution, who brought wizardkind out of hiding and into the light during those last, violent days of 1899. But a winter's night seventy-seven years later is where things really kick off. Because Remus Lupin knows what to expect when you’ve been sold somewhere new. He knows it better than he ever thought he'd have to by this point. He knows how to survive. And Sirius Black is doing his best to just graduate Hogwarts and get himself and his brother away from this goddamn house. He's got it figured out by now. He has a plan. Neither of them, however, had accounted for the other messing everything up by the mere fact of just existing.   (Or, the one where Sirius is heir to a pureblood first family and Remus is a half-blood servant, but a chance meeting leads to healing old wounds, stumbling into love, and just maybe accidentally kickstarting a revolution.)

For my second WIP and >100k fic, I picked this marvel of world building. I'm only at chapter 28 so I need to catch up before this WIP is no longer a WIP. The breadth of characters, backstory and universe creation is incredible. I often get bored with fics this long, but this one is so immersive and ernest in the best ways. You can tell the author wants to tell this story honestly and truly. It is a pure joy. You probably heard of this story already if you're into Wolfstar. It really is that good. Also, Pigoletta is recording the story as a podfic.

>> rec fest masterlist <<

[ouidamforeman]

I got tagged to do this Ao3 tag game by @gallifreyburning!

I don't usually do these kinds of fanfiction ask games bc I'm primarily an artist and don't do much of the actual writing bits of things so my answers for these will be a little unusual lol. I'm also going to keep my answers to the fics I actually helped co-write instead of just illustrate. Shoutout to my primary writer collab partner @moveslikebucky who I do most in depth stories with! They do the writing bits and I help with ideas, plots, brainstorming, betaing, phrasing, and other little nuances! I would not have works on Ao3 without my writer partners!

1. how many works do you have on Ao3?

31! Again some of which I actually helped co-write and some of which I just illustrated. A couple are solo collections of my own artwork for events and things

2. what's your total Ao3 word count?

213,593. Again emphasizing that the word counts specifically are my collaborators' accomplishments lol

3. what fandoms do you write for?

Primarily the Good Omens novel but I have a good amount for the Good Omens tv show as well and one that's a Star Trek DS9 fusion

4. what are your top five fics by kudos?

My most kudosed fic was written and conceptualized by a collab partner for a bang event and only illustrated by me so here are my top ones I actually did work on the story of lol. All of these are ones I did with @moveslikebucky 💛

Night of the Living Boyfriend! (367)

I won't have a life (until you're dead) (346)

go where I go, do what I must (304)

his fragrant garland (267)

Marginalia (227)

5. do you respond to comments?

I like to when someone comments about the art specifically, and I sometimes do when a comment mentions a story element or something that I worked a lot on or is a question about something I have insight on. I'm bad at keeping up with my inbox though so most of the time I leave replying to comments to my collab partners lol

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

Sad endings aren't really my thing so stories I work on don't usually have them. However I like subverting traditional character and genre ideas so stuff I do with Buckie sometimes has weird endings that are happy for the characters but scary or disturbing otherwise, like (spoilers) in starlit nights (I saw you) will hopefully have when we finish it

But in terms of actual angstiest I think that would probably be I think about you which ends with miserable pining and crying jsgfjdfjffgj. Thank Buckie for that ending though not me lol

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Most of my works have happy endings but my favorites are probably the AUs Buckie and I like to do where the characters end up in a more peaceful and free place than they could have expected at the beginning 🩷 My favorites of these are probably our the blood is the life series about vampires, whose fics all have or will have happy endings that I love, go where I go, do what I must whose universe will always be happy and we have plans to continue, and formation displays of affection which is about sooooo so softly falling in love for marginalized characters. Probably his fragrant garland as well because I want to live in pastoral ancient Greek fantasyland too tbh

