#fiction reading

[liskantope]

I'd appreciate if there were some variant of Cliffsnotes/Sparknotes freely accessible out there for Almost Nowhere. I've started reading it and am up to the ninth chapter, but my reading has progressed in fits and starts (a recent trip at close quarters with other people made it impossible entirely for a solid week); my reading comprehension is pretty terrible to begin with; and I find Rob's complex, cerebral style of narrative, while engaging, to often be challenging to follow.

It would be really great if someone just had a bunch of quick chapter summaries and a list of character specifics written down somewhere.

[wrongpublishing]

Author reading + open mic: BT Hayes (06/08/23)

Also featuring:

Arthur DeHart

Briar Ripley Page

Buy a copy of Dionysus and I Ship On Cabernet and Talk Sh*t from Wrong Publishing:

[if-not-now-tell-me-when]

“Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened. But if a story touches you, it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.

Horror stays with you hardest. If it brings a real chill to the back of your neck, if once the story is done you find yourself closing the book slowly, for fear of disturbing something, and creeping away, then it’s there for the rest of time. There was a story I read when I was nine that ended with a room covered with snails. I think they were probably man-eating snails, and they were crawling slowly toward someone to eat him. I get the same creeps remembering it now that I did when I read it.

Fantasy gets into your bones. There’s a curve in a road I sometimes pass, a view of a village on rolling green hills, and, behind it, huger, craggier, grayer hills and, in the distance, mountains and mist, that I cannot see without remembering reading The Lord of the Rings. The book is somewhere inside me, and that view brings it to the surface.

And science fiction takes you across the stars, and into other times and minds. There’s nothing like spending some time inside an alien head to remind us how little divides us, person from person.” - Neil Gaiman, introduction to M is for Magic

[thoughtportal]

If you haven't read any short stories in a while, it's a great time to get back into them. A ton of truly excellent books of short speculative fiction came out recently, and wondrous new tales are appearing in magazines all the time. We talk about some of our favorite new books of short stories — and we offer some tips for writing some short fiction yourself.

[beepboopappreciation]

Is this anything

[aesethewitch]

When I was a kid, we moved into a house that had a huge lilac tree out front. It was mostly rotten, and it needed to be taken down before it fell. It took a while, but eventually, it was gone.

Mostly. A couple years later, little lilac babies popped out of the ground in its place. My mom was determined to get rid of them, because she'd planted a beautiful flower garden there, and the lilac trees would overshadow and kill the whole garden. I insisted on saving at least a few saplings. She said fine, but I had to dig them out and put them in pots myself.

So, I did. I spent days digging little lilac bushes out of the ground and putting them into pots. Some couldn't be saved, but some could. When all was said and done, I had five brand-new lilac saplings. Seven or eight years old, and it was my absolute pride and joy.

Three died due to sun scorching, severe drought that no amount of watering could save, and perhaps just being moved from their place in the ground. But two survived, and I was awfully proud of them! I'd go out and talk to them every single day. I watered them by hand and made sure they were fertilized properly. I learned all about their favored environments, and I was determined to make sure they lived.

One of my mom's friends saw what I was doing with the lilacs. She asked if she could have one to put in her backyard, and I agreed on the condition that she take very, very good care of it.

It's now fucking enormous. I'm talking ten feet tall and bursting with beautiful purple flowers every spring. My mom still gets updates each year as they start to bloom, which she forwards to me. And all I can think is, "That's my friend! Thriving some twenty years on, there it is."

The other tree nearly died, too. It lived in a pot for far, far too long. I wanted to plant it somewhere in my parents' yard, but my mom was reluctant. Eventually, we agreed to put it in the far back garden. It grew okay for many years, despite the shade, but in all these years, it's never bloomed.

Last year, the massive tree casting massive shadows over the lilac and the garden cracked in half and fell. It tumbled into the garden, crushing part of the nearby shed and destroying a few plants beneath it.

It missed my lilac by inches.

The clean-up is long done. The rest of the tree has been cut down, and my lilac has full sunlight for the first time in fifteen years. It won't bloom this year, I know. But it's got new shoots up. It's taller than ever. I spent half an hour a few weeks ago praising it for surviving all this time, dreaming about its future and telling it how I believe it'll become the tall beauty it's always been meant to be.

I think next year, I'll see flowers.

[parksprout]

2024 Fiction Reading List

Hey!! I meant to make a post compiling my reading list and goals for this year forever ago, but never got around to it! So bwomppp here it is!! I think in the future I'm going to update this with when I started and finished a book, but because I didn't record the dates for most of these they'll just be listed as completed!! Wayyyy too many of the books I've read this year are me rereading childhood favorites, but tbh I just got back into the habit of reading daily this year so I'm UNASHAMED!!!

