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loveharlow · 8 months ago

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SEVEN [THE INBETWEEN] - KISS IT BETTER

PAIRING ‧₊˚ JJ Maybank x Fem!Reader

SYNOPSIS‧₊˚[2.5k] Three weeks of no John B or Sarah and you're officially overwhelmed with grief and mixed signals, leading to an emotional outburst directed at certain blonde.

WARNING(S)‧₊˚ swearing, mentions of death, mutual pining, grief avoidance, little fluff, mentions of low self-esteem/negative self-image, mentions of past non-con

NOW PLAYING‧₊˚

A/N‧₊˚ I think this chapter is actually so soft and beautiful🥺 and I never really say this but I do think listening to the song on repeat as you read makes it one hundred times better.

˗ˏˋ series masterlist ˎˊ˗

THIS DAY MARKED THREE WEEKS SINCE YOU’D LOST JOHN B AND SARAH…And one week since JJ kissed you out of nowhere. Co-existing in your other presumed dead best friend’s house has been…odd, to say the least. You didn’t really know how to talk to JJ now, which was something you never thought would be an issue.

He’d been in the surf shack working on your car more than usual, without your company unfortunately. You’d been taking more small jobs just to get out of the house at this point. But barely talking to your best friend for an entire week while living in the same space was starting to take a toll on you.

And so was the kiss.

Did he mean to do it? Was it a spur of the moment thing? Did JJ have feelings for you? Ten thousand thoughts running around in your mind at once, driving you closer and closer to the edge of crazy. Your heart was telling you that the kiss was no accident — that it seemed too passionate and eager to be something he’d done in the heat of the moment. But your head was telling you that the kiss was an act of grief — something he’d done in a moment where his head wasn’t exactly screwed on straight.

That it was an honest mistake.

You didn’t know which part of you that you believed.

Or which part of you that you wanted to believe.

It was nightfall when you walked up the steps of The Chateau, bag slung lazily over your shoulder as you huffed out a puff of air, exhausted from your nearly ten hour long babysitting gig. Some couple needed someone to watch over their three kids while they went on a date. You should’ve known something was off when the mother was offering fifty dollars an hour, way over minimum wage — her three kids were more like a pint-sized trio of bats from hell. But you walked away with five-hundred more dollars in your pocket, so who were you to complain?

But even with fatigue and hunger weighing heavy on your bones, your heart still dropped at the thought of seeing JJ at the end of the day.

Sighing, you quietly opened the door of the home, throwing your bag on the sofa and letting the door close behind you as Marley immediately came charging, light paws feeling like punches on your thighs but you smiled nonetheless.

“Hi, pretty girl. How are you?” You cooed, scratching behind both of her ears as she wiggled against you.

Another set of footsteps rounded the corner, a freshly awoken JJ coming into your view. You coughed awkwardly under your breath, straightening out as the two of you locked eyes. “Oh, hey. I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“Nah, it’s fine. I’m just glad you made it in before it got too late, one of the corner stores got robbed a couple hours ago.” He said, voice raspy and low from sleep as he rubbed the exhaustion out of his eyes.

The two of you stood there awkwardly— JJ scratching the back of his head as you averted your eyes anywhere else, Marley’s panting filling the silence.

You took a deep breath, shoving your hands in the back of your pockets as JJ mindlessly nibbled on his lower lip. You took the opportunity to break the silence, the blonde seemingly having the same idea.

“Well, I’m gonna get ready for bed-”

“Look, I’m sorry-”

You both stopped talking, attempting to allow the other to speak. Small smiles broke out on your faces, the two of you looking down at your feet simultaneously. “This is awkward, if I’ve ever seen it…” JJ huffed out humorously. “Can we just…like, sit down and talk, for a minute?” He asked, his own words making him cringe slightly as he motioned towards the battered sofa.

You nodded, not saying a word as you plopped down on the piece of furniture, eyes on the floor as your hands held each other in your lap. JJ sat down oddly slow next to you. You expected him to try and create as much distance between the two of you as possible but surprisingly, he sat so close that your shoulders were brushing in the tiniest of ways.

The unexpectedness of it all had your brows furrowing, finding some kind of courage to look the boy in his eyes as he finally settled on the right words to say.

“...I shouldn’t have kissed you.” For some reason, the string of words made your heart tremble and your lips parted in surprise. They hurt more than you ever expected them to. Noticing your solemn expression, JJ was quick to clean up his statement, turning in his seat to look at you completely. “Not in the sense that I didn’t want to, no, God no.” He sputtered, hands moving around wildly. “It’s just that, with everything going on, I don't think that moment was the best moment to act on my feelings-”

He was cut off when you lurched forward, colliding your lips with his in the heat of the moment. In your haste and his surprise, the blonde accidentally bit your lip but you didn’t mind, never breaking the exchange. After a moment, you both seemed to settle into it — one of his hands sliding around your hip and waist to find a home on the end of your back, pulling you closer in the smallest motion. Your own hands cradled his jaw on each side, pulling him deeper into you.

You kissed that boy until you couldn’t anymore. Until your lips were swollen and wet, your head spinning as you pulled back and let your hands fall, sliding down the length of his neck and shoulders while his own hand slid back to rest on your thigh.

“...What was that for?” He asked in a whisper. He sounded breathless.

You simply gulped, tucking a small strand of hair behind your ear before speaking. “...When you kissed me, I felt something. Something I didn’t think I should feel while kissing my best friend. Because I never thought I’d be kissing my best friend at all.” You explained, elevating your gaze to meet his eyes. “And I thought to myself that I should feel repulsed. That the kiss should feel wrong. Right? But nothing about that kiss felt wrong.” You told him. “I haven’t been avoiding you because of the kiss, JJ. I’ve been avoiding you because I haven’t been able to get the thought of kissing you again out of my head since it happened.”

“And now that you have?” He asked, eyes searching yours. “Now, that you have kissed me again?”

“...I’m struggling not to do it a third time.” You breathed out, eyes fleeting towards his lips for the slightest of moments. “I don’t know what this is. In my head, you’re my absolute best friend and I love you in that aspect but everytime I see you now, I can’t help but think about you in ways that I shouldn’t. So, if that kiss or this one didn’t mean anything to you, you’d better tell me now because-”

“Oh, it meant something.” He cut you off enthusiastically, a small smirk playing on his lips. “I know you probably have no idea but that kiss meant everything to me.” He told you, edging closer on the sofa. “I’ve had this huge crush on you for, like, ever. Probably since I even knew what a crush was. But you know how I am…” He lowered his voice, avoiding your eyes. “I didn’t trust myself with you. Anytime I look at you, I see this ball of light around you and I never want it to go away. Or be the reason for it going away. With me and all my shit…”

“I don’t think of you like that.” You said honestly, a small frown on your face. “You aren’t some southside screw up or a charity case. JJ, you know that I don’t care about all that. I’m always there to walk through it with you, your life doesn’t define you, you know that. Or at least, you should.” You told the blonde, running a soft hand through his hair. “And I know that it may take some time for you to believe that for yourself but I’ll be the one to tell you it everyday until you actually hear it, as a friend or…whatever else.”

You reminded the boy, biting your lower lip in thought. “...That’s why you never said anything? Because you thought you weren’t good for me?”

He seemed to ponder on the statement before nodding, somewhat shamefully. “I mean, c'mon, look at you.” He scoffed, wide blue eyes looking at your face with so much adoration and purity that you never cared to notice before. “Someone like you doesn’t need to waste her life away trying to love someone like me.”

“I do love you-”

“Not in the way that I love you.” He blurted, pinching his eyes shut as he cut you off.

“...I could. But you’ll never know if you don’t let me try.” You told him. “I won’t sit here and tell you that I love you in that way because I really don’t know. But whatever I’m starting to feel for you is beyond a friendship and once I figure that out, who knows? But I also don’t want you to wait on me to figure things out if that’s not what you want.” You concluded, retreating your hands back to the comfort of your lap.

You don’t know how helpless you looked, but you made no attempt to hide the frown that you could feel on your face. You knew JJ was known as promiscuous but his ways seemed to have settled with everything that’s happened. Although the thought of him with anyone made your gut turn, you didn’t want to confine him within the cage of your emotional contemplation. You didn’t want to lead him on now knowing how he felt about you.

“Hey,” He started, a hand on your arm. “I will wait. And that’s my choice. If you decide that you want me, that you want this, then I will be here. I know my past actions are probably making my words seem like a load of shit right now, but weeks ago? When I was hooking up with half the island? I was under the impression that you and I would never happen. But now there’s a chance.” He spoke, laughing at the end of his sentence, the oddness of the action making your face twist. “Sorry, I just, I thought about somethin'.” He said, waving himself off. “I was talking to Bree one day, about you. I told him that the odds of you ever liking me back were one in a million. And he told me that a one in a million chance is still a chance, to which I told him that he was full of shit. But now…” He trailed off, shrugging.

“...John B knew?” You asked, tilting your head to the side. JJ rolled his eyes playfully.

“I think everyone knew, except you, of course.” He cocked an eyebrow, you being the one to roll your eyes this time.

“...So what do we do now?” You asked, voice small.

