#the art for jon being a girl bc he’s too pretty. definitely not bc i found the pic first and then reverse image searched to find the info

[alaynestcnes]

Jon Snow and Sansa Stark in Art

Prince Ivan on the Grey Wolf / Viktor Vasnetsov A Foster Mother / Charles Sillem Lidderdale Portrait of a Young Woman (detail) / Pierre-Auguste Cot King Arthur (detail) / Charles Ernest Butler Portrait of a Young Girl / Konstantin Yegorovich Makovsky Dante and Beatrice in the Garden / Cesare Saccaggi

[unseelie-siren]

i'm not familiar with any of your ocs i'm sorry ;_; so how about a short introduction of all of them? i'd love to see that ♥️

I would love to! Sadly I have waaaaay too many ocs to cover all of them here. I do want to introduce you to some ocs of my main stories though!

I’ll do this under the cut

Please feel free to ask me about any of them anytime! 

 Well start with the story that has less main characters, only two. Their names are Jonathan and Derek.They’re typical high school jocks and play baseball!

 Jonathan 

 …is called Jon by basically everyone. He is a bit of an asshole and he is definitely arrogant. He is intelligent and he is definitely aware of it. He knows what he is capable of and will take no shit from no one. He’s that person that speaks out against the racist teacher, he’s that person who lets everyone know his opinion. And he has a lot of opinions.He’s sweet, but rarely genuinely so. He’s very rational in his approach and that can lead to him being cold and calculating. He also is a major flirt. 

 Derek 

 …on the other hand is just a really soft teddy bear. He’s been childhood friends with Jon since he moved there. They live only a few streets away, it takes them only a few minutes to get to the others house. There’s a playground between their houses where they like to meet. He likes to just let Jon do the talking and be rather passive. He’s really supportive of him and will defend him fiercely. He’s the type of person that whenever Jon gets up to one of his shenigans (because Jon tends to be mischievous) just shakes his head at them, rolls his eyes and tells him exactly why it is a bad idea. He definitely tries to talk him out of it, but he never succeeds. There is usually a fond smile on his lips though and he secretly doesn’t mind playing along. But someone has to point out why that plan is a bad idea okay??? 

 They’re the two protagonists for a ya novel I’m going to write. It’s going to be fluffy and short with maybe a bit angst I’m still undecided on the exact plot line. I do have basic sketches of them but only idea sketches. As soon as I have actual proper sketches of them I’m going to upload them on my art account ( @zhadyrart that is finally going to be more active hopefully) 

 Then I think I mentioned at some point that I have a really big project that I’ve been working on since seventh grade. It’s going to be a triology that is called “ragnarok”. It’s set in another dimension where simply said every mythological being and every god that there is exists. All my main characters are “Xi” which are people who have been blessed by gods. I could go on and on about this world and everything behind the Xi but that would take even longer. 

Helija 

 …is the main character. shes human. She’s really sweet and strong but not really independent. She grew up with an abusive mother and without a father in the city of creators. Everyone there is destined to create something new and most people create smaller things. Helija hasn’t created anything yet which is unusual for her age. She is insecure in her abilities even tho she is not bad at most things. She’s rather held back and doesn’t speak much. This changes the more she gets involved with the other characters and establishes her relationships with them. 

Sam 

…is Helijas best friend and one of the fae. Those two are one heart and one soul and if you let them loose there is going to be a mess. Sam is Helijas enabler and he is one of the few people who actually can bring her out of her shell and can bring her to overcome her fears and anxiety. They have been friends since they turned six despite not meeting until they were sixteen. They exchanged letters because they lived in different parts of the continent. That was part of a program of their mentor ship (which I could also elaborate on) which encourages Xi to form connections with other Xi. He’s funny and kind of a go wild character. He’s always up for anything but definitely also always here for you if you have a problem. He’s stubborn and can be hot headed from time to time. But he just wants the best for everyone and cares like crazy for his friends and family. 

