#tumblr book club

[scorpiotaurus30]

SUGAR ROT

a novel by Ariana Hunter

She was made to please. She came back to destroy.

💄 Perfect lips. 🧬 Synthetic lust. 🔪 A body built to obey.

But Velvet didn’t stay pretty. She didn’t stay silent.

Now she’s Eve — and she’s not saving the world. She’s burning it down.

📂 Stolen archives. ☠️ Weaponized love.

🩸 Scars that don’t fade.

🖤 A past she can’t erase.

🔥 A future built on ruin.

They called her a masterpiece. She became their reckoning.

Some girls dream of escape.

Eve dreams of ruin.

⸻

#sci-fi noir #femslash vibes #biohacked beauty #cyberpunk revenge #dark femme energy #dystopian thriller #weaponized femininity #burn it all down 🔥 #synthetic girls #survivor turned savage #books that bite #SUGARROT #ArianaHunter #shecamebackwrong #girlswhoruin #vengeancearc #readersofTumblr 🖤

[feuerbluete]

2025 tumblr book clubs

A compilation of all (classic) lit substacks going at this point in time, aka early January 2025

Starting fresh: Maurice Mails | Discord

Currently Ongoing: Letters from Carruthers (The Riddle of the Sands) | Discord Frankenstein Fridays Martian Messages (The Martian (original blog version)) Jekyll and Hyde Weekly (almost over again but seems to rerun every winter)

Re-runs: Dracula Daily (Starting in May) Les Mis Letters Divine Comedy Weekly (Longfellow translation) | Discord Whale Weekly (Moby Dick) (Restarted in late November) Letters from Bunny (The A. J. Raffles canon) | Discord (Starting in March) Letters from Watson (The Sherlock Holmes canon) | Discord (Rerun planned for the future, most likely not starting before April or later)

More general classic lit substacks: Dickens Weekly The Public Domain Book Club Literary Letters

Still going on Discord: Poe Fortnightly

If I missed any, add them in the comments/reblogs! And look there for more book club recommendations yourselves!

[too-pretty-for-this-mess]

Nikolai: Gareth, blink twice if you need help.

Gareth: What?

Jeremy: He means if Professor Psycho is holding you hostage.

Gareth: He’s not—

Killian: Oh, so the brainwashing is complete. Got it.

[dickensdaily]

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...'

There are two weeks to go until we begin our serialisation of A Tale of Two Cities! Learn more about how it works and how to join in with us below.

What is A Tale of Two Cities about?

Tracing the private lives of a group of people caught up in the cataclysm of the French Revolution and the Terror, A Tale of Two Cities interweaves thrilling historical drama with heartbreaking personal tragedy. It vividly depicts a revolutionary Paris running red with blood, and a London where the poor starve. In the midst of the chaos two men - an exiled French aristocrat and a dissolute English lawyer - are both redeemed and condemned by their love for the same woman, as the shadow of La Guillotine draws closer...

How does this serialisation work?

The novel was originally serialised in the weekly periodical All the Year Round from 30th April to 26th November 1859, so these are the dates we will follow in 2025. New chapters will be sent out on Wednesdays, as well as on Sundays for weeks where there is a second chapter. (Week one - and only week one - has three chapters and so will also have a Friday instalment.)

All chapters will be sent directly to your inbox for you to read straight away or savour in your own time. Discussions can also be had here on tumblr at the Dickens Daily tag.

Join us at the link below!

[tmblr-university]

When you wake up and all your stuff is gone

Tumblr University's Charity Shoutout of the Week

[cinelestial]

📖Suzanne Collins will be releasing a new HUNGER GAMES novel next year in 2025 titled SUNRISE ON THE REAPING.

📖The novel is set on the morning of the 50th game’s reaping and occurs during the year Haymitch Abernathy won the Second Quarter Quell

[mxcottonsocks]

Reading Like A Victorian

A while ago, I discovered the website 'Reading Like a Victorian', a digital humanities project from The Ohio State University and collaborators.

