#it would be nonfiction

[directactionforhope]

Might fuck around and write a book for real

[kjscottwrites]

And, importantly, share some recs!

[smileposting]

point: one of the most common criticisms of the hobbyhoo chapter that i've seen even from diehard fans is that its central conflict doesn't leave much room for forms of love that aren't romantic or (implicitly) sexual in nature - platonic relationships can just as easily lend themselves to deep and dramatic and introspective art, after all!

counterpoint: said central conflict is clearly a commentary on entertainment companies censoring/refusing to commit to explicitly queer relationships for the sake of raking in more cash, and the vital importance of not watering down your identity and relationships to appeal to people who only care about how much money they can wring out of you and your loved ones. also, neither milldread or buzzhuzz feature romance in their main plots, with the latter even going out of its way to emphasize that the relationship between its two gods is the most important relationship in both of their lives while Also not being even remotely romantic in nature; not to mention that it is Also a story about the importance of artistic freedom in the face of censorship. while the hobbyhoo chapter Probably could have gotten its central point across just as easily if not More effectively by like. idk rick wanting byella to get with feldly or something. to act like the game itself believes that romance is necessary for any given work to be True Art just bc it brings it up as an inspiration in One chapter is to ignore everything outside of hobbyhoo.

counter-counterpoint: that still doesn't mean that those other relationships don't get overshadowed by romantic shipping in fanwork. this is common in all fandoms, of course, but it's an especially missed opportunity in this case, isn't it? also, most of the fans posing that initial criticism are themselves on the aroace spectrum and therefore queer - they aren't trying to water anything down, they just want more variety in an area that's all about variety.

counter-counter-counterpoint: the game's already out. what do?

conclusion: we Gotta extend the "dramatic novella-length multichapter pre-ascension fic" treatment to huzzle mug and/or bauhauzzo. cobigail as well But i would be lying if i said that born on the cob hasn't been doing an excellent fucking job of that already. still. we need More.

[nonmahogany]

who wants to hear my aro book recs?

was gonna wait for asaw but i can start blabbing about them now

[nothwell]

What books should I read if I need to learn everything about daily life in medieval Welsh monasteries?

[idontmindifuforgetme]

About to deep clean & rearrange my bookcase …… I am about to be a girl reborn

[incesthemes]

this is fun!! thank you @saintmarywinchester for tagging me to show off 9 books i plan to read this year!!! 🥺🙏

i actually just finished my herman melville/nathaniel hawthorne rpf book last night (yes they DID kiss) so i can cross that one off the list 💗 some other ones are ummm

some of my Old Books which don't have very (or any) descriptive book covers to share, and therefore relegated to the honorable mentions section:

The Ghosts, and Other Lectures – Ingersoll (1878)

Memoria Tecnica; Or, a New Method of Artificial Memory – grey (1781)

and books i'm reading through substack newsletters this year:

moby dick – melville (won't be finished this year)

maurice – forster

les miserables – hugo

the divine comedy – dante (won't be finished this year)

don quixote – cervantes (not a substack specifically but a guided reading list all the same)

i'm being quite ambitious this year!!! and hoping that i can read even more than this tbh. i have no idea what to follow up the herman melville rpf novel with. that's a really strong start to the year i have to say 😵

ok i will tag @i-already-know-im-going-2-hell, @captainmicaptain, @hoshimagico, @zaegreus, @theastralbeast-cometh, @rottenarmour, @roaldamundsen, @venomousmaiden, and @wincestuously-charged 💖 i liked kostas's stipulation that fanfic counts so i'll apply that here too!

[jazzically]

the library is an archivist's grocery store. imagine jon gets hungry but he cant go around eating people's experiences anymore so he starts devouring memoirs instead and becomes the world's leading expert on every autobiography ever written

[fictionadventurer]

Potential September Reading

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (ideally in audio)

An English Squire by Christabel R. Coleridge

A Sherlock Holmes story (and/or a screen adaptation)

C.S. Lewis nonfiction

A sensation or mystery novel

A piece of one of the Psmith stories

Some kind of nonfiction book

[intothestacks]

As a children's librarian in a school where Who Would Win is hardly ever on the shelves due to it being so popular, I saw this and I had to share...