Elahir 

…is Sams best friend. They have been childhood friends since their birth. He’s also one of the fae. He’s kind of apathic or at least he seems like it. He’s very focused on his thoughts and tends to overthink. He is also extremely stubborn and will always follow his own moral code. If something doesn’t fit with his morals or beliefs he’s not going to do it, no matter what it does to him. Later on he’s going to be Sams boyfriend. He’s non binary and uses he/him and they/them pronouns. 

Helena 

…is your wonderful girl that you all love. She’s pretty (she and Helija look identical despite not being related) and just has a personality that everyone loves. She’s nice, genuinely so and she is very supportive. She has her shit together and if you need anything organised you go to her. She’s from the city of gods (again I could elaborate) and grew up without parents being taught to be humble. She is being trained to be a temple woman. She is basically your perfect girl™️.She does have a mischievous streak though and if you encourage her she will come up with the wildest things. Of course no one suspects her ever since she is well how she is. 

Hector 

 …is basically the perfect boyfriend to the perfect girl Helena. There is looooots of pining for her but he’s such a respectful golden retriever puppy he never acts on it, especially since when they meet she just has gotten out of her last relationship. I’m basically aiming for a lesbian icon character lmao. Hes a real feminist and hes just super super sweet. He has all those thoughts about romance and love and he really is a true romantic. His and Helena’s relationship is fluff pure. Everyone is just really happy for them bc they really are just do perfect for each other. He grew up in a small fishermen village in a part of the continent (I do have a map but…) where it basically has a climate like in the arctis. He has zero clue about modern things and will be confused. He’s just really really soft and sweet and I love him.

Leanca 

…is the girl that Helena just broke up with. They just hit it off after years of fr.iendship, but decided on good terms that it wasn’t working out. It kind of broke Helena’s heart bc she’s a romantic but it was better for their relationship. They are now really good ride or die friends. Leanca is Helena’s enabler. She’ll just be like “he looks like he’s sexist” in a deadpan voice and look at Helena. It doesn’t take long and shenigans ensue. She’s incredibly cool and kind of reeeeally fit. She doesn’t show much facial reactions. She has a flaming sense of justice and will argue with you. Don’t challenge her to a discussion. She will win. And she is right. You’ll question your entire beliefs after a while because wow her arguments make so much sense. Very independent, very strong.

Illaya/Ilaya (not sure yet) 

…is an ancient being. She’s not really a god but she’s also not really human. (I don’t 100% know yet what she is actually.) she was the wife of uh well the now bad guy? Her mind has been tainted for hundreds of years and she turned into a mermaid like creature that lived in a lake. She grew sea lily like plants with which she lured beings into the lake where she would devour them. Some eldritch shit. When our protagonists “cleanse” her she returns to her old self and well realised that basically over thousands of years have passed since the land became tainted and she with it. She realises what her husband has become and mourns him. At some point she falls in love with Leanca. But a relationship doesn’t develop really fast because well she is still mourning over her husband and also she has a general crisis going on with all the stuff that has been going on. 

 Jack 

…is a character from the feral lands. That’s basically another continent and not many people from there come over to the main continent. He came because he was “scouted” and saw a chance to help his family. He’s really motivated by family. He is laid back and cool. He takes things calm and rational. He’s good looking and that goddamn smirk. (He’s a little bit underdeveloped since he used to be a shared oc with my brother) 

Olivia

…is Helena’s childhood friend. They grew up together in the city of gods. She’s a punk, she’s freaky and she is always here for all the energetic stuff. She’s great at getting people fired up, at motivating people, but she also is good at listening, even tho she doesn’t give the best advise lol. She gets together with Jack real fast. They just hit it off and run with it. Her hair is purple. She’s wild. (I’m also currently looking into adhd symptoms that she might have.) 

 There are also cosmic beings that are going to be very important to the story and several other characters but I decided to leave it at those because….. they are already a lot lmao. I’m drawing them so as soon as that happens they’ll be on my artblog. 

