#reading this book was a testament to my masochism

[not-poignant]

Top 5 memeee! Top 5 m/m books? :)

Oooo, okay this one is particularly tough, and would definitely change month to month, but here we go:

1. Bad Judgment, Sidney Bell - I have reread this book so many times. The fact that I can enjoy this book despite the fact that one of the MC’s names is Brogan (which to me is like a hideous cross between Bro and Bogan - the Australian derogatory term for our version of a ‘redneck’) is a testament to how good it is. And Embry is one of my favourite characters of all time in m/m. Fussy, picky, dangerous, unpredictable, lonely, and probably one of the strongest depictions of a victim of domestic violence I’ve ever seen. Also, like, I wouldn’t have called myself a fan of suspense romance until I read this, and I’m still not sure I am, but I’m definitely a fan of this.

2. Claimings, Tails and Other Alien Artefacts, Lyn Gala - Xeno? Sure. Two literally incompatible species who have to fuck through very unconventional means? Definitely. The most solid worldbuilding you’ll pretty much ever see in a science fiction m/m romance - so far, for me, yes. The entire Claimings series is a gift, as far as I’m concerned, with one of the most interesting biological takes on domination and submission I’ve ever seen. I like Lyn Gala in general, but this one I reread for it’s generous hurt/comfort factor.

3. Out of Nowhere, Roan Parrish - It was this or Invitation to the Blues by Parrish, but frankly I’ve read this one far, far more often. This is the second part of a series. In the first part, the MC has been - among other things - verbally abused by his homophobic brother Colin. You learn to hate him. THEN, comes Colin’s book. I was prepared to hate this story. I hated Colin. Then I learned how much he hated himself, how closeted he was, and worse (or best, if you like angst as much as I do), what he’d endured in his back story that made him the way that he was. This is probably one of the least obviously likeable MCs in a series, and yet I love him so deeply. I come back to this one again and again.

4. The Good Boy and its sequel, The Boy Who Belonged, JA Rock and Lisa Henry. Hands down one of my favourite hurt/comfort reads, with really typically awesome BDSM depictions from these two (anything they touch generally turns to gold when it comes to kink, and I very nearly chose The Subs Club instead, but this series won out for how many times I read it a year).

Basically it’s the story of a rich millionaire young man who suffers a horrendous fall from grace, and how he ends up in the lap of the man who initially hated him for having all that money in the first place (it’s more complex than that). It features some really lovely puppy play, some creative BDSM ‘I want you to hurt me, but I don’t want to be hit’ resulted in some lovely scenes as Lane grew through his fears and his trauma around masochism and sadism. When I talk about good BDSM in m/m, this is generally what I’m thinking of. What sends it above and beyond for me is the absolute bevy of hurt/comfort. Also? Brin gets better, hang in there, lmao.

5. Axel’s Pup by Kim Dare. I was going to say ‘probably one of my favourite shifter reads’ but I just realised that given I’ve read it about 10+ times, along with a lot of other Kim Dare’s shifter works (including Duck! and Magpie, which feature bird shifters and an interesting bird shifter universe), this is definitely my favourite shifter read.

For a start, Bayden is like, one of the most interesting ‘omegas’ (for lack of a better term) I’ve ever seen. He’s traumatised, quiet, self-sufficient, engages in behaviour that harms him (including getting himself beat up and whipped for money), and has almost no faith in humanity or indeed, many other wolves. He meets Axel, the human owner of a biker bar, and a well-practiced dominant. Bayden begins to gravitate towards Axel (thinking of him as an alpha), but Axel has a whole lot of ‘what the fuck is this’ around Bayden and all his issues. Watching the way he handles them and offers Bayden structure, comfort and discipline is really fascinating.

*

I was going to do some honourable mentions but frankly you can also just go into my m/m shelf on Goodreads and sort it by rating :D

*

From the Top 5 meme!

[flameclaw22]

Book Review: The Crown’s Game

Spoilers ahead!

