#read the buried giant

[rudestmechanical]

i want to read at least one book a day for the rest of november so i can read just christmassy / winter-y books in december. let’s do this lads

[gillianthecat]

I don't know how I would answer this (and there's a couple of them I haven't read yet), but I'm curious about everyone else's thoughts:

[fictionadventurer]

All the tour groups in Springfield should be very proud of me for how well I refrained from sharing all my fascinating Lincoln facts.

[a-funeral-pyre]

I have 13 pages left before I finish The buried giant and I feel like my heart has been physically torn

[tbookblurbs]

The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro

4.5/5 - heartbreakingly sad; anti-war; what does it mean to remember?

I was blown away by this book. It's a truly very sad depiction of post-Arthurian Britain that sets your brain thinking about the ramifications of war, what it means to be at peace, and whether memory is always a good thing.

Personally, I think one of the strengths of this novel is that at no point does the premise or worldbuilding feel outlandish. It feels like stepping into a fairytale book, or potentially the aftermath of one, and living as the characters there do. Ishiguro has a gift for describing not only these desolate landscapes, but also for the inexplicable bond between strangers.

I cam away from it asking myself, what does it mean to have peace? Does how that peace was earned taint it? What does it mean to remember and is it better to remember or forget?

[jeanharlowseyebrows]

Supernatural, "Bloodlust" / Isaiah 49:2 (English Standard Version) / Succession / The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro

[smalltownfae]

Searching in the tags about the books I want to read might spoil me but so far I am just getting excited to read them because of killer quotes.

[violentdevotion]

the buried giant - kazuo ishiguro

[nagdabbit]

books! this is some of the stuff I've liked in the past couple of yrs.

Nobody is Talking About This, as already suggested

horror: Ring Shout - P. Djeli Clark. Black women fighting KKK but also there are weird alien things.

Camp Damascus - Chuck Tingle. queer woman fighting a church conversion camp but also there are weird demon things.

The Ballad of Black Tom - Victor Lavalle. this is a Lovecraft retelling set in 1920s Harlem so maybe too close to actual Lovecraft for you? but it definitely had me staring at the wall occasionally.

not horror, but weird: We Had to Remove this Post - Hanna Bervoets. super short and fucking WEIRD. about a woman who works doing quality control responding to reports for a twitteresque company.

not horror or weird, but goofy enough to possibly break a reading slump from sheer amusement: Kaiju Preservation Society - John Scalzi. Our hero (gender never given) gets a job working for a secret organization. It's basically Jurassic Park but make it kaiju and with less science and more jokes.

I also recently discovered a small queer indie press called Neon Hemlock and I've loved everything I've read from them so far so if you can find any of their stuff, I recommend! And they're almost all novellas so nothing really draggy.

fucking fuck yesssss thanj you and god bless im adding adding all of these to my reading list immediately

im so pumped todd ordered both camp damascus and bury your gays the other day, im so excited to read them! or try to at least if my brain cooperates

[llycaons]

what the fuck

[shiteatinggrin]

kazuo ishiguro the buried giant i need to bleach my eyeballs to read you with a fresh view

[torpublishinggroup]

Celebrate Pride with Tor Publishing Group!

The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang

Mountain outlaws on the margins of society, the Bandits of Liangshan proclaim a belief in justice—for women, for the downtrodden, for progressive thinkers a corrupt Empire would imprison or destroy. They’re also murderers, thieves, smugglers, and cutthroats. Together, they could bring down an empire. 

Now available in paperback!

Somewhere Beyond the Sea by TJ Klune

The long-awaited sequel to The House in the Cerulean Sea is a story of resistance, lovingly told, about the daunting experience of fighting for the life you want to live and doing the work to keep it. Welcome back to Marsyas Island—home to six magical and purportedly dangerous children. This is Arthur’s story.

