#bookish save

[sesame-sim]

Books I'm considering next

I mentioned before I add a new book every 5 sim years in my bookish save.. I'm torn about what book to add in next for Year 55. I know It seems too soon to be thinking about it bc I'm posting Year 50 right now, but in actuality I'm halfway through playing Year 53 so I need to give myself some time to finish reading and do prep like take notes, make a timeline.

Below are the ones I'm currently considering. They each have things about them that I really want to play and things about them that would be difficult to show with sims. Opinions welcome! I would love if somebody just tells me they have a clear favorite and then I don't have to decide lol.

In alphabetical order (info on each after the cut)

Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys (memoir)

Dust Child (historical fic)

Magic Lessons and the Practical Magic trilogy (fantasy)

Refugee High (nonfic)

Salvage the Bones ; Sing, Unburied Sing (fic)

She's Not There (memoir)

The Glass Castle ; Half Broke Horses (memoir)

To Kill A Kingdom (fantasy)

War and Speech (YA)

Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys (memoir of Viv Albertine, member of British female punk rock group The Slits. I'm interested in the aesthetics of this. She's also dated Mick from The Clash, has been friends with various ppl like Sid Vicous. But should I hold out for the possibility of a bands EP or GP in the future? And there's another memoir of hers I could also read before playing. It's more focused on her family rather than her music career)

Dust Child (historical fiction about a half Vietnamese half black man who is trying to find out who his father is in the present time intertwined with the story of two sisters who leave their small town to become bar girls in Saigon in past time. I actually haven't read this yet but I became interested in playing something with a Vietnamese storyline because of the tumblr @biplusco . Their Indochine cc collection made me want to play something set in Southeast Asia.

Magic Lessons; The Book of Magic; The Rules of Magic; Practical Magic (trilogy and a prequel following the Owens family of witches since the 1600s. You may know the movie Practical Magic. Of these books I've read Practical Magic and half of Magic Lessons but haven't read The Book of Magic or The Rules of Magic yet. The main issue here is 4 books is a lot to take notes about and make timelines for before playing through. Plus, starting from the late 1600s all the way to more current times at the speed I play will mean I never finish! But maybe I could JUST play the prequel.)

Refugee High (nonfiction about the high school in the U.S. with the highest percentage of refugees. The author chose some students, each from a different country, to delve into the lives of. Could be interesting depicting each one's past in sims before they end up together in Copperdale High School. But I've only just started reading this one.)

Salvage the Bones; Sing, Unburied, Sing (fictions both by Jesmyn Ward and they take place in the same town. The characters even cross paths at one point. I love her writing so much but a key part of one book is a hurricane and the other book mostly takes place in a car so I don't know if I can do this well in Sims 4 as the game is rn)

She's Not There (memoir, gender transition. I might want to read her other book called Good Boy about every dog she's had in her life first so I can play both together and have each of the pets join the family at the right times)

The Glass Castle; Half Broke Horses (both by Jeannette Walls. The Glass Castle is a really popular memoir about the author's nomadic upbringing with parents who eventually choose to be homeless. Half Broke Horses is her biography of her maternal grandmother. That one mostly takes place on ranches. What happens in The Glass Castle basically picks up right after what happens in Half Broke Horses.)

To Kill A Kingdom (fiction, fantasy, mermaids and princes. This one I'm worried about my lack of cc for. I want to play out a fantasy book at some point but I haven't done any collecting of fantasy cc whatsoever yet so it might take a while to accumulate it )

War and Speech (a humorous YA book about a high school girl, new to a school, who joins the super snobby speech team just to try to bring them down from the inside.)

[mysticmiav]

Jesper always felt better when people were shooting at him. It wasn't that he liked the idea of dying (in fact, that potential outcome was a definite drawback), but if he was worrying about staying alive, he couldn't be thinking about anything else.