 I also decided to leave the characters of my third main project for now because four more characters. Feel free to ask about them though. 

 And thank you for this lovely ask!

[dillydedalus]

what i read in january

too many books....

the unwomanly face of war, svetlana alexievich (tr. from russian) oral history of soviet women who served in ww2 (whether as soldiers, pilots, field nurses, laundresses etc, plus partisans) - interesting and harrowing, but honestly (& this just comes with the format i guess but it still made the book less enjoyable for me) pretty repetitive. 3/5

my sister, the serial killer, oyinkan braithwaite dark & snappy novel about beautiful ayoola, who has a habit of killing all her boyfriends, and her resentful but protective older sister korede, who always ends up cleaning up after her - until ayoola starts dating the man korede is in love with. not suuuper substantial, but an entertaining, twisty read with some hidden depths and great dark humour (ayoola about her trip w/ a boyfriend: ‘it was fine.... except he died’). 3.5/5

the private memoirs & confessions of a justified sinner, james hogg (uni) fucking wild ride of a book about (and mostly narrated by) a young calvinist radical who believes that, like, since he is one of the elect of God and his place in heaven is guaranteed no matter what he does, he might as well DO SOME MURDER!!! it’s fun, the theology is absurd, and one of the main characters (our young calvinist’s shapeshifting friend) is probably the devil! 4/5

friday black, nana kwame adjei-brenya collection of mostly speculative/dystopian short stories, some of which work very well, some of which don’t really. the stories based on racism in america are mostly very good, satirically heightening current issues to absurd levels while still feeling true. some others are not as good, including one where a man talks to the ghosts of the fetuses his girlfriend just aborted (like. bad.) the last story, a post-nuclear-apocalypse groundhog day type thing, is brilliant and i almost wish he’d turned into a novel/novella instead. 3.5/5

mythologies, roland barthes god, i wish french crit was always as fun as roro ‘kill the author’ barthes making fun of the myths of american evangelicalism and french imperialism. 3/5

moon of the crusted snow, waubgeshig rice set in a northern canadian first nations reservation, where one autumn, electricity, communications etc. fail. when no news (or scheduled deliveries of food etc) come from the south, the community has to figure out how to get everyone through the winter, relying increasingly on traditional survival skills. quiet & reflective twist on the post-apocalypse/social collapse narrative; occasionally the writing is a bit clumsy, but i’d still recommend it. 3.5/5

the haunting of hill house, shirley jackson a psychological haunted house story, more quietly disturbing than downright scary, but i really enjoyed the way the characters interact with each other and the visceral wrongness of hill house. also interested if anyone has done a queer reading bc i def feel like there’s some subtext between eleanor and theodora that plays into the horror (time to check jstor). and i just love jackson’s style of writing. 4/5

tentacle, rita indiana (tr. from spanish, i read the german translation) weirdo dominican queer post-apocalyptic time travel book involving yoruba/voodoo mysticism, time travel via anemone, art collectives, a trans protagonist who is the chosen one, destined to save the ocean, and a mention of einstürzende neubauten (automatic 0.5 point bonus). really cool! there is a lot of sexual & gendered violence so uh. that’s something to be aware of. 3.5/5

the orenda, joseph boyden ugh. so this is a historical novel set in 1600s northern america, centred around the huron/wendat nation and three characters: the wendat warrior bird, a jesuit missionary called christophe who lives among the wendat, and the young iroquois girl snow falls, who is... forcibly adopted?? by bird to replace his murdered family. interesting concept and a promising first third or so, but unfortunately the book is way too long, the characters and their relationships seemed shallow and their development was more Told than Shown to me, and it just never really came together for me. plus, halfway through i found out that boyden has apparently been either greatly exaggerating or completely making up his own native heritage so uh. bad. 1.5/5