JJ sighed, suddenly sitting up straighter in his seat and taking both of your hands in his own. “...As much as I want to make you my girlfriend, right here and right now, I don’t think it’s a good idea. I think that we both need time to grieve and sort ourselves and I also think that you need time to explore your feelings more and make sure that this isn’t a fluke.” That was the most mature sentence you'd ever heard leave JJ's lips.

“A fluke?” You asked, mildly offended. “What does that mean?”

“Just that, I’ve seen how you can deal with grief. And not to twist the knife…are you okay with me talking about the…Rafe thing?” You clenched your jaw at the mere mention of his name, nodding stiffly in JJ’s direction, the boy drawing his lips into a thin line before continuing. “When that happened, you were still grieving. You kissed him because you were in a bad place and he was there and he ended up...taking advantage of that vulnerable part of you, right?” You hummed in agreement. “I am not at all blaming you for what happened when I say this. You didn’t deserve it and that asshole should be six feet under for what he did and, God so help me, I will put him there myself-”

“JJ.” You interrupted the boy’s rant, wanting him to finish his point completely. Huffing out a puff of air, he continued.

“I’m sorry. I just, I really hate that that happened to you. And I know it happened to you, not me but I want to kill him. Every day that I wake up, I just hope he's dead somewhere.”

“I know. Trust me, I know.” You reassured.

“But all I’m trying to say is that, I don’t want to repeat that same cycle — taking advantage of your emotional state. I want you to be yourself again and be in the right space before trying to take this any further. And I want you to have no doubts and be completely sure.” You understood his point of view and his reasoning behind it. Nodding, you allowed him to finish his sentence. “So, for now? We can just figure things out, set some kinda boundaries, if you want.”

You thought about it for a moment, fingers drawing shapes on one of his hands. “...Just honesty. If you kiss someone, hook up with someone…” The words made your eyes twitch. “Just don’t let me find out from someone else.”

“Oh, I can promise you that I have no one else on my mind, especially now that I know I’m on yours, so there will be nothing to tell ‘n nothin’ to find out, m’lady.” He smiled, saluting towards you. “I’m all yours, even if you aren’t mine. Yet.” He winked.

It’d been weeks since you’d seen the goofy side of JJ. It was comforting.

You giggled, bowing your head slightly. “I promise that I am solely focused on clarifying my feelings towards you and only you, blondie.” You returned the sentiment and the salute. “What about our friendship, though? Is it still a friendship?”

“Mmm….” He thought aloud, chewing the inside of his cheek. “Actually, you’re the smart one. What’s like a fancy, silly term for developing a relationship? Like getting to know each other but not dating, like the in between stage?”

“...We can say we’re in a courtship?” You suggest half-jokingly, shrugging. “But… does this also mean we have to stop kissing each other? 'Cause I kind of like that part.”

JJ faked offense, throwing a palm against his chest and gasping. “Kissing?” He asked, wide eyed and shocked. “We are pogues. And number one rule of pogues, is no pogue-on-pogue macking…Eugh.” He reprimanded playfully, fake gagging. You slapped his shoulder in response, a smile on your face as one grew on his.

“No pogue-on-pogue macking, huh?” You said, playfully swatting his arms as he did yours. “

“That’s exactly right, little miss lips-a-lot - Ow! Did you just pinch my nipple?” He laugh-shouted, holding his chest as your swatting ceased. “What are you? Six?-”

You took the opportunity with JJ's guard down to grab the nape of his neck and pull his face into yours, giving him one last hard, passionate kiss of the night, slightly biting his lip as you drew your face away from his.

“How’s that for no pogue-on-pogue macking?”

next chapter>

feedback is appreciated! thanks for reading.SVN Taglist; @esquivelbianca @fallingwallsh @calmoistorm @i-love-ptv @liability28 @rivaiken @sophiahristov @rafxcameronss @ldrvinyl @purplerose291 @boo22sstuff @heartsforandrewgarfield @coolgirl458 @sabrina-carpenter-stan-account @jujubeaz @ellobruv-blog @yourmumstoy @belle101200 @libertyybellls @c4ttheart @ihe4rttwd @redhead1180 @ditzyzombiesblog @spideysimpossiblegirl @sex-me-stiles @honeyiti @rafedrewandjjs @highformaybank @broidfk609

©loveharlow.

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four-leafed-queer-gal · 6 months ago

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𖡼.𖤣��𖡼.𖤣𖥧Hi there! You can call me Clover!𖡼.𖤣𖥧𖡼.𖤣𖥧

𖡼.𖤣𖥧𖡼.𖤣𖥧toki! mi waso Kowe!𖡼.𖤣𖥧𖡼.𖤣𖥧

‧₊˚🌿✩ ₊˚🪵⊹♡‧₊˚🌿✩ ₊˚🪵⊹♡

I AM NOT ON POST LIMIT

I hate to do this, because there are some genuine and important donation pages and the like out there, but a few bad apples mess it up for everyone I suppose.

ATTENTION EVERYONE:

UNLESS WE ARE MUTUALS, DO NOT SEND ME ASKS WITH DONATION LINKS. IF YOU DO, I WILL ASSUME YOU ARE A BOT AND YOU WILL BE BLOCKED.

More below the cut ::3

♡ 18 years old, & a Saggitarius! (Fuck the new zodiac sign system, Sagittarius for life, I'm not a Scorpio)

♡ ✨Taken✨ by the amazing @theacemagpie, the Black Bat to my Spoiler 8/7/2024 (Or 7/8/2024, if you use DD/MM/YYYY)

♡ my pronouns are she/they! 🏳️‍⚧��

♡ I have ASD, BPD, PTSD, and ADHD ☘️

♡ I love languages! I can only speak English fluently, but I'm learning a little bit of everything! If you can name it, I likely know at least one or two words! 🗣️

♡ I like Marvel, PJO, Avatar (Both blue people and not blue people), Batman, Hunger Games, Suits (The show), Skyrim, Ben 10 (Not the reboot), and more! ✨

♡ Therian! Theriotypes: Spotted Hyena, Sea Wolf, Viperfish, Vampire Bat, Arctic Fox, Eleonora's Falcon, Moth, Barracuda, Thresher Shark, Raven, & Cheetah (Plus others I haven't figured out yet)

♡ my favourite animals are dinosaurs 🦖

♡ I love to read 📚

♡ I enjoy writing! ✏️

♡ I am questioning my religion, I have no idea anymore tbh- Half considering making one-

"People are going to talk shit about you no matter what. May as well give them an interesting topic!"

𖡼𖤣𖥧𖡼𓋼𖤣𖥧𓋼𓍊

"Be humble, be kind, but don't be afraid to drag the fucker who crosses the line" - Storia

Please DNI if: you’re queerphobic, anti-self dx, someone who supports beastiality, zoophilia, pedophilia, rape, etc, or if you’re racist, ableist, sexist, or fascist. Be nice! I won't hesitate to block assholes, or bigots ✨☘️

Taylor Swift makes halfway decent music and is a bad person <3

✩°𓏲⋆🌿. ⋆⸜ 🍵✮˚

Side blogs! Pls interact with them?

- @cass-daughter-o-ari RP blog for my PJO OC, Cass Clemens!

- @the-axolotl-queen Blog for the Axolotl Kingdom! I'm the Queen, obvs-

- @montoya-son-o-nemesis RP blog for my PJO OC, Jason Montoya!

- @lucas-bane-son-of-punishment RP blog for my PJO OC, Lucas Bane!

- @lughs-lightheaded-son RP blog for my Celtic PJO OC, Aidan O'Neil!

- @daughter-of-the-cailleach RP blog for my Celtic PJO OC, Taran Keir!

- @ronan-child-of-ogham RP blog for my Celtic PJO OC, Ronan Callahan!

- @behold-a-man-everyday Behold! A man! Everyday!

- @diogenes-totally-real Diogenes the Cynic gimmick blog!

- @aeolus-the4winds RP blog for Aeolus, Notos, Zephyros, Boreas, Euros, Aeolus, Auster, Favonius, Aquilon, and Vulturnus!

- @the-fmby-north-carolina-totally Gimmick blog, a Femboy North Carolina!

- @antiquitian-empire-real Gimmick blog, Antiquitian Empire! A micronation!

- @literally-the-first-state Gimmick blog, Delaware! The first state in the United States!

- @four-leafed-queer-writing Writing blog! I'll reblog writing tips, and sometimes post original stories of mine!

✩°𓏲⋆🌿. ⋆⸜ 🍵✮˚

Here are some of my cool humans (moots)! 💚

♡ @theacemagpie My amazing girlfriend! A fellow fan of numerous fandoms, and a speaker of multiple languages! <3

♡ @star-dust-shark Mack! He's a super cool dude, and who made most of this intro post! Go check out his blog!

♡ @lucas-iamgod Lucas! He's also a really cool guy, you should check out his blog!

♡ @hugs4neth-official Neth + others! They're all really cool, and in my experience are nice. (THEY BACK, BITCHES)

♡ @green-thighs-save-lives I honestly don't know much about him, but he's a nice, chill guy from our interactions.

♡ @violet-hady Hady! Great person, good friend, though always tells me to be healthy and stuff-

♡ @ankoku-teion Sarah! My lovely Irish moot, and fellow sword lover

♡ @poemsofanentomologist An anentomologist! They're really cool, they write poetry and have inspired me once or twice to write some of my own!

