#Reading log

[kryptonbabe]

This first issue had many high points, but baby Diana bonding with demons in hell... I was not ready for Absolute Cuteness

From Absolute Wonder Woman #1 (2024) by Kelly Thompson & Hayden Sherman

[literatureaesthetic]

first read of may — a cup of sake beneath the cherry trees by yoshida kenkō

moonlight, sake, spring blossom, idle moments, a woman's hair. 'a cup of sake beneath the cherry trees' is a collection of fragments from the journal of a 13th-century monk, as he reflects on the pleasures of life and its passing moments. i think there's something in here for everyone to admire, with its reflective themes, philosophical undertones, and beautiful writing and imagery.

i definitely recommend!! 🌱

[oooocleo]

How did you make your filofax reading log it looks so cool!

djffs through Trial And Error (still ongoing) haha - i arrange everything digitally in procreate on a4 sized pages, print out the text on tomoe river paper, fold it over + holepunch, print out the covers on photo paper & stick em in

its all little textboxes & the dividers i draw by hand (the base hobonichi grid as ive mentioned before i found just by googling - someone uploaded a digital version of it on reddit)

(italicized = i own a physical copy)

im pretty behind on the actual review pages tho (some i have finished digitally but havent printed out yet, most r just unfinished bc its hard to produce coherent thoughts when brain machine broke lol)

[4theitgirls]

november book journal

books read:

1. ‘the guest list’ by lucy foley

rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

2. ‘home before dark’ by riley sager

rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

3. ‘the last time i lied’ by riley sager

rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

4. ‘devil in ohio’ by daria polatin

rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

5. ‘nineteen claws and a blackbird’ by agustina bazterrica

rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

6. ‘the woman in cabin 10’ by ruth ware

rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

dnf:

the perfect marriage by jeneva rose

december tbr:

the bell jar by sylvia plath

and then there were none by agatha christie

the chestnut man by søren sveistrup

the exorcist by william peter blatty

[disregardcanon]

just finished reading america's first civil war: the mormon rebellion 1847-1848 and HOOOOOOO BOOOOOOOOOYYYYYYYYYY has my understanding of 1800s america been shifting recently

[aubryjoi]

First quarter reading check-in 📚 Steadily filling the shelf up!

Kitty book tracker & coloring page download available in my Ko-Fi shop 📖��

[doomsayings]

darkly: blackness and americas gothic soul

[the-busy-ghost]

Childermass assured him that the time was propitious and Childermass knew the world. Childermass knew what games the children on street-corners are playing- games that all other grown-ups have long since forgotten. Childermass knew what old people by firesides are thinking of, though no one has asked them in years. Childermass knew what young men hear in the rattling of the drums and the tooting of the pipes that makes them leave their homes and go be soldiers- and he knew the half-eggcupful of glory and the barrelful of misery that await them. Childermass could look at a smart attorney in the street and tell you what he had in his coat-tail pockets. And all that Childermass knew made him smile; and some of what he knew made him laugh out loud; and none of what he knew wrung from him so much as a ha'pennyworth of pity.

"Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell", by Susanna Clarke

[nadiea]

[laciere]

Bo Ruberg: We Know The Devil is, as you say, about women who love other women, yet you've written online about being "against representation" in video games. What does that mean and how do you reconcile those approaches? Aevee Bee: That article was a little manifesto. When I say that I'm "against representation," I mean that representation can't just be a list of identity categories. It's not really representation unless you're creating complexity; without complexity, characters feel insincere and incomplete. The dumbed-down version of a queer person, or the queer person that never expresses their sexuality--these characters don't actually require you to empathize with queer people, because these characters have no sexuality. When you erase that, you erase their anchor, their passion, their frustrations, or their flaws even, especially their flaws. You're not doing empathy work if you're not engaging with these things, because these are the stumbling blocks for empathy. Sometimes people are like, "I like gay people who don't act gay." You know? Those are the people you're catering to when you make those sorts of characters. Identity is so important to talk about, yet it can be so limiting. I've been having a lot of discussions with queer activists and queer scholars about this desire to all call ourselves "queer," like we're this amorphous blob. That can actually be incredibly unhelpful because it doesn't acknowledge the very real differences that often exist between queer people. Our experiences are specific to our lives. Focusing only on identity, especially identity without experience, reduces everyone to an abstraction. Ruberg: Given how much you value the specifics of individual queer experience, how would you describe the complexities, as you call them, of your own queer identity? Bee: Being a woman is really important to me. Transness is also really important to me. In terms of sexuality, I tend to talk about how sexuality is practiced and understood rather than talking about specific attractions. What's the point of trying to say, "Oh, I have this very specific sexual identity" when sexuality is really hard to separate from gender identity and expression? Sexuality is more complicated than we often give it credit for. For example, I'm less interested in saying "I identify as bisexual," than I am in thinking about the ways that I love women and the ways that I love men and how those are unfortunately incredibly different because of all these social pressures, my own histories, and my internalized baggage. How do we navigate that together with another person? What does a relationship with someone like me look like? it's one thing to be like, "We have this list of labels," but we have so few models for what those labels are supposed to look like.

