#e-book reviews

[authortoberecognized]

WRITER’S FORUM  E-BOOKS REVIEWS

                        WEBSITES HELPFUL TO WRITERS This is a series of posts which, I think, will be beneficial to writers. But first, I would like to include my usual warning about using websites. Whenever you check a website you are, in my opinion and I talk from experience, being put on a list for sale. So, expect the possibility of being bombarded by ads from companies you, perhaps, have…

[bmpmp3]

sorry to be a bit of a hater but i do wish youtubers weren't so scared of making their videos just like, "reviews", whys everything gotta be a "video essay" all the time. every day my recommendations are filled with 40 minute videos titled "_____: An Underrated Masterpiece" where the first like five minutes are reading the wikipedia definition of "masterpiece" in a somber voice with dramatic themed text on screen. please just tell me how good or bad you think something is and use the rest of the runtime to explain why. you dont need to put on all these airs

[makedonsgriva]

Devil Venerable Also Wants To Know : A Review

So I generally don't do reviews. But going through the tumblr tag and then on AO3 and seeing the abysmal amount of posts and fanfics, I am writing this review in hopes of someone reading this and then getting convinced by my agenda.

Because Devil Venerable Also Wants to Know deserves to be read by yall.

IT. IS. SO. GOOD.

To summarize, we start with the leader of the demonic Xuanyuan Sect, Wenren E, getting a copy of a trashy romance novel, Abusive Romance.

What baffles him is that he, a logical, rational person who has never felt love in his life, is the second lead and falls in love with the Mary Sue female lead and gives up everything for her and dies in the end for her too.

What makes him even more confused that after he dies in the novel, his loyal subordinate Yin Hanjiang is driven to madness and is hell bent on revenge, pursuing the female lead to kill her.

Wenren E decides that this cannot be allowed. He is not afraid of death, (although he does mind that it was for a stupid reason and not on his own terms) but he very much minds the fact that his subordinate went insane after it. So he sets out to re write destiny.

Now let's talk about the highlights of this book

The Characters

DVAWTK is full of interesting, fun and exciting characters who will remain etched in your memory. Whether it is the sensuous, ruthless and ambitious Shu Yanyan or the wise, perceptive and kind Zhongli Qian, there is a multitude of characters to pick from to love and adore and all of them have deeper and hidden depths that give them layers of complexities.

Not to mention, DVAWTK has several strong and amazing female characters. I have mostly read MXTX books and this is where she lacks the most: hardly any strong female characters. She writes shockingly amazing characters but most of them are male and I mostly don't mind but I do wish I got some great girls to cherish in there too.

Cyan Wings does not disappoint in that aspect. All their female characters are wonderfully well fleshed out. Especially Baili Qingmiao. Seeing her go from the biggest girlfailure to an absolute girlboss over 70 something chapters is satisfying in a sense the way, and I quote the book here, "one feels about their first daughter finally grow up" Chef's kiss truly.

The Plot

The plot is engaging but nothing too crazy, if I am being honest. Apart from a couple of reveals and plot twists that were shocking, it mostly stuck to a more or less predictible story line. That does not mean it was not good; it was. Most of the arcs keep you engaged enough to keep reading without being able to put the story down and tie into each other seamlessly. As such, there are no plot holes and stupid or unnecessary story lines. It works very well to support the characters and their personal growth and arcs.

The Humour

Top notch. So well done. Got me laughing out loud multiple times and earned me a lot of weird looks from my roommate but all worth it. SVSSS was the funniest work I read but DVAWTK gives it a run for its money in terms of the comedy it has and also it's general unhinged-ness, mostly thanks to it's characters. Everyone at the Demonic Xuanyuan Sect is a goofball although they are not trying to be. The skeleton lady Qiu Congxue has no brains. Literally. A ghost ate it so you can guess just how well she is faring in the books.

(she still is immensely powerful tho)

The Romance

So far the biggest freaks I had found while reading Danmei are Mo Ran and Luo Binghe.

Yin Hanjiang is a hundred times worse.

