#read: i was an english major but there are several books on goodreads that only i and grady hendrix have read

[goddessofthedawn]

honoring the pretension inherent in me by having a commonplace book but the first entry is lyrics from cobra starship's "prostitution is the world's oldest profession (and i, dear madam, am a professional)"

[casual-eumetazoa]

Tumblr Top 50 Books of 2022 - thoughts from a reader and writer

I was bored and tired on Wednesday so I did this for fun. Don’t take it too seriously and don’t mind me sounding cynical at times.

intro

I am a writer obsessed with book publishing, both traditional and indie. I’ve been trying to understand the trends in the modern book world for the last couple years and I have some info from the querying/trying to get published side of the deal. I am also a reader of books that don’t seem to fit modern trends very much. I both read and write primarily in 2 genres: science fiction and 20th-21st century literary. I thought looking at the books popular on tumblr, a social media that does not fit many online molds, would be fun and informative.

methods

I took the tumblr top 50 books of 2022 list and copypasted it to excel. I cleaned up the data and added three columns to the original title and author: genre, age category, and year of publication. I got this data from goodreads and wikipedia.

 Several important notes on this methodology: genre is a fuzzy category and many books on this list would fit multiple labels. I tried to stick with the most characteristic, e.g. listed first in goodreads or listed most often on google. For books before the 20th century, I labeled them as literary even though they also have their genres, e.g. Pride and Prejudice I labeled as literary though it is also a romance. There were a couple books that seemed in between YA and middle grade, and again I tried to pick the most often listed category. Lastly, Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad appear on this list, somehow, and in order not to mess up my year of publication stats, I listed year of pub as the year it was translated into English and published in Europe. 

Then I calculated super basic average and count descriptive stats. I also found some info about the tumblr users to inform my conclusions. 

results

the age category split is pretty even between YA and adult: 28 adult, 20 YA, 2 middle grade

it is exactly 5:5 adult and YA in the top 10

however, if we only look at books published after 2010, YA jumps to above 50% (14 out of 23)

fantasy is by far the most popular genre, 26 books out of 50, 16 out of 23 published from 2010 (not counting science fantasy)

fantasy YA specifically is the most popular combination, with 11 books out of 23 published from 2010 being in that category

there is only 1 book on the whole list that can be classified as pure sci-fi: 1984 by George Orwell, published in 1949 - though there are a few science fantasy books on the list, e.g. The Locked Tomb series

there are also a few “classics” (aka literary on my list), 2 thrillers (specifically dark academia books), and 2 contemporaries - the rest of the genres are 1 book per category

the average publication year of a tumblr top 50 book is 1960

books published after 2010 are less than 50% of the list, and there are less than 10 books published in the last 5 years - out of them 1 book that hasn’t even been published yet

the vast majority of these books are not what I would call a “tumblr-specific fandom”, with the exception of maybe The Locked Tomb (though it is very popular on Twitter) and some classics that have seen a resurgence of popularity due to chapter-by-email fandoms

discussion

In my opinion, tumblr trends are pretty typical of modern online and industry trends in general. First of all, a note on books’ popularity as a whole: it’s not great. The top post in the top book of 2022 sits under 1k notes, while the top posts of the top TV show of 2022 range in the above 5k notes. Also, the top 50 books list itself was on page 6 out of 7 in the tumblr fandom review. Despite common opinion, millenials and gen Z actually read more than some previous generations, especially because by far the bulk of all readers are children and teenagers. However, books are obviously less popular than other media. I’d guess that more people on tumblr read fanfic of TV shows and movies than original books, even when those properties are based on books. This is not a criticism or a moral judgement, but simply my intuition about the state of media popularity.

It is also not surprising that, by far, the most popular categories of books on tumblr are YA fantasy and old classic. From querying experience, I know that YA is the absolute king of books. A querying YA author has an above 30% chance to be agented eventually, while e.g. a science fiction author has around 3%. In personal experience of going to bookshops multiple times a week, YA, especially YA fantasy, absolutely dominates the shelves. Fantasy itself is much more popular than almost any other genre: it often gets lumped with sci-fi and horror, which leads to the shelf/area being 80% fantasy and 20% old sci-fi classics and Stephen King. I’ve no idea when and how fantasy defeated science fiction so brutally, but it makes me sad. No beef with fantasy readers or writers, I just wish there was space for all of us.

The average publication year is also not surprising, considering trad pub makes way more money publishing old classics than new books. As I’ve said, the chapters by email trend raised their popularity even further. In general, it takes a book a while to get popular. With the exception of The Locked Tomb, which appears to be an outlier on almost every aspect, the top 10 is dominated by books older than 10 years at least.

The popularity of YA surprises me to some extent, considering it is, by definition, a category aimed at teenagers. Again, despite common belief, tumblr demographics are much more skewed towards people aged 20-35. My guess is that people who read YA as teenagers continue to read it in their 20s because they know they like it and there’s a great abundance of new books. In comparison, middle grade rarely remains popular among adults. On the other hand, the prevalence of classics and what I would call politically/socially important books like Maus, 1984, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, etc, tells me that there is also a fair amount of people who read for reflection/education. Not that those books are not enjoyable reads or that there is a good or bad way to read, I’m just curious whether these are separate demographics or whether an average tumblr person who posts about books goes between Percy Jackson and The Illiad on their reading list.

Among all these trends, as I’ve said, The Locked Tomb appears a huge outlier, considering its main ship also made it to the top 100 ships of 2022. I don’t know what it is - the lesbians, the necromancy, the sword fighting - but this book just broke through all the YA fantasy and became like A Proper Fandom. I am currently reading Gideon the Ninth because a few people told me it sounds like a good comp title from the novel I am currently querying and, around 100 pages in, I personally think it’s the memes. Taking notes...

conclusion

Despite tumblr seeming like the quirky teenage girl of webbed sites, its reading trends are somewhat typical to the modern industry. And what is typical of the modern industry is the dominance of super old titles, big names, YA in general and YA fantasy in particular, and a great difficulty of new books to become popular. Of course this data is limited to 50 books (I would love to look at the top 200 for example) so obviously it’s gonna be dominated by big names and classics, but I really thought at least the top 50 to 30 would look a bit more diverse. Oh well, I guess I’ll carry on in the querying trenches.

[coquelicoq]

i finished 1Q84 last night and am now reading some reviews and it's funny because there are LOTS of negative reviews (this is a polarizing book!), but most of the things those reviews are complaining about i actually liked, and the things i didn't like i haven't really seen anyone mention. this goodreads review amuses me and is 100% true but also only one of these things affected my enjoyment of the book (the comment about sexual assault; that's the main thing in the book that i took major issue with and the reviewer summed it up very well).

it's true that there's a lot of repetition and monotony, that the sex scenes are weirdly written, that the worldbuilding is super duper ambiguous, but those were all the point. it was repetitive and monotonous to a purpose. also, it was at the exact same time a total pageturner! that to me is an accomplishment in itself. the monotony/repetition is what allowed the book to play with surrealism (because the surreal aspects were directly juxtaposed with the hyperrealism of mundanity) and suspense (because obviously it forced us to wait longer for major plot events to happen. in this way it is the polar opposite of battle of the linguist mages lol). (and i do wonder if part of the reason the book was better received in japan vs. internationally has to do with the fact that the original was published as three separate books which the english translation combined into one 925-page behemoth.)

the straightforward and at times clunky style at the sentence level, another thing i've seen complaints about, provided the backdrop for several moments of laugh-out-loud humor that would have been drowned out in a different style. the protagonist is straightforward and at times awkward in various ways; the writing style reflects and contributes to her characterization, which is very interesting to me in 3rd-person narration that switches POVs.

the sex scenes are truly atrocious as sex scenes (one of them was nominated for Literary Review's Bad Sex Award and i agree it was completely deserved), but they are not in the book to be sex scenes! they're serving other purposes. you may not like what those purposes are (i didn't, often), but it's missing the point to read them expecting them to be sexy.

when i first finished the book i was disappointed by all the unanswered questions, but as i thought about it more i realized that if the book had given definitive answers, it would have been a different book with something different to say. the ambiguity suits the book that it is. if the book were shorter i would be tempted to reread it just to come up with my own answers. that's a sign of a certain type of successful worldbuilding (which may not be everyone's cup of tea!).

a lot of reviews (even negative ones) have mentioned liking the love story. that aspect of the book was one that left me utterly cold in a way that i don't think it was intended to (we were probably supposed to like the love story but i did not). it didn't work for me, which may mean that it was poorly written, but not necessarily. and notably, i was still very invested in the suspense of whether they would meet again, because the flow of the narrative was strong enough to make me care about that even though i didn't care about them being in love!

i also didn't like how often the POV characters had a thought and then just somehow knew that it was the truth, no matter how farfetched or illogical - i realize this was connected to the fantastical elements of the worldbuilding, but it seemed facile to me. i haven't seen anyone else complain about that but it's probably the biggest issue i have with the craft of the writing. the other narrative elements i didn't like i can pretty much see what they were doing and respect that it's my personal preference coming to play, but that aspect just seemed unintentionally clunky.

it's totally valid if someone doesn't want to read monotony or bad sex scenes or worldbuilding that doesn't answer most of the questions it asks, but that's a personal preference; it doesn't necessarily say anything about the author's craft. "i didn't like this" is a valid review but "this is a piece of crap because i didn't like it" is less of one imo. it could also be a piece of crap! but that's much harder to support. i do find myself wondering how valid or applicable my own opinion is here given my aforementioned recent history of reading extremely long and bloated novels...maybe you have to spend several months doing that first in order to be in the mindset to enjoy this book lol. in any case, i will be recommending it to exactly no one.

thanks to some extremely wordy 19th-century authors i won't name, my baseline for book length has become so skewed. just finished my current library books and have a few days before i can go to the library to get my holds so i was like, hmm, what should i read in the meantime? how about...this 900-page novel i found on the side of the road?

[whimsicaldragonette]

Blog Tour & Arc Review: Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn

Welcome to the Killers of a Certain Age book tour with Berkley Publishing Group. (This blog tour post is also posted on my Wordpress book review blog Whimsical Dragonette.)

Order

Add to Goodreads

Publishing Date: September 6, 2022

Synopsis:

Older women often feel invisible, but sometimes that's their secret weapon. They've spent their lives as the deadliest assassins in a clandestine international organization, but now that they're sixty years old, four women friends can't just retire - it's kill or be killed in this action-packed thriller. Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie have worked for the Museum, an elite network of assassins, for forty years. Now their talents are considered old-school and no one appreciates what they have to offer in an age that relies more on technology than people skills. When the foursome is sent on an all-expenses paid vacation to mark their retirement, they are targeted by one of their own. Only the Board, the top-level members of the Museum, can order the termination of field agents, and the women realize they've been marked for death. Now to get out alive they have to turn against their own organization, relying on experience and each other to get the job done, knowing that working together is the secret to their survival. They're about to teach the Board what it really means to be a woman--and a killer--of a certain age.

My Rating: ★★★★

*Author Bio, my review, and favorite quotes below the cut.

Author Bio:

New York Times and USA Today bestselling novelist Deanna Raybourn is a 6th-generation native Texan. She graduated with a double major in English and history from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Married to her college sweetheart and the mother of one, Raybourn makes her home in Virginia. Her novels have been nominated for numerous awards including two RT Reviewers’ Choice awards, the Agatha, two Dilys Winns, a Last Laugh, three du Mauriers, and most recently the 2019 Edgar Award for Best Novel. She launched a new Victorian mystery series with the 2015 release of A CURIOUS BEGINNING, featuring intrepid butterfly-hunter and amateur sleuth, Veronica Speedwell. Veronica has returned in several more adventures, most recently AN IMPOSSIBLE IMPOSTOR, book seven, which released in early 2022. Deanna's first contemporary novel, KILLERS OF A CERTAIN AGE, about four female assassins on the cusp of retirement publishes in September 2022.

My Review:

This book was very good. I wasn’t sure what to expect, having never read a Deanna Raybourn book, and I was pleasantly surprised. The story whizzed along at a good clip, the characters were for the most part well-developed and interesting. The pacing was breathless as they raced against time to carry out heists and murder the men who are trying to murder them.

I came to really appreciate Billie, as it was in her POV for the most part, but I did feel that the other three women blurred together a bit and weren’t as distinct as I would have liked.

I very much approve of the casual inclusion of LGBT+ characters and relationships. That always makes a book feel much more friendly, and it was done so naturally that I barely even registered it.

I also really really appreciate that the main characters were 'women of a certain age' and (despite being expert assassins) they felt very authentic. There were many mentions of the plans having to be adapted to their older bodies. Despite it, they still kicked ass. They were competent and capable AND dealing with things like hot flashes and muscles and stamina that weren't what they once were. It made for such a nice contrast to the usual teenagers/twenty-something protagonists I usually read about.

I wasn’t sure at first if I was going to like it. There were a few issues I had with it:

The placement of the ‘past’ sections was sometimes jarring and I occasionally got confused about where and when they were. I did become more used to this as I went along, but it took me out of the flow of the story on more than one occasion.

The action scenes - which, to be fair, were a large chunk of the book - were just a tad too clinical. They read almost like newspaper reports. I don’t know if this is just a style common to thrillers - I haven’t read many of them. I feel like the simple language and not-flowery writing are a staple of the genre, but I’m not sure about the descriptions of fight scenes. As the book progressed this bothered me less and less, however, so it might have improved or I might have gotten used to it.