The West Passage by @jpechacek

When the Guardian of the West Passage dies in her bed, the women of Grey Tower feed her to the crows and go back to their chores. No successor is named, and no hand takes up the fallen blade, so the West Passage—the ancient byways of the beast—goes unguarded. This is a weird and delightful journey across a deliriously medieval landscape where decay thrives in abundance and giant Ladies rule a palace the size of a city. 

Blood Debts by Terry J. Benton-Walker

On the thirtieth anniversary of the largest magical massacre in New Orleans history, Clement and Cristina Trudeau mourn their father and care for their sick mother. But their mother isn’t sick, they learn: She’s cursed. Cursed by a member of the same magic council over which she used to preside. Cursed by someone who will come for Clement and Cristina next. 

Now available in paperback!

Bury Your Gays by @drchucktingle

After so many years, Misha’s big Oscar moment is here. All he has to do? Kill off the gay characters in his long-running streaming series, “for the algorithm.” Misha refuses, but that’s hardly the end, because monsters from his old horror movie days have begun to step out from the silver screen and stalk him. 

The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo

The Cleric Chih accompanies a young bride to her wedding to Lord Guo, the aging ruler of a crumbling estate, but amid the elaborate courtesies and extravagant banquets, they realize something haunts the shadowed halls. As the big night nears close, Chih will learn that not all monsters dwell in shadows; some hide in plain sight. 

Remedial Magic by Melissa Marr

1) An unassuming librarian falls in love with a powerful witch. 

2) Previous librarian discovers she too is a witch…

3) …and that she must attend magical community college to learn how to save her new world from annihilation. 

Swordcrossed by @fahye

Part-time con artist / full-time charming menace Luca Piere didn’t expect to get blackmailed into teaching a chronically responsible merchant Matti how to wield a sword. He also didn’t expect to find his charge so inconveniently handsome, or to get so entangled in his tale of intrigue, sabotage, and matrimony. 

It’s important to read Swordcrossed because while you’re reading gay fiction, you can also study the blade.

Celebrate Pride with more titles from Tor Publishing Group here!

[lboereads]

September Reads

[odinsblog]

“I first started noticing the journalists dying on Instagram. I'm a journalist, I'm Arab, and I've reported on war. A big part of my community is other Arab journalists who do the same thing.

And when someone dies, news travels fast. Recently, I pulled up the list that the Committee to Protect Journalists has been keeping and looked at it for the first time. There are 95 journalists and media workers on it as of today.

Almost everyone on it is Palestinian. Scrolling through, I started to get angry. These were the people carrying the burden of documenting this whole war.

Israel is not allowing foreign journalists into Gaza, except on rare occasions with military escorts. These people's names are being buried in a giant list that keeps growing. What I want to do is lift some of them off the list for a moment and give you a glimpse of who they were and the work they made.

I'll start with Sadi Mansour. Sadi was the director of Al-Quds News Network, and he posted a 22-second video on November 18. That was a report from the war, but it also gave me a picture into his marriage.

Sadi's wearing his press vest and looks exhausted. He's explaining that cell service and the Internet keep getting cut off, and it's often impossible to text or call anyone, including his wife. So they've resorted to using handwritten letters to communicate while he's out reporting, sending them back and forth with neighbors or colleagues.

He ends the video with a picture of one of these letters from his wife. In it, she writes,

‘Me and the kids stayed up waiting for you until the morning, and you didn't come home. We were really sad.

I kept telling the kids, Look, he's coming. But you didn't show up. May God forgive you.

Come home tomorrow and eat with us. Do you want me to make you kebab or maybe kapse? Bring your friends with you, it's okay.

And give Azeez the battery to charge. What do you think about me sending you handwritten letters with messenger pigeons from now on? Ha ha ha.

I'm just kidding. I want to curse at you, but we're living in a war. Too bad.

Okay, I love you. Bye.’

A few hours after he shared that letter, Sadie and his co-worker Hassouna Saleem were at Sadie's home, when they were killed by an Israeli air strike that hit his house.

His wife and kids, who weren't there, survived.