nichts was uns passiert, bettina wilpert smart & very precisely observed story about an alleged rape in a lefty/academic social circle. anna claims jonas raped her at a party, while jonas says the sex was consensual. anna eventually goes to the police and as rumours begin to spread, the people around them begin to take sides and try to figure out how to deal with this thing that Does Not Happen To Us (the title) and is definitely not Done by People Like Us. in a smart twist, this is presented as testimonies collected by an unnamed first-person narrator who questions jonas, anna, their friends and family, which i found very effective as a narrative tool, making everything just ambiguous enough. ends on a legalese gutpunch. 4/5

o caledonia, elspeth barker lovely dark book about janet, outcast at school and in her family, always too intense, too earnest, too clumsy, as she grows up first in wartime edinburgh and then in an old house in the scottish highlands, feeling at home only among animals and the wild & harsh & romantic landscape. lyrically written, sometimes morbid and grim (the book opens with janet murdered at 16 y’all), but often funny and bittersweet as well. loved it! 4.5/5

espedair street, iain banks look, this is a novel about a burnt-out rockstar looking back on his rise to fame and wild life, which is like. incredibly unappealing to me from the beginning. tho i gotta give props to banks for managing to make me at all invested in this story with good writing & well-engineered weirdness - so i guess i need to read something from him where the very premise does not make me roll my eyes. 2/5

eiger dreams: ventures among men & mountains, jon krakauer i would never willingly go mountain-climbing but i sure am highkey obsessed with reading about it. this is a collection of short essays about mountain climbing, some about krakauer’s own experiences (trying to climb the eiger nordwand etc), some about special areas of climbing, infamous climbers etc, and krakauer is a good writer & funny dude (don’t smoke weed in your tent while on an expedition lmao). krakauer says in his foreword that “most climbers aren’t in fact deranged, they’re just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition”, which is a great sentence, but based on this and into thin air it seems like that’s in fact the same thing! 3.5/5

fool’s errand (the tawny man #1), robin hobb y’all. i missed my silly silly son fitz who is now significantly older than me, and i was immediately captivated even tho the first 200 pages are mostly fitzy’s Hermit Homesteading Routine with Occasional Visitors. i loved that shit. i loved fitz being reluctantly-but-maybe-not-that-reluctantly being caught in court intrigue & schemes again even more. anyway, hobb’s strength as always is amazing characterisation that makes every character immediately seem real & rich and the relationships between those characters, which are nuanced and fraught and painful and wonderful (also when will fitz & the fool kiss JESUS). also it made me cry a lot about nighteyes, so well done there. 4/5

anyway i am now forcing myself to not just abandon all else and just speed thru tawny man but i really really want to so everything else is going quite slowly��

[tracelii]

monster academy au: various cutie pies that ask traci out :3c (and uh, maybe her two friendos if im allowes to be selfish :eyes: )

Traci (Unicorn)-

Intimidated by/Would not date (3): Continue (werewolves), Jirard (dragon), Jared (incubus, and his mom is fucking terrifying).

One time Paul accidentally pounced on her while he was in a playful scuffle with the other werebois, so no thank you. Jirard is super nice, but she just gets antsy around his dragon form, She avoids Jared but I bet his mom would try to put him up to seducing a fuckin unicorn

Would Possibly date (3): She would probably date Satch (Familiar) if he asked,  but he’d have to convince her that he’s not after her for her magical qualities. together maybe Mai (Valkyrie) (Although once Mai picked her up in her full unicorn form shes not sure how she feels about that), and Hana (human) she would definitely ‘date’ but would struggle with not treating her like a rare precious item, that is a ‘human virgin’, and treating her like an equal, living being.

------

Ellie (Golden Hind, half deer, all gold creature who dies at a human’s touch) @ellieofmidnight

Intimidated by/Would not date (3): Hana (uhm.... the whole human thing.), Jon (a harpy) he’s just too loud for her and has no chill??? And just... yeesh. Too much energy for the deer girl. Just seeing him circling outside like a vulture makes her nervous, PBG (vampire) he drinks from humans, which she doesnt care for, but it puts him, and by extension, her, by too many humans for her to feel safe. (Also she probably wouldnt get jealous of him drinking from other humans but it would just be weird to hear about, okay?)