"Aevee Bee: On Designing for Queer Players and Remaking Autobiographical Truth", in The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers are Reimagining The Medium of Video Games (2020, Duke University Press)

[huurrefanfictionreadinglog]

Fanfiction Reading Log

I did Fanfiction Reading Log to Google Sheets with really cool and neatly looking statistics and I thought it would be nice to share to everybody.

The list of updates and links to the update info post are in the end of this post.

Please mind that I'm still in the middle of testing it and I've found one bug I don't know how to fix it and I'm going to update as I find some mistakes, so you might be better to save also the link to the original file (it can be also found from Instructions sheet). I'm not professional with Excel/Google Sheets so all the feedback will be taken with huge thanks and I will do my best to fix every problem you might have, but just a warning: I have full time job, full time school and everything else going on in my life (for example huge fanfic I'm writing), so it might not be fast.

This is mostly for AO3 fanfics, but of course you can put there anything you want! I did this, because I have all the time time over 200 tabs open in my phone's browser and I'm still always trying to find something new to read, because "I don't have anything on my TBR". So yeah, here you go & if you have any ideas you would want to add there, you can also let me know that so I can think of it! :)

Update on March 12th: This is starting to look pretty good and I am going to update changes here, so please follow along if you want to know about updates. I'm trying to figure out some easy ways to keep people updated if they want to get some kind of notification when I've published new update.

Updates

Version 1.2 (March 12th, 2024) read more

[kryptonbabe]

After trying to kill him as a boy and failing, Erik sends Wolverine to assassinate Herr Hitzig, the nazi official who killed his friends and persecuted him. By the end he needed to see the body, the concrete proof that the nightmare was over and so he did. The trauma would never really leave, but the man was finally dead

From Magneto #16 (2015) by Cullen Bunn & Gabriel Hernandez Walta

[demi-shoggoth]

2024 Reading Log, pt 2

006. Gardening Can Be Murder by Marta McDowell. I honestly thought that this book was going to be about something else. With the subtitle “how poisonous plants, sinister shovels and grim gardens have inspired mystery writers”, I thought it was going to be about, you know, that. True crime themed to gardens, discussions of poisonous plants, that sort of thing. The book is actually about the mystery books that have gardening as a theme. And while the author’s dedication to not spoiling anything (seriously, anything, even 150 year old stories like The Moonstone or “Rappacini’s Daughter”) is admirable in its own way, this leaves the book feeling like endless buildup without any payoff. Big fans of murder mysteries might enjoy this—especially the last chapter, which interviews writers about their gardens—but I found it more boring than anything else, and finished it only because it was very short.

007. Antimony, Gold and Jupiter’s Wolf by Peter Wothers. This book is about how the elements got their names, and most of it deals with the early modern period, as alchemy transitioned to chemistry and then into the 19th century, when chemistry was a real science, but things like atomic theory were not yet understood. The book goes into fascinating detail, and has a lot of quotes from primary sources, as scientists then were just like scientists now, that is, opinionated and bickering with each other over their preferred explanations. And names! Many of the splits between elements and their symbols (like Na for sodium) are due to compromise attempts to appease two different factions with their preferred names. A book covering arcane minutia of history always has the risk of feeling like a slog, but this is a fast and fun read.

008. Doctor Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs by Nathan T Barling and Michael O’Sullivan, illustrations by Mark P Witton. This book is an odd concept, but one that I was immediately on board with—a D&D book written by paleontologists with the intention of bringing accurate and interesting stats for prehistoric reptiles to the game. The fact that it’s mostly illustrated by Mark Witton definitely clinched my backing that Kickstarter. And this book is a lot of fun. So much so, that I read it all in a single sitting. I don’t know how accurate the stats are (like, a Hatzegopteryx has a higher CR than titanosaurs or T. rexes), but they seem like they’d be fun in play, and the writing does a good job of combining fantasy fun with actual education. Even for someone not running a 5e game, the stuff on how to run animals as not killing machines, and the mutation tables, could be useful. There are multiple types of playable dinosaurs, all of which seem like they’d work well at the table and avoid typical stereotypes, and a lot of in-jokes and pop culture references (like the cursed staff of unspared expense, which looks like Hammond’s cane in the Jurassic Park movie).