Zoologist Reacts to "Who Would Win?"

Here's one he really liked:

And one he really did not:

[deanmarywinchester]

previous years: 2022, 2021 / list of worst sf/f/horror

the bangers were BANGING this year, I kept mentally readjusting my top 5 list every time I read something good so the honorable mentions are extremely honorable this year. I hope you read anything that sounds good from this list and tell me about it!

top 5:

chain gang all stars by nana kwame adjei-brenyah: when I say that this book is like the hunger games for adults, I’m not making a glib comparison between two books about fighting to the death, I’m saying that I haven’t felt so intensely about a book since I stayed up late to tear through the hunger games and sob about it when I was thirteen. this book is satire as real and devastating as I’ve ever read, with action scenes that feel like they’re being dripped directly into my hindbrain and a unique and believable love story. put it on hold at your library literally RIGHT now.

the actual star by monica byrne: about a post-climate catastrophe utopian society built around a religion started by a teenage girl in 2012 based on mayan traditions, and also about the teenage girl, and also about the maya. this book made me crazy because the future society felt real enough to touch, with its radical openness and collectivity solving problems that exist today but causing new ones that are totally novel and meaty and interesting to dig into. read it if you’re interested in different ways of being.

the spear cuts through water by simon jiménez: really, REALLY good, fresh, original epic fantasy. jimenez picks a few perspectives to stick to but hops fluidly into bystanders’ brains to give you their perspectives, so even background characters feel fleshed-out and no one’s pain is dismissed as a side effect of heroic battles or whatever. highly recommended if you like framing narratives and stories about stories, and like epic fantasy but wish it wasn’t mostly about finding acceptable enemies to slaughter with cool swords

the dispossessed by ursula k. le guin: I love how much this book is about hope as clear-eyed commitment to the boring and difficult work of a brighter and necessary future. sometimes the work of the glorious anarcho-communist revolution is leaving your university post and romantic partner for months at a time to dig irrigation ditches so nobody starves when there’s a drought. read this book for diplomatic conniving, a clash of values between a capitalist planet and its dissident moon, and hope.

imperial radch trilogy and its spinoffs by ann leckie: what if you were built to be a weapon of the empire, a serene sentient battleship with thousands of human bodies all containing your consciousness, and you lost all bodies but one and had to figure out how to be a person, singular and alone? what if you were a 19th century british military officer and you slept for a thousand years into the decline of the empire? what if you were grown in a vat to be a facsimile of human and then told off for eating all your siblings even though eating them was SO interesting? what then. leckie’s prose is incisive and funny, her unreliable narrators are wonderful, and her stories are intimate even though the backdrops are insanely huge. 👍.

honorable mentions:

house of leaves by mark z. danielewski: guys? anyone hearda this one? anyway. Something Is Wrong With This House horror with themes of storytelling and grief. recommending that you slam this book as fast as possible like I did so you can hold all its layers in your head at once.

the lathe of heaven by ursula k le guin: i thought I didn’t like ursula k le guin, and then I read this book, went OH and immediately devoured the hainish cycle. im so sorry miss ursula. this book about a hapless pacific northwesterner whose therapist is making him dream different realities into being is so sharp and sly and funny. themes of choices, ends and means.

he who drowned the world by shelley parker-chan: I liked the prequel to this addition to the radiant emperor duology. I LOVED this book. parker-chan has invented new and exciting modes of fucked-up codependency and im obsessed. historical light-fantasy with themes of ideals vs what it takes to reach them, gender, and regret.

babel by r. f. kuang: found the didacticism of this book annoying, but i really loved the concept of this novel and the way it slowly ratchets up the stakes. this novel is for people who want to smash the fun of the magic school genre against the reality of universities’ complicity in the imperial machine.

piranesi by susannah clarke: im late to this book but it’s such a weird little gem. peaceful yet unsettling. a man takes care of an endless house with an ocean inside it until he realizes the house is stealing his memories. themes of memory and devotion.