One thing that did bother me consistently through the book was that it was a tad vulgar for my tastes. I do appreciate the bluntness with which things not normally talked about are discussed among the women, but there were so many instances of descriptions of sexual harassment from their targets (which they had to put up with with a smile which definitely made the targets unsympathetic very quickly). Even more off-putting to me (and more common within the story) was the way that the (many) murders were described. Not just how they looked, but how they felt, how they sounded, how they smelled… I get that they are assassins and yes, they do kill a lot of people over the course of the book, but I just didn’t want that much familiarity with the deaths.

I did appreciate the very feminist slant to it all, and the way the men’s casual sexism was used to increase support for the women. Also the way that the four of them used the ‘old women are invisible’ idea to their advantage in order to further their schemes.

The story was very compelling and I found it difficult to put down. I would also probably read it again and will definitely be recommending it to others.

*Thanks to NetGalley and Berkley for providing an e-arc for review.

Favorite Quotes:

And every job was a chance to prove Darwin’s simple maxim. Adapt or die. We adapted; they died.

---

Three old women, nodding their heads like the witches in Macbeth. I’d known them for two-thirds of my life, those impossible old bitches. And I would save them or die trying.

---

Women are every bit as capable of killing as men.

[dillydedalus]

january reading

why does january always feel like it’s 3 months long. anyway here’s what i read in january, feat. poison experts with ocd, ants in your brain, old bolsheviks getting purged, and mountweazels. 

city of lies, sam hawke (poison wars #1) this is a perfectly nice fantasy novel about jovan, who serves as essentially a secret guard against poisoning for his city state’s heir and is forced to step up when his uncle (also a secret poison guard) and the ruler are both killed by an unknown poison AND also the city is suddenly under a very creepy siege (are these events related? who knows!) this is all very fine & entertaining & there are some fun ideas, but also... the main character has ocd and SAME HAT SAME HAT. also like the idea of having a very important, secret and potentially fatal job that requires you to painstakingly test everything the ruler/heir is consuming WHILE HAVING OCD is like... such a deliciously sadistic concept. amazing. 3/5

my heart hemmed in, marie ndiaye (translated from french by jordan stump) a strange horror-ish tale in which two married teachers, bastions of upper-middle-class respectability and taste, suddenly find themselves utterly despised by everyone around them, escalating until the husband is seriously injured. through several very unexpected twists, it becomes clear that the couple’s own contempt for anyone not fitting into their world and especially nadia’s hostility and shame about her (implied to be northern african) ancestry is the reason for their pariah status. disturbing, surprising, FUCKED UP IF TRUE (looking back, i no longer really know what i mean by that). 4/5

xenogenesis trilogy (dawn/adulthood rites/imago), octavia e. butler octavia butler is incapable of writing anything uninteresting and while i don’t always completely vibe with her stuff, it’s always fascinating & thought-provoking. this series combines some of her favourite topics (genetic manipulation, alien/human reproduction, what is humanity) into a tale of an alien species, the oankali, saving some human survivors from the apocalypse and beginning a gene-trading project with them, integrating them into their reproductive system and creating mixed/’construct’ generations with traits from both species. and like, to me, this was uncomfortably into the biology = destiny thing & didn’t really question the oankali assertion that humans were genetically doomed to hierarchical behaviour & aggression (& also weirdly straight for a book about an alien species with 3 genders that engages in 5-partner-reproduction with humans), so that angle fell flat for me for the most part, altho i suppose i do agree that embracing change, even change that comes at a cost, is better than clinging to an unsustainable (& potentially destructive) purity. where i think the series is most interesting is in its exploration of consent and in how far consent is possible in extremely one-sided power dynamics (curiously, while the oankali condemn and seem to lack the human drive for hierarchy, they find it very easy to abuse their position of power & violate boundaries & never question the morality of this. in this, the first book, focusing on a human survivor first encountering the oankali and learning of their project, is the most interesting, as lilith as a human most explicitly struggles with her position - would her consent be meaningful? can she even consent when there is a kind of biochemical dependence between humans and their alien mates? the other two books, told from the perspectives of lilith’s constructed/mixed children, continue discussing themes of consent, autonomy and power dynamics, but i found them less interesting the further they moved from human perspectives. on the whole: 2.5/5

love & other thought experiments, sophie ward man, we love a pierre menard reference. anyway. this is a novel in stories, each based (loosely) on a thought experiment, about (loosely) a lesbian couple and their son arthur, illness and grief, parenthood, love, consciousness and perception, alternative universes, and having an ant in your brain. it is thoroughly delightful & clever, but goes for warmth and humanity (or ant-ity) over intellectual games (surprising given that it is all about thought experiments - but while they are a nice structuring device i don’t think they add all that much). i haven’t entirely worked out my feelings about the ending and it’s hard to discuss anyway given the twists and turns this takes, but it's a whole lot of fun. 4/5

a general theory of oblivion, josé eduardo agualusa (tr. from portuguese by daniel hahn) interesting little novel(la) set in angola during and after the struggle for independence, in which a portuguese woman, ludo, with extreme agoraphobia walls herself into her apartment to avoid the violence and chaos (but also just... bc she has agoraphobia) with a involving a bunch of much more active characters and how they are connected to her to various degrees. i didn’t like the sideplot quite as much as ludo’s isolation in her walled-in flat with her dog, catching pigeons on the balcony and writing on the walls. 3/5

cassandra at the wedding, dorothy baker phd student cassandra returns home attend (sabotage) her twin sister judith’s wedding to a young doctor whose name she refuses to remember, believing that her sister secretly wants out. cass is a mess, and as a shift to judith’s perspective reveals, definitely wrong about what judith wants and maybe a little delusional, but also a ridiculously compelling narrator, the brilliant but troubled contrast to judith’s safer conventionality. on the whole, cassandra’s narrative voice is the strongest feature of a book i otherwise found a bit slow & a bit heavy on the quirky family. fav line is when cass, post-character-development, plans to “take a quick look at [her] dumb thesis and see if it might lead to something less smooth and more revolting, or at least satisfying more than the requirements of the University”. 3/5

the office of historical corrections, danielle evans a very solid collection of realist short stories (+ the titular novella), mainly dealing with racism, (black) womanhood, relationships between women, and anticolonial/antiracist historiography. while i thought all the stories were well-done and none stood out as weak or an unnecessary inclusion, there also weren’t any that really stood out to me. 3/5

sonnenfinsternis, arthur koestler (english title: darkness at noon) (audio) you know what’s cool about this book? when i added it to my goodreads tbr in 2012, i would have had to read it in translation as the german original was lost during koestler’s escape from the nazis, but since then, the original has been rediscovered and republished. yet another proof that leaving books on your tbr for ages is a good thing actually. anyway. this is a story about the stalinist purges, told thru old bolshevik rubashov, who, after serving the Party loyally for years & doing his fair share of selling people out for the Party, is arrested for ~oppositional activities. in jail and during his interrogations, rubashov reflects on the course the Party has taken and his own part (and guilt) in that, and the way totalitarianism has eaten up and poisoned even the most commendable ideals the Party once held (and still holds?), the course of history and at what point the end no longer justifies the means. it’s brilliant, rubashov is brilliant and despicable, i’m very happy it was rediscovered. 5/5

heads of the colored people, nafissa thompson-spires another really solid short story collection, also focused on the experiences of black people in america (particularly the black upper-middle class), black womanhood and black relationships, altho with a somewhat more satirical tone than danielle evans’s collection. standouts for me were the story in letters between the mothers of the only black girls at a private school, a story about a family of fruitarians, and a story about a girl who fetishises her disabled boyfriend(s). 3.5/5

pedro páramo, juan rulfo (gernan transl. by dagmar ploetz) mexican classic about a rich and abusive landowner (the titular pedro paramo) and the ghost town he leaves behind - quite literally, as, when his son tries to find his father, the town is full of people, quite ready to talk shit about pedro, but they are all dead. it’s an interesting setting with occasionally vivid writing, but the skips in time and character were kind of confusing and i lost my place a lot. i’d be interested in reading rulfo’s other major work, el llano en llamas. 2.5/5

verse für zeitgenossen, mascha kaléko short collection of the poems kaléko, a jewish german poet, wrote while in exile in the united states in the 30-40s, as well as some poems written after the end of ww2. kaléko’s voice is witty, but at turns also melancholy or satirical. as expected i preferred the pieces that directly addressed the experience of exile (”sozusagen ein mailied” is one of my favourite exillyrik pieces). 3/5

the harpy, megan hunter yeah this was boooooooring. the cover is really cool & the premise sounded intriguing (women gets cheated on, makes deal with husband that she is allowed to hurt him three times in revenge, women is also obsessed with harpies: female revenge & female monsters is my jam) but it’s literally so dull & trying so hard to be deep. 1.5/5

the liar’s dictionary, eley williams this is such a delightful book, from the design (those marbled endpapers? yes) to the preface (all about what a dictionary is/could be), to the chapter headings (A-Z words, mostly relating to lies, dishonesty, etc in some way or another, containing at least one fictitious entry), to the dual plots (intern at new edition of a dictionary in contemporary england checking the incomplete old dictionary for mountweazels vs 1899 london with the guy putting the mountweazels in), to williams’s clear joy about words and playing with them. there were so many lines that made me think about how to translate them, which is always a fun exercise. 3.5/5

catherine the great & the small, olja knežević (tr. from montenegrin by ellen elias-bursać, paula gordon) coming-of-age-ish novel about katarina from montenegro, who grows up in  titograd/podgorica and belgrad in the 70s/80s, eventually moving to london as an adult. to be honest while there are some interesting aspects in how this portrays yugoslavia and conflicts between the different parts of yugoslavia, i mostly found this a pretty sloggy slog of misery without much to emotionally connect to, which is sad bc i was p excited for it :(. 2/5

the decameron project: 29 new stories from the pandemic, anthology a collection of short stories written during covid lockdown (and mostly about covid/lockdown in some way). they got a bunch of cool authors, including margaret atwood, edwidge danticat, rachel kushner ... it’s an interesting project and the stories are mostly pretty good, but there wasn’t one that really stood out to me as amazing. i also kinda wish more of the stories had diverged more from covid/lockdown thematically bc it got a lil repetitive tbh. 2/5

[awed-frog]

Since March, I have been sending discreet messages to authors of young adult fiction. I approached 24 people, in several countries, all writing in English. In total, 15 authors replied, of whom 11 agreed to talk to me, either by email or on the phone. Two subsequently withdrew, in one case following professional advice. Two have received death threats and five would only talk if I concealed their identity. This is not what normally happens when you ask writers for an interview.

[An] author I will call Chris is white, queer and disabled. Chris has generally found the YA community friendly and supportive during a career spanning several books, but something changed when they announced plans for a novel about a character from another culture. Later, Chris would discover that an angry post about the book had appeared anonymously on Tumblr, directing others to their website. At the time, Chris only knew that their blog and email were being flooded with up to 100 abusive messages a day.

“These ranged from people telling me that … I was a sick pervert for tainting [their] story with my corrupt, westernised ideas,” Chris says, “to people saying [I] had no right to appropriate [their] experiences for [my] own benefit and I must immediately stop work. Some emails and comments consisted of just four-letter words.” There were threats of beatings and sexual assault. One message made the threat of a group “coming to my house in the middle of the night, and breaking in so that they could give me a lethal overdose”. Some messages came through Goodreads, although Chris does not know if they were linked to the main YA community. The “vast majority”, and all of the most violent threats, “came from an ideology that I would identify as left”, Chris says, and every message made the same demand. “Stop writing this. Don’t write this. You can’t write this. You’re not allowed … ”

Reading stuff like this is truly disheartening, and I think a reminder that we should all stop and search our souls once in a while. Because being ‘on the right side’ doesn’t make you right all the time. And when I see what’s going with a fringe of the US left, and how it’s slowly spreading to Europe, I’m genuinely pissed off and afraid. I do not want to be caught in the middle between a right-wing that’s becoming completely demented and - whatever this is. We should make our voice heard before it’s too late.

[witchybooks]

55 BOOKISH QUESTIONS (THAT YOU LIKELY DON’T CARE ABOUT)

I found this questionnaire here

1. Favorite childhood book: Hmmm I didn’t read much when i was a kid. But I’d have to say i loved the Magic Tree House series. That series was amazing when i was a kid.

2. What are you reading right now? I just started Incubus Dreams by Laurel K. Hamilton. But i just finished reading Kiki’s delivery service.

3. What books do you have on request at the library? To Sleep in a sea if stars by Christopher Paolini. Sadly i have to wait eight weeks before i can get it. *sad face*

4. Bad book habit: Hmmm I’d guess i’d have to say that sometimes i check out too many ebooks from the library and sometimes never get to them. Oops.

5. What do you currently have checked out at the library? Nothing. I haven’t been able to go to the library.

6. Do you have an e-reader? No. I want one and will get one eventually but for now i use my ipad.

7. Do you prefer to read one book at a time, or several at once? I usually read about one or two books at a time. It really just depends on my reading mood.

8. Have your reading habits changed since starting a blog? No not really. I still read a majority adult fantasy. 

9.Least favorite book you read this year: I’d say Storm Front by Jim Butcher. I just really didn’t like it.