009. Romaine Wasn’t Built in a Day by Judith Tschann. I’m a sucker for books about etymology. And this one, on food etymology, is a pretty breezy read. I had fun with it, and it even busted some misconceptions that I had, etymologically speaking. Like, there’s no evidence that “bloody” as an explicative originated from “God’s blood”? Wild. Etymology books tend to be written in a sort of stream-of-consciousness style, where talking about one word may lead down a garden path to the next one. The book also has a couple of little matching quizzes, which is something I haven’t seen in a book since like the 90s.

010. The Lives of Octopuses and their Relatives by Danna Staaf. I was previously a little disappointed in The Lives of Beetles, another book in this series, but I knew I liked Staaf, who wrote the excellent book Squid Empire about cephalopod evolution and paleontology. I’m pleased to report that this book is also excellent. Staaf takes the “lives” part seriously, and the book is arranged by ecology, looking at different marine habitats, the challenges that they pose to living things, and the cephalopods that live there. Cuttlefish get slightly short shrift in this book compared to squids and octopuses, but that’s about the biggest complaint I had. I like how the species profiles cover more obscure taxa, and information about the best studied (like Pacific giant octopus and Humboldt squid) is kept to the chapters.

[oooocleo]

Oh shit your reading log is super cool AND you have super good taste in books??? Le Guin is my favorite author of all time, and I've either just read or want to read most of the rest of your 2024 list!

wahaha there r some Stars (the dispossessed.....................yea) in there but also some stinkers

some months back i made a list of the faves up till that point, but let me list some more:

dark places by gillian flynn (if u like fucked up characters shes SO good at writing them... mayb find trigger warnings for this one tho, its darker than gone girl content-wise)

salt slow by julia armfield (short story collection where my enjoyment ranged a bit, but the title story was sooo delicious)

the haunting of hill house by shirley jackson (i didnt enjoy we have always lived in the castle that much so i was hesitant, but this was rly interesting! i believe one of the first novels that went hard on the unreliable narrator bit)

the last unicorn by peter s. beagle (woggghhhh the prose.... this surprised me by how incredibly it captured the essence of fairytales)

fight club by chuck palahniuk (i mean. it was more enjoyable than american psycho lol.. and well structured 🤔 and absurd)

[polycraftory]

August 2024 Reads

This Month's Favs

Gabe @words-writ-in-starlight (wordswritinstarlight on Storygraph) : The Husky & His White Cat Shizun (2ha) Volume 6 by Meatbun Doesn't Eat Meat. Runner up is the whole Murderbot series by Martha Wells (on a re-listen). They refuse to pick favorites.

Nic (businesswife) : The Sacrifice by Rin Chupeco for fav novel and Re-Living My Life with A Boyfriend who Doesn't Remember Me by Gin Shirakawa was their favorite manga.

Meghan (edgybutfemme): The Husky & His White Cat Shizun was also probably my fav, with the final Guardian by Priest as a very close second. Literally any month I read a 2ha volume it'll be hard to pick a different fav book.

We had an absolutely wild August, but thankfully we managed to fit some reading in (especially devouring some of the manga we got at AnimeNYC)!

You can find the reviews for all of these on our individual Storygraph accounts. You can look us up by the names at the top of each of our graphics, or find the links on our website polycraftory.com (I'm not linking them because tumblr hates external links!)

We'll also be making video reviews for some of our favorites soon. You can find both a spoiler free pitch video and a full review with some spoilers on our TikTok & Youtube right now for The Bone Orchard by Sara A. Mueller. We'll also be posting videos about Dark Restraint / The Dark Olympus series by Katee Robert in the next few days.

[wineonmytshirt]

Jen Reads 2024!

You - Caroline Kepnes 8/10

Hidden Bodies - Caroline Kepnes 7/10

You Love Me - Caroline Kepnes 7/10

For You And Only You - Caroline Kepnes 6/10

The Duke and I: Bridgerton Book 1 - Julia Quinn 7/10

Atonement - Ian McEwan 9/10

The Viscount Who Loved Me: Bridgerton Book 2 - Julia Quinn 7/10

The Devil In The White City - Erik Larson 9/10

Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn 9/10

The Silence Of The Lambs - Thomas Harris 8/10

The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank 10/10

Conclave - Robert Harris 9/10

Red Sparrow - Jason Matthews 9/10

Never Lie - Freida McFadden 9/10

I’m Glad My Mom Died - Jennette McCurdy 9/10

The Queen's Gambit - Walter Tevis 9/10