hell follows with us by andrew joseph white: I can only read YA these days if it’s a reread or if it’s genuinely good and really really strange. this is that. weird gory fantasy about a trans teen who escapes his militarized post-apocalyptic christian cult and finds himself turning into something Different. my only gripe is that he uses 2023-perfect language to describe transness and I think he should be inventing genders weve never even thought of. such is YA.

some desperate glory by emily tesch: a rolickin’ good space opera time with terrible women <3. a thriller about how the golden child of her isolated human-supremacist space station cult deprograms and the consequences of it. this feels like a grown-up SPOP until the theoretical physics gets involved. big fan

the library of mount char by scott hawkins: this book is harrow the ninth in suburbia until it becomes a more macabre version of the absurdity of the gomens apocalypse. God raises his children, sometimes brutally, to hone their powers in a neighborhood that mysteriously keeps out outsiders. came for the dysfunctional mess of the god-children and now I can never look at a grill the same way

runners up:

bunny by mona awad: books that make you WISH you were in mona awad’s MFA program where she must have been having a terrible time. the weird one out in an MFA program accepts overtures into the unbearable rich-girls’ clique to find out what they’re Up To. themes of aimlessness and the intersection of class with the art world

camp damascus by chuck tingle: have you ever wished that you were simply too autistic to be successfully demonically brainwashed into not having gay thoughts? horror-flavored thriller that was just fun

light from uncommon stars by ryka aoki: this author put a bunch of genres in a blender and came up with something fun and surprisingly cozy. an immortal woman must sell violinists’ souls to the devil in exchange for their fame, or he’ll drag her to damnation instead. there might be aliens and coffeeshop romance involved. definitely a blender.

the fragile threads of power by v. e. schwab: if you haven’t read a darker shade of magic and you like tightly paced high fantasy and historical fantasy elements, political intrigue, and pirates, read that first. if you have, there’s more now! lila bard are you free on thursday when I am free

the library of the dead & our lady of mysterious ailments by t. l. huchu: a teenage girl provides for her family in soft-apocalypse magic edinburgh with a job carrying messages from ghosts to their living relatives. an ongoing mystery series about the intrigues she uncovers among the dead.

severance by ling ma: this books is on the list of media that is the terror to me: it's about an apocalyptic disease that makes people reenact their routines mindlessly until they collapse. intimate apocalypse novel with themes of late capitalist malaise.

ocean’s echo by everina maxwell: i didn't really like winter's orbit because i'm just not a romance guy, but this second novel stands alone and the romance is more insane and less of the entire point of the novel. (also it's between essentially Discworld's Carrot and Moist Von Lipwig, which is. really something.) in the Space Military, a buttoned-up mind controller must pretend to bend a socialite with illegal mind-reading powers to his will. what if fake relationship but the relationship they have to fake is "brain linked master/servant pair."

the murderbot diaries by martha wells: novellas about a misanthropic security android who jailbroke itself in order to watch tv. the name "murderbot" is a joke but it very much did kill people <3 themes of paranoia and outsiderhood, corporate wrongdoing, repentance, and trust

black water sister by zen cho: zen cho is good at any kind of fantasy she writes, including this, her first modern fantasy novel. a closeted lesbian has to move in with her family in malaysia after college in the US, only to discover that her dead grandmother has some unfinished business involving a local goddess and a conniving real estate developer. themes of family, gender, and place.

the way inn by will wiles: a man who’s paid to pretend he’s other people to attend conferences in their place gets trapped in an endless Marriott. has the sharp humor of a colson whitehead corporate satire until it becomes more straightforwardly horror-flavored.

[fredersen]

hey wait a minute there’s nothing necessarily stopping me from just writing fiction the same way i’d write a paper is there

[exitbearpursuedbyactor]

I know I’ve seen the post asking for this before but does anyone have any books that are similar to the tv show Mash?

It can be a totally vibes-based recommendation

[autistic-puffin]

Made a book list, there are definitely missing ones but these are the main books. mostly novels, with a few exceptions. Sleeping on the wing, a poetry anthology, was not on there, but if anyone's read that please include that in your count, it rearranged my brain repeatedly

@variousqueerthings if you're interested!

[bendover-productions]

have to say the worst part about me getting into jet lag is that i’m genuinely considering getting a nebula subscription and it’s not even for like. a normal reason.