♡ @i-am-thoroughly-confused A fellow therian & fellow bat! They are a good being :3

♡ @poppitron360 A fellow PJO enjoyer! They've got great takes on Riordanverse stuff, y'all should check out their blog!

♡ @justagremlinoncaffeine Gremlin! Cool person, really nice, I've enjoyed every interaction I have with them.

♡ @unstableunicornsofasgard Forrest! Also a great person, ¡y el habla español!

♡ @theacemagpie Magpie! An amazing person! Honestly can't believe it took me this long to add her to my pinned, lol-

♡ @peace-love-and-french-toast Amazing human! I sometimes do PJO rps with them, and with a bunch of others! They run @cabinseventheaterchick, and do a darn good job!

♡ @lizzzzzzzzzzzzzz---lol We haven't interacted much, but Liz is a great person, and what little interaction we have had has been good!

♡ + All my other moots! I have a lot, so I can't list all of y'all, but you're all amazing!

₊˚ʚ 🌱 ₊˚✧ﾟ.

"Either walk like you are the Queen, or like you don't care who the Queen is." - Eola

Have a nice time! <3

(Note: Intro post was made by @star-dust-shark!! If you want one like it, go check out Mack's blog!!)

#intro post #hi everybody!

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ewingstan · 11 months ago

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Going into Ward, one of the things that interested me is that pretty much everyone who read it, no matter what the felt about it as a whole, seemed to like what it did with Tattletale and incorporate it into their understanding of the character. To a certain extent this makes sense, outside of Amy people's problems with Worm usually aren't that characterization had been changed. But few other aspects of Ward have been talked about with so much relative positivity, or influenced so much retroactive analysis of Worm.

After reading her interlude, I'm starting to understand why.

From the bat we're given blunt and effective portrayals of how alone Lisa feels. Half of her descriptions of other characters focused on how they reminded her of people she's lost. The Heartbroken are primarily described by the ways they do and don't resemble Alec. Aiden by how he does and doesn't resemble Taylor. Imp and Rachel get mentioned but don't get to make an appearance at all, furthering the effect—reminders of her closest connections are everywhere, but the connections themselves are nowhere. She's left with the "expanded Undersiders," and is painfully aware of how they either dislike her or will never form a close connection with her.

There's a lot more emphasis here on how her power is a separate entity than there was in Lisa's Worm interlude. She's snarking at it, talking about it as something that interjects, drawing a clear divide in her head between what it figures out and what she figures out. Is that her knowledge of its nature developing, or simply a new way of looking at how it always worked?

The framing in the passage above seems to suggest that its encouraging her to distance herself from others, pushing her to interact but specifically feeding her information that will prevent close connections. Questions of agency and identity aside, I do like this as an aspect of powers-as-coping-mechanisms: she was triggered by failing to save someone she was close to, not recognizing the signs that he was unwell. Her power helps her see the signs she couldn't before, but it also seems to try to prevent those close connections from forming so she can't be hurt the same way. Not that its successful. Can't stop betting on losing dogs and all.

What she calls people internally is interesting. I figured she had been calling Sveta "Garotte" earlier to needle her, but she continues to call her that in her own thoughts, as does her power. Valkyrie gets to be "Valkyrie," and Vicky isn't called a cape name at all. There's a few ways to interpret this; I'm tempted to say that Lisa sees Victoria as a relic of pre-Gold Morning days, and sees Sveta largely in that context. Though I also feel like there's some refusal to see her or Rain as people who are separate from what they've done in the past. A lot of the comments I've read while reading the last few chapters are people debating whether she should've gone "white-hat," and I get the sense that she sees something dishonest in that. Leaving behind the things you've done isn't something she can do—even Lisa Wilbourn can't leave behind the failures of Sarah Livsey.

That might be something to think about in the context of Victoria claiming Tattletale is awful because she represents "giving up on something better." Its kind of baffling in that context; many people have pointed out that cutting the number of overdoses in half was way better than anything the heroes ever did, but Victoria resents that TT saw merely halving it as acceptable. She prefers methods that highlight a certain attitude towards a problem over methods that are effective at dealing with a problem. Having zero tolerance for overdoses and being able to do fuck-all about it becomes preferable to halving it, because not giving up on an ideal world is better than actually making the world better. As little regard as I have for Victoria's position, it seems that the text is giving it some credence by positioning Lisa not just as pursuing the methods that will make an actual difference, but also as rejecting the idea of "something better." Sveta can't be more than Garotte, overdose rates can be halved but not lowered further. Its weirdly reifying of Victoria's position, making Lisa a foil to it rather than a reflection of an entirely unrelated worldview.

There's a few team leaders in the parahumans-verse who get characterized as encouraging and benefiting from chaos within their ranks. Jack Slash had a self-image of himself as a master manipulator who knew just how to keep the Nine at each others throats to keep them in line, though of course his power was pulling heavy duty there. Trickster exulted in sowing chaos, but while he could use it to his advantage when working alone it explicitly got in the way of the Travellers as a whole during their operations. Lisa incorporates aspects of both; she seems to be cultivating a "this chaos is all part of my design" air for Faultline and Victoria while actually always being on the cusp of losing control of her own team. It seems less like something she's doing deliberately and more like something she has to deal with, even if she later frames it as part of preparing Aiden or something similar.

Man, her relationship with Aiden. First explicit mention of Taylor we've had since the beginning and its for a blunt confirmation that she sees herself as failing Taylor in the same way she failed Rex, and is terrified of doing with Aiden. It feels both like she's holding him at arms length and that she's desperate for a close connection with him.

#lisa wilbourn #wardblr #wildbow #parahumans #leo says #leo reads ward

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companion-showdown · 19 days ago

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Showdown 2k25

Just like last year I want to kick January off with a flat popularity contest, showdown 2k25.

Automatically competing - everyone from last year (list), with the following exceptions

Last years winner - Donna Noble

Possibly Rose Tyler as the 2023 winner, but I need to think on it a bit more

I'm going to reassess a few from last year, specifically the real people

Rules for new nominees (tardis wiki list referenced below)

Anyone on the list will automatically be accepted

TV companions MUST be on the list

EU companions not on the list will be considered on a case by case basis. If they meet a reasonable definition of companion I will accept them, basic guideline is has their own tardis wiki article so I can actually check, multiple stories with the Doctor, none of these guidelines are hard rules, if you can justify them to me, I'll let them in

Propaganda is not carrying over from last year, if you want to go to bat for someone, use this same form

You can use this form to make multiple nominations/give multiple bits of propaganda at once.

You have until at least the 1st of January

list of competitors, anyone in green has propaganda submitted for them

Classic Who

Ace McShane

Adric

Barbara Wright

Ben Jackson

The Brigadier

Chang Lee

Dodo Chaplet

Grace Holloway

Harry Sullivan

Ian Chesterton

Jamie McCrimmon

Jo Grant

Kamelion

Katarina

Leela

Liz Shaw

Mags

Mel Bush

Mike Yates

Nyssa

Peri Brown

Polly Wright

Romana I

Romana II

Sabalom Glitz

Sara Kingdom

Sarah-Jane Smith

Sergeant Benton

Steven Taylor

Susan Foreman

Tegan Jovanka

Turlough

Vicki Pallister

Victoria Waterfield

Zoe Heriot

NuWho

Adam Mitchell

Amy Pond

Bill Potts

Canton Everett Delaware III

Clara Oswald

Dan Lewis

Graham O'Brien

Grant Gordon aka the Ghost

Handles

Inston-Vee Vindor

Jack Harkness

Karvanista

Kate Stewart

Martha Jones

Mickey Smith

Missy

Nardole

River Song

Rory Williams

Rose Noble

Ruby Sunday

Ryan Sinclair

Wilfred Mott

Yasmin Khan

Audio

Alex Campbell

Anya Kingdom

Bliss

C'rizz

Cass Fermazzi

Charley Pollard

Cousin Eliza: Christine Summerfield: Horus

Dalek Test Subject 2

Erimem

Evelyn Smythe

Helen Sinclair

Hex Schofield

Iris Wildthyme

Liv Chenka

Lucie Miller

Mark Seven

Molly O'Sullivan

Narvin

Oliver Harper

Sheena (The Starship of Theseus)

Tania Bell

Novels

Anji Kapoor

Anna (Good Companions)

Badger

Barusa

Bernice Summerfield

Business woman (Time on a Vine)

Catherine “Cat” Broome

Chris Cwej

Cinder

Claudia Marwood

Compassion

Dorothy (The Wonderful Doctor of Oz)

Fitz Kreiner

Guinevere Winchester

Hector (All Flesh is Grass)

Homunculette

Ikalla

Irving Braxiatel

Jack McSpringheel

Larna

Marie (Alien Bodies)

Milena

Patience

Penelope Gate

Peter Summerfield

Rosie Taylor

Roz Forrester

Ruth Leonidas

Sam Jones

Serena

Sibling Different aka Mae

The Mortimer Family (Ida, Alan, Helen, George)

Trix MacMillan

V.M.McCrimmion

Wolsey the Cat

Zeleekhà

Comics

Abslom Daak, Dalek Killer

Alice Obifune

Angus ‘Gus’ Goodman

ARC

Chantir

Child Master (The Then and the Now)

Cindy Wu

Dave Lester

Destrii

Duh

Flanx

Fey Truscott-Sade

Frobisher

Gabby Gonzalez

Gillian & John Who

Grayla

Hattie Munroe

Izzy Sinclair

Jayne Kadett

John Jones

Josie Day

Kroton

Ly Chee the Wise

Majenta Pryce

Maxwell Edison

Olla

Rose-the-cat

Shayde

Ssard

The Squire

Weeping Angel (Origins)

Real Life

Alan Turing

Claudia Winkleman

John Lennon

Jules Verne

Mary Shelley

Peter Cushing

Other

Alison Cheney

Andy Davidson

Antimony (Death Comes to Time)

Brian the Ood

Dormouse (The Red and the Blue)

Emma (curse of fatal death)

Koschie

Romana (Battle for the Universe)

Splinx

Susan Who

Tom Campbell

#doctor who

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battyaboutbooksreviews · 1 month ago

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🌈 Queer Books Coming Out in November 2024 🌈

🌈 Good morning, my bookish bats! Here are a FEW of the stunning, diverse queer books you can add to your TBR before the year is over. Happy reading!