Continuing the Crows' profiles series✍️

[musingsofmonica]

hello darkness, my friend

📸 via Pinterest

[apuff-comics]

me when protagonists are 12 year olds

[cirrus-grey]

Honestly? It’s not canon at all, but I love that this episode is offering the idea that. Yeah. Jon and Martin survived Somewhere Else. They’re not in the Archives universe anymore – mind you, they’re not in the Protocol universe either. They landed in some random-ass third universe, in the early 90s, and Martin got a job as a receptionist for the therapist Jon is seeing in case he has a panic attack during an appointment and needs Martin there to calm him down. It has nothing to do with the Protocol plot. Chester and Norris are completely unrelated. It’ll be the only descriptions we ever get of background characters that even vaguely resemble jmart, and it will never, ever be confirmed.

But it’ll still be there.

[pimpofgore]

What do I have to do to get inspired to write again. Do I sacrifice a pig? Perform a bacchanal? What is it?

[thereadmind]

The more you learn, the more you earn!!

[livingasaghost]

spotify playlists for every mood ✨💿🦋

featuring mixes for books, vibes, seasons, and everything in between

highlights include:

brat girl summer / feeling feral / god tier / stop feeling! / throne of glass / rwrb // firstprince / jade city / the locked tomb [griddlehark] / what's my age again? / friendship can be romantic / though your heart is grieving / dark academia / sad girl machine / night drives / morgan matson summer / bergman brothers / a haunting / frost / taylor breakup playlist / it's charli babyyy / what the folk / dad rock

[franticvampirereads]

This was so much fun to read!! It’s one of those books that doesn’t take itself too seriously and you can just have an absolute blast reading it. I loved that Cinnamon didn’t want to be the adventure-having-main-character and she ended up being the reluctant adventure-having-main-character! And she made a bunch of new friends in all the demons she set free. And I loved that Fallon was so smitten the second he met Cinnamon. Seriously, this book is cozy and fun and absolutely hilarious! It’s a perfect summer read. That Time I Got Drunk And Saved A Demon is getting a solid four and a half stars!

[libraryofnika]

౨ৎ 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚂𝚌𝚞𝚖 𝚅𝚒𝚕𝚕𝚊𝚒𝚗'𝚜 𝚂𝚎𝚕𝚏 𝚂𝚊𝚟𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚂𝚢𝚜𝚢𝚎𝚖 ʙᴏᴏᴋ ʀᴇᴠɪᴇᴡ (𝚛𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚍) ౨ৎ

“𝑯𝒐𝒘𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓, 𝒊𝒇 𝑺𝒉𝒊𝒛𝒖𝒏 𝒊𝒔 𝒏𝒐 𝒍𝒐𝒏𝒈𝒆𝒓 𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆, 𝒊𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒐𝒏𝒍𝒚 𝒑𝒆𝒓𝒔𝒐𝒏 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒍𝒅 𝒘𝒉𝒐 𝒉𝒐𝒍𝒅𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒔𝒆 𝒆𝒙𝒑𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒎𝒆 𝒏𝒐 𝒍𝒐𝒏𝒈𝒆𝒓 𝒆𝒙𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒔, 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒏 𝒎𝒆 𝒃𝒆𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒗𝒆 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒄𝒍��𝒂𝒓 𝒎𝒊𝒏𝒅𝒆𝒅, 𝒉𝒆𝒂𝒍𝒕𝒉𝒚 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒔𝒕𝒓𝒐𝒏𝒈…𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒎𝒆𝒂𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒘𝒐𝒖𝒍𝒅 𝒂𝒏𝒚 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒉𝒂𝒗𝒆?”

–----

(REREADING)

Novels that have death tropes, kind of doomed lovers, obsessive male characters, and traumatising (NOT THE TOXIC WAY) will ways have my heart 🫶

In a nutshell:

1. Compilation of Lou Binghe's unhinged, crybaby, possessive, and obsessive moments.

2. Shen Qingqiu stressing moments.

3. Qingge angry moments.

4. Tianlang Jung chaotic moments.

5. Of course, all those tragic moments that make me wanna cry.

Not gonna forget the captivating world lore here and the power or cultivation system 🤌🏽