He is an absolute psycho, a complete nutter, powerful beyond comprehension and hopelessly devoted to Wenren E. And Wenren E, once realising his own feelings, thinks it is all so hot!! (makes you really wonder just who is more insane among the two)

My subordinate wants to destroy the entire cultivation world after my death? He has my full support that's so cute of him <3

Freak4freak with some very beautiful and tender moments and an absolute badass power couple who kick ass together in battles. Truly amazing. I love love love wenrenjiang.

The World building

Wonderfully well done and also easy to follow! I especially liked how cultivation was viewed from a different light in this novel and how the book explores the ways it is actually harmful to mortals. I actually learnt a lot about various cultivation stages from this novel and came to understand some common aspects of xianxia novels. DVAWTK uses many technical terms in terms of cultivation and it is fun to read and learn about it

Found Family

Need I say more? Like what's better than a bunch of idiots coming together and growing on their journey thanks to each other? *gently holds Su Huai, Baili Qingmiao, Qiu Congxue and Zhongli Qian in my palms* they are so important to me

Final Thoughts

DVAWTK is a great read with a very satisfying ending. It keeps you hooked till the very end and I am honestly surprised it is so underrated. I am very glad it is getting an official translation soon so hopefully, it will amass more readers although the unofficial translation I read is also very good. It deserves way more hype and fans then it has because it's so silly, so good and so well done. Ugh I hope it also gets some kind of adaptation some day to make it more popular because it deserves it all.

Please read this novel. That's what I want to say. You will not be disappointed.

[annabolinas]

Tudor Week 2023:

Day 5: Most Used Tudor Related Resource: A Non-Comprehensive List of My Favorite Tudor Books

I know I said this wasn't comprehensive, and it really isn't; I used 63 secondary sources and 9 primary source collections for my novel alone. These are just my favs, the ones I go back to regularly, plus one surprise. Warning: this is a long post. *crying emoji*

Tudor England: A History - Genuinely the best one-volume history of Tudor England out there. If you're a Tudor buff, GET THIS BOOK!!! There's not only refreshingly balanced interpretations of every Tudor monarch, but Wooding is careful to focus on ordinary people in Tudor England, with chapters dedicated to their religion, literature, relations with the wider world, authority and dissent, and more! Plus, the footnotes and Further Reading are an absolute delight, chock-full of fascinating research. This is academic history at its absolute best.

The Tudor Chronicles - Ever forgot what important stuff happened in Tudor England in 1505? 1563? 1589? This is the book for you. It's a year-by-year look at Tudor history. This was an invaluable book while writing the novel; it really provided a chronological framework on which I could structure the story. Absolutely essential.

Henry VIII by J.J. Scarisbrick - Despite being published in 1968, this remains a classic biography of Henry VIII, one of the very best out there. While Scarisbrick has aged poorer in some areas than others (i.e. his underestimation of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Parr), his treatment of Henrician foreign policy and the struggle for the annulment has IMO never been bettered. Plus, he has a whole chapter on matrimonial canon law if you want to better understand the background to Henry's quest for an annulment from Catherine of Aragon.

Henry VIII by Lucy Wooding - I actually think Wooding is a better biography of Henry than Scarisbrick, if only because this was published in 2015. Understanding yet never excusing Henry, and with balanced and well-argued interpretations of every historiographical controversy in his reign, this is a book I keep coming back to! Plus, she manages to be sympathetic to Catherine, Anne, and Henry in the Great Matter, no small feat.

Henry VIII: The Mask of Royalty - A bit of an odd book, this is a psychological profile of Henry in his last years, 1540-7. Nevertheless, Smith is careful to never armchair diagnose Henry with anything, but rather bring out facets of his personality which are often ignored, like his obsession with honor and deep-rooted conviction in his close relationship with God as an anointed monarch. This was really helpful in fleshing out Henry as the main character in my novel.

Henry VIII: The Decline and Fall of a Tyrant - If Lacey Baldwin Smith focuses mainly on Henry's psyche from 1540-7, Robert Hutchinson provides a more general picture of these last years. He's particularly insightful on Henry's declining health, his war with France, court factionalism, and the economic woes England faced as a result. I wasn't as familiar with the non-matrimonial aspects of Henry's reign when I was writing the novel, so this book proved a godsend to me.