10. Favorite book I’ve read this year: The Laughing Corpse by Laurel K. Hamilton. It was so cool. 

11. How often do you read out of your comfort zone? Not very often. Just because most of the time i read out of my comfort zone i end up not enjoying what i’m reading. But recently I started reading some science fiction and i might be getting into this genre. 

12. What is your reading comfort zone? Fantasy in general but more adult fantasy. :) 

13. Can you read on the bus? I don’t normally take a bus so...no. lol

14. Favorite place to read? My bed or outside under my big maple tree.

15. What’s your policy on book lending? No one but two people are allowed to borrow my books. But they don’t get to borrow my favorites. I’ve had too many bad experiences with people borrowing them.

16. Do you dogear your books? Occasionally if i don’t have a bookmark but normally i use a bookmark.

17. Do you write notes in the margins of your books? No

18. Do you break/crack the spine of your books? only massmarket paperbacks. I find them so hard to read.

19. What is your favorite language to read? Umm English. I am learning french right now so eventually i would love to read in french. 

20. What makes you love a book? The Characters and the plot. 

21. What will inspire you to recommend a book? If I loved it and think the appeal extends to the person or group of people I’m recommending it to.

22. Favorite genre: Adult Fantasy. 

23. Genre you rarely read (but wish you did): General Fiction. A lot of the plots sound interesting but i just have a hard time getting into them. 

24. Favorite Biography: None lol 

25. Have you ever read a self-help book? (And, was it actually helpful?) I had to for school in 9th grade. It was so boring. 

26. Favorite Cookbook: Do restaurant menus count? They should really count.

27. Most inspirational book you’ve read this year (fiction or non-fiction): I really don’t know honestly.

28. Favorite reading snack: Pretzels and Soda or peperoni slices. 

29. Name a case in which hype ruined your reading experience: The Bridge Kingdom. I was expecting too much from it. 

30. How often do you agree with the critics about about a book? I’ve never really payed attention. 

31. How do you feel about giving bad/negative reviews? I feel bad, especially when it’s a book i really didn’t like. But at the same time ba reviews do come with the territory of publishing or releasing art.

32. If you could read in a foreign language, which language would you choose? French. 

33. Most intimidating book I’ve read: I really don’t get intimidated by books. 

34. Most intimidating book I’m too nervous to begin: I don’t really have one.

35. Favorite Poet: Emily Dickinson i guess. I really don’t read poetry

36. How many books do you usually have checked out from the library at any given time? 1-10 books. 

37. How often do you return books to the library unread? Sometimes but not as often as i used to. 

38. Favorite fictional character: Rhysand. That man is just amazing.

39. Favorite fictional villain: Eric from True Blood series. Eric is so amazing. Granted he’s not fully a bad guy but mostly he is.

40. Books I’m most likely to bring on vacation: Romance. I enjoy a good fluffy romance when i’m on vacation. Or i will read a easy fantasy book.

41. The longest I’ve gone without reading: Well 6 months since i started my reading journey 12 years ago.

42. Name a book you could/would not finish: Crazy Rich Asians. I couldn’t deal with the characters or the writing. Ugh.

43. What distracts you easily when you’re reading? Loud Noises or the TV.

44. Favorite film adaptation of a novel: Lord of the Rings. It’s one of the best adaptations movie made.

45. Most disappointing film adaptation: Hmm i don’t know.

46. Most money I’ve ever spent in a bookstore at one time: $86.

47. How often do you skim a book before reading it? Never.

48. What would cause you to stop reading a book halfway through? if i just can’t stand the characters or the writing any more.

49. Do you like to keep your books organized? Kind of. I keep the authors together & series together. Also my favorites stay together.

50. Do you prefer to keep books or give them away once they’ve been read? I keep the ones i liked or loved but i chuck the ones i didn’t like.

51. Are there any books that you’ve been avoiding? hmm not really

52. Name a book that made you angry: The Girl in 6E. I couldn’t stand that book.

53. A book I didn’t expect to like but did: Eragon by christopher paolini. It was a book that really surprised me.

54. A book I expected to like but didn’t? From Here to Eternity by Catlin Doughty. I really loved her first book. But this one was just not my cup of tea.

55. Favourite guilt-free guilty pleasure reading: I don’t get the whole guilty pleasure thing. You like what you like and thats that.

Okay thats it ya’ll. Tag me if you do this tag. See you in my next post. :D

My Goodreads page

[mermaeids]

hello! you said in one of your videos (I think) that in order to write it’s important to read, but I can’t seem to be able to fit reading in my schedule (as in other than fanfic) so I’m wondering how you do it and what your goals are weekly/monthly/yearly. can’t wait to finish Narcissus btw! xx

HELLO!!! honestly it would be really hard for me to find time to read at all if i wasn’t an english major. i’d say about 75% of the books and short stories that i read this year were for one class or another, and the rest i read over the summer or during smaller breaks from school.

i don’t know what your situation/schedule is like, but no matter what i think the key is routine. if you schedule a daily block in your day ahead of time you no longer have to find time — it’s already there. making a habit doesn’t take very long, so it’ll get easier and easier to just do it without thinking as time goes on. and start with small goals! it’ll be easy to commit, for example, to reading for just fifteen minutes before bed every night. anothering thing to keep in mind is to always set goals based on time reading and not number of pages read! you’ll be surprised by how much material you’ll get through with just fifteen minutes a night.

and don’t be afraid to change up how you’re reading! audiobooks are great and though a lot of them are expensive, if a book is in the public domain you’ll find an audiobook of it on youtube or spotify! i personally am not a fan of audiobooks (i have a predominantly visual/photographic memory — i recall stories by remembering how the pages looked so i don’t retain stories as well if i’m only listening) but i’ll often play one while reading along. i did this for about ten shakespeare plays this year (because shakespeare is meant to be heard, not read, dammit) and am currently listening to little women before bed (because i’ve read it so many times already).

once reading is part of your daily routine, you can increase your time spent reading by reading whenever you have a spare moment. i read a lot this year in between classes, whenever i didn’t have friends to eat with at the dining hall, whenever i had free time at work, and while on the train. this is made even easier if you are able to carry your book with you everywhere, so i’d recommend either reading paperbacks whenever possible or on your phone/laptop.

in short, just remember that slow and steady wins the race! reading is not a competition or a matter of page count. this is why i detest yearly reading goals based on number of books read (like the goodreads challenges). i’d much rather you focus on rewarding yourself for reading every day rather than achieving a certain number of books read. ALSO it is always more important to read things that you enjoy rather than things that will make reading a chore in any way for you. since i read a lot of *intellectual* material for school, i read exclusively fun books for enjoyment.

anyway, happy reading! also thanks for reading narcissus! i’m so happy that i actually finished writing it this year rather than letting it go on as an unfininished work forever.

here are some of my favorite things i read in 2019:

the poppy war by rf kuang, nobody is ever missing by catherine lacey, the fourth state of matter by jo ann beard (commonly known as one of the best creative non fiction essays in existence), lavinia by ursula k le guin, my body is a book of rules by elissa washuta, severance by ling ma, wonder woman grew up in nebraska by sarah gerkensmeyer, reeling for the empire by karen russel, a midsummer night’s dream by shakespeare, notes of a native son by james baldwin, selections from the iliad by homer (translated by caroline alexander), the odyssey by homer (translated by emily wilson), and the song of achilles by madeline miller.

also i’m currently reading a memory called empire by arkady martine and loving it! and soon i want to start reading the witcher book series because i loved the show.

anyway i hope this answer was helpful to you. happy reading!! (and come back when you’re done with narcissus — i’d love to hear your thoughts!)

[bookishlyjules]

What I Learned From Reading a Book(ish) a Day

I have been in university for the past four years of my life in a very draining English degree. You might think this would have made me want to read, but, in fact, it had the exact opposite effect. I was drowning in required readings. So much so that in one of my seminar classes I had to read 12 novels. Yes. 12! And that was only 1 of my 5 courses! So of course I read as much as I could (and cheated with the help of sparks notes how could I not? just so I would be able to keep my head above water. Sure I learned a thing or two, and found fantastic books along the way, but this left me severely unsatisfied. Why? Because none of this was reading for fun.

During my first winter break in first year I read 5 books in the span of 3 weeks. I was so consumed by school work that reading for pleasure became my release. When school started again, so did the reading, but for education instead of fun.

Now I jump to today. At the beginning of April I submitted my last undergraduate assignment, thus ending my reading for pain. Similarly to what happened after my first semester of university, I read. And I read and read until I almost hit a slump.

It may have been my depression keeping me in bed, but I still read. From my last submitted assignment to today as I sit here writing this post, I have read about 12 books. For someone who only keeps her Goodreads goal at 35 it’s a lot.

So what did I learn from this? I learned that my love of reading may have laid dormant for the past 4 years, but it certainly didn’t die like I feared it would (and as many past English majors told me it would). 

So now as I prepare to embark on my masters in publishing I hope that I can keep this newly reignited passion for reading going... or at least I’ll try.

[coffeebased]

It’s been a whole year since I posted last. Part of me wants to apologise for being gone so long, but mostly I’m just glad that I’m here.

Instead of doing a GIANT 2018 READING POST, I’m going to chop it up into three posts:

Favourite Books Read in 2018

2018 Reading Data and Goal-setting for 2019

2013-2018 Reading Data Trends

I was going to do a bigass one like I usually do but it just felt so daunting. Probably because I read 256 books in 2018 and it was pretty tempting to just close that Excel sheet and move on to an empty one for 2019. But what is the point of an unexamined life, anyway?

So this post is basically a listicle with summaries grabbed from Goodreads, as well as the complete list of the books I read in 2018. I really enjoyed all these books immensely and they’re all in my personal canon now.

My Top 10 Reads for 2018:

The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

The first great adventure story in the Western canon, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty, and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, hospitality, and the yearning for home.In this fresh, authoritative version—the first English translation of The Odyssey by a woman—this stirring tale of shipwrecks, monsters, and magic comes alive in an entirely new way. Written in iambic pentameter verse and a vivid, contemporary idiom, this engrossing translation matches the number of lines in the Greek original, thus striding at Homer’s sprightly pace and singing with a voice that echoes Homer’s music.

Circe by Madeline Miller

In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child—not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power—the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love.

3. The World of the Five Gods by Lois McMaster Bujold

A man broken in body and spirit, Cazaril, has returned to the noble household he once served as page, and is named, to his great surprise, as the secretary-tutor to the beautiful, strong-willed sister of the impetuous boy who is next in line to rule.

It is an assignment Cazaril dreads, for it will ultimately lead him to the place he fears most, the royal court of Cardegoss, where the powerful enemies, who once placed him in chains, now occupy lofty positions. In addition to the traitorous intrigues of villains, Cazaril and the Royesse Iselle, are faced with a sinister curse that hangs like a sword over the entire blighted House of Chalion and all who stand in their circle. Only by employing the darkest, most forbidden of magics, can Cazaril hope to protect his royal charge—an act that will mark the loyal, damaged servant as a tool of the miraculous, and trap him, flesh and soul, in a maze of demonic paradox, damnation, and death

4. Noli Me Tangere by Jose Rizal, Translated by Harold Augenbraum

In more than a century since its appearance, José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere has become widely known as the great novel of the Philippines. A passionate love story set against the ugly political backdrop of repression, torture, and murder, “The Noli,” as it is called in the Philippines, was the first major artistic manifestation of Asian resistance to European colonialism, and Rizal became a guiding conscience—and martyr—for the revolution that would subsequently rise up in the Spanish province.

5. America is Not The Heart by Elaine Castillo

Three generations of women from one immigrant family trying to reconcile the home they left behind with the life they’re building in America.

How many lives can one person lead in a single lifetime? When Hero de Vera arrives in America, disowned by her parents in the Philippines, she’s already on her third. Her uncle, Pol, who has offered her a fresh start and a place to stay in the Bay Area, knows not to ask about her past. And his younger wife, Paz, has learned enough about the might and secrecy of the De Vera family to keep her head down. Only their daughter Roni asks Hero why her hands seem to constantly ache.

Illuminating the violent political history of the Philippines in the 1980s and 1990s and the insular immigrant communities that spring up in the suburban United States with an uncanny ear for the unspoken intimacies and pain that get buried by the duties of everyday life and family ritual, Castillo delivers a powerful, increasingly relevant novel about the promise of the American dream and the unshakable power of the past. In a voice as immediate and startling as those of Junot Diaz and NoViolet Bulawayo, America Is Not the Heart is a sprawling, soulful telenovela of a debut novel. With exuberance, muscularity, and tenderness, here is a family saga; an origin story; a romance; a narrative of two nations and the people who leave home to grasp at another, sometimes turning back.

6. The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk W. Johnson

A rollicking true-crime adventure and a thought-provoking exploration of the human drive to possess natural beauty for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief.

On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London’s Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin’s obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins–some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin’s, Alfred Russel Wallace, who’d risked everything to gather them–and escaped into the darkness.

Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man’s relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man’s destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.

7. Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

An unforgettable memoir in the tradition of The Glass Castle about a young girl who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University

Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her “head-for-the-hills bag”. In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father’s junkyard.

Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent.

Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one’s life through new eyes and the will to change it.

8. The Wicked + The Divine, Vol. 7 and 8 by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, André Lima Araújo, Matt Wilson, Kris Anka, Jen Bartel

In the past: awful stuff. In the present: awful stuff. But, increasingly, answers.