SVSS will always have my heart 🤧🫶 Volume 2 and Volume 3 will always be my favourite ♥️ INFINITE 5⭐️ I honestly wish I could read this novel again for the first time— all MXTX novels 🤚🏽

If you didn't know, The Scum Villain's Self Saving Sysyem is a historical fantasy/ Chinese Cultivation/ Cultural danmei novels or novels that features Male to Male love or relationship 🫶

Also, check author MXTX's other novels, THEY ARE ALL SO BRILLIANT 🤌🏽

That's to say I'll be continuing rereading the last volume next month and starting my reread of ERHA (pray for my soul)🤚🏽

I also added some highlights or parts that I really liked. There are more of them, actually, but I don't want you all to be bombarded 😆 but I hope those are enough to make you read this novel 🫶

Bookstagram Booktwt Goodreads

[valewritessss]

I don’t read unfinished works to protect my sanity

[sesame-sim]

Emergency Contact (by Mary H.K. Choi)

ALEXIS: (to Billy Ray) You be good for your daddy ok hun? ALEXIS: (to her husband Danny) It's New Year's Eve. The diner's gonna be busy. Lord knows when I'll get home. Don't just let 'em eat cereal all night. There's chili in the pot and some sandwich stuff around. DANNY: I'm a pro at this by now.

ALEXIS: When you're awake you are but you ain't much help when you snooze off after drinking. Brandi Rose, babe. Please try and get your brother to sleep if your dad can't handle it. BRANDI ROSE: 'kay, but can I stay up and wait for you? ALEXIS: Stay up for the countdown on tv if you want but not much later than that, alright? I'll be home already when y'all wake up.

Billy Ray fussing

ALEXIS: You wanna be picked up again? BILLY RAY: Yes. ALEXIS: Oh, look at that face. He misses me already. (gives him kisses)

DANNY: You're never getting out the door. DANNY: (to Brandi Rose) Why does your mom always think she's leaving for 20 years instead of a few hours? BRANDI ROSE: (shrugs) She's just like that. (pause) I kinda like it.

BOOK SYNOPSIS - Penny (a college freshman) meets Sam (a coffee shop barista) because he’s kinda-sorta a relative of her roommate. Penny rescues Sam when he’s having a panic attack. A will they won’t they set in Austin, TX. 

CONTEXT - Brandi Rose Sidelow later grows up to be the mom of male protagonist Sam Becker. At this time, Brandi Rose is age 5 and her brother Billy Ray just turned 2.

BOOK TIME/PLACE - year unspecified in the book; Austin, Texas

MY SAVE TIME/PLACE - Sim Year 50 / Sim Day 5712 / Winter D28 / Saturday / Evergreen Harbor

POSTS FOR THIS BOOK

SONG PAIRING - for their new year, "This Will Be Our Year" by OK Go

[wutheringmights]

please please please explain how the bullshit military death cult in Fourth Wing is unsustainable. I need more Iron Flame slander in my life lol

I may have chosen the wrong phrasing last night. It’s less about the sustainability of the magical dragon country’s military college, and more about how much Yarros’s tendency to use specific numbers riles me up. Very specifically, a graphic at the beginning of Iron Flame. 

(Note: I only got a little bit over 200 pages into Iron Flame before I had to return it to the library; if there is an universe rebuttal to any of this, I may not have reached it yet; I also do not have the book in front of my to double check specific numbers, but luckily Yarros’s Specific Numbers have rustled my jimmies so much that I have been spamming my group chats about them so I inevitably wrote them all down.)

The graphic in question is this:

It illustrates the structure of the titular Fourth Wing. As you can see, it is made out of 3 sections that are then divided into 3 squads. You will notice two important notes on this graphic:

Each squad contains 15-20 people

Each of the four wings that make up the dragon rider cadets in the military academy has the same layout

With this information, I should be able to more or less calculate the number of dragon riders attending the military academy. 

In theory, the fourth wing has 8 people in leadership positions, and 136 to 180 squad members. That’s a total of 144 to 188 people in the fourth wing. 