Six Wives - I know, I know, David Starkey is a racist POS. But he somehow managed to make the (so-far; I hope Suzannah Lipscomb will change this) best overview of the six wives. Weir is downright unreliable and Fraser repeats a number of myths and is a strong CoA partisan. It's Starkey who debunks myths and offers intriguing interpretations of everything from the dating of Anne and Percy's relationship to proof of Foxe's story of Catherine Parr's near-arrest.

Catherine of Aragon by Giles Tremlett - Why it took seventy years to supersede Gareth Mattingly's biography on Catherine, I don't know, but Tremlett did it. This is a richly detailed, fair book on Catherine, and while he is sympathetic to Catherine, he doesn't present her as a plaster saint. Still, it's hard to feel anything but admiration for her after this biography. This is the closest book we'll get to knowing her as a person.

The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn by Eric Ives - This book deserves to be called "the Anne Boleyn bible". An underrated feature of this biography is its fascinating and insightful analysis of Anne's faith, presenting convincing evidence of her evangelical beliefs, and her artistic patronage. Even if I don't agree with his theory of her fall, this is still the best Anne biography out there.

Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves by Elizabeth Norton - In a small field of books about these two queens, Norton manages to produce the best ones. Due to the paucity of evidence, there's naturally a lot of speculation and use of "might have", but she does the best of any book at producing a picture of these two queens as actual people (with thorough citations to boot).

Young and Damned and Fair by Gareth Russell - I feel I should clarify that I don't agree with Russell's analysis of Catherine Howard's relationship with Manox and Dereham; it was not consensual (although I think Dereham groomed her into thinking it was). That being said, Russell sweeps away many of the myths and misconceptions about Catherine to present a very empathetic, yet never biased book about this tragic queen. Plus, he includes a wealth of details about court life and anecdotes about Catherine not found in other bios.

Catherine Parr by Susan James - James is practically the expert on Catherine Parr; it was James who really proved that Catherine was far more passionate and lively than popular belief has it. Thus, it's no surprise this biography is superb. James is particularly good on Catherine's 1544 regency, household, and her Protestant beliefs, really giving you a detailed picture of her faith.

Letters and Papers (L&P) of Henry VIII and the Calendar of State Papers, Spain (CSP Spain) - These two Victorian primary source collections are invaluable resources for researching Henry's reign. They're collections of summaries (and sometimes transcripts) of primary sources for Henry's reign. This is the bedrock of nearly all books about his reign, so much so that excerpts of it are part of my set texts for next term. Plus, there's so much in it; it's a never-ending-buffet for Tudor buffs.

Dress at the Court of Henry VIII - What color shoes did Catherine Parr like to wear the most? How did clothes communicate royal status and political leanings, for both Henry and his wives? How did Henry's children, courtiers, and servants dress on different occasions? This book is the one-stop shop for Henrician fashion. My only complaint is that its illustrations are B&W, but if you combine this with the drawings of gowns in Herbert Norris' Tudor Costume and Fashion, you're pretty much set.

Elizabeth I - The later Tudors aren't really my wheelhouse, but I had to include this amazing biography of Elizabeth I. Forget Weir or Plowden, this is the best biography of Elizabeth out there, and it's a masterpiece of historical biography, period. This book manages to grapple with everything that happened in Elizabeth's nearly 70-year life without getting bogged down in details and preserving a sympathetic, nuanced picture of the woman behind the queenly mask. 10/10, highly recommend!!

[sing-you-fools]

if anyone's looking for a spooky read this month i highly recommend Starling House by Alix E. Harrow, an author whose book descriptions always sound like they'll be pretty decent, fun reads, but whose books themselves always manage to take root in my soul and haunt me for years

Starling House is a spooky Beauty and the Beast retelling set in a tiny nowhere coal town in Kentucky about a young homeless woman who will do anything for her brother and the haunted house she's dreamt of for as long as she can remember. It delves into the history of the town, including the slavery the mining empire was founded on and the many additional sins of the family that built it.