Gaza is tiny, and the journalist community is really close. Reading the list, you can see all the connections between people. Like with Brahim Lafi.

Brahim was a photojournalist, one of the first journalists to die. He was killed while reporting on October 7. He was just 21, still new to journalism.

On his Instagram, you can see that in his posts just a few years ago, he was still practicing his photography, taking pictures of coffee cups and flowers. Then he started doing beautiful portraits and action shots. You can really feel him starting to become a journalist.

Clicking around on Instagram, I found a tribute post about Brahim from his co-worker Rushdie Sarraj. In this photo, Brahim staring intently at the back of a camera, his face lit up by the light from the viewfinder. He looks so young.

The caption reads, My assistant is gone. Brahim is gone. Rushdie himself was a beloved journalist and filmmaker.

And I know that because he's also on the list. He was killed just two weeks after Brahim. I read the tribute post to him too.

I saw this over and over again. Journalists posting tributes, who were then killed themselves soon after. And a tribute goes up for them.

And then the pattern continues.

Thank you.

Something else I saw over and over on the list, journalists later in the war who had become aware that they could be making their last reports. They'd say it at the beginning of their videos. And those were the hardest to watch, especially when it was true.

One video like that was posted by Ayat Hadduro. Ayat was a freelance journalist and video blogger. Her videos before the war covered a wide range from what I can tell, interviews about women in politics.

She even appeared in a commercial for ketchup-flavored chips. She clearly liked being in front of the camera. Once the war started, Ayat's pivoted to covering bombings and food shortages.

On November 20, she posted a video report from her home. You can hear the airstrikes hitting very close to where she is. It's scary.

‘This is likely my last video. Today, the occupation forces dropped phosphorus bombs on Beit Lahya area and frightening sound bombs. They dropped letters from the sky, ordering everyone to evacuate.

Everyone ran into the streets in the craziest way. No one knows where to go.

But everyone else has evacuated. They don't know where they're going. The situation is so scary.

What's happening is so tough, and may God have mercy on us.’

She was killed later that day.

Targeting journalists, in case you didn't know, is a war crime. So far, the Committee to Protect Journalists has found that three of the journalists on the list were explicitly targeted by the IDF, the Israeli military. Investigations by the Washington Post and Reuters, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations have also raised serious questions in these three cases.

And the Committee to Protect Journalists is investigating 10 other killings. When we reached out to the IDF for comments, they said, quote, the IDF has never, and will never, deliberately target journalists. That's the answer they always give in these situations.

Meanwhile, dozens of seasoned reporters have fled Gaza. Journalists who worked for Al Jazeera, the BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, Agence France-Presse. So many media offices were demolished in Israeli airstrikes that the Committee to Protect Journalists stopped counting.

It's not just individual lives that have been destroyed. It's an entire infrastructure.

Thank you.

The name on the list that was hardest for me to look at was Issam Abdullah, because I'd crossed paths with him once. Issam was a Lebanese journalist, a video journalist for Reuters for many, many years. He had just won an award for coverage of Ukraine.

I'm Lebanese and still report there sometimes, and I'd worked with Issam a couple of summers ago. He helped me film a sort of random story in Beirut. I was interviewing this entrepreneur who had started a sperm freezing company after an accident where he spilled a tray of hot coffee on his private area, burning himself.

I know, ridiculous. It was a really silly shoot. Right after we said cut and started to rap, Issam started this whole bit about being in his late 30s, reconsidering his own sperm quality and everything he now realized he was doing to hurt it, and no one could stop laughing.

It was a really good day that felt good to remember and to remember him that way. Issam was killed by the IDF on October 13. His death was one of the three that the Committee to Protect Journalists has identified as a targeted killing.

He was fired upon by an Israeli tank while standing in an empty field on the Lebanon-Israel border with a small group of other journalists. Everyone was wearing press vests with cameras out. They were covering the Hezbollah part of this war.