If anyone has reading suggestions, or wants to talk about any of the books on this list, feel free to DM me :3

READ SO FAR -

Babel, R.F. Kuang

The Poppy War, R.F. Kuang

The Dragon Republic, R.F. Kuang

The Burning God, R.F. Kuang

The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan

The Sea of Monsters, Rick Riordan

The Titan's Curse, Rick Riordan

The Battle of the Labyrinth, Rick Riordan

The Last Olympian, Rick Riordan

The Lost Hero, Rick Riordan

The Son of Neptune, Rick Riordan

The Mark of Athena, Rick Riordan

The House of Hades, Rick Riordan

The Blood of Olympus, Rick Riordan

The Hidden Oracle, Rick Riordan

The Dark Prophecy, Rick Riordan

Dark Rise, C.S. Pacat

Dark Heir, C.S. Pacat

The City of Brass, S.A. Chakraborty

The Kingdom of Copper, S.A. Chakraborty

The Empire of Gold, S.A. Chakraborty

The Darkest Part of the Forest, Holly Black

Howl's Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones

TO BE READ: but honestly this list is SO MANY BOOKS and college is SO busy so there's no shot I get through these in four months

The Burning Maze, Rick Riordan

The Tyrants Tomb, Rick Riordan

The Tower of Nero, Rick Riordan

The Children of God's & Fighting Men, Shauna Lawless

Dreams of Sorrow, Shauna Lawless

The Words of Kings and Prophets, Shauna Lawless

The Land of the Living Dead, Shauna Lawless

The Jasmine Throne, Tasha Suri

The Oleander Sword, Tasha Suri

The Lotus Empire, Tasha Suri

The Bone Witch, Rin Chupeco

The Heart Forger, Rin Chupeco

The Shadow Glass, Rin Chupeco

Eragon, Christopher Paolini

Eldest, Christopher Paolini

Brisingr, Christopher Paolini

Inheritance, Christopher Paolini

Murtagh, Christopher Paolini

The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm, Christopher Paolini

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

Dracula, Bram Stoker

The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver

A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin

The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K. Le Guin

The Farthest Stone, Ursula K. Le Guin

Tehanu, Ursula K. Le Guin

Tales from Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin

The Other Wind Ursula K. Le Guin

The Coldest Girl in Town, Holly Black

The scholomance, Naomi Novik

Iron Widow, Xiran Jay Zhao

Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld

Behemoth, Scott Westerfeld

Goliath, Scott Westerfeld

A Day of Fallen Night, Samantha Shannon

Priory of the Orange Tree, Samantha Shannon

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell, Susanna Clarke

The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern

The Sword of Kaigen, M.L. Wang

The Will of the Many, M.L. Wang

The Strength of the Few, M.L. Wang

The Merlin Conspiracy, Diana Wynne Jones

The Waning, Wunmi Aramiji

Under the Earth over the Sky, Emily McCosh

The Adventures of Amina Al Sarifya, S.A. Chakraborty

The River of Silver, S.A. Chakraborty

Cruel Prince, Holly Black

Castle in the Air, Diana Wynne Jones

The Dark Becomes her, Judy I. Lin

[novelconcepts]

I Saw the TV Glow is such a uniquely, devastatingly queer story. Two queer kids trapped in suburbia. Both of them sensing something isn’t quite right with their lives. Both of them knowing that wrongness could kill them. One of them getting out, trying on new names, new places, new ways of being. Trying to claw her way to fully understanding herself, trying to grasp the true reality of her existence. Succeeding. Going back to help the other, to try so desperately to rescue an old friend, to show the path forward. Being called crazy. Because, to someone who hasn’t gotten out, even trying seems crazy. Feels crazy. Looks, on the surface, like dying.

And to have that other queer kid be so terrified of the internal revolution that is accepting himself that he inadvertently stays buried. Stays in a situation that will suffocate him. Choke the life out of him. Choke the joy out of him. Have him so terrified of possibly being crazy that he, instead, lives with a repression so extreme, it quite literally is killing him. And still, still, he apologizes for it. Apologizes over and over and over, to people who don’t see him. Who never have. Who never will. Because it’s better than being crazy. Because it’s safer than digging his way out. Killing the image everyone sees to rise again as something free and true and authentic. My god. My god, this movie. It shattered me.

[emeryleewho]

People on here are always like "fuck capitalism, why can't things be weird anymore" and then write up a whole dissertation about how the biggest IPs need to change to be weirder.