[gray-griff]

20-06-24; maurice, e. m. forester

"I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now... and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness."

i really wanted to love this novel :( i had heard so many wonderful things abt it, and being a classic queer text i had high hopes. my disappointment lies mostly within my misalignment with the characters and the pacing, but overall i’d be willing to reread it. i ended up reading this one rather quickly and it’s possible that in doing so i missed the intricacies of certain chapters or characters.

i never felt any sense of connection to, or even particular enjoyment of any of the characters in this novel. each tender moment felt off set by the classism, misogyny (both era-accurate, but doesn't mean i have to enjoy it), and general rudeness and mean spirits prevailed by the main characters. maurice does develop and change, though not in a way i personally found substantial enough to like him other than in his acceptance of himself. in other ways in fact, i found he grew worse with age.

i have discussed with a few others on the subject of the characterization, some of their perspectives being as follows (hopefully i'm not watering this down!); maurice being flawed as he is is apart of the point. he is written to be representative of a common man, and does being so make him any less deserving of love? and the final pairing represents the truth of love; that it surpasses all earthly bounds. "He educated Maurice’s spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought ‘Am I led; am I leading?’ Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection." with particular emphasis on the last line. it was such beautiful quotes as these that made me so conflicted on the novel ;-; i see, understand, and actually agree with these statements, however they don't do much for my overall enjoyment of the text.

my complaints for the pacing are such that i think more time should have been devoted to the development of maurice's relationship to alec. not to say time should be taken from him and clive, all that is essential to his development and character, his development with alec just felt rushed and devoid of affection until it had already happened. I recognize maurice's need for sexuality as apart of love, but like forester's friend lytton strachey is quoted in the terminal note, i am partial to believe "the relationship of the two rested upon curiosity and lust and would only last six weeks".

on the whole, i can recognize maurice as a treasure of queer history, and as a monumental accomplishment given the time period in which it was written; however as a novel it fell short for me. despite all the moments forester had me positively beaming at the pages, i had fostered no strong affections for this story by its completion. if you think i missed something, or would benefit from another read, i'm open to the concept and would love to hear your interpretations!

༄˖°.ೃ࿔:

[folkhorrorrevival]

Sunken Lands: A Journey Through Flooded Kingdoms and Lost Worlds by Gareth E. Rees: Book Review

Sunken Lands, the new book by Gareth E. Rees may be one of those that forms a quandary for bookshop staff – just what shelf should it be placed on? For within its pages it covers a wealth of terrain (mostly of the moist or entirely saturated variety). Is it a folklore and legend book? A travel and history book? Psychogeographical philosophy? Natural History/Conservation? Occulture and Mystery?…

[inkubuzzz]

Devil Venerable Also Wants to Know Review

Rating: 9/10

Non-spoiler review: Very fun read with a very light and comedic tone. The characters played off each other very well and the plot was interesting. The highlight is definitely the character interactions though, the plot generally comes secondary to that. The concept of a character inside the story being privy to the story's ending and working to change it is very interesting and is executed well. My favorite character would definitely have to be Yin Hanjiang.

Spoilers below!

This whole story was so fuckin fun and had such interesting little twists. The slow build up to the "reveal" that Yin Hanjiang has actually been hiding much of his true nature from Wenren E all along, and then Wenren E's easy acceptance of it is probably one of my fav things in the story. Also when Yin Hanjiang gets to go into Wenren E's memories??? This entire little arc made me so emotional and was so well done. I'm also such a sucker for the trope of "I've seen you at your worst, and I still love you."

Also, Wenren E and Yin Hanjiang really give demisexual vibes and that will forever be my headcanon for them. I have a lot of sexuality/gender identity headcanons for the characters tbh (which you will likely see in my fanfics for them). Only He Wenzhao and uhhh the doctor dude feel like they're cishet.

One day, I'll reread the whole thing and do a chapter-by-chapter analysis, these are just the highlights for now.

[azazel-dreams]

A Date To Die For by E V Hunter

Rating: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

[rladpeps]

[boldlyvoid]

[andreai04]

I wished that love could be simple, that it was always given and returned in the same measure, equally and at the same time, that all the planets aligned in a perfect way to dispel all doubts, that it was easy to understand and never painful.