A few other journalists were injured in the attack, which was captured on video. The IDF says they were responding to firing from Hezbollah, not targeting the journalists. But multiple investigations, including by Reuters, the United Nations, Amnesty International and the AFP, found no evidence of any firing from the location of the journalists before the IDF shot at them.

The journalists in the group and video footage confirmed that there was no military activity near them. I had only met Issam once, barely knew him, but it affected me so much when he died. I know that he understood the risks of his job, but somehow it still felt so random and unfair that he would be struck down like that, following the rules, wearing his press vest and helmet, and a pack of reporters on a sunny day in an open field.

I find myself thinking about him all the time. His last Instagram post was commemorating another journalist, this iconic reporter Shereen Abou Aql who had been killed by the IDF. When I first saw that post in October, I thought how ironic because a week later, Isam also was killed by the IDF.

But then, after spending time reading the list, I realized how common this had become. I still haven't finished going through the list and looking up the people on it. I keep finding things that stick with me, like the funny way this one radio host would cut off a caller who was rambling on for too long.

A tweet from reporter Al-Abdallah that quoted Sylvia Plath. It read, What ceremony of wars can patch the havoc? I'm going to keep going down the list, even though this story is over now.

Just for myself. My own way of bearing witness. Which is, in the end, all that these journalists were trying to do.”

—DANA BALLOUT, The 95. Dana sifts through a very long list—the list of journalists killed in the Israel-Hamas war, and comes back with five small fragments of the lives of the people on it. Dana is a Lebanese-American, Emmy-nominated documentary producer.

[clockwayswrites]

'Birdritch' part 3

Someday I might post this not at fuck all in the morning and proof read it first, but today is not that day! Masterpost Art

-

“Pamela—”

“Don’t ‘Pamela’ me during a fight!”

“But that’s the thing!” Nightwing said, keeping his hands raised even as he motioned with them. “This isn’t a fight. I get that you were upset—”

“They were trying to bury a body in my park!” Pamela hissed.

“And we stopped them!”

“You know,” Red Hood started from where he was sitting on top of the bound criminals, “you could have just thought of it as free fertilizer.”

Nightwing gave up and buried his face n his gloved hands. “Hood, you’re not really helping.”

“’Course I’m helping.,” Hood said as he inspected his gloved fingers. “I’m keeping the baddies pinned. Red is the one who’s not helping.”

“I’m keeping a birds eye view on things,” Red said into the comms. Which really was a good thing, considering. Like, what? “Speaking of birds, there’s one the size of a large SUV headed this way. Or at least it mostly looks like a bird.”

“What do you mean it mostly looks like a bird?” Nightwing asked.

“Fuck that,” Hood cut in, “what do you mean the size of an SUV?”

Pamela crossed her arms, hip jutted out defiantly. “What it wasn’t me. I don’t deal with animals, you know that.”

“I mean it’s got two legs and a beak…ish thing? It looks like some sort of water bird. Which I guess could explain it? Like, we know Gotham Harbor has too many weird chemicals in it. Maybe someone emptied one too many things right on a totally normal bird and— oh, it’s glowing too.”

“Well great,” Hood managed right before, with a thundering step, the bird thing broke through the vines.

The tuft of green feathers on its chest seemed to almost glow from how bright the color was, but Red hadn’t been wrong. The bird thing really was glowing, a pale cyan color that seemed to shift and ripple and pull away from the white crest and mostly black body of the bird.

“See,” Red said, motioning from his perch on the lamppost, “an SUV sized bird like thing.”

The bird thing’s head tilted and Red and the very sudden, very certain sense that all of the creature’s focus was suddenly on him.

“Red,” Hood rumbled as he slowly pulled out out a gun, “I think you better stop moving.”

“You can’t shoot it,” Nightwing hissed.

“If it tries to eat Red, I sure as fuck am shooting it,” Red growled back.

“Or I could just entangle it with my vines,” Pamela said. She crossed her arms when they all turned to look at her and examined her nails. “What? I am not going just stand here and let a giant bird eat my favorite little birds.”