Rating: 1 star out of 5

I'd been contemplating reading Circle of Shadows, the newest Evelyn Skye novel, but I wanted to test the waters by reading another of her books first. I found The Crown's Game on sale in the NOOK store for $1.99, so I snapped it up. In a way, I'm glad I did, because reading The Crown's Game ultimately prevented me from wasting considerably more money on Circle of Shadows.

I could use the phrase “dumpster fire” to describe this book, but that's really not fitting: Dumpster fires at least entail vaguely interesting events. The Crown’s Game is easily one of the dullest books I’ve ever read - even duller than any novel in the Twilight series. It’s no compliment to say that Stephanie Meyer did a better job world-building. Evelyn Skye exerted such negligible effort on world-building that her tale barely squeaks into the historical fantasy genre, giving more of the feel of historical fanfiction with magic tossed in for shits and giggles. The magic originates from some spring or fountain or some bullshit that apparently pays attention to arbitrary geopolitical boundaries and nationality. And excluding faith healers and a couple of magical creatures, the latter of whom are only mentioned in passing, there are only four known characters in Russia with the magic, and two of them monopolize most of it. Since both competitors possess gargantuan supplies of the magic, the result is a pair of stupidly overly-powerful heroes.

Skye is just as bad at inventing plots as she is at world-building. Expect no real action or intrigue from Crown’s Game. The game itself is nothing more than an unstructured magical pissing contest, and Skye fails to leave enough to the imagination to keep readers hooked. There’s no nefarious plot running beneath the surface, there’s no tension or suspense; it’s just a fight for who gets to be the tsar’s chief suck-up and who gets to die, and the two competitors falling in love.

The characters are breathtakingly boring. If you played the Wii Fit obstacle course game, you probably remember what a pain in the ass it was to avoid those logs, lest your Mii be comically flattened. Clearly The Crown’s Game’s characters played this game and lost spectacularly, because damn, are they dimensionally challenged. Though it’s not Vika’s fault that Pasha worshipfully describes her in a manner that is utterly vomit-inducing, it is Vika’s fault for failing to demonstrate that she is anything more than an insipid, gorgeous magical girl anime reject. She has pretty red hair with a black streak in it and can generate an entire island with her mind. She misses her dad. She’s pretty. She’s powerful. Did I mention she’s pretty? The way Vika blathers on about how attractive Nikolai is implies that she’s never seen a boy before (even though that’s probably not true). Spare me the agony.

Scarcely surpassing the sentience of a doorknob, Nikolai might as well have been a giant Russian Ken doll. His thoughts mostly consist of dreamily imagining banging Vika, hawing over not wanting to kill her, and attempting to concoct a contest-winning plan. When a woman in a semi-zombified state shows up out of the blue - alleging to be his mother, no less - Nikolai is relatively unperturbed. His strongest reaction is his revulsion over how dreadful Aizhana smells. Come on. Even if you live in a world steeped in magic, if a shambling, malodorous corpse lady appears and claims to be your dead mommy, you should shit yourself, at least a little bit. If all you can do is complain about is the foul stench, you desperately need help. When he walks into the Enchanted Hollow, a goddam cave, his thought is, “So this is why it’s called the Enchanted Hollow.” You’re a little slow on the uptake, pal. Reading this particular line evokes thoughts of that iCarly scene where Kurt, the cute but dumb (fired) intern, rides the elevator and then breathes in awe, “This is an elevator.” And really, that captures Nikolai’s essence - the hot but moronic guy who should be fired before he ruins the world. I half-expected him to pop into a scene with a plastic bag of lemonade.

Pasha isn’t much better. Like Nikolai, he too obsesses over Vika to a degree that seriously annoyed me, as a reader stuck in his head. (What I can say is that Pasha, as nauseatingly pesky as his crush-related thoughts are, isn’t a complete creep. For instance, he refrains from kissing Vika while she is asleep because he does not want to disrespect/violate her.) Unlike Nikolai, however, he exhibits some intellectual curiosity and later undergoes a considerable personality change; unfortunately, this shift is such an about-face that its effect comes off less as character development and more as a rancorous temper tantrum.