Modernist poets trapped in an Agatha Christie Murder Mystery. The Romantics gathering in Lake Geneva to resurrect the dead. What really happened during the fall of Rome. The Lucifer who was a nun, hearing Ananke’s Black Death confession. As we approach the end, we start to see the full picture. Also includes the delights of the WicDiv Christmas Annual and the Comedy special.

9. Mister Miracle by Tom King and Mitch Gerads

Mister Miracle is magical, dark, intimate and unlike anything you’ve read before.

Scott Free is the greatest escape artist who ever lived. So great, he escaped Granny Goodness’ gruesome orphanage and the dangers of Apokolips to travel across galaxies and set up a new life on Earth with his wife, Big Barda. Using the stage alter ego of Mister Miracle, he has made quite a career for himself showing off his acrobatic escape techniques. He even caught the attention of the Justice League, who has counted him among its ranks.

You might say Scott Free has everything–so why isn’t it enough? Mister Miracle has mastered every illusion, achieved every stunt, pulled off every trick–except one. He has never escaped death. Is it even possible? Our hero is going to have to kill himself if he wants to find out.

10. The Band, #1–2

Clay Cooper and his band were once the best of the best — the meanest, dirtiest, most feared crew of mercenaries this side of the Heartwyld.

Their glory days long past, the mercs have grown apart and grown old, fat, drunk – or a combination of the three. Then an ex-bandmate turns up at Clay’s door with a plea for help. His daughter Rose is trapped in a city besieged by an enemy one hundred thousand strong and hungry for blood. Rescuing Rose is the kind of mission that only the very brave or the very stupid would sign up for.

It’s time to get the band back together for one last tour across the Wyld.

PHEW. Did you guys read any of those books? Did you like them? Hit me up!

The books I read in 2018:

Okay, thank you for reading. Keep a weather eye out for the next post, hopefully very soon.

My Ten Favourite Books from 2018 It's been a whole year since I posted last. Part of me wants to apologise for being gone so long, but mostly I'm just glad that I'm here.

[mimireadsromance]

REVIEW-The Sweetest Fix  by Tessa Bailey         ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 STARS

The Sweetest Fix is the delicious story of a dancer, taking her chance in New York City, and the grumpy baker she meets under less than honest circumstances. Leo wants nothing more than to be left to his baking, something that fulfills his need to care for others. He has dreams of expanding, but needs a push to make them happen. That push comes from Reese, the woman that dances her way into his life and opens his eyes to possibilities. I'll say now that while I loved Leo and his dirty-talking ways, Reese is the absolute star of this book. She's got dreams and, despite a few moments of self-doubt, she is determined to create the life she wants to live. Her excitement at being in New York came alive on the page, and I adored that Leo was happy to bask in her joy. The gift Leo sent to Reese while they were apart is one of the best things I've ever read in a romance novel. Also, nap dates are the best idea ever!  Major swoon and lots of happy tears! If you're looking for a sweet treat, with a side of sexy, the The Sweetest Fix is sure to hit the spot!

                                              Excerpt:

Leo stuck his hands in his pockets and sauntered toward her, taking a spot beside her at the edge of the roof. “So. You’re a long way from home. How long have you been in the city?”

Her smile wavered, the reminder of her lies of omission twisting bolts on the sides of her throat. “Oh, not long.” She turned and propped her arms on the wall, looking out over the city blocks. “I wish my mother could see this.”

“You said she owns a dancing school. Was she your teacher?”

“When I was little, yes. Around age ten, she thought I needed something a little more advanced.” She gave him a prim look. “It paid off, too, don’t you know? You might remember me from a certain national Red Rover Yogurt commercial.”

He turned slightly, squinting an eye at her. “Wait a minute. No way.”

Reese pushed off the wall and performed the soft shoe routine she’d done thousands of times—mostly as a party trick—since the age of eleven. “No preservatives or chemicals, we’ve got your all-natural meals,” she sang, “Choose Red Rover products and kick up your heels.”

“Holy shit.” He stared at her, dumbfounded. “The audacity of me to ask out a celebrity.”

“Please.” She fluffed her hair. “I put my pants on one leg at a time like everyone else.”

They seemed to gravitate toward each other naturally, as if there was no other option, until their faces were a handful of inches apart. “How about those shorts?” he said gruffly. “You get those on the same way?” 

A hot, fizzy stream of awareness circled and danced in her midsection. This was flirting. But not the kind she was used to. Where she worried about every line out of her mouth, worrying they would come across too desperate. Or if the guy would think she was funny. No, it was easy as breathing to pull back the edge of her coat, drawing his attention downward. “What? These old things?”

“Yeah.” A muscle ticked in his cheek. “Those.”

She leaned in like they were sharing a secret and watched his eyes darken. “I have to wiggle around a little to get these on.”

They exhaled into each other’s space, not bothering to hide the fact that both of them were breathing faster. “Damn, Reese.”

There was a wealth of meaning in those two words. Not just, damn, you look good in those shorts. But damn, this attraction between them was not typical. “I know,” she said in a rush, their mouths almost touching. She wasn’t sure what made her pull away before he could close the distance for a kiss. Maybe it was to gather her wits or a tug from her conscience. But she took a long pull of February air to perform maintenance on her short-circuiting brain. “So, um…” She resisted the urge to fan herself. “How long have you owned the bakery?”

With his own centering breath, Leo slowly settled back in a safe distance away. “Four years,” he said, voice gravelly. “Took me a while after culinary school to build the capital and find the right people. The right place. Didn’t want to rush it.”

“Capital?” Her question hung in the air for several seconds before she realized what a stupid assumption she’d made. “Forget I said that. I just…I thought with your father being who he is…”

“That I would have an automatic investor?” He shrugged a shoulder. “Natural to assume that. Don’t worry about it.” There was an assessing glance in her direction, as if he wasn’t sure whether to say more. She held her breath, hoping he would. “I guess it didn’t feel right taking money for something he doesn’t have a real interest in. Baking. I’m not saying he’s unsupportive. We’re just about different things. Felt better doing it on my own.”

“That’s admirable.” She wanted to tell him how much she could relate. Currently. Trying to grasp something that felt just within reach, refusing any shortcuts. How it could feel scary and unfair one minute, rewarding the next. “And I guess you found the right people. Jackie and Tad.”

Warmth moved in his expression. “Yeah. Tad was actually an usher downstairs when I met him. We interviewed Jackie together. She’d just dropped out of nursing school because the emotional toll was more than she expected.”

“So she went for the exact opposite.”

“Only for a while. I doubt she’ll be at the Cookie Jar forever. But I’ll be glad to have her as long as she puts up with my grumpy ass.”

“You’re not coming across as grumpy as you did Saturday night.”

“That’s because I’m trying to charm you into going out with me. Is it working?”

Her laugh drifted out over the rooftops. “Maybe. How long until the grump returns?”

“I skipped lunch. So…imminently.”

Download your copy today or read FREE in Kindle Unlimited!

Amazon: https://amzn.to/3qLixkj

Amazon Worldwide: http://mybook.to/SweetestFix

Amazon Paperback: https://amzn.to/3qQ9OO3

Add The Sweetest Fix to Goodreads: http://bit.ly/3qMG0la

                                      ABOUT TESSA: 

Tessa Bailey is originally from Carlsbad, California. The day after high school graduation, she packed her yearbook, ripped jeans and laptop, driving cross-country to New York City in under four days. 

 Her most valuable life experiences were learned thereafter while waitressing at K-Dees, a Manhattan pub owned by her uncle. Inside those four walls, she met her husband, best friend and discovered the magic of classic rock, managing to put herself through Kingsborough Community College and the English program at Pace University at the same time. Several stunted attempts to enter the workforce as a journalist followed, but romance writing continued to demand her attention. 

 She now lives in Long Island, New York with her husband of eleven years and seven-year-old daughter. Although she is severely sleep-deprived, she is incredibly happy to be living her dream of writing about people falling in love.

Contact Tessa

Website: https://www.tessabailey.com

Facebook: http://bit.ly/2sScu5g

Instagram: http://bit.ly/36pRws6

Amazon Author Page: https://amzn.to/2NSjQgA

Goodreads: http://bit.ly/37nMrSB

Join her Reader Group: http://bit.ly/2uoDGZP

Stay up to date with Tessa Bailey by joining her mailing list: http://bit.ly/36j2TCl 

[yasbxxgie]

Where Are Our Black Boys on Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Novel Covers?

Why are there no boys like me on these covers?

My seventeen-year-old brother who lives in Lagos, Nigeria, raised this question to me recently. Not in these exact words, but sufficiently close. I’d been feeding him a steady drip of young adult (YA) science fiction and fantasy (SFF) novels from as diverse a list as I could, featuring titles like Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti, Martha Wells’ Murderbot series, Roshani Chokshi’s The Star-Touched Queen and Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. The question, at first seemed like a throwaway one, but as my head-scratching went on, I realised I did not have a clear-cut answer for it.

His question wasn’t why there were no black boys like him in the stories, because there definitely were. I guess he wanted to know, like I now do, why those boys were good enough to grace the pages inside but were somehow not good enough for the covers. And because I felt bad about the half-assed response I offered, I decided to see if I could find a better one.

So, I put out a twitter call for recommendations.

Can anyone point me to science fiction & fantasy novels with black teenage boys on the cover? Asking for my teenage brother. I know there's Tristan Strong, & books from Victor LaValle & Colson Whitehead, but I need more. Most YA I see with black boys are contemporary lit.

— Suyi on hiatus. (@IAmSuyiDavies) May 6, 2020

The responses came thick and fast, revealing a lot. I’m not sure I left with a satisfactory answer, but I sure left with a better understanding of the situation. Before I can explain that, though, we must first understand the what of the question, and why we need to be asking it in the first place.

Unpacking the Specifics

My intent is to engage with one question: How come there are few black boys on young adult science fiction and fantasy novel covers? This question has specific parameters:

black: of Black African descent to whatever degree and racially presented as such;

boys: specifically male-presenting (because this is an image afterall), separate from female-presenting folks, and separate from folks presenting as non-binary, all regardless of cisgender or transgender status;

are displayed prominently on covers: not silhouetted, not hinted at, not “they could be black if you turned the book sideways,” but undeniably front-of-cover blackity-black;

YA: books specifically written for young adults (readers aged 12-18), separate from middle-grade (readers 8-12) and adult (readers 18+);

SFF: science fiction and fantasy, but really shorthand for all speculative fiction and everything that falls under it, from horror to fabulism to alternative history;

novels: specifically one-story, book-length, words-only literature, separate from collections/anthologies or illustrated/graphic works (a novella may qualify, for instance)

I’m sure if we altered any of these criteria, we might find some respite. Contemporary YA and literary fiction with teenage protagonists, for instance, are littered with a relatively decent number of black boys on the covers (though many revolve around violence, pain and trauma). Young women across the people-of-colour spectrum are beginning to appear more often on SFF covers too (just take a look at this Goodreads list of Speculative Fiction by Authors of Color). Black boys also pop up on covers of graphic novels here and there (Miles Morales is a good example). But if we insist on these parameters, we discover something: a hole.

It is this gaping black hole (pardon the pun) that I hope to fill with some answers.

The Case for Need

Think about shopping at a bookstore. Your eyes run over a bunch of titles, and something draws you in to pick one–cover design, title, author, blurb. You’d agree that one of the biggest draws, especially for teens to whom YA SFF novels are aimed, is the character representation on the cover (if there’s one). Scholastic’s 7th Edition Kids & Family Reading Report notes that 76% of kids and teens report they’d like characters who are “similar to me,” and 95% of parents agree that these characters can help “foster the qualities they value for their children.” If the cover imagery, which is the first point of contact for this deduction, is not representative of the self, there’s an argument to be made that reader confidence in the characters’ ability to represent their interests would be significantly reduced.

The why of the question is therefore simple: when a group already underrepresented in literature and readership (read: black boys, since it’s still believed that black boys don’t read) are also visually underrepresented within their age group and preferred genre (read: YA SFF), it inadvertently sends a message to any black boy who loves to read SFF: you don’t fit here.

This is not to say that YA is not making strides to increase representation within its ranks. Publisher’s Weekly’s most recent study of the YA market notes various progressive strides, touching base with senior publishing professionals at teen imprints in major houses, who say today’s YA books “reflect a more realistic range of experiences.” Many of them credit the work of We Need Diverse Books, #DVPit, #OwnVoices and other organizations and movements as pacesetters for this growing trend.

In the same breath, though, these soundbites are cautiously optimistic, noting that the industry must look inward for underlying reasons why easy defaults remain commonplace. Lee&Low’s recent Diversity in Publishing 2019 study’s answer to why unquestioned go-tos still reign supreme is that the industry remains, sadly, 76% Caucasian. For a genre-readership with such exponential success, that makes the hole a massive one. Of the Top 10 Best Selling Books of the 21st Century, four are YA SFF franchises by Rowling, Collins, Meyer, and Roth, the most among all listed genres. In 2018’s first half, YA SFF vastly outsold every other genre, amassing over a quarter of an $80-million sales total. This doesn’t even include TV and film rights.

I once was a black boy (in some ways, I still am). If such a ubiquitous, desired, popular (and don’t forget, profitable) genre-readership somehow concluded a face like mine on its covers was a no-go, I’d want to know why too.

Navigating the Labyrinth

Most of the responses I received fell into three categories: hits & misses, rationale, and outlook. Hits & misses were those who attempted to recommend books that met the criteria. If I had to put a number to it, I’d say there were around 10+ misses to one hit. I received many recommendations that didn’t fit: middle-grade novels, graphic novels, covers where the blackness of the boy was up for debate, novels featuring black boys who were not present on the cover, etc.