8. Do you get hate on fics?

I don't think I've ever gotten straight up hate on one of my collabs or solo works but one time we got a ridiculous comment on formation displays of affection (which is about an autistic robot and an autistic human falling in love) about how it was disrespectful to autistic people and that this person was at their last straw with us for whatever reason as well as a mini essay about why its bad to depict robot autistic characters lol. I don't think they actually read the fic bc I had to reply to them explaining that it was specifically about my own experience being autistic and Buckie's being ADHD and how we wanted to subvert the "robot isn't human and is therefore inferior" trope with a story about two people with divergent neurology, one of whom is a person who happens to be an android, finding love and commonality together. It was just weird and sort of disrespectful to be told I was being ableist against myself when I made the characters specifically partially to reflect my own experience lmao

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

Yeah all the gd time (as far as brainstorming how it'll go and drawing it etc, Buckie is the one good at the actual writing part!) . I love erotica and the emotions and concepts it can communicate. Most of my Ao3 works are smut varying from tender stuff to weird raunchy kink things about monsters. It's always as genuine and queer as I can possibly make it if that's a "kind" lol

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written?

I'm not really a big fan of crossovers in general but I do have a couple fusions (characters from one fandom set in an AU based on the universe of another) I've done with collaborators! My favorite and probably the really unusual one is Reclamation and Reconnaissance, a long term collaborative project I've been doing with a team, which is a Good Omens/Star Trek DS9 fusion set in a Bajoran farming community of refugees

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I'm aware of but like who knows with AI scraping these days

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Not as of now but that wold be amazing

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Yep as is obvious from the rest of my answers that's most of my Ao3 library lol

14. What’s your all time favorite ship?

Aziraphale and Crowley obviously just based on how thoroughly and quickly they completely took over my creative output and destroyed my brain

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

I'm not sure? All my unfinished stuff on Ao3 we do plan on finishing eventually even if it's a little unfeasible like with Reclamation and Reconnaissance lol. The real answer is definitely Grow Better though which was a bang event collab my partner went awol for before it was complete (and no hard feelings it's p old by now)

16. What are your writing strengths?

Worldbuilding concepts and characterization I think? And obviously the most prominent thing I contribute is illustrations

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

I actually used to write fic solo by myself but as I got older my brain stopped sort of. being able to do the logistics of putting words in order to form a plot? to the point where actually writing whole things was more trouble than it was worth when my strength that i enjoyed the process of more was illustrating the same ideas visually. So the logistics of getting from one image in my head to the next all in words is something my brain is just terrible at which is why I like working with writers

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

I don't really do it but it's fine if done well idk

19. First fandom you wrote for?

Lord of the Rings

20. Favorite fic you’ve written?

Obviously these are collabs still but rn it's probably quenched like the burning thorns bc I'm rly happy with the feel of the art in it and how it matches the prose and bc rereading it is like opening a gift over and over again, and I'm also really proud of the art I managed to do for Marginalia, but overall it's probably I won't have a life (until you're dead) and its series bc like we managed to make a whole fully illustrated vampire novella with coherent worldbuilding and themes for that one that I still just really like and makes me feel warm and fuzzy lol

All done! I'm gonna tag my friends @moveslikebucky and @fenrislorsrai to do this if they want 💛

[libraryofjoy]

Books I read in March 2023

When I Spoke in Tongues by Jessica Wilbanks. This is a memoir about the author's deconstruction from her Pentecostal childhood faith. It also includes details of her recovery process from an eating disorder and her journey to become a writer. I was really interested in her travel to Nigeria in order to explore Yoruba influence on Pentecostal worship. This was interesting to me because one of my grad school classes involved studying Yoruba religion in Cuba, which also has a large emerging neo-Pentecostal demographic. Although some of my views and experiences with Pentecostalism were very different from Wilbanks's, I appreciated the chance to think carefully about how to approach my experiences through writing and academia intentionally and fruitfully.

Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr is nonfiction arguing that biblical womanhood as understood by American evangelicals today is not a straightforward reading of the Bible but developed over a long and complicated history, driven by men's desire for power over women. Some of the history was new for me but as a New Testament student I liked her exegesis.