There’s little to say for the remaining characters. Renata merely serves to upgrade the love triangle to a love web. Ludmila is Vika’s plump, middle-aged sidekick, who effectively fills the role of a lame-ass Molly Weasley: a source of tasty baked goodies and motherly love, minus the tough fierceness that makes Molly so endearing. Pasha’s sister, Yuliana, functions as the impetus behind the Crown’s Game, urging her father to commence the contest, but Tsar Alexander is such an unpleasant dickbag that no other scapegoat for starting the game is truly required, rendering Yuliana obsolete. At virtually every given opportunity, he goes out of his way to be rude, condescending, or snappish. During his spiel about the rules of the game, Vika interrupts him as respectfully as possible to inquire about why one Enchanter must die at the end of the game, and Alexander acts as if she’s expressed the desire to hit him in the testicles repeatedly with a large stick. He can’t even muster the patience or sympathy to answer a valid question posed by a competitor - a teenager, mind you - in a fatal contest to be the tsar’s magical toady. When Vika arrives at the ball in her fabulous dress, the tsar snidely remarks that she should “take care not to become too enamored of the tsarevich” because “it will require more than a showy gown to be worthy.” Damn it, dude, she just told you that she fashioned her clothes herself. Would it kill you to just toss out some platitude or another? Honestly, I pity Tsarina Elizabeth - she deserves so much better than Alexander. Sergei’s role is just being Vika’s mentor/father figure and an eventual sacrifice; Sergei’s bitchy sister, Galina, is a fucking psychopath who forces Nikolai to kill animals that she put in his bedroom and doesn’t miss a chance to remind him of his “low birth”. And if you’re holding out for a decent villain, don’t bother: Despite being one of the more interesting characters, Aizhana is just a vengeful zombie who boasts a typhus-riddled black tongue (I kid you not), long fingernails, and a festering grudge. That’s pretty much it.

And just what the fuck is this sentence structure?! The writing is clunky, awkward, and the cause of many an eye-roll. For example: “Nikolai shook his head at the beauty of Bolshebnoie Duplo.” This is an actual sentence in a published book not written for fourth-graders. This is an actual sentence in a published book that is presumably not written by a fourth-grader. I have read and enjoyed books with similar writing flaws, but the other elements of the book compensated for them. Obviously, nothing in The Crown's Game does.

This clumsy delivery pervades the romance of the book too. In yet another nightmare sentence, Pasha gushes about this gorgeous girl (Vika), whom he spotted from a distance the other day:

“She has red hair, like the most hypnotizing part of a flickering flame, and her voice is both melodic and unflinching.”

Ew, gross, no, stop. You’re embarrassing yourself, Pasha. You heard her speak but three sentences from a distance and now you can describe her voice like that? Not only does this further paint Vika as a Mary Sue, but it also just makes Pasha look like a pompous ass. This sort of florid diction is typically reserved for Lord Byron’s poetry. And then, when Pasha hops back on the boat back to St. Petersburg, Skye writes, “He murmured, ‘Vika,’ to himself, more than once.” Oh. My. God. By this point, I can safely say that Pasha acts like Ron Weasley under the influence of Romilda Vane’s love potion. J.K. Rowling at least had the courtesy to cure Ron of his sorry state by within the chapter; Skye’s characters, on the other hand, continue this behavior throughout Crown’s Game. I can’t pick on just Pasha, not when Vika serves up internal monologues like this one:

“It was as if the attempts to kill her faded into the background, and now she saw the truth at the core of it all: Nikolai’s magic was gorgeous and powerful and... and... Her lungs faltered. Even the mere memory of his magic was so strong. And touching Nikolai, even through her gloves and his sleeve, was like being pummeled by a stampede of wild horses. No, wild unicorns. Beautiful, wild unicorns.”