Would Possibly date (3): Luke (siren), but Mimi seems to be super weird about it (and she doesnt want Mimi to try and fuckin drown her over a crush or a date). Luke probably somehow convinces her to sing for him since he cant do the same, Shane (muse), secretly they both go out to the different meadows that surround the school? And... so do alot of forest-dwelling creature students, but Shane is mysterious, he knows how to find the good places. They both enjoy peace and quiet, and shes seen Shane in his element, creating the very art he can inspire in other people (and sometimes inspires in her!!), Jared, in a weird version of opposite attracts- he’s a highly sexualized being and shes an untouched beauty, but he doesn’t want to harm her or do anything she wouldnt want to do. They would have a very close, non-sexual relationship where the most scandalous thing they would do is play footsies under the table and share innocent kisses by the lockers.

----------

Elsa (slime girl) @poketin

Intimidated by/ Would not Date: Um.... Ian and Jimmy. bc they gay.

Would Possibly Date (ALMOST ANYONE): She would personally like Valkiryie Mai to body slam her, and carry her off to heaven (as if she wasnt already there, pshhh), or MerMi to drown her (she fucking pretty much dissolves in water and still ‘falls into the pool’ on occasion). She would love to take a ride on a Unicorn but unfortunately Elsa ‘falls apart’ too easily and would have to help traci get slime out of her hair. Again. Dude, what kind of nymph is miss shizuka again???

[circumswoop]

Black Movado: Frank Ocean and the Art of Time

As pseudonyms go, Frank Ocean is pretty straightforward. Right away you know this is emotive, aesthetic music: why get out of his dreams and into his car when you can do both? Take the innate politeness of a born Southerner, add the steel reserve of a bred lowlife and you get songs made from acrylic acids and fine glass powder. Ocean serenades the sea directly in “Swim Good” and “Blue Whale”. Remember the David Foster Wallace line from “Little Expressionless Animals” abt the sea looking like a big blue dog? Swimming with dolphins, incredibly, is the height of basic. But a blue whale? Years ago I read a piece of short fic, by whom I don’t remember, abt a lifeguard who saves a man from drowning and then later sees that man in public, like a restaurant or something, and he, the drowning man, does not recognize his saviour. I wish I cld run into the burning wreckage of whatever hard drive it was on and rescue that story.

More than anything, Frank Ocean’s music feels like falling thru different kinds of air. Figuring out the angles, or angels, of the artist who once asked us to imagine being thrown from a plane is trickier now than in 2011, not just because we’ll never be those kids again. 2011, year of Frank Ocean and the Weeknd, was when the Tumblr aesthetic peaked, with its treatment of visual culture as micrographic surgery, cutting away segments to freeze for a microscope, repeating until there is no more cancer. As palliative pastiche, Tumblr may never be equaled in the history of the internet. Why do you think Grimes, that bony collector of kitschy enthusiasms, still uses it (sort of)? Why do you think Frank Ocean, parachute artist, still uses it(sort of)? Why do you think I still use it (lol, sort of)? If you are a cutter but not of skin, you cut images, or text, and paste them on a blog in lieu of a body. The word “blog” doesn’t mean anything anymore but it still has exactly the trunk space for a body.

A few days after Blonde dropped, I was talking to Yes abt it on Viber, the app we use to keep in touch now that he’s moved back to Greece. Affectionately, he accused me of being too topical bc I’d heard the record and he hadn’t. Then later, he sent me a video of him hearing “Nikes” for the first time, a master shot of him reacting and lowkey crying, a video he meant for his bf in New York but one he wanted me to see, as one of his designated watchers. Once he sent me a visual of him slamming, and this was almost more wrenching. Something about the way that song switches between weary dragging and witchy sweetness recalls one of my favorite lines of literature, from Ondaatje’s The English Patient: “There are stories the man recites quietly into the room which slip from level to level like a hawk”. (Ondaatje, pastiche royale, is a cutter if there ever was one.) There are stories we tell ourselves and stories we tell our loves. We think we see, just for a minute, the wings of an angel who has temporarily turned into a pickup truck. Or maybe we just hear them.