❓What was the last queer book you read?

[ Release dates may have changed. ]

❤️ I Am the Dark That Answers When You Call - Jamison Shea 🧡 Snowed in With You - Reba Bale 💛 Fire Spells Between Friends - Sarah Wallace & S.O. Callahan 💚 Ho Ho Homicidal Maniac - K.A. Merikan 💙 Escape to the Sea - Alex Callan & Angelica Babineaux 💜 She's Always Hungry - Eliza Clark 💛 Phoenix Rising - Emily Hayes 💙 A Flower's Fatal Thorn - Jordan Dugdale 💜 A Sharper, More Lasting Pain - Alex Harvey-Rivas

❤️ The Librarian's Gargoyle - Evelyn Shine 🧡 Dead Girls Don't Dream - Nino Cipri 💛 Of Hoarfrost and Blood - Scarlet Tempest 💚 Judgement - Lucas Delrose 💙 Deadline for Love - Candi Tab 💜 Wake Up, Nat & Darcy - Kate Cochrane ❤️ All the Truth I Can Stand - Mason Stokes 🧡 Celia - Addison James 💛 A Diamond Bright and Broken - Holly Davis 💙 Hexed - Emily McIntire 💜 Hometown Christmas - Laura Conway 🌈 This Christmas - Georgia Beers

❤️ Suite Heart - Jade Winters 🧡 We All Fall - Arden Coutts 💛 Taiwan Travelogue - Yáng Shuāng-zǐ 💚 Pit Stop - L.M. Bennett 💙 The Damaged Hearts Bargain - Sienna Waters 💜 War of Night - Greyson Black & E. Scott Clevenger 🧡 I'll be Boned for Christmas - Katherine McIntyre 💜 All You Want for the Holidays - Quinton Li 🌈 Queer as Folklore - Sacha Coward

❤️ Time and Tide - J.M. Frey 🧡 Ghost of the Heart - Catherine Friend 💛 Flopping in a Winter Wonderland - Jason June 💚 All the Painted Stars - Emma Denny 💙 Currency in Flesh - Heather Nix 💜 I Really Do - Emily K. Hardy ❤️ Something Close to God - Erika del Carmen Ruiz 🧡 The Crack at the Heart of Everything - Fiona Fenn 💛 Undeniable You - Chelsea M. Cameron 💙 The Twice-Sold Soul - Katie Hallahan 💜 Always on My Mind - Kelsey Painter 🌈 Interstellar MegaChef - Lavanya Lakshminarayan

❤️ Don't Break Character - Jules Landry 🧡 Rani Choudhury Must Die - Adiba Jaigirdar 💛 Remnants of Filth: Yuwu - Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou 💚 Sugar, Spice, and Christmas Nice - Anne Hagan 💙 The Wishing Tree - Barbara Winkes 💜 Love on Moonlight Lake - Adriana Sargent ❤️ Mistletoe Motel - Lise Gold 🧡 The Royal They - KJ Sinclair 💛 My So-Called Family - Gia Gordon 💙 Frosted by the Girl Next Door - Aurora Rey & Jaime Clevenger 💜 The Star-Crossed Empire - Maya Darjani 🌈 A Hard Fit - Jennifer Moffatt

❤️ The Sacred Heart Motel - Grace Kwan 🧡 Leap - Simina Popescu 💛 I Dare You - Regena Mercy 💚 Love Lessons - Mary Ellen Capek 💙 Afterglow - Emily Antoinette 💜 In the Back Row With You - Natasha West ❤️ Make Room for Love - Darcy Liao 🧡 Here Goes Nothing - Emma K. Ohland Just for the Holidays - Micah Carver

❤️ Cookies, Candles, and Cute Butts for Christmas - Cameron D. James & Cali Kitsu 🧡 Objects in Mirror - N.W. Downs 💛 Sleigh Bells Ring - Alyson Root 💚 Real Tree / Fake Boyfriend - Ree Thomas 💙 Out of the Storm - Logan Sage Adams 💜 Hungry Heart - Jem Milton ❤️ A Wild and Ruined Song - Ashley Shuttleworth 🧡 Beneath Her Power - Margaux Fox 💛 Thanks for Listening - Molly Horan 🌈 The Lotus Empire - Tasha Suri

❤️ Naughty November - Anthology 🧡 Hearts and Stars - Phoenix Kathryn 💛 Guarding Her Gangster Queen - Persephone Black 💚 The Shadow Spinner - Eric Kao 💙 Black, Queer, and Untold - Jon Key 💜 Hall of Shadows - Mariah Stillbrook ❤️ The Last Hour Between Worlds - Melissa Caruso 🧡 A Crimson Covenant - Aimee Donnellan 💛 Isaac - Curtis Garner 💙 Vineyard Dreams - Carol Wyatt 💜 Kiss of Death - Bryony Rosehurst 🌈 The Many Mistakes of Amy Love - RA Hunter

❤️ Accidentally in Love - Kimberly Cooper Griffin 🧡 Unwrapped - D. Jackson Leigh 💛 Hot Honey Love - Nan Campbell 💚 Havoc for the Holidays - Jay Leigh 💙 London - Patricia Evans 💜 Fatal Foul Play - David S. Pederson ❤️ The Gift of Us - Abigail Taylor 🧡 Upon the Midnight Queer - 'Nathan Burgoine 💛 The Christmas Pic - Rena Sapon-White & Ella Schaefer 💙 Seducing Scylla - Lex Logan 💜 Fated Winds and Promising Seas - Rose Black 🌈 A Surprise For The Holidays - Anna Sparrows

❤️ Immortal Hunger - KL Bone 🧡 Love and Loyalty - Emily Hayes 💛 A Kingdom of Lies - Ben Alderson 💚 Christmas Dreams - Carol Wyatt 💙 Wrecked for the Holidays - Kerry Kilpatrick ❤️ Not for the Faint of Heart - Lex Croucher 🧡 Phoenix Found - T.J. Nichols 💛 Room for Two - Rochelle Wolf 💙 The Long Winter of Miðgarðr - Edale Lan 💜 A Handyman for the Holidays - Valerie Gomez 🌈 Sundown in San Ojuela - M.M. Olivas

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mysterycitrus · 1 year ago

Note

Do you mind elaborating what you mean by the cool girlfriend archetype in your Barbara Gordon post? What do you feel about James Gordon (Barbara’s brother)? Do you think he was a good addition or not a good addition to that family? When you think about the Gordons they really would be a very dysfunctional family but admittedly I kind of wish he wasn’t portrayed as some serial killer. I know Jim had sons before the creation of Barbara and then later Barbara had an older brother and then it kept changing, but I would have liked to have seen the Gordon have a much bigger family especially since the Gordons play a part within Gotham. Barbara just having a lot of brothers and comics centered around their dynamic.

i actually disagree — babs is surrounded by enough men in her life, and i don’t think having a lot of brothers would be helpful in her development as a character. her smaller immediate family is a good point of comparison to bruce’s family. additionally, having a lot of brothers immediately encourages a specific character beat, being the tomboy who’s a competent physical fighter “because i have x number of older brothers,’ etc, which is not babs at all. she’s entrenched enough with the bats, and i greatly prefer that most of her significant relationships are with women. id also say that she has very powerful only child energy, imo.

that also ties into what i was talking about with the cool girl thing — babs as she’s often portrayed in current comics (especially nightwing) reminds me a lot of amy’s monologue from gone girl. babs pre-2011 was a very difficult person for a lot of reasons. she was very loving, very opinionated, and very controlling. i actually really enjoy their relationship from this period, but only because there was equilibrium and they were both allowed to be themselves. in the new comics, tom taylor doesn’t give babs her personality, and as a result she’s a sassy, flat, hot woman for dick to date. she’s just very tepid, and the fact that she’s still batgirl just makes it worse.

for ur other question, when ur looking at the gordons as a unit, it’s important to remember why they arent a big family. jim gordon cheated on his first wife with sarah wesson in batman year one, just before his son is born. in post-crisis continuity, babs also isn’t jim gordon’s bio daughter, she’s actually his niece (although their relationship is clearly that of a parent + child). honestly, i like their dynamic as a father and daughter duo, and i don’t think adding more kids would improve it. i do also really enjoy black mirror, but jim jr being a serial killer can be lazy writing, although i also like his dynamic with both dick and babs and his dad. he could be an interesting angle for jim gordon to examine his own violence, and how jim justifies the actions he’s taken in his life, but i don’t have much hope of that happening.