The hits were really great to see, though. Opposite of Always by Justin A. Reynolds was the crowd favourite of the recent recommended titles. The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad by Minister Faust was the oldest recommended title (2004). One non-English title on offer was Babel Corp, Tome 01: Genesis 11 by Scott Reintgen (translated to French by Guillaume Fournier, published in the US as Nyxia). Non-print titles also showed up, like Wally Roux, Quantum Mechanic by Nick Carr (audio only). Lastly, some crossover titles like Miles Morales: Spider-Man by Jason Reynolds (MG/YA) and Temper by Nicky Drayden (YA/Adult) were present. You’ll find a full list of all recommendations at the end of this article.

Many of the hits were worrisome for other reasons, though. For instance, a good number are published under smaller presses, or self-published. Most are of limited availability. Put simply: a high percentage of all books recommended have severely limited wider industry coverage, which twanged a sour note in this orchestra.

The rationale group attempted to approach the matter from a factual angle. Points were made, for instance, that fewer men and nonbinary folks are published in YA SFF than women, and fewer black men even so, therefore representing black boys on covers may increase with more black male authors of YA SFF. While a noble thought, I do argue that various YA authors, regardless of race or gender, have written black boys as protagonists, yet those didn’t make the covers anyway. Would more black male authors suddenly change that?

Another rationale pointed toward YA marketing, which many stated mostly targets teenage girls because they are the biggest audience. I’m not sure how accurate this is, but I know sales often tell a different story from marketing (case in point: 2018 market estimates show that nearly 70% of all YA titles are purchased by adults aged 18-64, not teenage girls). If the sales tell a different story, yet marketing strategies insist upon a one-note approach, then it’s not really about the sales, is it?

Lastly, the outlook responses came mostly from readers, authors and publishing professionals who are long-time advocates of increased inclusion in publishing. The overwhelming consensus was that, while there is no complete absence of black boys on YA SFF covers, the real problem is the difficulty in pointing them out. It was agreed that it speaks volumes that we have to do this deep-dive just to find an okay amount of recommendations. Many left with a feel-good note, though, since more authors and professionals dedicated to inclusion and visibility are finally getting their feet into the doors at Big Publishing. Thanks to advocates like People of Color in Publishing and We Need Diverse Books, the future looks exciting.

So, I’ll end this on another feel-good note by offering an ongoing list of recommendations that fit the bill. You’ll find that most are absolutely worth a look-see. This list is also open for public updates, so feel free to add your own recommendations. And here’s looking to the decision-makers at Big Publishing to make this list even bigger.

+Black Boys on YA SFF Novel Covers: A List of Recommendations

[catescher]

Review: The Precious Dreadful: A Novel

Quick Disclaimer: I was not in any form or shape paid for this review/compensated for it. I bought the book on my own initiative and out of my own pocket. No strings attached whatsoever. Also Spoiler Warning!

The Data Part

Name of the book: The Precious Dreadful: A novel Author: Steven Parlato Publishing House: Simon Pulse Pages: 353 Formats available: EBook, Hardcover ISBN:1507202776 Price: 10.75/15.99 €, 18.99$, 8.99/9.45 £ (as of writing)

Description (Amazon, Goodreads, etc.)

Combining romance and humor with elements of the paranormal, this is a profound novel about one teenage girl’s decision to redefine her life in the wake of supernatural events. Teddi Alder is just trying to figure out her life. When she joins SUMMERTEENS, a library writing group, she’s only looking to keep herself busy, not go digging around in her subconscious. But as she writes, disturbing memories of her lost childhood friend Corey bubble to the surface, and Teddi begins to question everything: her friendship with her BFF Willa, how much her mom really knows, and even her own memories. Teddi fears she’s losing her grip on reality—as evidenced by that mysterious ghost-girl who emerges from the park pool one night, the one who won’t leave Teddi alone. To top it all off, she finds herself juggling two guys with potential, a quirky new boy named Joy and her handsome barista crush Aidan, who has some issues of his own. As the summer unfolds, Teddi is determined to get to the bottom of everything—her feelings, the mysterious ghost-girl, and the memories of Corey that refuse to be ignored.

The Author

Steven Parlato, novelist and poet, is also associate professor of English at Naugatuck Valley Community College, where he serves as faculty advisor to award-winning student newspaper, The Tamarack. Parlato has played roles ranging from the Scarecrow to Macbeth, and his poetry appears in journals including Freshwater, MARGIE, Borderlands, CT River Review, Pirene’s Fountain, and Peregrine. Steven’s manuscript, JUNIOR, YA winner of the 2011 CT Shoreline Arts Alliance Tassy Walden Award, was acquired by Jackie Mitchard of Merit Press. Upon its 2013 release as The Namesake, Publishers Weekly called Parlato “a name to watch.” Most recently represented by Victoria Marini of GSLA/ICM, Parlato has led writing workshops for teens and adults at several CT libraries. Also an illustrator, he is husband to Janet and proud father of two amazing teens. Follow Steven online at StevenParlato.com and on Twitter @ParlatoWrites.

Also, now is the last time to turn back if you are not interested in spoilers! Read on at your own risk!

Cover art (Yes, I judge a book by its cover): 5/5 It’s kept in violet and reddish shade, very atmospheric for the supernatural part of the story. I think the silhouette represents Teddi. I thought while reading the book that Teddi had a more tomboyish look to her in the beginning for some reason, but this does not distract from the cover. The title is written in chalk, maybe representing the writing class. Overall, very fitting.

Readability: 3/5 First POV, and Present Tense. Two pet peeves right out of the gate. Since Teddi is the narrator I didn’t enjoy it. Maybe I’m too old but she was an obnoxious, stupid brat. I could go on and on but I’ll leave it at that… Until I get to the Characters. But, and this is the saving grace, it was easy to read and Mr. Parlato tried to keep it close to what a teenager might talk like.

Fun: 2/5 A few lines had me snickering, I admit that. It was fun, for some parts, but I was mostly shouting at Teddi when she made stupid decisions. Teenagers… Also it was pretty sad at some points. The whole backstory with Corey was nothing short of heartbreaking and I shed some tears, believe me. Hard to make me cry at a book, so kudos to Steven Parlato. I mentioned screaming at Teddi (which explains the bad score here). Mainly I did it because I didn’t quite agree with her choice of a boyfriend. Which leads to the next point.

Characters: 2/5 Frankly, I disliked most of the more prominent characters. I already mentioned not liking Teddi as the narrator - she had a distinctive voice, I admit that at least. She was an obnoxious, stupid teenager and I honestly have no time for that kind of shit anymore. Next point, her “boyfriend” Aiden. He was a shithead. I don’t give a fuck about his sob-backstory. He was an asshole from the beginning. He was borderline abusive and Teddi notices it - but she still went back to being with him. Let’s just say I wanted to smash both of their heads together more than once. This shouldn’t be the reaction to the main character and her, for the most of the book, boyfriend/love interest. Luckily, they don’t get together in the end even though it looked like it for a huge part of the novel. Thank God for that. Which brings me to the next point. Ed (or Joy as he is first introduced) is a punk. The obvious bad boy (except he isn’t) and the one Teddi ends up with. They have some tender moments, but after the last scene with Aiden when Teddi gave Aiden CPR we have a time skip and then they end up together. Nothing more. Like I said, a bit sudden and Ed had a lot less screentime than the other two. Also, he is a bit too much the clichéd  bad boy with a heart of gold. Willa was Teddi’s BFF. I’m kinda… neutral about her. She seemed like a good friend (far better than Teddi was to her). Otherwise… that’s it. But, for all my criticism, I do have characters I liked. Mostly Adaluz and Eleonore who both have far too few page time. Both are wonderfully eccentric, supportive characters. Both tie in with the supernatural plot which might also be why I like them so much. I was really sad to see them not having the scene time I would have loved them to have. Teddi’s mom, Brenda, was one of the more sympathetic characters to me. She had an honest, tragic backstory and tried to look out for Teddi who didn’t make it easy on her.

Predictability: 2/5 The second the two boys were introduced I knew that those two were the Love Interests. I also pegged it correctly that Teddi would end up with Ed (or I at least hoped it). I didn’t know that the romantic plot would be so heavily featured - I preferred the supernatural way more. Also I thought that Corey was the girl who haunted Teddi until I realized that it was Teddi's childhood friend's name. My second thought about the apparition was Fawn, the other friend but she didn’t figure in in the end. Or not much, at least. I thought that Eli would feature in as a major antagonist, maybe even as a Aiden’s dealer or something. Sadly, that didn’t happen and he instead was killed in a fire, away from anything happening during the novel, almost as an afterthought to tie up loose ends.

Overall impression: 2.8/5 Yeah, not happy with the book. I originally thought the supernatural plot would figure more which it didn’t and I didn’t like the romantic plot. I didn’t like Love Interest 1 (Aidan) and found Ed a bit too cliché punk with a heart of gold. If you’re more into romance, this might be a book for you. I’m more of a fantasy type. But, the supernatural plot was heartwrenching, sad and beautiful. I shed tears, and grieved with Teddi in the end. I felt with her because her loss was nothing short of heartwrenching.

In short: If you like love triangles and heartwrenching tales of loss mixed in with a paranormal plot in a writer’s group, this is a book for you.

Favourite quotes

“More like an anomaly. I’m the one mistake my mother didn’t make repeatedly.” (Teddi to Ed about her mother)

“Alder, the Goddess Tree […] But qualities of the alder: Strength. Resilence. These are aspects to explore in your writing. Absolutely. Did you have any idea, for example, when submerged in water, alder wood hardens to the toughness of stone?” “Can’t say I did.” “Names are significant, Miss Alder. They shape - to some degree they even dictate - the people we become.” (Eleanor talking about Teddi’s names.)

Eleanor says, “Crazy? Hardly. There are three more likely possibilities.” “Three. Really?” Voice a whisper, she says, “Yes. You’re either - one: lying in some woeful bid for attention.” “Nope.” “Thought not. Option two: there’s a feral child loose, and she’s imprinted on you.” “That’s unlikely, isn’t it?” “Afraid so.” “Then… what’s option three?” Eleanor thrums the edge of her folder. Biting her lip, she regards me seriously. “I fear, Miss Alder, this may be a haunting.” (On Teddi’s recent experiences)

[crow-moon]

Reading and Self Isolation

One goal I set for myself for 2020 was to read one book a month that has been on my bookshelves for a long time. So far I have been sticking to that goal, and have read The Man Who Ate His Boots by Brandt, Tree: A Life Story by Suzuki and Grady, and most recently, and due to the self-isolation protocols and having nothing better to do, The Iliad by Homer. My personal white whale.

The Iliad has been on my book since I took a high school course in Greek mythology, way back in 2001. It's been hanging around on my shelf in various forms for the last 20 years, more or less, and every once in a while I'd look at it, contemplatively, thinking perhaps today is the day, perhaps this is the year...

Needless to say, it never was the day, or the year. A bit of backstory: I spent a lot of high school reading Forgotten Realms and other Dungeons and Dragons-esque fantasy series, which evolved into high fantasy and fairy tale retellings by Patricia McKillip (which i still love).

In university, I moved on to the grim-dark fantasy we all know (and I thoroughly despise) as Game of Thrones. After that broke me of any interest in fantasy whatsoever, and well into university, I started heavily reading non-fiction. I was taking a major in history, you see, and sometimes real life is stranger than fiction.

I moved to Italy and read whatever I could find, really, having only a small collection of books to choose from in English - along with my course material from my long-distance courses with university, mostly 19th Century English literature and the very massive Janson's History of Art textbook that surely has every piece of Western art in it since history became a thing.

When I finished all that, moved back to Canada, and settled in (2011/2012-ish), I started thinking about fantasy again, and read a few more grim-dark things (A Dance With Dragons just came out and I decided to torture myself with that, and the The Blade Itself trilogy or whatever it's called), then fell into the most massive reading slump I ever did experience. I didn't read anything for like three years, unless I had to. Didn't even think of Homer in all that time.

Went back to school for two years to get my B.Ed, and read as little as possible (although for one course I did, I read several real gems, like Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson and Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King). I graduated in 2017. This brings The Slump up to five years.

Graduated, spent half a year working, and was still massively disinterested in reading. I tried to get back into the habit, because it is a habit that you have to build for yourself if you want to read a lot. I read Fahrenheit 451 which sparked some interest in me, then got a fateful email from Goodreads in December.

This email gave me reading stats of celebrities for the year. Sarah Jessica Parker, star of Sex and the City (and lots of other things I am sure), this email said, managed to read something like 25 books in one year. I was flabbergasted. Sarah Jessica Parker, who is a busy adult woman with an acting career and probably interests and philanthropic endeavours and all sorts of stuff, managed to find enough time to read regularly and I, who has just sort-of started a job and had no interests or hobbies besides playing video games, walking, and reading, can't find time to read books? I'm certainly not making movies or t.v. shows, or donating my time to charities. What is wrong with me?

And all this time The Iliad is still on my shelf, untouched. That's not to say I haven't bought books in all this time. My shelves are teeming with things to read, because I kept buying, but not reading. I even bought a newer copy of The Iliad during the Five Year Slump.