He’s the other enchanter, and she’s just now figured out that he’s powerful? Also, does she want to fuck him or his magic? If you think Nikolai contributes nothing to this travesty of romance, you’re quite wrong:

“He had thought, during the mazurka, that they’d had something. Their touch had both frenzied and frozen the ballroom. Their breathing had synchronized, heatedly.”

I could find more examples but I really don’t want to, since I prefer not vomiting.

Skye spends so much time on saccharine pseudo-poetry that she skimps on meaningful interactions between characters, particularly those involved in the two pairings we the readers are supposed to choose between. One carriage ride and a ballroom dance with Vika, whom he’s only known for a couple of weeks, and he thinks he’s so in love with her that when he discovers Nikolai's identity as the second enchanter and that Nikolai is "in love" with Vika too, he feels betrayed enough to pit the two of them - his best friend and the girl he supposedly loves - against each other in a battle to the death. Nikolai and Vika's encounters consist of either one attempting to murder the other, often with a crowd of bystanders within view, or gazing longingly into each other's eyes. Although Vika does have a sweet mother-daughter scene with Ludmila, and Sergei and Galina seem to reach some kind of reconciliation before the former dies, character-to-character interactions are generally superficial and unanimated.

In the end, whether you subject yourself to the agony of reading this book is up to you. Personally, I think it might be less time-consuming to purchase a bottle of high fructose corn syrup from the grocery store, go home, and drink the entire fucker in one sitting. You'd get the same bland, over-sweet experience from whichever one you choose. As for me, I won't be reading another book of Evelyn Skye's. I've had enough literary corn syrup to last me a lifetime.

You can also read this review on my website: <https://thebookishhawk.home.blog/2019/02/25/the-crowns-game-book-review/>.

[pamphletstoinspire]

6 Spiritual Lessons I Learned From the Book of Job

Written by Sebastian Campos

If you haven’t read this Old Testament book, you’ve missed out on a major part of the Jewish spiritual understanding of pain and suffering. I won’t narrate the complete story, but in summary Job had to go through tremendous calamities. He lost his possessions, his servants, and his whole family… and he even suffered a wound that stretched from his head to his feet. The explanation the bible gives of what happens to Job is that the “enemy” tempts him through trials and suffering in attempt to make him deny and curse God.

The narrative explains that Job tried to look for answers that allowed him to resist the devil’s temptations, since he knew God is good. Amidst his pain, desolation, confusion and anger, he fired in every direction without hitting on any consolation, any logical idea to fill his heart. A couple of friends even went to him to comfort him, but there was nothing they could say to appease his sorrow or to explain all that was happening to him. The confusion caused by all the things he lived through was so great that even his friends were at a loss. As the scriptures say:

“And when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted up their voice, and wept; and they rent every one his mantle, and sprinkled dust upon their heads toward heaven. So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great” (Job 2, 12-13).

I suppose you’ve probably been through an inexplicable suffering that just knocks on the door of your life, leaving wordless even your closest friends. Nobody, not your friends, nor you, nor your faith are capable of giving any explanation to what happened, and hopelessness and anguish start to grow in your heart. In the face of these situations, the foundations of faith, life, what we believe in and what we do, start to falter.

The first chapters of the story are unsettling, above all because apparently, and justly, Job didn’t deserve any of what was happening to him. On the contrary, what Job really deserved were blessings and prosperity, which come hand in hand with God. I personally have sometimes felt challenged by the story of suffering Job, especially on those occasions in which I have given all of myself, I have persevered in my work, my faith and in my love for others in service; and I have kept my heart clean and right; and even then, things have turned out awful: I’ve experienced pain, brokenness, loneliness, poverty, suffering. Surely you too have felt this way at some point and know there isn’t much to find comfort on.

I know I haven’t suffered as deeply other people have, but the study of the Book of Job during the painful and hard times of my life has helped me bring out some ideas that could be of use to you. Better yet, it may help you to accompany others in their tribulations and sustain them in hope.