“Aw,” Nightwing cooed, you do care!”

Pamela rolled her eyes and flicked the hand she had been looking at. One of the massive vines broke free from the ground and whipped towards the bird thing at a speed that was almost hard to track.

And stopped.

Short.

Held in the clawed grasp of the creature. The long neck reared back and the bird thing opened its beak and squawked in offense.

“Uh, guys?” Red said, his voice quiet now.

“Yeah, I’m seeing it too,” Nightwing answered.

“Why the fuck does it have three legs?” Hood asked.

[amiableness]

Remus Lupin x Fem!Reader ☼ 659 words

"Y/N, love, what should we name him?" James asks curiously from his seat beside you.

For the past twenty minutes, you've been nestled on the couch between James and Remus, completely engrossed in the romance novel cradled in your hands. The story is reaching a pivotal moment, and your anticipation grows as the main characters edge closer to acknowledging their long-held feelings for each other.

James's right arm rests comfortably behind your shoulders, a reassuring presence, while Remus quietly turns the pages of his own book, the room enveloped in a serene hush. Despite the delay of Sirius and Peter, you hope they'll at least allow you to savor this crucial juncture in your literary escape.

"Name what—" you begin, turning to look at James curiously. But a sharp shriek escapes your lips as you spot a fairly giant spider crawling across his left hand. Your book slips from your fingers, forgotten, as adrenaline kicks in. 

In pure desperation, you scramble across the couch towards Remus, your movements quick and almost frantic. With adrenaline coursing through your veins, you find yourself in his lap, straddling his thighs. Remus, caught off guard, drops his book with a soft thud, his arms reacting instinctively to encircle you. His solid and reassuring arms pull you close against his chest, your own chest pressing firmly against his sturdy torso while you loop your arms around his neck for added security.

You watch James with wide eyes and parted lips, a sense of panic creeping in as he flashes you a teasing grin. You know he's about to tease you— it's inevitable.

“You don’t want to hold him? I can just plop him right-” James extends his left arm towards you, his tone teasing. 

Your reaction is immediate—a gasp that turns heads in the room, “Don’t you fucking dare!” You cling to Remus all the more, your fear palpable as you avoid any closer contact with the unwelcome intruder.

You and James both know there isn’t much of a threat behind your words. It’s hard to come across as intimidating when you’re buried in Remus's arms, seeking refuge from James's teasing.

"You can't keep running to Remus every time you have a problem." James teasingly huffs out, recalling the countless times Remus has scolded him for teasing you.

"Yes, she can." Remus asserts firmly, his voice carrying a hint of protectiveness.

"I promise he won’t bite." James continues, carefully adjusting his hands, one in front of the other, to let the spider crawl freely.

"Mate, leave it alone." Remus grumbles, adjusting your position so you nestle closer into him. Your cheek finds a comfortable spot on Remus’s shoulder. You consider giving James a defiant glare, but then remember he could easily toss the insect in your direction.

"I’m just teasing her. She knows I’m just messing around." James protests.

“James, leave her the fuck alone." Remus snaps sharply. James quickly complies, dropping his hand towards the floor and shaking off the spider. You watch with tense shoulders as the arachnid scurries off towards a dark corner. James glances nervously at Remus, guilt prickling in his stomach as he meets Remus's searing glare.

He knows better than to push Remus when he’s agitated, especially when it involves the girl he's so desperately into.

Several minutes passed in silence before James broke it.

"The spider's gone, love. You can get off his lap now. I'm sure Remus wants to go back to reading his book alone." He teases with a mischievous glint in his eyes, throwing a playful jab your way as he eyes how content you look being held by Remus.

"If Remus doesn't mind, I think I'll stay right where I am." You retort with a hint of defiance, glancing at Remus for confirmation. He responds by pulling you closer, his arm wrapping protectively around you, and giving James a pointed stare that silently asserts your decision to stay put.

That settled that.