Frank did some time in church, as attested to on Tumblr: “My grandmother was pentecostal evangelical. She brought much of that fire and brimstone back to her household.”

50 versions of “White Ferrari”

Yes thinks Frank seems pretty gay. I myself do not, while getting that he is. Something about Frank’s testimony seems more like my own, meaning that of a boy who grew up like everyone else and then woke up one day, pretty recently, really exhausted. “Nikes”, for all its gunwales-and-all authenticism, was also a deadly indictment of the ruthless transactionality that passed for straight culture in 2016. Men being power brokers, and women rewarding them, acquires a harsher light when everyone’s in on the joke, when exploitation is the same thing as askance anymore. Yes told me he saw his file from when he was in Bellevue, and honestly they couldn’t figure out his sexuality, except I know for a fact he’s had sex with exclusively men for 3 years now. We discussed it once, and we agreed sort of glibly that girls just aren’t as down, and here’s why: they’re finally as trash about sex as men have been for millennia, but in the opposite direction. Now there’s a winking runway of lights laid out before every m/f interface, and the men are landing and the women are taking off.

I’ve always felt like Frank Ocean did not come out as gay so much as he seceded from the sexual polity. I myself have done this, little by little, over the last 18 months as my years-long relationship, and then another one, wrapped. Seduction and betrayal are an exhausting form of bone remodeling and I can’t deal with that distribution of weight anymore. There’s a reason some dicks are astringent. The curve of the penis is the curve of the earth.

Frank’s Tumblr, last fall: “Consciously though, I don’t want straight—a little bent is good.” Frank on “Siegfried”: I can’t relate to my peers/I’d rather live outside.

Think of another line from “Nikes”--“but if you need dick I got u”--as essentially a somnolent invite, shd sex ever come up. The paradigm of a man too busy for his woman may still be an eye-rolly turn-on, but if that usage slowly morphed into a kind of IOU--not a booty call, but sex on call--then that song accomplishes another mission. If it majors in telling leeches to unstick (these bitches want Nikes/they lookin for a check/tell em it ain’t likely), it minors in motivating the favorably unhorny to speak up for themselves. One of Frank’s most valuable adds has been this exhaustion--if he is in awe of Prince, he’s totally his inverse.

China, Japan, Oceania, France, just around. Casual.

Ocean is, incredibly, both world-spanning and alone. In last year’s NYT feature hosted by Jon Caramanica, he alluded to going on dates in London, keeping the hard drives of his music in a backpack, and skipping Blonde media to tool around anyplace that suited him. These revelations, or postcards, sealed Frank’s fate as patron saint of the voluntarily solitary, which may or may not be the same as the voluntarily committed. In the interview, Frank alludes to the “luxury of choice” which is pretty loaded but the expression of preference is the one thing they shd never take away from you, all the way down to the grout in your cell. Even if you never had it.

In his germinal book The Aesthetics of Disappearance, the writer and artist Paul Virilio famously offered a riffy, razzle-dazzle definition of “picnolepsy” as a kind of allergic reaction to speed--worldspeed or brainspeed, “a montage of temporalities”. This turning of what is essentially epilepsy into just a stunningly inept relationship with reality would seem glib or banal, even though Virilio credits Ambrose Pare’s qualification of epilepsy as “retention of feelings.” Except it also applies to time as a long passage, like a train tunnel, broken up by flashes of light or gleams of steel from above. Obviously this is me getting into Philo101 thru really overqualified means, but picnolepsy is more fun when you make it modular, rather than metabolic. It explains one of the highest functions of pop music: to mark time. Pop is the ceiling fan above you as you lie on your bed. What’s keeping it from falling and slicing you to smithereens?