Leftover in China by Roseann Lake is nonfiction about women in China who remain unmarried over age 30-35. There's a lot of detail here about Chinese marriage norms historically and in the present, the impact of the one-child policy meaning that there were fewer girls in China and the girls who were born suddenly had unprecedented attention and access to educational and financial opportunity. I was really interested in the interviews with various women--it offered a personal glimpse into the challenges, privileges, and priorities of these unmarried women.

The Last Queen by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is historical fiction about the life of Maharani Jindan. This book has romance, politics, trauma of war, and ends with a very moving parent-child tragedy of assimilation and colonization. (Spoilers: you can blame a whole lot of problems on the British.)

The Gilded Page by Mary Wellesley. Nonfiction about handwritten manuscripts, mostly centered on medieval England. Wellesley is interested in what the manuscripts reveal about the people who wrote them by hand: marginalia, errata, other traces of everyday life. This book wove in neatly with Biblical Womanhood's discussion of Margery of Kempe. I was also really interested in all the detail it gave about the ascetic lives of anchoresses.

Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot. This memoir follows the author through her struggle as an Indigenous woman to leave an abusive relationship, learn how to live with bipolar disorder, and parent her two sons. Mailhot makes a conscious effort not to write an auto-hagiography, showing her worst moments in full detail that earns the audience's sympathies even more effectively. I love reading authors' memoirs because at some point they turn into books about writing books. It was really cool to see Mailhot's success after how hard she worked to earn it.

The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera. Dystopian middle grade scifi. When Earth becomes unliveable, Petra Peña, along with her parents and younger brother, are supposed to be part of a privileged few cryogenically frozen to be woken up 300 years in the future on a new colony planet. When things go wrong Petra stays conscious through her stasis and wakes in a world where no one else remembers stories of Earth. This book was really intense for middle grade fiction! It's a very thoughtful look at grief, love, stories as a means of continuing culture, environmentalism, critique of censorship, and at its heart an argument that conflict comes not from differences between people but from unwillingness to embrace those differences. I appreciated how this book approached its protagonist's disability in a eugenicist dystopia. I'd recommend this book for fans of Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series (particularly if you liked the John chapters in NtN).

The Preacher's Wife by Kate Bowler. This book was already on my list but then Beth Allison Barr talked about Kate Bowler in Biblical Womanhood, which made me even more interested. Bowler looks at celibrity women within evangelicalism, arguing that even the most conservative church spaces offer these spotlit women subtle but significant power, and even the most egalitarian-seeming liberal church spaces still embrace social norms that uphold patriarchal power over women. Fun fact: this book also cites one of my religion professors from undergrad!

How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Impler. This book is a collection of memoir essays in which various marine animals are used to illustrate the author's life. The Chinese sturgeon illuminates immigrant familiy history, an octopus watching her eggs pairs with the author's relationship with their mother in regards to disordered eating, and life in high temp, and high pressure volcanic vents are paired with the persistence of a queer community in Seattle. From a craft perspective I'm so impressed by the structure of this work, and it was a real pleasure to read.

Bitter Orange Tree by Jokha Alharthi. Realistic fiction in which an immigrant university student remembers and traces the life of her Omani pseudo-grandmother, who dies just as the narrator is leaving for Britain. There's a lot of love and grief and memory and love again in this book, and the writing is just beautiful.

Bible and Sword by Barbara W. Tuchman explores the historical relationship between Britain and Palestine, particularly the history of Zionism in Britain. (Spoilers: you can blame a whole lot of problems on the British.)

Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin. Realistic fiction about the family of a woman who goes missing after she gets separated from her husband at a subway station in Seul. The book switches between the woman's children and husband as narrators, as they search for her and remember her. This book made me think a lot about my own aging parents as I read how easily the children overlook their mother's health issues and failing memory.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty. Historical fantasy about a notorious pirate coming out of retirement to rescue the daughter of her old crewmate, in part motivated by love for her own daughter. This book is a bit sweary and has PG-13 level sexual content. We've got ruffians and scallywags, sea monsters, rigorous hospitality, legendary treasures, magic and scholars of magic, and some really thoughtful depictions of religious characters whose faiths inform their difficult decisions. Amina wrestles with her nostalgia for her pirate days in light of her post-retirement efforts to be a devout Muslim. I love how Chakraborty writes interactions between characters of different religions.

Nonfiction:8

Fiction:5

Total nonfiction for 2023 so far:18

Total fiction for 2023 so far:10

Total books read for 2023 so far:28

I'd love to chat about any of these books and I'm always happy to provide content warnings on request! What are y'all reading lately? Anything you really love or really hate? Any recommendations?

[spindrifters]

The way anything can happen bc Walburga will want Remus executed, Greyback probably wants his pet back and Sirius is out 💀

(all of you but also me)

[artylo]

Communicating About Culture is Pointless

I’ve been in a crazed kind of runt the past couple of years. It’s most definitely a ‘me’ kinda problem, so I’m not necessarily looking for sympathy or anything as benign as that. What I want to try and do instead is work through this in a way that ‘you’ (the hypothetical reader) could understand what I could possibly mean by such an inflammatory title.

Every once in a while, I feel the urge to recommend something to someone. Some fragment of culture, be that a song, a film, a video game, a blog post, a video. To do so, I give myself an aneurysm. Because I am so infinitely up my own ass, I feel like there is one abstractly ‘correct’ way to recommend something to someone, and that is usually with what I affectionately call “the bare minimum”. Nothing about the story, nothing about why it’s actually the coolest, most subversive kind of exciting thing ever grace your eyes, nothing about character, nothing about the circumstances in which it was made. As the kids say – no spoilers. However, in my mind, I take it a step further than simply “no spoilers”, and essentially demand that you go into it—preferably immediately, as we stand, here in the hypothetical white void—with nothing more than a name, and only once you come out on the other side of the experience can we have a conversation about it.

There is already a major kink in my thinking, because I imagine most fully formed humans out there, wouldn’t cross-dissolve into a smouldering pile of ash, if someone, on their recommendation, walks into a cinema, knowing that the film they’re about to see has a twist somewhere in it or that it is about some recognisable theme. My distaste for biographical criticism, also makes me unable to directly say that a movie is cool, because it’s directed or written by so-and-so in so-and-so period, despite this obviously being a meaningful addition to the experience for me, and if someone else were to obsess over such marginalia.

In reality, in totality, what I really want to say is: “You should have a look at X.”

If I wanted to make a more risky, personal assumption, I’d probably add an “I think you’ll like it.” or a “I think it’s really rad.”

You might very well think that that seems completely sufficient, but I, from my ivory tower, would leer and say that you have, in fact, wildly misjudged how effective this “bare minimum” is. The bare minimum should be enough, but never is. The crux of the method is that it completely relies on two completely unreliable things – reputation and the recipient’s will. Two factors that would make the average stoic take their own life in abject frustration.

If you’ve gotten this far into this here text, then those two requirements are already in play, in some part. You have already made an assumption on my character and on my intelligence, based off the wording and the menial wit on display in the first three paragraphs, so you’ve already made a value judgement as to whether or not I am genuinely capable of saying anything that is worthwhile to you, of value to your life, and of some use. If you didn’t like me, you wouldn’t have gotten as far as this sentence, and would have gone on to do something else. You have already exerted your will in a feat of patience and/or tolerance to deign reading what I have written, be that out of interest, morbid curiosity, or some other motivator. The same is likely to happen with the hypothetical recipient of a recommendation. The question of “Why should I listen to anything you have to say?” hovers sinisterly over nearly every aspect of inter-personal communication, because it is simply part of its nature.

So how do you overcome that punk-ish sentiment? How do you essentially, convince someone why a cultural fragment is worth experiencing, without saying anything about it; without them convulsing at the thought of taking your word for it?

