#book everyone should read

[inkskinned]

you know, you know. no gods, no masters, no kings on pedestals. everyone is fallible. death of the author. you know! you are balanced about your intake of media - you allow the wiggle room, the grace, the gratitude, the skepticism. nobody above criticism.

but still. a weird gut-punch feeling, something akin to betrayal. you read the article. surprise! an author you love is actually: a serial fucking predator.

well, shit. what now. no, you knew he was a person (all people are), but now you're wondering - what have i overlooked by accident? what messages have i internalized that are strange and cruel? and also, like, what the fuck?

his actions lay a thick glaze on top of everything. like each place is now ruined, opaque in a new way. but okay, fine, you've done this before. you knew better, right? you've been betrayed by many a cherished childhood author.

still, this stickiness. fuck. can you pick up that book again. will you read it to your children. you've recommended it to others - will you ever do that again? and of course, of course, no parasocial relationships. you were theoretically above this kind of sentiment. but the artist informs the art, right.

so it's not something as clear-cut as feeling he owed you, specifically (a stranger) better behavior - just that you kind of, in a distant and odd way... sort of trusted him to do better. it's not like a real trust or something speakable, just the faint hope that the product (good books) was a thin representation of the soul. now it feels like the product (good? books?) was a mask. in some small or insignificant way, your previous support of this person lent them power. your money and your time and your laughter.

and the thing is - you have this terrible, echoing sensation. how many times will this happen? over and over. you find out that the singer you love is actually a predator. you learn over drinks that your favorite high school english teacher is in jail for what he did to her. you listen to the news idly and suddenly discover that a woman you used to idolize has been abusing her kids for an actual eon.

what can you touch without the static melting off. you can't even really complain about it too much (you were supposed to know better, and besides, you don't want the same re-split "it's not your fault, love what you love" basic advice), but now it's here. somehow, it feels like - you let him into your life.

it's not that things need to be pure or an artist has to be like, endlessly perfect, mindful. demure. it's more just this terrible truth that has been replayed through your veins so often it feels criminally vain. power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. did you want any one person to be worth that power?

it's just that he wrote books where he seemed to understand that. he seemed to know about hierarchies and unfair systems and bigotry and privilege. you thought they were books about what it means to struggle. you thought they were about having power and still using it for good rather than for control. he spooned you a narrative of being a good guy, a kind soul. you fucking bought what that fucking monster sold.

maybe that's why they were fantasies, after all.

[aurumdoesthings]

happy 5th anniversary epithet!!! such a funny and joyful show with such a lovable and cute cast and lovely designs that are so fun to draw. everyone thank my minion @pupbeat who did the shading ^_^

unshaded:

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I haven't read these books at all, but your art is so fun and cute that I like seeing your comics a lot regardless. Fantastic Silly Little Guy energy.

Thank you for enjoying my silly little guys and my comics B*)

[arithmonym]

re-reading the locked tomb, and i'm thinking about how harrow identifies alecto as a "girl" rather than a "woman."

obviously, john had other sources of inspiration... but did you know that the original barbie doll was only supposed to be nineteen years old?

[mayasynth]

My beautiful unhinged daughter, Mary Elizabeth Frankenstein <3 I know this was not at all how the scene actually went, but humour me

(Pssssst everyone please read Our Hideous Progeny, pleaseee 🙏)

[graaaaaayy]

there’s few things that are more disappointing than when you finish a really good book, go online to find fandom content and there’s maybe 3 fanart pieces, a dozen fics and the most of the posts are from three years ago when the fandom was actually active.

[dykeofmisfortune]

doing this thing i call "reading every class high school lit book i missed out on" partially because as an english minor i feel like a lot of ppl in my english lectures have already read these books in higschool partially because high school english classes suck balls and i think the way they taught kids to read books was lame and dumb as hell and killed love for reading and i think some of these books they make kids read should never be experienced in a classroom setting

[chronostutter]

sometimes i see people make sweeping generalizations about entire genres or mediums and it evokes the same feeling as seeing gym bros only eat unseasoned protein slop. like oh man :( you are depriving yourself of so many wonderful experiences

[giritina]

The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn Saks

[damthosefandoms]

there’s people who stay and people who go, and then there’s darry curtis who never got a say in the matter

[spacebags]

The Rabbit

[dysphoresque]

“You mean I have a home to go to, as long as I don't go there?”

— James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

[slyandthefamilybook]

...And here we come upon a problem as basic as the nature of knowledge itself: all of our prodigious cognitive and computational abilities are inadequate to a full comprehension of our complex world. As humans, we remain heavily dependent on certain tools of perception and conception that our cultural and biological heritages have taught us are useful. These tools–such as language, causal logic, religion, mathematics–are indeed powerful, but they are powerful precisely because they reduce complexity to intelligibility by projecting our mental concepts onto the world. One consequence of this is that our recognition of significance is always what some philosophers call "theory laden," meaning that it is shaped by what our theoretical framework and cognitive tools encourage us to recognize as meaningful. Anti-Judaism, as I have argued throughout this book, is precisely this: a powerful theoretical framework for making sense of the world.

...

After all, no matter how overrepresented the Jews may have been among the European "bourgeoisie," they remained a tiny minority of that class. How could that tiny minority convincingly come to represent for so many the evolving evils of the capitalist world order? More broadly, how could untold millions of Europeans (and not only Germans) come to believe–or act as if they believed–the claims of the Nazis (and not only the Nazis) that Jews and their conspiracies so threatened the security of the world that they needed to be excluded, expelled, or exterminated? According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the liquidation of the Jews of Europe was not grounded in "reality." It took place in the vast gap between and explanatory framework ("anti-Semitism") that made satisfying sense of the world to a significant portion of its citizens, and the complexity of the world itself.