I got it at a thrift store. I saw some highlighting in it, and thought hmmm, perhaps the previous owner wrote some insightful commentary inside this copy... No such luck. Didn't matter anyway, as it simply replaced the older orange version on my shelf. I carried on not reading it, obviously.

After The Email, I made myself a goal: in 2019, I am going to read 25 books come hell or high water. Just like Sarah Jessica Parker. And I want to read The Iliad. So I started carrying books around with me again, and set time aside for at least an hour a day and read. I also got myself back to the library, a place I tend to shy away from because I dislike communal things: food, door handles, public washrooms, books... anything that might hang on to some nasty bug and pass it along to me (hmmm). But I went anyway, and got some audiobooks from the library to help me on my quest to read 25 books, including The Iliad.

I read all sorts of things in 2019:

The Silmarillion

Frozen in Time

Dombey and Son

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Rubicon

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

Far From the Madding Crowd

And re-read a bunch, too:

Jurassic Park

Good Omens

The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit

just about all of Jane Austen's books

The Shipping News

In total I read some sixty books, blowing past the goal I set some time in May 2019.

Still, no Iliad.  

I was quite proud of myself for reading 60 books, though. I haven't done that since probably 2001 or 2002, so I decided not to be mad at myself. I'd try again in 2020, and perhaps get through a few books that have been hanging around for a while.

So here we are in 2020, it's March, we're all being responsible and practicing social distancing, and my god I am bored. There is only so much one can do when they are not working, just hoping for good news.

About a week before the city shut down I was browsing the library waiting for my friend, when I happened upon the rather large collection of audiobooks they have stocked there, and lo, there was The  Iliad, like a sign from on high. I took it, ripped it to my library, and this week I have split my time listening to it while I walk and reading it while at home from yet another paper copy I picked up (I just love the  Oxford World's Classics, sue me).

The audio version I picked up is a rather plain English translation, which is nice because it made the story easy to follow while I did not have a copy to reference in front of me. The Oxford edition used somewhat more... complicated phrasing? I suppose, but while reading it I enjoyed that rather a lot. I guess the translation does count in some sense.

If you didn't already know, The Iliad recounts almost the last two or so weeks of the Trojan War. The poem itself does not even cover the events leading up to the war (the goddesses conning Paris into picking whose best between them; him 'winning' Helen, the prettiest lady, and pissing off the losers of this little competition; Paris making off with another man's wife and all her wealth, Menelaus; being really pissed about his wife taking off/being taken, raising a campaign to go after Helen (and her money); the ten year siege that ensues) or the events after Priam goes to beg for his son's body back (building the Trojan horse, ransacking Ilium, Achilles' death). It really mostly focuses on what is honourable and dishonourable in war, and the destructive power of humans (and the gods)  - through all time.

How do you review a poem from the 6th century BCE?  The Iliad describes, book after book, line after line, every spear thrust into an eye socket, bowel, jaw, or groin. The merciless ruin people are capable of, but also the great compassion and mercy they can be moved to, such the compassion Achilles felt for King Priam, who snuck into the enemy encampment to beg for Hector's body in order for him to have a proper funeral. I arbitrarily gave it five stars because it didn't disappoint me after 20 years of anticipation, but that may change when I get around to reading The Odyssey, which made it to my shelf at the same time as The Iliad.

Well. I just spent the last couple hours writing almost mindlessly, and it has been really fun. Perhaps I should try this more often, especially when I am bored of reading and walking.

TL;DR: I got really upset that my life was way less busy than Sarah Jessica Parker's and still she managed to read more than me, and that is my motivation to read more. maybe I should thank her.

[encephalonfatigue]

radical eschatology and 1Q84

i wrote this as a goodreads review, but i couldn’t fit the whole text there so this is the review in its entirety.

“‘lunatic’ means to have your sanity temporarily seized by the luna, which is ‘moon’ in Latin. In nineteenth-century England, if you were a certified lunatic and you committed a crime, the severity of the crime would be reduced a notch. The idea was that the crime was not so much the responsibility of the person himself as that he was led astray by the moonlight. Believe it or not, laws like that actually existed… I learned it in an English literature course at Japan Women’s University, in a lecture on Dickens. We had an odd professor. He’d never talk about the story itself but go off on all sorts of tangents.”

I think a lot of my writing on this site consists of meandering tangents, only obliquely related to the book at hand — though less useful and interesting than this literature professor’s in 1Q84. Either way I will stick to what I’m comfortable with here. I will start with why I read this obscenely large book. My high school friend who was recently married, hosted a birthday party at a new place he moved into in Etobicoke. I arrived half-an-hour late from the time it was supposed to start (according to Facebook), and was the first one there — which is some indication of the sort of company I keep. As I awkwardly sat around after a brief house tour, he poured me a drink, and we chatted about life and my terrible job. He suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, I almost forgot. There’s something I want to lend to you.” He skips up the stairs and comes back down with a large phone book. On its front cover: a face hiding behind the characters “1Q84” — maybe embarrassed by its bloated constitution. This will help you on your daily commutes from hell, he encouraged me.

I’ve heard that your first Murakami book has a good chance of becoming your favourite Murakami book. That was probably the case for me with “Kafka on the Shore”. I think that book put me onto Kafka, before I would later encounter him in the work of Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, and his late communist ‘wife’, Dora Diamant. But subsequent Murakami books were not as satisfying for me. After reading Norwegian Wood, I decided to try and take a break from Murakami. I had grown a little weary of the Oedipal themes, and Murakami’s recurring Manic Pixie Dream Girl tropes. Around this time, my fourth-year college roommate discovered Murakami for himself, and his first encounter was through 1Q84. He loved it, but what a book to start with, I had thought at the time. I was impressed that he ploughed right through such an enormous millstone of a novel. (I was very intimidated by its size when my friend handed it to me, but got through it in surprising time. Having now read 1Q84, I realize it was actually a very fun book to read, and often quite difficult to put down, so it now makes sense.) Anyways, I was discussing these things with my roommate and another law student who was camping with us at Sandbanks Provincial Park — she also shared similar thoughts as mine on Murakami. Conversation wandered on to Junot Diaz, who she was much more approving of — this of course was before the #MeToo revelations about Diaz. How quickly tides can turn. (Especially when there are two moons in the sky.)

So something about the structure of 1Q84. I am told the first two books are structured after the two books of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” — each chapter alternating between Aomame (major keys) and Tengo (minor keys). In each book of Clavier, Bach cycles through all twelve tones, a prelude and fugue for each tone’s major and minor keys. So each of Murakami’s chapters in Book 1 and 2 corresponds to a Prelude and Fugue in Bach’s collection of pieces — 48 chapters in all.

I admittedly have a thing for Bach. I have a copy of Gould’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” on compact disc at home. It came in a package of random shit the novelist Tao Lin gathered together from his bedroom and sold online for like $30 on eBay. That is the sort of stupid stuff I wasted my money on as an undergraduate student. Among the zines, postcard sized art prints, manuscript pages from his edits of Taipei, and a copy of “Shoplifting from American Apparel” was a disc of Gould’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. In one of the preludes and fugues, the disc is scratched, and makes these heavenly wobbling sounds as it skips, and I have grown quite fond of these parts. I also particularly love hearing the infrequent muffled hums of Gould behind his gas mask.

Book 3 of 1Q84 is structured after Bach’s Goldberg Variations. In the past couple years, I’ve listened to this composition likely more than any other, simply because it’s one of the few albums I happened to have downloaded on my phone. It’s Igor Levit’s studio recording of the Goldberg Variations along with his recording of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations and Rzewski’s “The People United Will Never Be Defeated”. I thought it was a clever trio to package in an album. I also recommend Lisa Moore’s performance of other Rzewski compositions put out by Cantaloupe.

I am particularly fond of Rzewski’s “People United” because it recalls for me my first May Day march, where I chanted the Chilean song (from which Rzewski’s title is derived and his piece alludes to) with other people on the street marching on the way to Queen’s Park, while students shouted ‘ftp’ at officers lined on the sidewalk. I was supposed to march with a small contingent from Student Christian Movement, but couldn’t find them at Allan Gardens, so I marched near some York OPIRG students, and in front of a communist who was debating random people the entire march, haha. I had never seen so many anarchists and communists in one place at a time. They sure do like their black and red flags, haha.

This brings me to the next comment I wanted to make. I was curious about Murakami’s politics and I had a difficult time finding a decent write-up that focuses on this, because Murakami can come across as fairly apolitical, which I think is what his ‘bourgeois individualism’ (I use that term in jest) requires of him. Anyways, I stumbled across a series of blog posts made by a Trotskyist grad student that discuss how Japanese student movement comes up in almost every single novel by Murakami, and he discusses how the student movement was a significant segment of the political left in Japan during that time.

“Some brief highlights of the student movement’s history in Japan will suffice. After the end of the war, university students oriented to the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) took advantage of the new liberal atmosphere to rally for university autonomy, for the appointment of progressive faculty and administrators, and for a student voice in administration… In 1948, students from all over Japan inaugurated the All-Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Organizations (known by its acronym, Zengakuren) with a leadership largely from the Japanese Young Communist League… However the honeymoon between the students and the JCP was short-lived… The JCP had seen the American occupation as an opportunity to complete the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Japan, which had been the Moscow-ordained task of Communist Parties the world over during the Popular Front (1936-39) and then again after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, when Communists were allied with all “liberal,” “democratic,” and “peace-loving” forces, meaning those of the ruling class.

…Student radicalism reached even greater heights as the movement entered the 1960s… In militant actions organized by Zengakuren, thousands of students broke into the Diet building twice in 1960, forcing the cancellation of a state visit by US President Eisenhower and the resignation of Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi with his cabinet. During this period Zengakuren’s leadership was largely drawn from the “Mainstream Faction,” which had originated the federation’s opposition to the JCP, however during the late 50s the leadership was briefly taken over by students from the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), a group formed from JCP exiles after the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, which was influenced by Trotsky’s writings and would affiliate to the Fourth International. By 1964, there were three different organizations taking the name Zengakuren: the JCP supporters, the Revolutionary Marxists (a Tokyo-based split from the RCL) and a unity faction.”

There’s a lot more the Trotskyist grad student blogger (the official title I have designated to this person) goes into, but he essentially concludes that:

“I believe at this point that I have made a solid case for why Murakami, whose early books on the surface are completely apolitical, take their starting point as the destruction of the Japanese student movement, though at no point is the movement itself exactly foregrounded.”

An an earlier conclusion in his first post:

“Based on conjecture from his novels, we can assume he was around the anti-Stalinist left concentrated in the Zenkyoto groups, though he has insisted that he was never a member of any particular faction. “I enjoyed the campus riots as an individual,” he writes. “I’d throw rocks and fight with the cops, but I thought there was something ‘impure’ about erecting barricades and other organized activity, so I didn’t participate… The very thought of holding hands in a demonstration gave me the creeps.”

…Since this is all I have till I learn Japanese, I will have to take his word that he always had a rather superior, hipster attitude toward politics, which is believable enough considering his status as a graduate of one of Japan’s most elite private institutions. And yet, there is something I see in his early novels that undeniably regrets the collapse of the student movement, no matter how much he resented the factions for “impure” organizational work.”

I think Murakami’s disdain for this sort of leftist hypocrisy comes through in a particularly memorable dialogue in Norwegian Wood (which the Trotskyist grad student blogger never mentioned for some reason):

"Have you ever read Das Kapital?"

"Yeah. Not the whole thing, of course, but parts, like most people."

"You know, when I went to university I joined a folk-music club. I just wanted to sing songs. But the members were a load of frauds. I get goose-bumps just thinking about them. The first thing they tell you when you enter the club is you have to read Marx. "Read page so-and-so to such-and-such for next time.' Somebody gave a lecture on how folk songs have to be deeply involved with society and the radical movement. So, what the hell, I went home and tried as hard as I could to read it, but I didn't understand a thing. It was worse than the subjunctive. I gave up after three pages. So I went to the next week's meeting like a good little scout and said I had read it, but I couldn't understand it. From that point on they treated me like an idiot. I had no critical awareness of the class struggle, they said, I was a social cripple. I mean, this was serious. And all because I said I couldn't understand a piece of writing..."

“...And their so-called discussions were terrible, too. Everybody would use big words and pretend they knew what was going on. But I would ask questions whenever I didn't understand something. "What is this imperialist exploitation stuff you're talking about? Is it connected somehow to the East India Company?' "Does smashing the educational-industrial complex mean we're not supposed to work for a company after we graduate?' And stuff like that. But nobody was willing to explain anything to me. Far from it - they got really angry. Can you believe it?"

“...OK, so I'm not so smart. I'm working class. But it's the working class that keeps the world running, and it's the working classes that get exploited. What kind of revolution is it that just throws out big words that working-class people can't understand? What kind of crap social revolution is that? I mean, I'd like to make the world a better place, too. If somebody's really being exploited, we've got to put a stop to it. That's what I believe, and that's why I ask questions.”

"So that's when it hit me. These guys are fakes. All they've got on their minds is impressing the new girls with the big words they're so proud of, while sticking their hands up their skirts. And when they graduate, they cut their hair short and march off to work for Mitsubishi or IBM or Fuji Bank. They marry pretty wives who've never read Marx and have kids they give fancy new names to that are enough to make you puke. Smash what educational-industrial complex? Don't make me laugh!”