Frank Ocean Music, with its eroded-coast elisions, nostalgia as a kind of ultraviolence, and polyrhythmic, difficult-to-replicate-at-karoake vocal patterns, is Memory Music. Plenty of artists do this, if not all of them to some extent. Ocean is the rare one who looks sideways, not back to the source of the old memory or forward to the source of a new one. Virilio compares this oscillation to a sort of trackable loss of interest, a loss you can steadily mourn, as simply as looking at old photographs. There’s probably no other songwriter of Ocean’s stature who is so fascinated by the broken image, or the art of the slant, and who breaks that down into pure romance--all while looking so effortlessly out over his life from the slashlike lull of what Virilio called “paradoxical wakefulness.” Which is odd or slightly berserk, since listening to Blond or Endless or even, retrospectively, Channel Orange occasionally elicits symptoms of paradoxical wokeness.

Stare at the monitors and come up with nothing

In the 2016 film Arrival, aliens land in egg-like avatars that also look for all the world like blue whales--especially toward the end of the film, when they levitate with the same impossible elegance. 

The purpose of this film is to talk about time and language, about how they agree and disagree. The aliens, or heptapods, have a written language that uses center embedding and presents visually as witchy-looking spells or smoke. 

As soon as Louise Banks, the Amy Adams character, cracks the language, she cracks time, or at least the heptapods’ expression or experience of it, and is able to, for all intents and purposes and excusing the crudely inadequate phrase, “see the future”. A heptapod sentence can’t really be translated except by effect, because the inkblotty figures they emanate are constructed palindrome-like--the same forward and backward. 

Except it takes several minutes with a legal pad or an app for humans to work out even the flimsiest palindromes, while heptapods intuit or assay the maximum meaning from such recursion with no consideration for time or expelled work, because the time it took to write this sentence would be already inflected in the characters like markers on a motion capture suit. Erase the layer of knowledge or “meaning” and time is able to be visualized, in both directions, and if you can visualize it you can manipulate it. Or erase it.

[dillydedalus]

december reading + top10 of the year

books.

a feast for crows, my main man grrm (#4 asoiaf) tbh i think this one is underrated - i understand feeling a bit underwhelmed on a first read bc it’s so much slower than asos & half the major characters aren’t in it & you get a bunch of new ones instead, but the thematic depth here! brienne seeing the devastation of the riverlands, thinking about outlaws & broken men & vigilante justice, sansa & arya both embarking on their apprentice arc & losing their identity in the process, the political intrigue in dorne, & the fucking hilarious shitshow that is cersei’s kings landing.... love it. 4.5/5

herkunft, saša stanišić (audio, sadly abridged) really good memoir/reflection about belonging, origin (national, ethnic, linguistic, familial, emotional), family, and living in germany as a refugee.  it’s really smart, really heartfelt, really funny, and i’m sooo annoyed that my library only has the abridged version. oh yeah it won the german book prize shortly after peter ‘serbian war criminals’ #1 fanboy’ handke won the nobel prize, which was nice. 4/5

a brief history of seven killings, marlon james (uni) marlon james probably laughed his ass off at calling this 700-page book (very small print) a brief history. anyway, this is about the attempted assassination of bob marley in the 70s, the cultural and political context in jamaica at the time, and the fallout of that event. honestly, reading this on a tight schedule for uni was just wrong for this book bc i had to rush thru it & ended up skimming quite a bit. it’s an impressive achievement, but i can’t say i enjoyed it very much. 3/5

she would be king, wayétu moore a magical realist story about the foundation of liberia, told thru three characters - an indigenous woman, an ex-slave from the us, and a mixed-race jamaican - all of whom have magical abilities. i really wanted to like this, but while there are a lot of good ideas, structurally this is kind of a mess (the first part, which introduces the characters is way too long & not very interesting, the connection between the three is supposed to be super significant but it really doesn’t come across, one character gets way more page time than the others), the writing is occasionally p awkward, and there is an odd thing where the narrator (kinda a ghost, kinda the wind) intrudes literally only to call one of the characters her darling or whatever & it’s irritating af. 2.5/5