#alright NO MORE JIM GORDON ASKS!!!#barbara gordon #batfamily #jim gordon #Batgirl #dc comics #the ask and the answer

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heyitschartic · 1 year ago

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Finally finished with the redone Undersiders as the Mall Cluster. Still cannibalized a lot of the secondaries from my previous attempt, but I'm happy with it. Entire thing is under the line cause I don't wanna clog people's pages.

Cluster Mechanic

Every night the group wakes up in the dream room. A rotating member of the cluster is given two tokens to hand out. Whoever is holding a token at the end of the dream gets an additional aspect of their primary unlocked.

Taylor

Trigger: Danny and Taylor made it out of Earth Bet as the world ended, but Annette didn't. Emma, after being attacked by a gang (potentially the Fallen) and saved by Sophia, turned on her. Bullied and abused, Taylor slowly began to fall out of society. Feeling less and less connected to others, feeling less and less like a person. Things came to a head when she's found by the Trio at the mall and locked inside a garbage room. As the flames grow closer and no one hears her cries for help, Taylor feels at her most trapped and alone, both metaphorically and literally. Trigger.

Primary: A master power with very rough control of bugs and a blink mover power that allows her to move between clumps of bugs roughly as big as she is.

Token Boost: When she teleports but before she reforms, she's spread throughout her swarm and gains a master power equivalent to Skitter. Feels at that moment however like she's trapped in darkness.

Sarah Secondary: A thinker power that allows her to understand potential angles of attack and a sixth sense of when they are coming as a slow building anxiety.

Alec Secondary: A master power that allows her to shout commands. Those who hear it feel their bodies moving without their control. Effects fade after a few seconds.

Brian secondary: Forms a cloud of inky blackness around herself. Affords weak brute powers, but mainly stranger capabilities, dampening noise and hiding her.

Rachel Secondary: Wet tinker power focused on modifying bats to increase sonic abilities, boost intelligence to follow simple commands.

Sarah

Trigger: After the end of the world, Sarah's family lost everything. While coping they found religion; the Fallen found them soon after. When her parents joined, her brother seemed to be the only one who managed to land on his feet. He made friends, formed connections, and kept their families standing while the rest of them felt like they were floundering. When he killed himself, it was a massive blow and the Fallen looked down on them for it. Pressure. Pressure from all angles to keep performing, to make up for it, and to do better. Sarah suffered the worst of it, including pressure from her parents that she should have done more, should have seen this coming. She picked up the slack and took his place at the mall attack. As she sees the fire rising and hears the screams of people inside, she realizes this is what her brother was trying to avoid so badly, he was willing to die to stop it. As the molotov slips from her fingers, she wonders what her brother would think of her now. Trigger.

Primary: A pre-cognitive zone thinker power, able to feel visceral sights/sounds of things to come in an area. However, this power is vaguer the further away from the event she is. Glimpses at a day, better understanding an hour away, perfect vision bare seconds before the event is happening.

Token Boost: Enhanced reactions and understanding during events, allowing for combat thinker capabilities.

Taylor Secondary: Blink mover ability dependent on damage. Transferring attacks on herself into a teleport that blasts out with force those she teleports near.

Alec Secondary: Master power to erode the will of someone, eliciting feelings of dread and despair after long enough. Power works through focused line of sight.

Brian secondary: Able to leak a smokescreen, thick and inky, from her pores. Loosely prehensile, can turn from a gas to liquid appendage that stings and numbs what it hits.

Rachel Secondary: Wet tinker power to modify sheep/goats with combat abilities, will act like guardians.

Alec

Trigger: Gold Morning upended many things, but Jean-Paul used it as his chance to finally escape the thumb of his father. Somewhere along the way, he met Olivia. They were inseparable ever since, moving place to place, though he always was looking over his shoulder for dear old dad. Not quite dating, never the right word, but together. In many ways, it felt like the first connection he ever had. Someone who drew things out of him that he thought were gone. Then the mall. They were separated in the rush and he spent his time looking for her. As he searches, half blinded and deafened by smoke and screams, he finally finds her body, trampled when the attack began. Trigger.

Primary: A single minion master. Forms a minion that resembles Olivia out of himself. She leaves with his emotions, putting him in a burnscar-esque emotional state. She's very swift and mobile, but weak to damage and Alec gets backlash from her breaking apart.

Token Boost: She radiates his emotions to others around her, intensly.

Taylor Secondary: Enters a mover state where he becomes faster and more agile while leaving behind a trail of harrying vermin.

Sarah Secondary: Thinker power to understand what others are thinking/feeling in an area. Surface level understanding without deeper insight.

Brian: Stranger power that gives him a sense when others are looking at him. Is able to blur the senses of one person of his choice, including powered sense.

Rachel: Wet tinker ability to modify birds with increased surveillance abilities, able to relay information.

Brian

Trigger: When GM happened, the Laborne siblings lost their parents. Reeling from the loss, but neither able to articulate it, they are forced to forge on. Brian takes the brunt of it, working construction jobs to try and make money. He doesn't have enough time to be with Aisha, to keep her in check, but as long as they're both safe, he's fine with that. They head to the mall on one of his free days to get her stuff for a new school year when the attack happens. Caught outside, they're ganged up by Fallen members and Brian is taken down by a blow to the back. He lies on the ground disoriented and unable to work up the strength or motivation to stand as he watches Aisha take her first few hits. Trigger.

Primary: Brian leaks a smoky mist he's able to form into a sword. The sword is weightless allowing for fast and continuous attacks, and hits with a force harder than it should.

Token Boost: The swords hits have the added effect of momentarily deafening and blinding who they hit.

Taylor Secondary: blink power to teleport around a set zone centered on his first teleport. Needs to move manually from first spot to change zone radius.

Sarah: A precog power focused on one person or thing to warn of incoming attacks. Allows for combat thinker-esque reactions to those warnings.

Alec: a single shot blaster power with good accuracy. Hits others with a sense of pacification. Emotion hits are cumulative, clouding judgement.

Rachel: Wet tinker abilities to modify offensive and defensive aspects of a single wolf.

Rachel

Trigger: A poor girl on the streets after the world ended, Rachel had to fight to keep what she had. Without a real connection to keep her safe though, she was one of thousands that slipped through the cracks. Like so many other people, she was found by the Fallen and press-ganged. Things were harder on her now because she didn't fit in. She was violent and could hold her own, sure, but she still couldn't connect to others, still couldn't quite understand them, and so she was pushed to the fringes of the group. She found herself caring for animals under Bamet, something she had proven good at. Things didn't get better and because of this position, she couldn't escape the stigma or try to improve with others. It comes to a head at the mall, when she see her dog Rollo get shot and go down. She rushes to save him and is pulled back by the hands of her compatriots. She in anger fights to break free, but can't shake so many and her pleas fall on deaf ears. Again, she can't even articulate or have them understand what she's trying to do. Trigger.

Primary: Wet tinker ability to modify dogs, granting some increased combat capability, but mainly making them more intelligent.

Token Boost: Able to make medication to grant temporary boosts beyond what her modifications can normally do.

Taylor Secondary: Master power to control a small group of rats. Power puts her in a dissociative state.

Sarah Secondary: Combat thinker power focusing on understanding her own body and movement with enhanced reflexes. Give vague feelings of intentions of others.

Alec secondary: Shaker power centered on herself. Those caught in the radius are forced into an emotion of Rachel's choosing.

Brian secondary: Striker power to imbue her strikes with mild smoke. Imparts an increased force (like a shove) and a cumulative disorientation/blindness.

#wormblr #undersiders cluster

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meta-squash · 9 days ago

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Squash's Reading List Year In Review 2024

(I've also posted this on WordPress here, where it might be more readable: https://jesuisgourde.wordpress.com/.../30/readinglist2024/)

Last year I read 92 books. I didn't plan on trying to surpass that number but I did, quite easily. This year I read 116 books. I didn't start off with any specific reading goal, but early on I decided to make it my goal to read more books by not-cis-men (women, trans/nonbinary people, etc) than by cis men. I hit that goal with 72 books. I did want to reread a number of books; I reread 7 books, but not all were the ones I listed in my last yearly reading review. I read 89 fiction books and 27 nonfiction. Of the nonfiction, the genres were mainly biography/autobiography, essay, science, and history. I read 45 books from small press publishers. I read 39 books by and/or about queer people. I don't have a super nice photo spread this year because I read a lot of books at work; I was going to screenshot my goodreads grid but unfortunately they have (frustratingly) changed the format from grid to list in the past week.