If the fourth wing is identical to the other three wings, that means that there are anywhere from 576 to 752 dragon rider cadets across three grade levels. That’s already a pretty small number, but this is an exclusive military program. It’s not an unreasonable.

Except it’s actually impossible for there to be 576 to 752 dragon rider cadets. Why do I know that? Because Yarros already gave us a Specific Number.

Let’s rewind. In Fourth Wing, it’s established that you cannot advance beyond your first year unless you bond with a dragon. If you do not bond with a dragon, you repeat the year until you either bond or die trying. There are also only a select few dragons who are willing to bond each year. 

Yarros, of course, told us specifically how many dragons were willing to bond not only for that current freshman class, but for the two years previous:

1st year: 100 dragons*

2nd year: 137 dragons

3rd year: 163 dragons

(*actually, it was 101 but two dragons, in a super special unprecedented move, bonded with the same person; I’m trying to count the cadets, not the dragons so this really does not matter)

That means that there are around 400 dragon rider cadets, which is way less than what the info graphic implied. You can argue that the missing 176 cadets are those who did not bond with any dragons, but I highly doubt they would make much of a difference. Why? Because dragon rider cadets keep dying. 

I kept track of how many people were dying in Fourth Wing. By the end of that book, there were less than 80 bonded cadets still alive. Yarros then contradicted herself in Iron Flame by stating that there were 89 cadets in the second year. This isn’t because a bunch of cadets suddenly bonded with dragons and advanced a year; that only happens in a one a year ceremony. Yarros is just bad with numbers, which shows how silly I am for going to this much trouble trying to prove her wrong.

All that’s to say that I’ll split the difference and say that 85 cadets were still alive at the end of the first year. That means that there is a 15% death rate between bonding with a dragon and getting to the end of the first year. 

That means that by the time each class ended their first year, this about how many dragon rider cadets there should be:

1st year 85 cadets

2nd year: 117 cadets

3rd year: 139 cadets

That’s 341 people across all four wings. That means each wing has about 85 people. 

But wait! People die beyond their first year. There’s an ever decreasing number of cadets each year. If we assume that 15% death rate is consistent each year, that means that by graduation day, each year has: 

1st year: 85 cadets

2nd year: 100 cadets

3rd year: 102 cadets

That’s 287 cadets across all four wings, or 71 people a wing. I need not remind you how that is far below our predicted 144 to 188 per a wing. 

And I haven’t even mentioned that not every dragon available to bond even bonds. So those starting numbers are already the best case scenario where every possible dragon selects a cadet. Our actual class numbers are probably 10 to 20 people smaller, and that’s before the numerous deaths. 

When I started Fourth Wing, I inferred that the incoming freshman class started with about 700 people. (Each of the freshman dorm floors hold 156 people; there are at least three but it makes more sense for there to be a floor for each wing. Sixty-seven freshman died on the parapets. That’s a total of 691 freshmen, which I rounded up to 700.) 

Xaden (terrible name) has a speech where he claims that 1/2 of the incoming class will die by the end of the first year, 1/3 by the second, and 1/3 by the third. He’s probably just trying to scare the newbies, but let’s take him at his word anyway. 

According to his estimation, by the time the freshman class graduation, 172 people should still be alive. That’s a 21% survival rate, according to Xaden. That is somehow less severe than what is actually happening in the books.

There's never a point in time in the story where we acknowledge that the class sizes are this small. Everyone is dying, and there always seems to be more nameless faces than not. Yet, as all evidence suggests, there's not even enough people in the entire dragon rider curriculum to fill up a movie theater.

Ultimately, the numbers don’t really matter. What matters is that this fantasy military system is wildly inefficient. I understand on a trope-level why it has to be deadly. New Adult, the gangly older sister of YA, loves a good deadly game of wits and wile. Yarros was commissioned to write a romantasy story, and by god she was going to write the most marketable one possible. But you would also assume that Rebecca “second generation army brat who loves military heroes and has been blissfully married to her for over twenty years” would have a better understanding of how the military works. 