This passage actually reminds me of a Japanese exchange student I met as an undergraduate who was really into Murakami and used to perform folk music in her spare time. Even though she was an atheist or agnostic of some sort and really into gender studies, she used to attend an international students bible study that I used to go to at a friends’ house. She’s now doing a PhD at MIT in neuroscience, but that passage in Norwegian Wood always reminds me of her. Anyways, you can see how Murakami’s purity politics requires of him a rejection of fully embracing any comprehensive political or religious system. The individual is always of most importance to him, and I think that comes through in 1Q84 too.

Part of what gets to Murakami I suppose is the pretence involve with a lot of armchair leftists. It recalls for me a passage I read in a book about country music of all things called “The Nashville Sound” by Joli Jensen:

“Students rarely ventured into the Rose Bowl. When they did it was usually to be rowdy and to make fun of the rednecks. One night, as I was waiting tables, four fellow graduate students came in. They did not see me, and I watched in rising fury as they sneered and whispered and laughed among themselves at the people around them. These were my peers, who defined themselves as Marxists and had disdained me as a politically unsophisticated liberal humanist. They patronized me in class and were now in "my" world making fun of "my" friends. Shaking with rage, I went over to the table to take their drink order. Of course, they were stunned to find me working there, complete with sequined Rose Bowl vest, and they left immediately. I had caught them at an unseemly game. But I have come to wonder about the basis for my rage and about what it tells me about how we understand ourselves in relation to our perceptions of others.

At the time I felt superior to them, friends of the working class, indeed! and virtuous in my admiration of, and affection for, Rose Bowl patrons. Later, I began to wonder, was I really any better, turning the Rose Bowl into a mythical venue of "salt of the earth" authenticity? Is it really better to idealize and sentimentalize difference than to ridicule and disdain it? This is a poignant dilemma for the country music scholar and is becoming a topic of discussion among sociologists, anthropologists, museum curators, and social critics.”

Anyways, to move past this thoughtful navel-gazing, I want to get into a dimension of 1Q84 that I found extremely interesting. Probably my favourite part is Chapter 10 of Book 1 (A Real Revolution with Real Bloodshed), where Tengo talks to Fuka-Eri’s current guardian, a former anthropology professor and friend of Fuka-Eri’s father. Fuka-Eri’s father (Tamotsu Fukada) was an academic and Maoist revolutionary, enthusiastic about the Cultural Revolution, who gathered a number of students to start a commune in the mountains of Takao. There is a fascinating section on the splintering of the commune into a moderate faction and a more radical one:

“Under Fukada’s leadership, the operation of Sakigake farm remained on track, but eventually the commune split into two distinct factions. Such a split was inevitable as long as they kept Fukada’s flexible unit system. On one side was a militant faction, a revolutionary group based on the Red Guard unit that Fukada had originally organized. For them, the farming commune was strictly preparatory for the revolution. Farming was just a cover for them until the time came for them to take up arms. That was their unshakable stance.”

This paragraph reminds me of the case of the Tarnac Nine. It is within the realm of possibility Murakami had heard about this case, because their arrest was in 2008, shortly before 1Q84’s first books were published. There’s a commune in Tarnac that was involved in the operation of a nearby general store (Magasin General, Tarnac). Giorgio Agamben wrote a brief post on this affair describing it this way:

“On the morning of November 11, 150 police officers, most of which belonged to the anti-terrorist brigades, surrounded a village of 350 inhabitants on the Millevaches plateau, before raiding a farm in order to arrest nine young people (who ran the local grocery store and tried to revive the cultural life of the village). Four days later, these nine people were sent before an anti-terrorist judge and “accused of criminal association with terrorist intentions.””

The social theorist Alberto Toscano described the event in similar terms:

“On 11 November 2008, twenty French youths are arrested simultaneously in Paris, Rouen, and in the small village of Tarnac (located in the district of Corrèze, in France’s relatively impoverished Massif Central region). The Tarnac operation involves helicopters, one hundred and fifty balaclava-clad anti-terrorist policemen and studiously prearranged media coverage. The youths are accused of having participated in a number of sabotage attacks against the high-speed TGV train routes, involving the obstruction of the train’s power cables with horseshoe-shaped iron bars, causing material damage and a series of delays affecting some 160 trains. Eleven of the suspects are promptly freed. Those who remain in custody are soon termed the ‘Tarnac Nine’, after the village where a number of them had purchased a small farmhouse, reorganised the local grocery store as a cooperative, and taken up a number of civic activities from the running of a film club to the delivery of food to the elderly. In their parents’ words, ‘they planted carrots without bosses or leaders. They think that life, intelligence and decisions are more joyous when they are collective’.”

The Professor’s farming of Akebono (the radical offshoot of Sakigake) are framed in similar terms to the way anti-terrorist police in France portrayed the activities of the Tarnac co-op farm, as a front for revolutionary activity. Of course, if you read the Invisible Committee’s “Coming Insurrection”, allusions to such notions are elaborated on:

“Every commune seeks to be its own base. It seeks to dissolve the question of needs. It seeks to break all economic dependency and all political subjugation; it degenerates into a milieu the moment it loses contact with the truths on which it is founded. There are all kinds of communes that wait neither for the numbers nor the means to get organized, and even less for the “right moment” — which never arrives.”

But this excerpt follows a notion of the commune that is not so easily type-casted into the rural commune of Tarnac:

“Communes come into being when people find each other, get on with each other, and decide on a common path. The commune is perhaps what gets decided at the very moment when we would normally part ways. It’s the joy of an encounter that survives its expected end. It’s what makes us say “we,” and makes that an event. What’s strange isn’t that people who are attuned to each other form communes, but that they remain separated. Why shouldn’t communes proliferate everywhere? In every factory, every street, every village, every school. At long last, the reign of the base committees! Communes that accept being what they are, where they are. And if possible, a multiplicity of communes that will displace the institutions of society: family, school, union, sports club, etc. Communes that aren’t afraid, beyond their specifically political activities, to organize themselves for the material and moral survival of each of their members and of all those around them who remain adrift. Communes that would not define themselves — as collectives tend to do — by what’s inside and what’s outside them, but by the density of the ties at their core. Not by their membership, but by the spirit that animates them.”

There is a strong eschatological element in the writings of the Invisible Committee, that some radical political theologians have picked up on (e.g. see Ward Blanton’s lecture on the Invisible Committee ). Because of Julien Coupat’s arrest as one of the Tarnac Nine, the Invisible Committee has become associated with the journal Tiqqun. In “Theory of Bloom” Tiqqun is defined:

“The French rendering of the Hebrew word Tikkun, meaning to “perfect”, “repair”, “heal”, or “transform”. In rabbanical school, students study mystical texts that view tikkun as the process of restoring a complex divine unity. A tikkun kor’im (readers’ tikkun) is a study guide used when preparing to chant the Torah, or to read from the Torah in a Jewish synagogue. People who chant from the Torah must differs from that written (the Kethib) in the scroll.”

The Wikipedia article for Tiqqun says the word is derived from the “Hebrew term Tikkun olam, a concept issuing from Judaism, often used in the kabbalistic and messianic traditions.”

Murakami certainly alludes to this intersection of eschatology, theology, and politics, firstly in his narrative mechanism which has this Maoist commune turn into a secretive religious cult. He ties the religious and political in this way, but in a manner that I myself find unconvincing. Many of these co-operative farms are anti-hierarchical and I find it difficult to see, even for a commune of the authoritarian left to turn into something resembling Sakigake in the novel. Regardless, I think the intersection of radical religion and politics in 1Q84 to be a fascinating subject to explore, even if I found Murakami’s particular approach unsatisfying. There is of course an eschatological dimension that Murakami gestures towards in various chapters, often in amusing an humorous ways. One of my favourites is in the following chapter (Chapter 11):

As a woman, Aomame had no concrete idea how much it hurt to suffer a hard kick in the balls… “It hurts so much you think the end of the world is coming right now. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s different from ordinary pain,” said a man, after careful consideration, when Aomame asked him to explain it to her.

Aomame gave some thought to his analogy. The end of the world?

“Conversely, then,” she said, “would you say that when the end of the world is coming right now, it feels like a hard kick in the balls?”

Aomame was called in and instructed to rein in the ball-kicking practice. “Realistically speaking, though,” she protested, “it’s impossible for women to protect themselves against men without resorting to a kick in the testicles. Most men are bigger and stronger than women. A swift testicle attack is a woman’s only chance. Mao Zedong said it best. You find your opponent’s weak point and make the first move with a concentrated attack. It’s the only chance a guerrilla force has of defeating a regular army.”

The manager did not take well to her passionate defense. “…I don’t care what Mao Zedong said—or Genghis Khan, for that matter: a spectacle like that is going to make most men feel anxious and annoyed and upset.”

If there’s any guy crazy enough to attack me, I’m going to show him the end of the world—close up. I’m going to let him see the kingdom come with his own eyes.”

The Witnesses’ rendition of the Lord’s prayer is recurring theme that surfaces throughout the novel, and even if it is presented in a cynical manner by Murakami, I think it still evokes a particular mode of contemplation that I found interesting. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are the obvious allusion Murakami is making and their pacifism is even explicitly mentioned by Ushikawa: “They are well known to be pacifists, following the principle of nonresistance.”

Pacifism, of course, more associated with the radical Christians of the anabaptist tradition, although I have yet to encounter the connection between Jehovah’s Witnesses and Anabaptism, other than certain millenarian impulses they might share. Anyways, I think this an interesting node that Murakami marks, posing the question of violence and justice: revolutionary violence (of Akebono), assassination (Aomame’s side gig), and sexual violence (experienced by the women that the dowager tries to protect). What causes aversion to political and religious radicals, fundamentalists, etc?

Murakami’s answer is coercion and the denigration of the individual. This is epitomized in a dialogue Aomame has with the dowager, where the dowager asks:

“Are you a feminist, or a lesbian?” Aomame blushed slightly and shook her head. “I don’t think so. My thoughts on such matters are strictly my own. I’m not a doctrinaire feminist, and I’m not a lesbian.”

“That’s good,” the dowager said. As if relieved, she elegantly lifted a forkful of broccoli to her mouth, elegantly chewed it, and took one small sip of wine.

This is very similar to the sort of ideology that Jordan Petersen subscribes to. It is a ‘higher than thou’ purity politics that looks down on any sort of collective organization that betrays any sort of hypocrisy. Yet most religious traditions recognize that any sort of collective organizing is bound to live in contradiction with its ideals. Within the Christian tradition, thoughtful adherents recognize the Church as a ‘fallen’ institution composed of ‘sinners’. I think it is important to recognize and confess the short fallings of previous attempts to realize ideals while not abandoning the ideals because people that came before us have severely fucked it up. Another world is possible, and I think if we fall back into our silos of individualism we will not realize this other world. Murakami provides an almost Kierkegaardian framing of what is essentially ritual rape in the novel — and I found that disturbing, though in the realm of magical realism, I’m not qualified to make any meaningful commentary. What I will confess is that my own life betrays a certain sort of ‘bourgeois individualism’ but I have not yet reached a form of cynicism that celebrates it, and I hope I won’t anytime soon.

Anyhow, beyond these critiques, I enjoyed this novel a lot, and I think it brought up interesting questions to contemplate. I found the Proust jokes hilarious, some of the funniest moments in the book. Curiously, I have never finished reading Orwell’s 1984. I was supposed to have finished reading it for a Grade 12 literature class, but I recall that period of the semester as a tremendously busy one for me. I do intend to finish it one day soon, and Orwell’s democratic socialism is a fascinating lens through which to also examine many of the themes that Murakami explores, including those of agency and freedom. There are these strange lines in the book that I don’t quite know what to make of: 

“He leaned against the wall, in the shadows of the telephone pole and a sign advertising the Japanese Communist Party, and kept a sharp watch over the front door of Mugiatama.“

There are funnier allusions to this like:

“Have you heard about the final tests given to candidates to become interrogators for Stalin’s secret police?” “No, I haven’t.”

“A candidate would be put in a square room. The only thing in the room is an ordinary small wooden chair. And the interrogator’s boss gives him an order. He says, ‘Get this chair to confess and write up a report on it. Until you do this, you can’t leave this room.’ ”

“Sounds pretty surreal.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s not surreal at all. It’s a real story. Stalin actually did create that kind of paranoia, and some ten million people died on his watch—most of them his fellow countrymen. And we actually live in that kind of world. Don’t ever forget that.”

...“So what kind of confession did the interrogator candidates extract from the chairs?”

“That is a question definitely worth considering,” Tamaru said. “Sort of like a Zen koan.”

“Stalinist Zen,” Aomame said.

I have my own views on Murakami’s crypto-Calvinist sections, which is not unrelated to Murakami’s interwoven narrative technique, and in excerpts such as the one I opened with about the etymology of ‘lunatic’. Also, I actually quite enjoyed the way Murakami alluded to Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor passage from the Brothers Karamazov — where Satan frames miracles as a sort of spectacle when trying to tempt Christ in the wilderness. I’ve always thought that there’s certainly some Debordian comment that can be made with respect to that. In fact, the notion of spectacle, and this process of reducing agency such that we become mere spectators, is itself thematic in Murakami’s fiction, especially here. Again, it is this crypto-Calvinist notion of fate, that one’s future is already predetermined and no matter what one might try, it is inevitable. (This must be related to Murakami’s quoting of Carl Jung: “Called or not called, God is there”.) And so one becomes almost a spectator to one’s own life unfolding under the predetermined path of capital. Yet curiously, Tengo and Aomame do escape from Leader’s prophetic claim that was to befall Aomame, out from 1Q84, back up the stairwell back to the path of 1984. If only escaping from “late declining capitalism” (Murakami’s term) was that simple.