Here's a photo of the books I read that I do own, which isn't a whole lot, since I read most of the books at work this year:

I'll do superlatives at the end, here is the list of what I read this year, in chronological order. (Apologies for the random line breaks in the middle of the list, tumblr doesn't like it when you have 50+ lines without breaks)

-The Sorrows Of Young Werther by Johann von Goethe -The Changeling by Joy Williams -Child of God by Cormac McCarthy -Pierrot Mon Ami by Raymond Queneau -The Ghost Network by Kate Disabato -The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan -Richard III by William Shakespeare (reread) -The Recognitions by William Gaddis -A Kestrel For A Knave by Barry Hines -Grief Is The Thing With Feathers by Max Porter -Bluets by Maggie Nelson -The Wild Party by Joseph Moncure March -The Hospital by Ahmed Bouanani -I Love Dick by Chris Kraus -Minor Detail by Adiana Shibli -Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson -Rent Boy by Gary Indiana -One Or Several Deserts by Carter St Hogan -Samedi the Deafness by Jesse Ball -Norma Jean Baker of Troy by Anne Carson -Die My Love by Ariana Harwicz -Missing Person by Patrick Modiano -Petite Fleur by Iosi Havilio -Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi -The Address Book by Sophie Calle -In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado -Plastic Jesus by Poppy Z Brite -New Animal by Ella Baxter -The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds by Paul Zindel (play) -Green Girl by Kate Zambrino -Death In Spring by Merce Rodoreda -Harold's End by JT LeRoy (reread) -Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto -Stranger To The Moon by Evelio Rosero -H of H Playbook by Anne Carson -When The Sick Rule The World by Dodie Bellamy -Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson -Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector -Not One Day by Anne Garreta -Mauve Desert by Nicole Brossard -Binary Star by Sarah Gerard -Slug and other stories by Megan Milks -Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block (reread) -The Deer by Dashiel Carrera -Mean by Myriam Gurba -Humiliation by Wayne Koestenbaum -The Toaster Project: Or A Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch by Thomas Thwaites -Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts by Claire Donato -Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield

-Notes on Thoughts and Vision & The Wise Sappho by H.D. -Harrow by Joy Williams -A Feast Of Snakes by Harry Crews -Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Lucy Sante -Milkshake by Travis Dahlke -Little Fish by Casey Plett -Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor -Sex Goblin by Lauren Cook -Biography of X by Catherine Lacey -Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller -Hir by Taylor Mac (play) -Daddy Boy by Emerson Whitney -Notes On Camp by Susan Sontag -Transformer: A Story of Glitter, Glam Rock, and Loving Lou Reed by Simon Doonan -Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo -Acid Snow by Larry Mitchell (reread) -33 1/3 Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott -The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides -red doc> by Anne Carson -Darryl by Jackie Ess -A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan -The Postman Always Rings Twice by James Cain -Body by Harry Crews -St Sebastian's Abyss by Mark Haber -The Quick & The Dead by Joy Williams (reread) -Don't Think Twice: Adventure and Healing at 100 Miles Per Hour by Barbara Schoichet -Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer -Timbuktu by Paul Auster -Nevada by Imogen Binnie -The End We Start From by Megan Hunte -Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang -Like Flies From Afar by K. Ferraro -Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe -Bestiary by K-Ming Chang -Playboy by Constance Debre -Red Dragon by Thomas Harris -Parting Gifts for Losing Contestants by Jessica Mooney -The Outline of My Lover by Douglas A Martin -Monstrilio by Gerardo Samano Cordova -Essex County by Jeff Lemire (reread) -Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have To Offer by Rax King -The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter -Lover Man by Alston Anderson -Cecilia by K-Ming Chang -The Employees by Olga Ravn -It Lasts Forever And Then It's Over by Anne De Marcken -Mercy Killing by Alandra Hileman (play) -Tentacle by Rita Indiana

-Nox by Anne Carson -What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami -McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh (reread) -Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin -John by Annie Baker (play) -Widow Basquiat by Jennifer Clement -All Down Darkness Wide by Sean Hewitt -The Blue Books by Nicole Brossard -The Book Of Difficult Fruit: Arguments for the Tart, Tender and Unruly by Kate Lebo -Blood Of The Dawn by Claudia Salazar Jimenez -The Balloonists by Eula Biss -Ravage: An Astonishment Of Fire by MacGillivray/Kirsten Norrie -Gods Of Want: Stories by K-Ming Chang -Fem by Magda Carneci -Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary by Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Toshio Merino -Mr Parker by Michael McKeever (play) -Fucking A by Suzan-Lori Parks (play) -Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha -Otherspace, a Martian Ty/opography by Brad Freeman and Johanna Drucker

I DNF'ed a few books, but all were put down with the intention of finishing them at some point. Mostly they were books I needed to read when I was less busy/in a different headspace. I DNF'ed: Soldiers Don't Go Mad: A true story of friendship, poetry and mental illness during the first world war by Charles Glass, a reread of Her by HD, and The Apple In The Dark by Clarice Lispector. The Lispector and HD are both modernist novels that need 100% attention, and the Glass book is a nonfiction book (very good so far) that I put down in favor of something that at the time was more interesting.

I gave out a lot of 5 stars this year. The books I rated as 5 stars were: The Changeling by Joy Williams, The Recognitions by William Gaddis, Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield, 33 1/3 Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott, Transformer by Simon Doonan, Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, Body by Harry Crews, Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang, Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, and Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin.

~Superlatives~

Like last year, I'm going to do runners-up because I read so many books.

Favorite book: The Recognitions by William Gaddis. I have to pick this one as my favorite for the year, because reading it was a journey, and because it was a book that was exactly everything I love in a book: fascinating, very human characters, weird formatting, great dialogue, metaphors galore, and most importantly, hundreds of cultural, artistic, historical, biblical and literary references. I started this book on January 4 and I finished it February 22. It was so unbelievably dense, probably the densest novel I've ever read, and I absolutely loved it. So much is going on in this novel that it's hard for me to summarize. In the very shortest version of a summary, it is a novel about counterfeits (specifically paintings, but counterfeits in all and any forms) and Catholicism in 1930s/40s New York. The main character is a young man named Wyatt Gwyon, a talented artist who instead of painting for himself, becomes a skilled counterfeiter-- not because he wants to make money, but because he's obsessed with the perfection of making exact interpretations of other people's art. He also struggles with religion and belief due to his strange religious upbringing. Many, many other characters are also focal points throughout the novel. The book is unique in that it doesn't use quotation marks when characters speak and rarely uses "he said"/"she said" or any similar phrase. But Gaddis is incredibly talented at writing dialogue so that each character's voice comes through, and it's obvious (except when he doesn't want it to be) who is speaking. Gaddis is also wonderfully scathing, and much of the novel is incredibly witty and intelligent observations about the Modernist art world and artistic spaces in general. The characters are all fascinating, there is a lot of mirroring and metaphors. I say this book is about counterfeits in every form, because it constantly highlights different ways in which each character is faking something, or lying, or pretending to be/know/do/think something they are not. This book was incredible, I annotated every single page and had so much fun reading it, even though or perhaps because it was so unbelievably dense.

Just for a bit of reference, here are a few of the more annotated pages in my copy of The Recognitions:

Runner up: Body by Harry Crews (more on this one further down)

Least favorite book: Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi. I was so disappointed by this book. The blurb on the back made it sound like it was going to be really beautiful and interesting and unique. It wasn't. It was all tell and no show. It follows Ada, a person who is born with one foot in the spirit world. A traumatic experience at university causes her to develop split personalities as the spirits from the other side step forward to protect her from trauma. Unfortunately, the spirits who now control her body have darker, more dangerous desires. Sadly, there was almost no plot, just description after description of Ada's unhealthy relationships and erratic behavior. But because the narrative is so distanced from said relationships and from Ada, the high stakes of this behavior is not felt, not really. Interesting characters can easily save 'all tell and no show type' books, but none of the characters get delved into with any depth, even Ada. The show rather than tell narrative also seriously undermines the poetic prose that crops up almost at random. This book felt flat. No plot, little stakes felt, no interesting characters, tell rather than showing everything, and it's not compelling at all.

Runner up: Playboy by Constance Debre. The back of this book describes it as a memoir detailing the writer's "decision, at age forty-three, to abandon her marriage, her legal career, and her bourgeois Parisian life to become a lesbian and a writer." Which sounds amazing! But it isn't! It's unbelievably pretentious and quite boring. It's mostly just complaining hidden by a facade of faux-philosophical meandering and directionless autobiographical vignettes. The author is a lawyer and she spends most of the time complaining about poor people and about women. It's so hilariously misogynistic. It's just various vignettes of her relationships with various women (who she dislikes and disparages for being femme or having bad bodies or for having lowbrow/uncultured interests etc etc) and then her going and visiting her ex-husband and teenage son, and then complaining that she has nothing. There's little to no emotion in the book, she is not charming, and her pseudo-philosophical musings are boring.

Most surprising/unexpected book: Body by Harry Crews. This book crept up on me in terms of a favorite. Crews' writing is not for everyone, but it's absolutely for me. The book follows bodybuilder Shereel Dupont and her trainer, Russell, who are at the world bodybuilding competition. Shereel has left home to compete over the past year and is now one of the most likely to win. Unfortunately, her family, who are "corpulent rednecks" with odd habits, show up to cheer her on, causing disruption and chaos throughout the hotel at which the competition is held and turmoil for Shereel herself. This book blew me away completely. Every time I thought it had reached a plateau of weirdness and chaos and insanity, it ratcheted that all up even higher, culminating in the most perfectly fucked up ending.

Runner up: Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin. A mother trapped in the liminal space between life and death is made by an unfamiliar changeling child to retell the events of the recent past, desperately trying to pinpoint the moment she can reverse the environmental poisoning of herself and her daughter. I picked this book up because it sounded interesting, and then it ended up being an amazingly written short horror novel. It had a lot of interesting thoughts on motherhood and the horror of being a parent - not in a negative way, but the horror of wanting to protect and keep your child safe and the inability to do so.