Most would probably just cave at this point and give them a morsel of information, just to whet the recipient's palette. In a sense, circumventing the cultural fragment’s natural sequence of divulging information, and getting to the good part immediately for the sake of selling yet another valued customer on the gross market opportunity of seeing something they’d like by dangling it like a shiny carrot in front of their famished eyes.

I am of the opinion, that if the recipient, upon hearing my bare-bones recommendation, then goes on to read the abstract, or watch a trailer, I would be somewhat fine, just as long as this act of diminishing their own experience is something they do at their own peril. This sounds slightly self-defeating, considering that the end goal here is, in fact, them seeing the thing you are recommending. However, I want them to see the thing itself, not the marketing that comes along with it. If I wanted this to be an exercise of marketing—which it probably sill is anyway—I would have just shoved a trailer and some exciting pictures in front of their eyes, and be done with it, essentially outsourcing the problem to a third party of admen.

Ironically, the only way to deal with reputation is having one. The reason why people will want to listen to you, is because you’ve said something before and it turned out to be true for them as well. Establishing bona fides is all well and good, but walking up to someone and disclosing your impeccable series of correct guesses on whether or not they’d like the song you’re going to suggest they listen to isn’t necessarily moving in the right direction to achieve “the bare minimum”. In reality the sentence becomes: “As a years-long fan of this kind of thing, and after writing at least 700 pages worth of material on why you and others like you should see the thing, I think this thing is rad and you should see it, because I’ve been right about this kind of thing before.”

Yet, even after you’ve assertively established your credibility and stacked the deck in your favour, you will find that even from a position of authority, you simply can’t make someone do something, just because you said so – even if it is telling them to have fun.

I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve seen someone discover something I’d recommended them half a decade ago, and it’s suddenly a new point of obsession for them. Ideally, I’d be content that they’ve finally seen it, and that it has brought them so much joy; yet, I can’t help but think about that nagging “I told you so”-kind of rhetoric that goes on in my head. It feels like something has been taken from me. I think it has to do with being denied the acknowledgement. In a sense, the reputation that is in part a requirement for recommendations is also part of the reward. The one that recommends, gets to risk gaining or losing reputation with the recipient. By recommending, you gamble on your ability to do so again in the near future. If they kick the can down the road for long enough to where they forget that you made a recommendation to begin with, you simply don’t get to have that conversation that comes after them seeing your thing and you just have to live with it.

You’re simply trapped in the Catch-22 of possibly not saying anything, leading to them not having any real extrinsic motivation to see something, or conversely saying too much, leading to a lesser experience. This isn’t even accounting for the possibility that you could even build said cultural element up so much in their eyes, that it couldn’t possibly ever meet the expectations you set.

So what is the point then? You tell someone about something and they don’t see it – you don’t tell someone about something and they don’t see it. They’re all to busy with all that stuff that makes up life. Just keep all those precious little cultural treasures to yourself and let things be as they will. Is apathy the way out of this? Is becoming a mute, cloistered archive of all things interesting any less maddening that engaging in the psychological warfare of talking about culture?

I can’t help but think that most people nowadays don’t even need a recommendation. Not from other flesh and blood people anyway. They’d rather have the TV play its predetermined schedule for the day, the computer spit out an algorithmically divined selection of things based on their profile in a marketing firm’s database, harvested from internet trackers logging previous internet purchases and regional trends. Curation as a skill itself has widely become devalued. You can almost assume that if someone wants to go out of their way, break the mold, find something that is of interest to them – they will.

The only real way to maybe get someone’s attention nowadays is the rather loose New Journalism approach of talking more about your personal experience of the day leading up to, during, and after having seen the cultural fragment in question. This again, assumes that the reader, listener—what have you—is in fact aware of you as a person, and respects you enough to be interested in how this morning’s breakfast and the late divorce of your parents affected you while experiencing said thing of culture.