1. Look at Job from a new perspective, the one of Jesus

I personally liked to look at the book of Job and validate feeling sorry for myself and sitting down on the ashes without doing anything but suffering… dwelling there, aching, looking at my wounds, feeling pain and waiting for it to magically pass or, even worse, until the end of my days. This is the Christian depression, selfless and resigned, which many of us believe is holy for the sole fact of accepting it without complaint. We forget that Job is a book from the Old Covenant, and that Jesus came later to make all things new, that He came to give us life in abundance, that for His merits we are saved, and that His love restores our friendship with God. We forget that every battle, test, tribulation and suffering was nailed at the Cross and exiled from our lives forever.

We often live as if Jesus had not saved us definitely, or even worse, as if his salvation were only to happen at the end of our days or as if it only affected the spiritual dimension of our lives. Job didn’t have a Jesus to look at. We do. Let us never forget that our every aching was suffered by Jesus at the Cross of the Calvary and his blood paid for us to be saved. This doesn’t make our lives free from pain and suffering, but it makes them temporary. Our life doesn’t end there, all of our battles are won hand in hand with Jesus. Don’t let any pain steal your hope.

2. God doesn’t test anyone

The story of Job is from the Old Testament. Keep this in mind when you read it. Because the dynamic used by Jews (who didn’t know Jesus yet) to explain God’s way of acting is different from what the New Testament shows us. The text says that one day Satan approached God to talk about Job, boasting that his temptations could induce Job to blaspheme against Him. God permits it in order to strengthen Job’s faith. It’s important to read this story from a spiritual perspective. God doesn’t play games, He doesn’t experiment on us like a child playing with ants.

As the Apostle James says: “When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me’. For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He tempt anyone” (James 1, 13); because, in fact, the last thing God wants is to test how strong we are to know whether or not we are worth it. That would be despising Jesus’ sacrifice. If we believe that God wants what happens to us, then within the possibilities we would find that God wants us to fail, to not pass, and to be incapable. Do you think God would want something like that? Of course not! God permits things to happen in our life, always to show us something better.

3. God doesn’t revolve around me

This idea could be confusing to us, in fact many people through history have been puzzled since they’ve had the impression that God is there to help them in their self-fulfillment and they pretend to use Him for it. This is to put backwards the nature of creation, and unfortunately it is destined to fail. I’ve seen myself fabricating complicated and detailed plans and afterwards presenting them to God so that He blesses them without changing anything I’ve so intelligently prepared. It’s different when I, alongside of God, take the time to discern what His plans are, and to carry them out myself, that way His blessing will always be with me.

It’s us who help God’s “great plan.” Our participation and the discovery of our purpose helps in the fulfillment of His will, not the other way around. We were made for God, not the opposite.

The Catechism, paragraph 27 says: “The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for.”

4. Not everything has an explanation, but everything has a purpose

“God would never allow any evil whatsoever to exist in his works if he were not so all-powerful and good as to cause good to emerge from evil itself” (St. Augustine).

There are two questions we could ask when faced with a situation that shatters our lives. Why? Or… for what? It sounds like pop psychology… empty, especially in the case of terrible sufferings, like death or a serious disease. But these kinds of questions should be made with a peaceful heart. First, you have to process everything with a sense of calm. Discovering God’s purpose is not a matter for a couple of minutes of prayer and then it’s done. God knows this and is waiting for you to get closer to Him and ask the necessary questions, to ask, to doubt, so that you finally accept, even without completely understanding. His will, although often indecipherable is amazing for our lives, and everything that happens to us, although hard to comprehend, makes sense in His bigger plan.

“In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed” (Peter 1, 6-7).

He obviously doesn’t want your suffering, He’s not mad at you, your life or your story. God wants what’s best for you! This is a truth you can’t doubt of for one second. The thing is, God knows that in order to do that which He has in mind, you often have to go through a desert.

“Tribulation is a gift from God, one that He gives his special friends” (St. Thomas More).

5. Do not numb the pain

It’s a part of our modern culture, we anesthetize ourselves. It makes us uncomfortable to see people suffer. So we marginalize them, we try to erase the pain, we cover it up. And we ourselves hide our pains with the excuse that “the procession is carried inside”.