Most fun book: Like Flies From Afar by K Ferrari. I fully judged a book by its cover with this one, and it did not disappoint. Small-time criminal/oligarch Mr Machi thinks he's hot shit, until he pops a tire on the way to an appointment and discovers an unidentifiable corpse in his trunk. As he scrambles to deal with the body, his paranoia grows as he tries to calculate who out of all his enemies and employees might be responsible, and who is trying to frame him, and who the body might be, and his life slowly transforms into a nightmare. Everyone in this book is loathsome, but in a way that is so fun to hate. The whole novel is a romp of panic and paranoia, people who think they're so cool and hard exposing how uncool they are, and a mystery that's so fun because watching the protagonist panic is a kind of schadenfreude.

Runner up: Transformer by Simon Doonan. This is a book for people who love Lou Reed, by a man who loves Lou Reed. It's just a wonderfully written biography that focuses mainly on the album Transformer, but also gives Lou Reed's history and is interspersed with stories about Doonan's own thoughts and experiences with Reed. The whole book is really passionate and vivid, and fun to read even if you don't have the album immediately to hand.

Best queer book: Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield. Leah, a marine biologist, has returned from a deep-sea voyage that went wrong. Her wife Miri begins to realize that something is wrong, and Leah came back changed. The narrative switches between Miri's point of view as she tries to reach Leah and struggles help her despite not knowing what's happening to her wife, and Leah's point of view as she remembers and recounts what happened to her during her submarine voyage. I started this book at work and brought it home. In the middle of reading it, I stopped to finish some task (I think it might have been to make dinner), and ended up having to cut the task short because I needed so badly to keep reading. The most compelling part of the book is the very different ways the two characters' love for each other shines through, even in the darkest moments of the novel.

Runner up: Darryl by Jackie Ess. The titular narrator of this novel discovers that he genuinely enjoys a cuckolding lifestyle, watching men have sex with his wife. But then he realizes that part of the reason he likes it so much, is that maybe he wants to be the wife. His explorations with sex and gender and relationships (and basketball) begin to unravel his marriage and his friendships and his own mind. Then he learns more about one of the men his wife has been sleeping with, and things get dangerous. I loved this book because despite it being written by a trans woman, the story doesn't at all go where you'd expect regarding gender or sexuality. It's satirical, it's witty, it's got some cool things to say about kink and about gender, and it's totally original.

Saddest book: Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. This is a classic I'd been meaning to read for a long time. The narrator is an American WWI soldier named Joe who was hit by an artillery shell and has woken in the hospital having had his arms and legs amputated, as well as most of his facial features mutilated beyond use/recognition. Trapped in his body, he drifts through memories and musings on life and war and philosophy as he tries to keep track of the days and to figure out some way to communicate with the hospital staff. It's no wonder this book is a classic. The writing is incredible, the imagery vivid and the plot totally gripping, even as it switches between the peaceful past and the horrible present. The end is completely gut-wrenching.

Runner up: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli. This novel explores what in history is a minor detail, and what impact that little moment might have on someone in the future. The first part of the novel opens in Palestine in 1949, in a military camp, where a group of Israeli soldiers (led by a captain suffering from a bite-induced hallucinogenic fever) kidnap, rape, and murder an unnamed Palestinian woman and bury her body in the desert. Fifty-odd years later, a Palestinian writer learns about this "small" moment in history, which occurred 25 years to the day before her birth, and becomes obsessed with learning more. She obtains an illegal pass to the Zone in which the woman died, determined to go there and find more information. I don't want to summarize much more because I don't want to give away any of the hard-hitting plot points. But Minor Detail was published in 2020, and it explores the cycles of violence and the ways in which oppression has not changed for the Palestinian people. It's a book that I wish I had read twice because (as the title suggests) there were a lot of small details that repeated themselves or were less noticeable at first but slowly grew or became important later in the story, and I'm sure I would have noticed more.

Weirdest book: The Changeling by Joy Williams. I love Joy Williams! I love everything she writes! Her themes are always so interesting and her writing style is so unique. The main character, a young woman named Pearl, escapes her terrible marriage by joining a rich older man and in doing so ends up living with him on an island that is populated by children he has taken under his wing. Pearl wants little to do with them and spends most of her days getting drunk by the pool -- the children are eerily smart and her son has joined their games and lessons, and they all want her attention. But her son is less and less her son as time goes on, and the children are not always the children, and the adults in the house are all bizarre and half-mad. I wish I could give a better summary, but Joy Williams books are always difficult to summarize, because so much of the stories are less about the plot and more about the characters just feeling things at the reader, and the plot is often built on or around odd occurrences and philosophical musings. This book blew me away with its imagery and its metaphors. I want to reread it, because it was just so amazing. My absolutely favorite thing about Joy Williams (and this is true for all of her books) is the way she writes these incredibly profound and philosophical phrases like they're nothing at all, like they're so easy, just breezes on by them even though she's just punched you in the chest. It's amazing.

Runner up: Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin.

Most gripping book: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe. This book is an absolute masterclass in pacing. It tells just a few fragments out of the whole history of the Irish Troubles, but the fragments that are focused on are woven together with brilliant timing, humanizing and vivid portrayals, fantastic analysis and contextualization, and altogether excellent writing. Every time I put this book down I wanted to keep reading, to know what was going to happen next. The book has 3 focal points: Gerry Adams, (alleged) leader of the IRA; Dolors Price, a member of the IRA; and the family of Jean McConville, a woman kidnapped by the IRA. At first, all three storylines are disparate, but Keefe slowly weaves them together, pulling all the threads of context and action and years in prison or government or delinquent schools together slowly but steadily. The book reads like a thriller, and I adored it completely. (Yes, I do know about the miniseries. I haven't finished watching it yet!)

Runner up: Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield.

Book that taught me the most: Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

Runner up: The Toaster Project: Or A Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch by Thomas Thwaites. This could also go under weirdest book, easily. As a graduate art school project, Thwaites decided to attempt to build the simplest (and cheapest) appliance he could think of - a toaster - fully from scratch. Quite literally, starting with mining the elements to make the right kinds of metal and figuring out how to make the right kind of plastic. Half of the book is Thwaites' attempts to build various elements of a toaster - and how they go wrong, or right, and why it's so hard. The other half discusses all the processes that go in to making all these elements in a more manufactured setting, their impact on the environment and the economy, and the difference between cheap mass-produced products that break down vs more expensive products that last longer. The writing was fun and included photos and diagrams and interviews with various industry professionals Thwaites contacted to learn more.

Most interesting/thought provoking book: The Recognitions by William Gaddis

Runner up: Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang. I've now read everything this author has published and this is by far her best book. Her narrative style is so unique and so poetic, and the themes she always comes back to are so interesting, and they culminate in this amazing novel. This magical realist novel centers around two best friends, Anita and Rainie, who are both first generation Taiwanese-American. The story opens when they are adolescents, and Anita has recently learned that they come from generations of dog-headed women and women-headed dogs. They vow to become dogs together, tying a string around each other's throats as collars and playing at dogs in the empty lot near their apartment complex. But Anita's dreamlike imagination and obsessively loyal personality starts to clash with Rainie's more reserved nature, and when it becomes too much, Rainie's family moves away. Rainie grows up, while unbeknownst to her, Anita has sunk into a dreamworld and her body has begun to rot. She narrates her family's past and her mother's bloodline because she cannot narrate her own present. When she returns to the town she grew up in, Rainie discovers Anita's condition, and knows that she is the only one who can save her. This novel is beautiful, incredibly poetic, and experiments with formatting and narration in really unique ways. Its exploration of friendship and queerness and obsession and tradition and folklore is absolutely fascinating. I often write in my books and underline sentences or paragraphs that I really love. I didn't write in this one, because I would have ended up underlining the entire novel.

Longest/shortest book: My longest book was The Recognitions by William Gaddis at 952 pages, and my shortest was Notes On Camp by Susan Sontag at 57 pages.

General thoughts on all the other books that didn't get superlatives:

-Child of God by Cormac McCarthy. This is the first McCarthy book I've ever read (I know, I know) and I really enjoyed it. You just watch a horrible guy walk around in the rural countryside of a small town, doing increasingly fucked up things and committing various awful crimes. Which is exactly up my alley in terms of literature. The main character, Ballard, is someone who is so weird and pathetic that he becomes turned inside out into evilness. You feel sorry for him but you also hate him and he's also fascinating because he's so fucking weird. It's a great book.

-The Ghost Network by Catie Disabato. This book was so much fun to read while living in Chicago. It's a rock n roll mystery novel that riffs on Situationism and the L tracks and maps. A rock star disappears, and the main character who is a fan of her's is determined to find out what happened to her. What she uncovers is a series of clues based on defunct lines and stations of the Chicago transit system, and the Situationist concept of detournment, which lead her towards finding out what actually happened to the rock star. This book was so much fun, and so much of it was based on real life defunct train lines and the actual Situationists, both of which I found really interesting. The ending was also just so good! Somehow I managed to have read everything I needed to in order to get every single reference in the book, which was really surprising to me, because they all came from different places.