[grumpyoldsnake]

Finished reading Dawn by Octavia E. Butler! This book didn’t amaze me or anything, but it was interesting enough that I’ll probably read the next one just to see where Butler is going with all this. I liked the worldbuilding. The prose didn't stand out to me. The themes… left me with mixed feelings, and are a big part of why I want to see what conclusions Butler is going to draw by the end of this before forming any solid opinions. No specific spoilers, but allusions to the premise and its impacts. . The book's reputation It's a shame that this book has such a reputation for being disturbing; I feel like almost every time I've seen it mentioned people will say they had to walk away from parts of it. Not that it isn't disturbing, it absolutely is, but having seen all of those comments I went in so guarded that I think I failed to connect emotionally. As far as disturbing themes go… unless you have a specific trigger or squick about sexual coercion such that you find it more disturbing than other types of coercion and violence, to me this felt about on par with books like Lord of the Flies, The Freeze-Frame Revolution, and Mirror Dance. Maybe more unrelenting about things; the unpleasantness taking up a greater portion of the book. (…By which I mean all of it. Beginning to end. :'D) . Themes about consent I’ve seen the themes of captivity-as-rescue, consent, helplessness, unwilling-sympathy-for-captors, and manipulation explored in ways that were more compelling to me before. But I also recognize that this is only the first book in the series. I did appreciate that Butler mostly treated the lack of meaningful choice and lack of consensual human connection as the points of real horror, and as the root cause of most human-on-human violence. . Themes about genetics I had… very mixed feelings about the our-children-won't-be-humans angsting. Again, the lack of consent was the major moral issue to me; the concept of having involuntary children at all is the horror to me. The genetic panic, on the other hand… I don't know. In the context of the story, sure, it'd be the end of the human race. And that's fine as a thought experiment, even if I don't find it particularly compelling on a personal level. (I think the only way I would find it compelling is if the thought went one step further: "And our children are going to go on to carry out this same cruel process on some other species…") But it kind of falls apart if you try to make any kind of connection back to the real world with it, because the closest comparisons I can see are to fear and hatred of disability and interracial children, and on both fronts: oof. But that may well be what Butler is intending to explore! So… again. I'm curious to see what her conclusions will be, if I manage to get through any of the rest of the series.

[bookworms-haven]

My Top 3 Reads of the Year So Far!

The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Beautifully written and truly gorgeous. I am forever changed.

2. We Were Liars - e. lockhart

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This book was short yet packed a hell of a punch. It was a rollercoaster and so so good!

3. Galatea - Madeline Miller

⭐⭐⭐⭐

This was extremely short but so thought-provoking. I don't think that an author will be able to affect me as much as Madeline Miller can!

[justforbooks]

Revisiting 50 Shades of Grey in the Age of Mega-Rich Creepers

“It’s my body.” That’s what virginal Anastasia Steele tells billionaire Christian Grey when he asks her to see the OB/GYN he has picked to check her out before he will consider having intercourse with her.

“It’s mine, too,” replies Christian.

That line from the beginning of Fifty Shades of Grey hits differently now, doesn’t it? Now that “your body, my choice” is a rallying cry for young men on the right in our post-Roe v. Wade world?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about E.L. James’s dark romance series that has sold more than 165 million copies worldwide since 2011. Since then the gap between the 1% and the rest of the country has continued to grow, with the wealth of the 1% reaching a record $44.6 trillion at the end of 2023. Since then our bodily autonomy has been taken away. Since then our data and privacy have been severely compromised by Big Tech and its less than charismatic leaders. Since then we’ve re-elected one of the worst billionaires to the office of President.

As Americans we should be furious. But rather than questioning the methods that billionaires have used to make their money on the backs of the poor, we (not “we” as in you and I, but the royal “we”) instead revere them as heroes and titans of industry. If Christian wasn’t a fictional character Walter Isaacson would have already written a big flashy biography of him.

In some ways I understand the fantasy of the virile billionaire. Who hasn’t dreamed, in late stage capitalist misery, of meeting someone filthy rich and falling in love—or lust—and thereby being freed from the confines of the rest of the world?