They set out to explore that gap in a philosophical history of modern thought they drafted in 1944 and later published as Dialectics of Enlightenment. Their final chapter, "Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment," suggested that what gave anti-Semitic ideas their power was not so much their relation to reality, but rather their exemption from reality checks–that is, from the critical testing to which so many other concepts were subjected. "What is pathological about anti-Semitism is not projective behavior as such, but the absence of reflection in it." In their terms, the problem is a heightened resistance to reflection about the gap between our ideas about Jews, Judaism, or Jewishness, and the complexity of the world. From their point of view, anti-Semitism provides adherents with a cognitive comfort: the fantasy that the gap between our understanding of the cosmos and its fearful complexity does not exist.

...

...[A]cross several thousand years, myriad lands, and many different spheres of human activity, people have used ideas about Jews and Judaism to fashion the tools with which they construct the reality of their world. The goal of my project, like Horkeheimer and Adorno's, is to encourage reflection about our "projective behavior," that is, about the ways in which our deployment of concepts into and onto the world might generate "pathological" fantasies of Judaism. And my choice of method owes something to Auerbach's conviction that the study of a given moment, problem, or even a single word in the distant past can teach us something about a much longer history, extending even to our own.

Selected excerpts from Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013 Nirenberg, David)

[walks-the-ages]

Every Autistic+ADHD person should have a Public Domain character as their special interest. It is so great.

You can go hog wild collecting books, movies, adaptions, and sharing all of your Public Domain finds freely.

You can write your own fanfiction and *its not even fanfiction its just its own canon.*

You can make your own custom covers and print your own custom versions of the books.

You can freely rewrite the books and publish them if you want.

You can change a character's pronouns and make them queer as much as you want.

You can make as much art and AUs as you want and you could literally make them their own published series if you wanted.

You can know the joy of receiving a 96 year old book in the mail in a language you can't even read yet but know that you can scan it and upload it to the Internet Archive because it is Public Domain and being able to see the original text is going to make someone's entire week.

You can start learning a new language just to be able to read the original works from a hundred years ago in their native tongue.

You can feel the Hatred of Disney for the Mickey Mouse Protection Act meaning the USA is one of the only countries in the world that doesn't have the entire series of books that are your special interest in the Public Domain which they should have been over a decade ago , but now at least you have something to look forward to on January 1st for the next decade, give or take a few gaps years of nothing entering the Public Domain!

This is about Arsene Lupin by Maurice Leblanc, first published in 1905 through to 1941, but I would *love* to hear about everyone's Public Domain blorbos in the notes lol.

[vagabondjourney]

I HAD TO FIND THIS OUT BY MYSELF AND NOBODY TOLD ME THIS WAS IN THE BOOKS ???????? THIS GAY ASS SCENE ????????

[greenerteacups]

What do you think of jkr as a writer? I for one has always felt like she didn’t treat her female characters well. It felt strange, being critical of her when she was god queen of the earth, and also being 10

I think most of the problems in her books can be chalked up to genre hopping. Books 1-3 are perfectly good and serviceable children's books — great children's books, even! They have compelling, relatable characters and juicy mystery plots. They have problems, sure, but for the first three books someone's ever written — especially someone with little or no background in creative writing — they're really fucking good. So: there's her flowers.

The last four books pivot sharply into much more emotionally complicated and sociopolitically loaded territory, because they're describing a war. And it's hard to write children's books about war. I would venture you can't really do it, at least without dramatically misrepresenting what war is! And so Rowling makes the executive decision somewhere during the writing of Book 4 that she's not going to flinch away from that, she's going to go for dramatic realism, and she kills Cedric Diggory to let us know. People had died in Harry Potter before, of course — Quirrell gets sent to the fucking shadow realm, for example. But children haven't. (It also gives parents who are reading these books with their children a warning shot: shit is about to get significantly more real, think twice before you buy the next one of these for your 10-year-old.) After that, Rowling starts leaning much more into dramatic realism, and the fast-paced mystery-novel plotting of the first few books is replaced by a slow, simmering political conflict that unfurls over the course of about a million words.

The problem — besides the fact that she's picking one of the hardest things to write about, like, in all of literature, war is really insanely complicated and emotionally intense and hard to portray well — is that she's now trying to use characters, plot points, and technologies she developed for a children's series to enact a sprawling war drama among teenagers and adults. So Hermione, who was a reasonably precocious snobby eleven-year-old, becomes this sort of encyclopedic all-knowing savant of the wizarding world, who somehow remains functional and mostly even-headed despite her identity being the chief target of a prolifically murderous terrorist group. Draco Malfoy, a schoolyard bully whose primary tools included 1. namecalling and 2. telling teacher, JOINS said terrorist group (and admittedly does react reasonably, i.e., has a total crashout and takes to sobbing in a girls' bathroom whenever he gets a free minute). Dumbledore, who starts out as "whimsical friendly winky-wink trustworthy grandfather type", ends up being Magical Winston Churchill in a violent game of spycraft and espionage, eventually revealing he's only been keeping Harry at all these seven years because he wants to KILL him! And like, maybe really good technical writing could smooth out these transitions and make the first-order dramatic choices seem more natural, but Rowling is like, a Fine Writer, technically speaking. meaning she's reasonably consistent in characterization, her plotting is well-paced and believable, she has a clear authorial voice, and her prose is readable. personally, that's not enough to get me to buy into some of the changes that happen in the later books, and because she stuffs these things so full with new elements every installment, a lot of stuff ends up getting glossed over.

And like, I still love the books. I think they're wonderful, and they taught me how to read. but i can say that and also say that Rowling probably did herself a disservice by trying to write four giant war novels as sequels to her first three mystery children's books.