-New Animal by Ella Baxter. This book baffled me. It is about a woman who works as a makeup-artist at her family's morgue. When her mother dies unexpectedly, she skips the funeral and goes to stay at her estranged father's house. While there, trying to figure out how to vent her grief, she decides to try out the local kink scene. Her first experience is with a dom who is a manipulative, horrible asshole. She has a bad time, but wants to try again, so she goes to a place that hosts scenes. She acts like she knows what she's doing when she doesn't, no one gives her any instruction, so she fucks up massively, and everyone has a bad time. It's the worst portrayal of the kink scene I think I've ever encountered. The author said she did a lot of research but it just seems like a lot of terrible assumptions and misinterpretations. I thought it was going to be a book that positively portrayed kink and people who like the kink scene, but it's very much not. It didn't even feel like the author was doing this so the character would learn that she can't run from her grief. It seemed more like the author had one bad experience due to poor communication or shitty individuals, and then decided that's what the whole scene was like.

-Harold's End by JT LeRoy. I read this book in high school (or perhaps just after graduating) and totally fell in love with it, and then never saw another copy until recently. It was so good to reread it, to re-experience the gorgeous watercolor portraits that come with it. The novel follows a young street kid/hustler who lives with other street kids; all his friends have pets but he doesn't. A john takes a liking to him and buys him a snail as a pet, who he names Harold. The book follows him as he lives on the streets and as his relationship with the john develops. The book is classic JT LeRoy, and the end is LeRoy's usual style of characters experiencing a life lesson and growth but not necessarily in a happy way. It definitely holds up!

-Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson. This was such a fun and weird book and I really enjoyed it. Markson's idea for the novel was "what if someone actually lived the way that Wittgenstein's Tractatus suggests?". What we get is a woman who believes she is the last person on earth (it is never confirmed whether this is true or not). She muses on life, culture, art, philosophy, and her past, and discusses her trips across the world despite its emptiness. But her story changes constantly; she's always referencing things she said before and editing herself. It's a weird, fun, fascinating novel with a lovably weird main character.

-A Feast Of Snakes by Harry Crews. Yet another fucked up book that I loved. It follows Joe Lon Mackey, a former high school football star that now lives a dead-end life in his hometown in Georgia. Each year the town hosts the Rattlesnake Roundup, where people come from many states away to try and catch as many rattlesnakes as they can in order to win a competition. Joe Lon is in charge of the event now that his father is too old and ill. He's uncomfortably self-aware of his own personal failings and his inadequacy and his abusive relationship with his wife; he'd rather not think about any of it and is incapable of figuring out how to change things. But his old girlfriend is returning for the event, and his father's attempts to control the goings-on from afar mean he's unable to stop thinking about where his life has ended up and where it's going. All this drives him slowly crazy with desperation until the insane ending. Crews is incredibly talented at writing characters that are likeable despite being so flawed and fairly awful people. This book is no exception.

-Milkshake by Travis Dahlke. What a weird novel! In a near-future dystopian heatwave, an 11 year old girl escapes the environmental catastrophe by traveling back in time to her past life as a fertilizer salesman whose marriage is slowly collapsing. I really enjoyed it, because it was just so odd. Now that I'm thinking about it, I feel as though it would have been really interesting to read just before or just after reading Tentacle; both books focus specifically on time travel and on environmental disaster.

-Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor. At the opening of the box, a Witch has been murdered in a small village in Mexico called La Matosa. The rest of the chapters are narrated by different characters, who all have some small or large hand in the death of the Witch, who was a woman who the whole town visited in secret for medicine, fortune-tellings, and advice. The narrating characters include a schoolgirl, a drug dealer, a prostitute, a hapless husband who wants to make something of himself, and a teenager in love with his young girlfriend. With each narration we learn more about the Witch, and her mother who was a Witch before her. Slowly, we get inklings of the nature of the murder, and the revelation at the end is brutal. Melchor's writing is incredibly vivid, and the characters are all caught in the cycle of poverty, driven by superstition and fear and hardship. None of the characters are likeable, but they're all so human.

-Biography Of X by Catherine Lacey. In a dystopic alternate-universe US, where the Southern Territory split from the North after WWII and established a fascist theocracy, a woman named CM grieves her recently deceased wife X, who was a famous artist. Despite X's wishes, CM decides to delve into her wife's past, researching her history before they met and before she was known as X. She uses her credentials and privileges as a journalist to cross into the Southern Territory and learn about X's family and the communities from which she came, her activism and her hidden lives, and begins to realize that maybe learning all this about the woman she loved won't benefit her in the long run and that maybe their relationship wasn't as rosy as she thought. This novel combined fiction and real life in really fascinating ways, and includes both real and fake sources in its footnotes.

-The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides. A famous and successful painter murders her husband and then refuses to speak. A psychologist who is also a fan of her work is determined to get her to speak again. Obsessed with uncovering the truth, he ends up taking risks that threaten himself and his patient. A fun mystery that went down easy. It didn't attempt to be too realistic from the start, so suspension of disbelief wasn't hard. I do think the book could have done without the entire last part. Leaving it on the realization of what had happened and allowing the reader to sit with that realization (especially with how creatively the twist is presented) would have had more impact I think than the slower and less engaging denouement of the last 3 chapters, which were far weaker than the rest of the book.

-Acid Snow by Larry Mitchell. I reread this book for the first time since about 2009 and really enjoyed it. It's a very sad novel about a man living in NYC during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Most of his friends and lovers have died and he's scared and sad about his own life and cynical about love, but he's attracted to the man who owns the shop below his apartment. It's a dark book, sad and scared and jaded. I think the main character's anxiety and grief that slowly escalates into paranoia is an amazingly surreal way to portray all the emotions that consumed the queer community at that time. I also loved the sort of lack of closure at the end - because many people didn't get that.

-Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer. I don't generally go for science fiction novels, but I read this one because so many people said they had liked it. I really enjoyed it. The unnamed narrator, a biologist, is part of an all-female expedition into a harsh, unknown territory that has appeared adjacent to the US. The suspense and strangeness of the novel had excellent pacing. The descriptions were also so vivid and clear, which made the story's weirdness so compelling. I loved watching the main character struggle to remain objective the whole time while knowing that she's failing. Her growing fascination and terror is so fun to read as each feeling tries to overtake the other. I also think it was great as a standalone and I feel no interest in reading the other books in the same universe.

-Nevada by Imogen Binnie. I'm a bad queer person, I hated this book. In it, the narrator, a trans woman, is frustrated with her life and has just broken up with her girlfriend, so she steals her ex's car and drives away, ending up in a small town where she spends the night with a department store employee. I just really don't like books that are meandering tell and no show without characters or a plot that are interesting. This entire book felt like someone recounting their weekend over breakfast, complete with casual informal language and overuse of the word "like". Which would be fine if any of the characters were compelling, or if the plot was really interesting and went somewhere, but it didn't. A good portion of it is just musings on New York City, but without the creativity or vividness that other portrayals of NYC have to offer. After I read it, I learned this book was kind of the catalyst for a specific style of trans writing. Which also explains why I hated Detransition, Baby when I read it a couple years ago, as it's a sort of literary descendant of this. I'm happy to read books that are tell rather than show....so long as something interesting happens or at least one of the characters is unique and compelling. This book sadly has neither.

-Essex County by Jeff Lemire. I read this for an English class in university, so this was a reread and I really enjoyed reading it a second time! All the stories in this collection are so beautiful and compelling, all the characters are so real. And the art style is fantastic. The stories revolve around characters living in the titular Essex County in Canada, across a number of generations. It weaves together their relationships and their lives, much of which revolves around hockey. There were some storylines I remembered quite well and others I didn't remember at all, so it was really nice to revisit this one.

-Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire by MacGillivray. Man, this book had so much potential. This novel is a fake biography of a fake poet who disappeared from a Scottish island in the 1960s after falling into delusions that he has become a demon. The fascinating thing about this book (at first), is that it's completely convinced that it is an actual nonfiction book. It gives no hints that it's fake, and the first 50 pages are convincingly written with an academic, nonfiction voice as the novel is utterly convinced of its own delusion of factualness. The novel claims to be an analysis of found papers: first, the poetry and written tracts of Tristjan Norge, a Norwegian poet, then the analysis of his works by MacGillivray, and finally, the diary of his companion Luce Montcrieff. Unfortunately, it is fairly repetitive in a way that bogs the reader down quite a bit. Even so, I think I would have enjoyed much, much more if the ending did not abruptly switch genres to a supernatural/fantasy novel in a way that was startling and had no previous indications of earlier in the book. Up to the last 20 pages I thought it was interesting, even when it was dense, but the end felt like the author didn't know how to end the novel and just used the deus ex machina of supernatural occurrences.

My goal for 2025 is to read majority nonfiction. I don't know if I'm going to actually meet that goal, but I'll try. I don't have any goals for how many books I want to read, especially because I tend to read nonfiction quite a bit slower than fiction, so I don't have a good idea of what my reading amount goal should actually be. This year I also forgot entirely about my attempt to read all of Jean Genet's (translated) works, so I will hopefully actually meet that goal in 2025, since I only have one or two books left to read. But my first three books of the year are going to be Soldiers Don't Go Mad by Charles Glass, which I started this year but didn't finish, The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews by Jean Genet, and Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe.

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