It’s kind of a joke, but you know exactly what I mean.

Sentences like “Ah, this movie helped me get through a rough breakup.” do have a certain power, because they don’t necessarily speak to the contents of the thing in question, rather the effect it had on you as a person in a particular circumstance. You can almost assume that recommending Wong Kar-wai’s In a Mood For Love to someone who has just been rejected from someone they loved will in some way resonate with them. The question them becomes in what situations is it OK to bring up things like Godzilla: Final Wars, Bringing Out the Dead, or The Men Who Stare at Goats. You can’t simply walk into someone’s funeral and put a boxed copy of Takashi Miike’s Gokudō kyōfu dai-gekijō: Gozu (Yakuza Horror Theatre: Bull's Head) on the casket for anyone who needs it, regardless of how functionally relevant and pertinent it might be to your dearly departed’s imminent resurrection.

Another way to approach discussing culture in general is to only do it if you and the other party are on equal footing – i.e. you’ve both experienced the cultural fragment at some point and, due to your general familiarity, you can now discuss it at any length you find satisfactory. Maybe this opens the gates to a more direct line of recommendation, which entirely relies on its relevance and close proximity to to the topic at hand. If someone engages you in a conversation about punk rock and mentions liking The Sex Pistols, you can sure as hell mention Amyl and the Sniffers, because it’s the right time and place to do so. This obviously comes with the preset expectations of “Is the thing being recommended even close to being as good as the thing that prompted said recommendation?” Yet another gamble that one must make in a vain attempt to appear cultured and draw parallels in between the arts.

Now we reach another morbid kind of blockade that rears its ugly head – relying on others to be cultured enough to talk about anything. This is obviously an incredibly snobbish assumption, but there is a statistical unlikelihood that two or more people in a given radius have experienced and are willing to talk about one common cultural fragment. This likelihood is obviously directly influenced by the cultural fragment’s recency and wider appeal. The more popular a thing is, and the more recently it has been experienced progressively increases the statistical odds of it entering the cultural zeitgeist and appearing in conversations. As a matter of fact, the more widely popular something is, the more likely it is to be recommended from one person onto another.

This leaves us in the rather precarious situation, where niche and foreign language cultural fragments are essentially delegated the label of “not worth anyone’s time”, and cannot in and of themselves be the seed for communication, simply because the likelihood of both parties having an equal familiarity with the fragment is so infinitesimally small, that it might as well be insulting their intelligence, by suggesting something so wildly out of their purview.

From this, I feel like on could extrapolate the nature of what it means to be cultured as a whole. Three people come to mind: one who is familiar with a large—likely eclectic—number of cultural fragments; one who is familiar with the currently relevant cultural fragments, which comprise the zeitgeist; and one who is intimately familiar with only one aspect of culture, be it one genre, art-form, etc.

I believe that the last one is easiest to be dissuasive of, simply because it could be considered a specialisation or an expertise. There is something borderline academic about someone who devotes themselves to a singular point of focus. Variety is the spice of life, so there must be some allure to subsisting only off of something that will inevitably grow stale and repetitive. This allure is completely unknown to me. Of those kinds of people, out of my own sheer ignorance, I’d say they are very intelligent, but they are not my broad definition of cultured.

The other two are a bit more interesting, because all that really separates them is a knowledge of history. Inevitably, the one who is only in step with the zeitgeist will turn into the other through the natural passage of time. This isn’t to say that all those who eclectically seek all forms of culture were once only interested in what was synchronically relevant, but there may be some behavioural correlation.