Like, you are so close. You are so close to getting the point. "Big" IPs *can only exist because they are normal*. They will *never* be weird. They will *never* do what you want. Go find some smaller IPs. Bring back discovery. Bring back never having heard of a book before you buy it. Bring back watching obscure anime online that none of your friends know about. Bring back trying new things, even if they're bad or cheaply made. That is how you get *weird*.

[very-uncorrect]

Edit: I've muted this post because apparently it reached some sort of higher plane of existence and is getting a shit ton of likes and reblogs and it's clogging up my notifs lol

[liskantope]

Update on my progress reading Almost Nowhere: I'm just about a third of the way through, and I'm enjoying it and intrigued by it enough to continue. But I'm not comprehending the lay of the land at an ideal level. This is slightly confounded by the fact that it's not entirely clear that I'm supposed to entirely comprehend the lay of the land. But I'm probably supposed to be following the plot closer to 100% than the degree to which I am following the plot.

At the moment, if someone were to ask me to give a summary of who all the characters and groups of sentient beings are and their motives and situation and so forth, I would be able to answer only in pretty vague, inarticulate terms. I also, if asked what specifically confuses me about the plot, would have a hard time explaining in more than vague, inarticulate terms, except to gesture at particular ways in which I don't really understand how all the timey wimey stuff works (in terms of what kind of time continuum each character is living and acting in or limited to). This doesn't speak volumes about my success at reading this first third.

I'm curious about where the plot is going and what will be made of the weird metaphysics of the universe, but I think the number one reason I want to continue reading is that many scenes of the book (almost all involving intense dialog) flow in a crackling way that I find enjoyable to read and which provides me with the type of escapism I look for in fiction, although in this case it's escapism into a generally more alien, abstract environment than I'm accustomed to from other fiction.

It's almost certainly the most cerebral fictional narrative I've ever read, and I'm allowing "fiction I've ever read" to include the first fifteen chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky, whom I generally view as one of the most cerebral intellectuals to walk the earth. Emotional intimacy, for instance, seems quite thinly dispersed so far, unless I'm not comprehending with enough emotional depth to pick up on some of it. But the characters by and large do feel real and emotionally engaging enough for me to care quite a lot what happens to (at least most of) them and to entice me to keep going in this long journey.

[reidiot]

don't fucking interrupt me when i'm reading my x reader fics it's rude

[itsbookwormme]

Different Genres I plan to read this year

This year I have decided to read books from other genres. These are a few of the books I have decided to read this year. #books #booklover #bookblog

People who have followed me for sometime will know I am completely crazy about murder mysteries or crime thrillers. That’s one genre I liked since I was a kid, but back I read the classics as well ( or made to read, I should say). It takes a lot of effort for me to get into a book other than mystery books. Since one of my goal this year is to read books that pull me out of my comfort zone. I…

[collgeruledzebra]

the thing about trying to recommend fiction podcasts to someone who isn't familiar with them is that not only are so so many genres represented but also the level of production can fall anywhere from "basically an audiobook" to "major motion picture minus the pictures"

[loki-and-louis-left-hand-daggers]

I’m actually thankful for Umbrella Academy season 4 because it was SO bad that previously dormant fan fic writers are so enraged and disgusted with the ending that they’re coming out of hibernation and starting to write fics again.

[gothamite-rambler]

That was actually a good deed, Jason.

Jason Todd walked over to Bruce Wayne scrolling through photos on his phone. He tapped the man on the shoulder.

Jason: You want baby pictures of Damian?

Bruce spat out his coffee in shock. Jason chuckled.

Jason: You have to pay me.

Bruce (frantic): You better not be lying to me because if you have baby pictures of him I will pay you whatever price you ask.

Jason: Um okay I have about 10 I can give you now so $10,000 for each one.

Bruce: Stay there, gotta get my phone and I'll transfer the funds to your bank account.

Bruce ran out of the room leaving Jason Todd with Alfred watching the entire interaction, impressed.

Alfred: Jason, how did you get baby pictures?

Jason: Remember, I knew about his existence before Bruce ever did. I visited the kid for the first 9 years before Bruce found out about him. Talia paid me to take photos of him for memories.

Alfred: That's very wholesome of you.

Jason (confused): I said Talia paid me.

Alfred: Money or not, you did a good deed. Now Master Bruce can have a few photos and trust me, he's been begging Talia for baby pictures for years. Be proud of yourself.

Jason smiled.

Jason: I appreciate you saying that.

Alfred: I mean every word of it. You're welcome.