But the 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon and the billionaire romance subgenre it inspired reflect a culture that was ready to debase itself with its delusions about the fabulously wealthy and all of the stuff their money and power could buy. Using the Trojan horse (ironic because Christian notoriously hates to use condoms) of female sexuality to hook readers, 50 Shades provided a primer on what we could come to expect from our current crop of billionaires who buy political influence and mass communications platforms along with their private jets and mega-yachts.

Let me be clear: This is not about kink-shaming. BDSM is not the problem, sexual preferences are not the problem. It’s not about genre-shaming, either. Romance novels are not the problem and they have never been the problem! Even the notoriously less-than-sparkling prose of Fifty Shades isn’t a problem. It’s the adulation of billionaires, specifically. It’s the fantasy of the billionaire as a romantic hero, as someone who is as good at love and sex as he is at making money (or spending the money his ancestors made).

“I’m incapable of leaving you alone,” Christian tells Ana in that very first book, and he proves it, using technology to track her location and swoop down to rescue her from a boring college party in a way that feels both stalkerish and exactly like Mark Zuckerberg’s business model for Facebook. Ana, of course, is grateful for Christian’s constant surveillance, his “overwhelming good looks” a nice distraction for how very creepy that is. As the series continues Christian Grey begins to control every facet of Anastasia’s life, from her diet and exercise to her birth control. Her submission in this very heterosexual, gender essentialistm feels like a precursor to the tradwife, that current TikTok sensation in which stay-at-home wives defer to their husbands, harkening back to a time when, apparently, America was Great.

Even before Ana can enter into a relationship with Christian she must sign a robust non-disclosure agreement. So much has been made about the love contract Ana signs, the ways in which it’s good that she puts her sexual boundaries in writing, but this contract is more about protecting the billionaire than it is about protecting the (frustratingly) innocent young woman whom he dominates. NDAs, of course, have been primary tools for billionaires (or hundred-millionaires, if we’re counting decimal places) to control their subordinates and keep their dirtiest secrets, from Jeffrey Epstein to Jeffrey Bezos.

I would never say that 50 Shades of Grey is a dangerous book; very few books actually are. I’m not asking for censorship here, or censure. I’ll leave that to the fundamentalist Right. I’m just asking for a more mindful reading of what we, as a culture, consider to be attractive and aspirational. We live in a world in which billionaires are spanking us in so many metaphorical ways, if not literal. Let’s be a little less deferential when they show us their villainous sides.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[booksandcupsofcoffee]

"Anne of Green Gables" || Book Review

written by L. M. Montgomery published in 1908

★★★★★ / 5 Stars ★

⋆ ˚｡⋆୨ ʚɞ ୧⋆ ˚｡⋆

Were you looking for the perfect spring and summer read? 🌼🍓 Well, I've got you covered!

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BOOK DETAILS: 🌷

Title: Anne of Green Gables

Author: Lucy Maud Montgomery

Date published: 1908

Recommend age: 10+

Notes: This book may be a little hard to read alone (it's an "old" book, so the vocabulary might not be understood entirely) for young readers, but it's still enjoyable and relatable!

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Today's book is “Anne of Green Gables” an enchanting novel written by Lucy Maud Montgomery.

This novel tells tells the story of Anne Shirley, a young orphan sent to two siblings… who wanted to adopt a boy in the first place, so he could help at the farm! 🌿

But Anne is as lovely as she is imaginative, and though she is also a liiittle bit dramatic, Marilla and Matthew grow fond of her very quickly, and soon, the mistake made is forgotten!

Anne discovers a new life in Green Gables, and, moreover, and happy to finally have found (or been found by?) a family for the first time.

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The book goes through Anne's life at Green Gables, following her during her first day of school to all of her adventures in the woods, with her new friend.

It really is a lovely story, filled with joy, life and innocence, and I can assure you that I laughed more than once while reading Anne's comments! 🤭

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This was my first time reading L. M. Montgomery, and I have to admit that, at first, I feared that this book would not have aged well, with the main character being a little girl from the 20th century… but oh, was I wrong!

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Have you read this book too? Or maybe you've watched the Netflix series? 👒

Tell me what you thought in the comments!

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