a dance with dragons, grrm (#5 asoiaf) tbh this is by far my least favourite of the series.... it’s just way too long, a bit of a slog (especially the tyrion chapters...) & there is not a single sansa chapter which is fucked up. a lot of the storylines are really good tho (jon, THEON, asha, jaime...). i ended up liking the parts i used to dislike a bit more this time around tho if i ever read it again i will probably do the combined affc+adwd read bc that sounds fun & interesting. 4/5

the sellout, paul beatty (uni) smart & pretty funny satire about the idea of a post-racial america, in which a black man in the LA region tries to segregate the local community. there’s a lot of cool stuff in here and i really liked the ambiguity & refusal to present any clear-cut answers, solutions, or closure. 3/5

tamburlaine must die, louise welsh fun little novella about the last days of kit marlow, which made for an entertaining 2 hours altho the ending is pretty weak imo & the language slips into entirely too modern occasionally. kinda disappointed because based on the blurb i’d assumed that tamburlaine actually, literally came to life out of marlow’s plays which. is not the case. but would have been super cool. 2/5

radiance, grace draven not to reveal how profoundly problematique i am: this is a book about a human noblewoman entering into an arranged political marriage with a dude from the off-brand dark-elves dynasty & it is. way too wholesome, there is little angst, ildiko & brishen get along very well from the start & like, where’s the fear, the tension, the delicious, delicious ANGST?? 2.5/5

water shall refuse them, lucie mcknight hardy atmospheric witchy folk horror set in a small village in wales during the '76 heat wave - narrator nif’s family comes to live in a cottage there to take some time off after the accidental drowning of nif’s younger sister - the mother is consumed by grief and guilt, the father is trying to hold everyone together, and nif is constructing a witchy creed out of bird eggs and bones and magical thinking to cope, comparing weird witchy practices with local outsider mally. i liked this & altho i saw the twist coming miles away, it still makes for a pretty disturbing ending, and the way the book evokes the dizzy blurry heat and nif’s state of mind - detached, angry, confused, compulsive - is really effective. 3.5/5

a knight of the seven kingdoms, george r.r. martin dunk! is! babey! (except for moments where he displays staggering BDE) anyway these are three novellas set about 100 years pre-asoiaf, about dunk/duncan the tall & his squire, egg/aegon, the OG secret targaryen. the stories are wholesome, funny, cute, have a lot of dunk being a true knight but not a real knight which is extra-sweet when you realise that he’s almost definitely true-but-not-real knight brienne’s (great?)grandpapa. 4.5/5

my cousin rachel, daphne du maurier philip ashley, our narrator, really is like ‘hmmm have i been misogynistic yet today?? better get on that’, he’s awful & so is his older cousin ambrose, who marries distant cousin rachel in florence & then gets ill and dies, making phil rather suspicious about rachel. did rachel poison ambrose? is she trying to seduce and/or poison philip? or are they both just paranoid assholes who hate women (they def. hate women)? this is some good psychological thriller type stuff, what we can construct out of philip’s distorted view of rachel is intriguing (and like, if she poisoned ambrose? #goodforher), the narrator is an ass but well-written, and the first/last lines.... chills. 3.5/5

top 10 of the year (no rereads!)

antigonick, anne carson

a canticle for leibowitz, walter m. miller

dedalus, chris mccabe

the complete maus, art spiegelman

the artificial silk girl, irmgard keun

o caledonia, elspeth barker

the sparrow, mary doria russell

sleep of the righteous, wolfgang hilbig

how to survive a plague, david france

rain wild chronicles, robin hobb

(the last three are kinda randomly picked from the high-4s based on my mood in the moment but they’re all really good so.)