On the most basic of levels, you win a war by having the most people still alive at the end. Everyone knows this. It’s not that hard. It’s in the best interest of the brass to keep your soldiers alive. When that best interest gets screwed over, it’s usually because of economic issues (like being able to afford the supplies needed to keep your troops alive), or prejudice (soldiers from persecuted demographics being less worthy of better food/ammo/missions, under qualified officials earning their jobs via privilege, etc.). 

That is in itself another gross simplification. My point is that there’s no good reason why you would kill your own troops before they can even reach the battlefield. That’s a waste of resources! I don’t care if the dragons demand a blood sacrifice, or whatever. A practical military leadership would find some way to reroute failed rider cadets to a different career track before they needlessly died in training. The training can be as dangerous as you want, but for world building sake, be practical about how wars work. At least acknowledge that the military’s favorite canon fodder aren’t soldiers, but foreign civilians. 

Believe it or not, but I actually don’t really care that the worldbuilding is nonsense. Can I write a needlessly long essay about how the numbers don’t add up? Sure, but who cares? It’s just bad in a normal way. I’m more than happy to let other people harp on it. 

What is interesting is the way that Yarros views the morality of the military. It’s one thing for something to be pro-military. It’s another when your book’s thesis comes down to “it’s morally wrong for the big, powerful, totally not American, country  to not provide military intervention to smaller, poorer foreign countries that are being viciously attacked by a seemingly unbeatable, dehumanized enemy.” Yarros doesn’t even try to cover it up; Xaden makes a giant, righteous speech about how they have a moral duty to protect citizens, to actually quote the book, “beyond our borders.”

As I said when I first read this: what the fuck? 

Rebecca “second generation army brat who loves military heroes and has been blissfully married to hers for over twenty years” Yarros claims she is writing a series about the dangers of censorship. See how callous we are for letting other people die, and then covering it up? Yet, she mindlessly reproduces that idealized justification we’ve been fed for decades. Yarros, it’s never about helping civilians. I know you’re a biased army wife, but you know about the oil and the military industrial complex. You know America is not the good guy. 

Moreso, the in-book movement to wage a war “beyond our borders” is labeled as a rebellion. According to this series, it’s counterculture to want military intervention overseas. Yes, Yarros is writing the world’s most marketable book. In a post Hunger Games society, there must be a little rebellion sprinkled in there. But to frame the desire to fight a war as any form of counterculture is downright insidious. 

Fourth Wing is a book that looks you in the eye and tells you that the government is lying to you-- the war beyond our borders is necessary, that if we do not send the army to fight our inhuman enemies, they will hurt not only our poorer, less fortunate allies but also our homeland. War is a morale imperative.

I haven’t finished Iron Flame yet. Perhaps this rant is premature. Maybe the series turns itself around. But as one can imagine, I don’t trust Rebecca “second generation army brat who loves military heroes and has been blissfully married to hers for over twenty years” Yarros to have thought it through all the way. Just a gut feeling. Who can say? If I am wrong, I would be more than happy to eat my words, though. I would love to be wrong. 

Me being wrong means that the most compelling reasons why Fourth Wing is bad really is the bad worldbuilding, prose, romance, characters, action, lore, smut, dialogue, editing, and everything else. There’s already a hundred big brained book reviewers who are making a video essay career off of telling you that in five hours or less. I respect the hustle. Personally, I never want to hear about this series again unless it’s about how Yarros built her blockbuster book series on conservative ideals of militarism and foreign policy, and then had the audacity to tell you that’s what it means to be a rebel. 

[sunshinegallery]

I find it extremely traumatic how many people use books being destroyed in their aesthetic book posts: books underwater, books being rained on, books being lapped by the ocean, books being ripped apart, books on fire!!!?

THIS ISN'T AESTHETIC THIS IS HORROR THIS IS MURDER

send help

[demure-ladys-library]

I really want to learn about Ethel Cain's Lore but I'm scared nor ready to so please recommend some sacrilegious books so I could prepare my mind with even more mental torture I'll put myself into :))

[whilereadingandwalking]

Time to turn the clocks back and enter spring…just wish we didn’t have to lose an hour of sleep to do it!