Oddly enough, time seems to be a large point of contention. Or rather, more specifically the age of a given cultural fragment. For some there is an invisible line over which they will not cross. As one film crosses the mark of being released forty or so years ago, it seemingly becomes “too old to be enjoyable”. I can somewhat see how the cultural and social sensitivities of the age can disagree, but most people just refuse to indulge in older things on a purely sensory basis – “it doesn’t look as good”, “they talk weird and it’s boring”. Shunned actors, insensitivity over race and gender, exploitation, suffrage – all now, apparently, so deep into the past, that anything that seems to bring them up is cause of distress and discomfort. The growing pains of an art-form, then seen as just the art-form, now revolting and unworthy of being experienced. Trying to talk to someone under the age of 30 about Sunset Boulevard might as well be asking a creature from the space age what the The Paleolithic Age felt like – not because of their inability to have seen and enjoyed it, but due to their sheer unwillingness to even entertain the thought of doing so.

There is genuinely no end to the reasons why you could not be interested in something. It’s infinitely easier to dislike something than to be indifferent about it, doubly so than be positive about the whole shebang. Yet, we do this song and dance, throwing around names of products, authors, trying to in some way elucidate in others the joie de vivre that is having seen or experienced something that provokes the mind and imagination in all sorts of wondrous directions. I wish more people would see the light, that there is more to mindless consumerism than meets the eye.

[imsiriuslyreading]

We concur-being sick sucks! Daft pup Skye says hi-he offers a snoot for feel better boops.

He hopes this helps!

The human half of this team recommends @eyra for cozy reads endlessly. The oldest recipe for parsnip soup was an absolute delight!

Most of my other Wolfstar rereads are a tad long for frazzled brains (Marginalia by @spindrifters comes to mind-it’s utterly spectacular and my all time favourite though). Stealing Harry by copperbadge definitely has suitably quaint opening chapters and is also a longer read.

I read a lot of ‘Wolfstar raising Harry’ fics and the Wolfstar as parents AUs series is adorable-I’d start with To make a family. Lupine is also very sweet (Sirius is a zookeeper in that one! And Teddy is obsessed with the wolves). Let’s play pretend is a bit longer, and very funny! I’m fairly sure my cheeks hurt from grinning by the end! In this vein I’m currently reading the Ordinary Delights series, which does an excellent job of being exactly what it says on the tin (Padfoot and Moony rescue Harry-there are secret Hope made pastries)

I’m English enough that I think The London Underground book of love is very cute!

Better in the Morning is a Sirius makes it back through the veil a bit later fic that makes me feel all the things, but is very soft all things considered.

And last but certainly not least I’d cross an ocean for you by @imjustherefortheshipping is my most recent reread. It’s a Sirius makes it out of Azkaban years ahead of time story. Many tears. Thankfully also hugs!

I hope at least a couple of these float your boat and help pass the time whilst stuck in bed feeling less than great. Skye sends snuggles! And Happy reading! -RebelWriter99

Oh my goodness, hello?? LOOK AT THAT SNOOT! Thank you so much Skye for the boop'n'snuggles, I feel better already?

What a beautiful treat this was to wake up to.

I've just finished reading Parsnip Soup and I haven't stopped thinking about it since. What a gorgeous story that was, one thing about Eyra, their words make their way into my brain and change it a little every time, I think.

i cannot wait to get into Marginalia, i keep sneaking over to look at spoilers of that one, my willpower is working against me so badly with that one, it looks too good. TOO good.

I adore wolfstar raising harry and the only one of these I've read so far is Let's Play Pretend and i ADORED IT so I'm thoroughly looking forward to the rest of these - thank you ever so much! <3

The london underground being turned into a love story is the best thing to ever happen to it - my days of commuting left me bitter so I'm excited for this one too 👀

Better in the morning made me SOB oh my goodness. you have fantastic taste, at this point, I'd trust you with my life I think.

I haven't heard of that last one either, so I'm promptly bookmarking that, too.

You're truly a star for all of these recs and well wishes. not to mention that incredible boopysnoot pic, i feel very very lucky.

this was lovely. truly. thank you so very much, have the absolute best day! Lana xoxo

[mercymornsimpathizer]

have we done this one yet

[honeyglot]

here’s my reflection on + interpretation of Midsommar and it’s ending / what made it all so impactful!

spoiler warning, obviously.