#Books I meant to read this year

[meeghanreads]

Top 5 books I meant to read in 2024

Hello friends!! Welcome to Top 5 Tuesday!! This week’s topic is top 5 books I meant to read in 2024!! Friends, we did it. It’s basically 2025. We have survived this madness. (Only joking, we’ve got like 5 more weeks of this.) BUT, we are definitely on the downhill slope for Top 5 Tuesday posts for 2025. I know this because we’re at our week of screaming (internally) about all the books we haven’t…

[inkyrainstorms]

guys. listen i am gripping you by the shoulders. she is. so awful. so sad. so tragic. i love her.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

ORV is about enduring the horrors in real time.

(for @everyonesfavoritebastard)

[thatfriendlyanon]

[paper-bag-arts]

girls when they’ll be other nights i’ll have to sleep in your arms

[districtunrest]

Haymitch: *has the 'oh, no, sweetheart. I know you, but you don't know me' card locked and loaded for if/when she gets too close*

meanwhile, Katniss: *demonstrates Haymitch Abernathy Clairvoyance™ whenever she gives just one iota of thought toward him*

There’s only one way Haymitch could have won, and Peeta says it just as I’m reaching this conclusion myself. “He outsmarted the others,” says Peeta.

(next book)

Haymitch makes a beeline for his cliff and has just reached the edge when she throws the ax. He collapses on the ground and it flies into the abyss. Now weaponless as well, the girl just stands there, trying to staunch the flow of blood pouring from her empty eye socket. She's thinking perhaps that she can outlast Haymitch, who's starting to convulse on the ground. But what she doesn't know, and what he does, is that the ax will return. And when it flies back over the ledge, it buries itself in her head. The cannon sounds, her body is removed, and the trumpets blow to announce Haymitch's victory.

even more impressively, without Peeta's input,

The sixteen-year-old boy who won the second Quarter Quell must have had people he loved - family, friends, a sweetheart maybe -that he fought to get back to. Where are they now? How is it that until Peeta and | were thrust upon him, there was no one at all in his life? What did Snow do to them?

(pages later)

"My mother and younger brother. My girl. They were all dead two weeks after | was crowned victor. Because of that stunt | pulled with the force field," he answers. "Snow had no one to use against me."

which is why this:

Maybe he wasn’t always a drunk. Maybe, in the beginning, he tried to help the tributes. But then it got unbearable.

is canon to me, no question.

[mizzingyou]

they are literally made for each other wtf

[oldkamelle]

dubiously legible sketches #15: mary and john watson

[vickyvicarious]

it's so fascinating to see how one of bram's ways to signal that the characters are modern and in tune with new science ends up horribly dating the book and making them all look worse to modern readers (i'm talking about the physiognomy thing)

Yes, absolutely! It's really interesting. In this case it's much worse because physiognomy is such an inherently racist and flawed idea. And that feels much more like something they could have realized. It forcibly reminds modern readers of the different culture these characters belonged to and the prejudices they either actively held or at the least passively accepted.

But it's not the only instance of the passage of time making certain details feel a lot different than they were meant to for contemporary readers. For example, Jack's phonograph is pretty new and exciting technology. Mina gets excited to see it today! But within the 1890s the shift from wax cylinders to flat discs began to happen, leading to gramophones and eventually record players. At the time this story is set (likely somewhere in the 1893-1897 range) the two technologies co-existed, but records were what eventually took off on a massive scale and phonographs with cylinders are seen as more of a prototype. This is something that might be less notable to modern readers since both are old technology to us, but it's a shift that happened not too long after the book was published. And of course the famous blood typing discovery...

When it was originally published, several critics disliked the book for being too modern, something they thought didn't suit a vampire story. Of course, the very contrast between modernity and ancient monsters was intentionally a major theme. And yet the passage of time changes our perspective on that theme. It's really fascinating to consider this stuff from 100+ years on.

[meeghanreads]

Top 5 Tuesday topics: October-December 2024

Hello friends!! Welcome to the Top 5 Tuesday topics post: October-December 2024!! Ahh, our wrap up posts for 2024 are imminent!! And you know what, I’m a little bit excited about it. The November and December topics are always my favourites, every year. I think what I love is partially the part where I don’t need to make up topics… But I also love wrapping up the year of reading. If YOU would…

[beneathsilverstars]

my kid is getting so into the warrior cats it's so cute. she gets all dismayed whenever the cats do something mean or strict, she's always like "if i was there, i would let firepaw eat something, i would catch a mouse and give it to him." or "wow, yellowfang is SO mean, if i was a cat i would hiss and scratch her!" like yes queen go off!!! you would be the nicest warrior cat in the clan!

[magickkart]

Speechless. Gagged. Cant believe he did that

ivan going crazy… mitya sent to siberia… alyosha and the christ parallels w his prepubescent disciples

nobody did it like mr d

[armadillorollup]

Reading (listening to the audio book) Moby Dick has me insane. what do you MEAN within the first 10 chapters Ishmael and Queequeg get married?!?!?! hello????

[newvision]

the second Donna Tartt publishes her upcoming book I will turn into a monster (poetically though)

[koyacyi-vode]

what if i.... got obsessed with Star Wars again??

[cultivating-wildflowers]

Why is it so difficult to sit down and just read these days? I used to read a book in a single sitting but now it's like I have no attention span.

*opens up a book with an engaging writing style, well-crafted characters, and a decent grasp of pacing*

*proceeds to tear through it*

Ok so maybe it's not entirely a me problem....