Though I had many reservations, 1Q84 was breezy read and I think that’s a testament to how fun Murakami’s writing can be, and this was one of those books where this was very much the case.

[hub-pub-bub]

Earlier this month, the author and screenwriter Gareth Roberts announced that his story was being removed from a forthcoming Doctor Who anthology. Having been shown Roberts’s past tweets about transgender people, BBC Books said that his views “conflict with our values as a publisher”. At least one of the book’s other contributors, Susie Day, had promised to withdraw from the project if Roberts were included. “I raised my concerns, and said if he was in, I was out,” Day said.

A few days before, at the Hay festival, the Irish author John Boyne had described a campaign against his own book, My Brother’s Name Is Jessica, about a boy and his trans sister. He was insulted on Twitter for his appearance and his sexuality. (Like Roberts, he is gay but not trans.) Some critics proposed a boycott of Boyne’s novel, which was not withdrawn. Others made veiled threats to his safety. “I don’t feel it’s my job as a reader or a writer to tell anyone what they can or can’t write,” Boyne said. “We are supposed to use our imaginations, to put ourselves into the minds and the bodies of others.”

The campaigns against Roberts and Boyne are not new, or isolated. Since March, I have been sending discreet messages to authors of young adult fiction. I approached 24 people, in several countries, all writing in English. In total, 15 authors replied, of whom 11 agreed to talk to me, either by email or on the phone. Two subsequently withdrew, in one case following professional advice. Two have received death threats and five would only talk if I concealed their identity. This is not what normally happens when you ask writers for an interview.

Amélie Zhao withdrew her forthcoming fantasy novel about slavery.

Another of Zhao’s critics was Kosoko Jackson, whose own debut novel A Place for Wolves, about a romance between two teenage boys during the Kosovo war, was scheduled for release in March. Jackson is black and gay, and a professional sensitivity reader, which means he reads books before publication and offers advice on how they handle matters of identity. Yet on 22 February, he too was accused of insensitivity, for allegedly minimising the suffering of Albanian Muslims. “I’ve never been so disgusted in my life,” said the first review to make this point, on the reading community website Goodreads.com. On 25 February, comments below the review began to discuss sending an open letter to Jackson’s publisher. On 28 February, he posted a note apologising to “those who I hurt with my words” and withdrew the book. In April, the British YA author Zoe Marriott was widely accused of cultural appropriation for writing a Chinese-inspired fantasy novel called The Hand, the Eye and the Heart.

These are just the latest battles in a war that seems to be escalating over who should control the way that people from marginalised communities appear in YA fiction. In August 2016, the Mexican-American author EE Charlton-Trujillo’s verse novel When We Was Fierce was delayed after several bloggers criticised its attempt to capture the voice of a black teenager. It has still not been published, and is not mentioned on Charlton-Trujillo’s website. In the months that followed, three speculative fiction novels, The Black Witch by Laurie Forest, American Heart by Laura Moriarty and The Continent by Keira Drake, attracted protests for their allegedly racist content. Forest published regardless, and with great success, despite a campaign of one-star reviews and emails to her publisher. Moriarty published, too, although Kirkus magazine, which had defended The Black Witch, downgraded and revised its review of American Heart, because it said the article “fell short of meeting our standards for clarity and sensitivity”. Drake, however, was convinced by her critics, 455 of whom signed a petition demanding that The Continent, “a racist garbage fire” according to one fellow author, be delayed to allow “additional editorial focus”. A substantially revised version appeared in March 2018.

The YA community is a much tighter group than the scattered loners who write adult fiction. “Young adult” means books suitable for readers aged 12 to 18, and the grownups who write them exhibit en masse the same idealism and energy, the defiance and conformity, and the love of social media for which teenagers are famous. Spend time weaving through the Twitter feeds of YA bloggers and authors and you’ll find a supportive atmosphere for struggling writers, along with a widespread belief that the novels they produce should be good in all ways, moral and artistic. In particular, every author I’ve spoken to agrees that marginalised people must be represented in books more accurately and often than in the past. It is something they have more reason to care about than most, since young people on average are more liberal and less white than the general population in both the US and the UK. It is also natural to write more cautiously when about half the people reading will be children.

The YA category is still a teenager itself, with origins in the Harry Potter years at the beginning of the century. Its first big identity discussion took place in 2012, when the film of The Hunger Games surprised some loyal but inattentive readers with the news that two of the main characters were black. In May 2014, a new fan convention in New York called BookCon announced an all-male, all-white panel for its Blockbuster Reads event, and We Need Diverse Booksgrew out of the protests that followed. In September 2015, Corinne Duyvis, a Dutch YA author, proposed the Twitter label #ownvoices to promote books in which “the protagonist and author share a marginalised identity”. It has since become a kind of quality assurance mark for many campaigners, since it means that a book will help diversify both the characters and authors in YA fiction, while guaranteeing that the author knows what life with the character’s identity is like. In autumn 2015, Kirkus began a policy of noting the skin colour of major characters in children’s and YA books, and assigning own-voices reviewers to them. Kirkus also started to provide what it called “sensitivity training” to its reviewers. The employment of sensitivity readers became routine in US YA publishing at around the same time.

John Boyne faced criticism of his book My Brother’s Name Is Jessica. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

Many of the battles around YA books display the worst features of what is sometimes called “cancel culture”. Tweets condemning anyone who even reads an accused book have been shared widely. I have heard about publishers cancelling or altering books, and asking authors to issue apologies, not because either of them believed they ought to apologise, but because they feared the consequences if they didn’t. Some authors feel that it is risky even to talk in public about this subject. “It’s potentially really serious,” says someone I’ll call Alex. “You could get absolutely mobbed.” So I can’t use your real name? “I would be too nervous to say that with my name to it.” None of the big three UK publishing groups, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins or Hachette, was available for comment.

Another author I will call Chris is white, queer and disabled. Chris has generally found the YA community friendly and supportive during a career spanning several books, but something changed when they announced plans for a novel about a character from another culture. Later, Chris would discover that an angry post about the book had appeared anonymously on Tumblr, directing others to their website. At the time, Chris only knew that their blog and email were being flooded with up to 100 abusive messages a day.

“These ranged from people telling me that … I was a sick pervert for tainting [their] story with my corrupt, westernised ideas,” Chris says, “to people saying [I] had no right to appropriate [their] experiences for [my] own benefit and I must immediately stop work. Some emails and comments consisted of just four-letter words.” There were threats of beatings and sexual assault. One message made the threat of a group “coming to my house in the middle of the night, and breaking in so that they could give me a lethal overdose”. Some messages came through Goodreads, although Chris does not know if they were linked to the main YA community. The “vast majority”, and all of the most violent threats, “came from an ideology that I would identify as left”, Chris says, and every message made the same demand. “Stop writing this. Don’t write this. You can’t write this. You’re not allowed … ”

Chris now realises that it would have been best to call the police. In fact, they told no one. The messages continued for about a year, during which time Chris stopped sleeping, found it hard to write, and became increasingly depressed. At last, from a mixture of financial necessity and the feeling that the punishment was already happening, Chris finished the book, which has since been published. The original Tumblr post remains online.

For publishers, supporting a book accused of racism could seriously harm their reputation, yet the price of withdrawing one could be enormous. “It is a topic that is discussed on a daily basis in private groups on Facebook,” says an author I will call Paris, who has twice been nominated for the Carnegie medal. “There is a huge demand for books to be more sensitive to minority groups, but there is also a concern that this censorship, pre-publication, is the wrong way to go about it.” In Paris’s case, after months of debate, an entire series was withdrawn by the publisher. “The books were literally going to print that morning,” Paris remembers. “They ended up paying for the entire series, so I got all my advances and it never got published … It was mind-boggling. Just bizarre.”

Does Paris know why they pulled it? “Because the publisher was scared of Twitter. They admitted this, because there are things like a racist character in the book. They were worried that people would say, ‘This has got a racist character. The author must be racist.’” The publisher was certain that the books were fine, Paris says, but felt it could not risk an accusation of racism. “They are paranoid, and [the] sales [department] were second-guessing everything. They went through [the books] and went, ‘That could be misconstrued as offensive. That could be offensive. That could be offensive …’”

The idea that sensitivity is too subjective to understand, let alone enforce, frustrates many of those who campaign for it in the YA community. Rather than being a righteous mob trying to silence other opinions, they regard themselves as simple fact-checkers, providing a service that is welcomed by authors. “I see sensitivity reads as a form of peer review,” says one, who asked not to be identified. “There are some things as a white, cis, straight person that I may not notice or even consider. I recall a huge moment for me was reading about black ballerinas dyeing their pointe shoes to match their skin. It’s such a small thing, but I never had to think about that when I did ballet; the shoes always matched my skin.”

Heidi Heilig runs a YA Facebook group with more than 1,700 members. She says that the community is much more moderate and reasonable than many outsiders have been led to believe. “There is a sect of people who say, ‘Any criticism is censorship,’” she says. “There are people who say, ‘You can only write a character from a certain race if you are of that certain race.’ But a lot of the conversation falls somewhere in the middle.”

‘The way that things have played out this year doesn’t sit comfortably for me’ author Mary Watson.

Far from being afraid of criticism, Heilig says that many writers in her group are eager for feedback on identity matters, and many writers from marginalised groups are happy to provide it without accusing anyone of anything. None of this, of course, is seen by the outside world. “We care about our peers,” Heilig says. “We don’t want to drag people. That is the worst and last option. The first thing to do is try to help.” Meanwhile, many mildly racist books are still published without controversy, she believes, and some of the controversy we see has an important but hidden private context. “I don’t think that the fears you’re talking about are borne out by reality. People make this out to be so hard, but honestly I don’t think it’s that difficult. What we’re looking for is good writing, so you either know what the tropes are and subvert them, or break the tropes entirely. I don’t understand why there’s such a push to do the same old thing.”

Ellen Oh has been reluctant to talk publicly since her tweets about Blood Heir, for which she received death threats against herself and her family. She reported the worst cases to the police, and in the end deleted her social media accounts. Criticism is healthy, Oh believes, but she feels that outsiders have made things needlessly unpleasant. “I wish we did not have these mob reactions,” she says. “The YA community used to be a safe place where bloggers and writers could communicate and share book news. It’s become so different … There are extremes on both sides, and it is hard to find the truth among all the vitriol.”

Mary Watson, a mixed-race author who grew up under apartheid in South Africa and now lives in Ireland, agrees. “I think there have been many careless and even damaging representations of people of colour in books,” she says, “and as a reader I’ve experienced it throughout my life. Sometimes it’s just eye-rolling, sometimes it makes you want to shut the book in exasperation, so I understand that there’s a lot of anger about how people are represented. I absolutely get that. But the way that things have played out this year doesn’t sit comfortably for me … I absolutely agree that sloppy representation should be spoken out against, but I think this should happen in ways that encourage constructive dialogue rather than cancellation.”

Sophia Bennett, a British author, welcomes many of the changes in YA over the past five years, but sees a clear line that critics should not cross. “One thing that saddens me about the way that the argument is polarised on social media is how many people comment negatively, particularly, on books that they haven’t read,” she says. “I think that is an unhealthy attitude for a readership to have. They don’t want to make up their own minds based on their own experience.”

There are other reasons, beyond the page, why the YA community might be upset right now. According to research by Melanie Ramdarshan Bold at University College London, after a period of rapid growth in the early 2000s, the number of YA books being published in the UK peaked in 2012, since when it has declined rapidly. In 2016, the latest year in the study, just 167 different YA authors were published in the UK, less than half the number of 2012 and fewer than in any year since 2006, when the dataset begins. Overall, sales of young adult fiction fell in the US last year, and in February the Bookseller revealed a very steep drop in UK sales, which are now at their lowest point for 11 years. There are many theories to explain this, including the idea that YA has become overloaded with social justice themes – although this was hardly a problem for The Hate U Give, a huge blockbuster by Angie Thomas, which concerns the shooting of a black teenager by a white police officer.

The YA wars may die out in the months ahead, as people grow weary of the arguments. Or the conflict may appear to die out, if timid publishers purge anything that they can imagine being questioned. The wars may even spread. There have been two pre‑publication campaigns against adult novels on the basis of identity so far this year. A petition demanded the withdrawal of The Cape Doctor by EJ Levy because of the way it handles the gender of its central character. In May, They Called Me Wyatt was cancelled after its author Natasha Tynes tweeted a photograph of a black subway worker eating, against the rules, on a Washington DC train. Tynes was widely accused of racism. At the time of writing, on Goodreads, her book has received 1,970 one-star reviews. She is now suing her publisher.

It may not be realistic to hope for restraint on social media, but it is clearly what’s required. If authors are only human and make mistakes that need to be corrected, then critics are also human, and must be ready to admit some mistakes of their own. In January, Kosoko Jackson was an authority on negative tropes in fiction. In February, he was a perpetrator, as unreliable as everybody else. Heilig herself praised A Place for Wolves on Goodreads, then later apologised for being “flippant and disrespectful”. Still, correction hurts, so it is always tempting to dismiss the “social justice warriors” or the “arrogant racists” on the other side. Ironically, it can even happen when writers argue over how to avoid stereotypes. Nothing is more normal than being wrong.