Job sits down on the ground, shaves his head and covers himself in ashes as a sign that he doesn’t understand anything, that his battle doesn’t seem to make any sense. He sits down to suffer, to mourn over himself. We instead try to rapidly pass over our pains and, if after 3 or 6 months of mourning someone is still sad, we tell them “come on, it’s time to move on,” or “you have to be strong and move forward.” But, in truth, each of us has his own time and we have to respect it.

Embracing the one who mourns and crying with him instead of making him stop, letting him soak our shoulders with his tears instead of offering a tissue. Aching with the one who’s suffering, anguishing with the vulnerable, filling your face and heart with the other’s passion… that is to feel compassion, that your own heart turns, not for mere masochism, not as penance, but as an exercise of communion, as the Church’s body. It’s like when you stub your little toe and your whole body contorts, the whole body suffers the pain of a single toe. This should be our way of accompanying.

Job teaches us to suffer with dignity, to live the pain while allowing others to be there for us, to not hide the sufferings, to ask for help, and to get frustrated when answers are not easy to find, but accepting that losing, getting sick, dying, not having explanations, is terrible and has to be lived, not hidden nor covered.

6. Trust that you will be restored

The first time I read the book of Job all the way through was when my younger sister died, a little three-month-old girl with a diagnosis of an untreatable genetic condition.

Sorry about the spoiler if you haven’t read the book, but the story ends with God restoring Job to life, seeing that after suffering and accepting it, Job never denies nor curses Him. Job goes on to form a new family, much more fruitful that the first one. He prospers economically more than before, and his fame as a blessed man extends everywhere. In other words, the idea that the biblical author wants to express is that if you live your pain like you ought and without rebelling from God, He Himself will bless you and give you back even more than what you had before. Yes and no. That is to say, it’s not a spiritual trade in which God gives you back more than what He has taken. In the spiritual economy of Christians, there is no meritocracy; it’s all Jesus merits and even when we do things right, we don’t deserve a thing from God. He gives us everything for love, not because we are good or bad. Despite this, God comforts us, gives us relief, and accompanies us just like the Angels accompanied Jesus through His passion in Gethsemane.

Therefore, it is expected from God to show Himself, to bless you, to act in your favor, but don’t expect it to be a “quantitatively superior” manifestation, compared to whatever good or easy situation you were in prior to your suffering.

As an anecdote, I remember a time when I went on a retreat of spiritual exercises. I arrived with a dry heart, without wanting anything. My spiritual guide sent me to sit in front of the Blessed Sacrament, told me to sleep if I felt like it, but to spend time there, “sun-bathing under His light.” I have no idea what happened, but I got out of there bronzed, with a robust heart. Although I didn’t get any explanation that I can put into words, I did find answers, sense, and hope just by being there, before Him.

[nicolecasamento]

Read "Clichés for Tom" by the brilliant & remarkably prolific @wj_simmons 1st thing this morning. Feeling grateful to be in a field with such intelligent colleagues & always in awe of people willing to put their deepest personal experiences & emotions out there. Beyond being a thoughtful addition to the clichéd-for-a-reason, coming-of-age-in-New-York essay (with more self-awareness than most), the book offers a refreshingly honest look at our entire generation's obsession with introspection & navel-gazing (both of which have metastasized in the digital age & as the author points out, may be forms of sadism & masochism at once). Maybe the fact that reading this made the urge to write my own (which I have been very consciously suppressing for at least the last 5 years) reappear is testament to the author's depth - because the other personal essays I've read in recent years made me feel more annoyed & embarrassed than inspired tbh. This is also probably largely due to the fact that Simmons avoids the common millennial tendencies to either hide behind snark or to pretend like all his emotions have been neatly resolved in totally linear, noncontradictory forms. Thanks for sending me a 1st edition copy. Cover art by @anthony_iacono. #nicsthanks2017 #ncbookshelf http://ift.tt/2jny639