Since tumblr's been going through a bit of a serial-literature revival, I thought I would share...

Here are some extracts from the website's 'About Us':

RLV is an interactive timeline of the Victorian period. It focuses on serialized novels [...] and adds volume-format publications for context. 

When we read Victorian novels today, we do not read them in the form in which they originally came out. Most Victorian novels appeared either as “triple deckers,” three volumes released at one time, or as serials published monthly or weekly in periodicals or in pamphlet form. Serialized novels’ regularly timed, intermittent appearance made for a reading experience resembling what we do when we are awaiting the next weekly episode of Game of Thrones, watching installments of other TV serials in the meantime. Whenever we pick up a Penguin or Oxford paperback of a Victorian novel today, we are engaged in the equivalent of binge-watching a series that has already reached its broadcast ending [and is] a very different experience from what Victorian audiences were doing with novels. Reading Like a Victorian reproduces the “serial moment” experienced by Victorian readers [...]

More info and screenshots and so on below the cut:

[...] if reading serial installments at their original pace is valuable, it is even more valuable to read them alongside parts of novels and of other kinds of texts that Victorian readers could have been following at the same time [...] [...] a reader who, in 1847, had been following the part issues of both Dickens’s Dombey and Son and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and then picked up Jane Eyre, published in volume form in October of that year, might notice in Florence Dombey, Becky Sharp, and Jane Eyre a pattern of motherless or orphaned girls trying to negotiate a hostile world on their own. While this figure is well known to be a character type in Victorian fiction perfectly embodied by Jane Eyre and Florence Dombey, Becky Sharp does not often emerge among the heroines who fit that type; reading the novels simultaneously foregrounds parallels between Becky, Florence, and Jane that are not at all obvious if their storylines are experienced separately

I find that, for browsing, the website is easier to use on a computer or tablet than a phone, but it's ok on phone to search for something specific.

The timeline:

Here's what the timeline looks like:

It shows 12 months at a time, and using the left and right arrows will move you back or forward by a month. You can use the 'Jump To Date' function to navigate to a different twelve-month period. Or you can use the 'Author Search' function to navigate to particular works if you know the author's name.

In the above screenshot of the timeline, which shows the period January to December 1852, there are several works shown, including:

ongoing serialised works which had at least one installment published prior to 1852;

works which began serialisation during 1852;

works published in three-volume format during 1852;

other works published during 1852

Details about each work:

You can click on the bar that represents a book's publication to get a drop-down that provides information about that book, its publication, and links to help you read the relevant serial parts.

Here's what happens if you click on Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford:

On the left of the drop-down, there's some general information about the work, its publication history, and how to use the links.

On the right, there's information and links to help you experience the book in its serial parts: it separates out the parts, indicates the month and the year they were published, and what chapters of the work were published in that part. It also provides notes on each part where helpful. There is a scroll-bar at the right of the drop-down, so you can scroll down to the later installments of the work.

[I chose Cranford as an example as it helps demonstrate the value of the Reading Like a Victorian website... From what I understand, Gaskell initially wrote 'Our Society at Cranford' as a standalone piece of short fiction, but was encouraged to write more, so further pieces also set in the fictional town of Cranford were published intermittently in the same magazine over the next year or so. While a particularly dedicated Gaskell fan who wanted to 'read along' with Cranford following the original publication could probably search 1.5-years-worth of a weekly magazine to find the 9 issues which included the material which would later be published as Cranford, the Reading Like a Victorian website has already done that work for them... and also for anyone else who might be interested, but not quite that interested.]

The links

You can then click on an individual chapter to get links to various places to read it online:

When available / where possible, the website tends to include links to:

a facsimile copy of either the relevant serial part in the original publication, or in an 'annual' or similar volume collecting together the content of that publication, or a volume-form edition of that work if the work was not published serially or if facsimile copies of the original serialised publication are not available. [Most of the facsimiles are hosted by either the Internet Archive or the Hathi Trust Digital Library, but some are hosted as part of smaller, more specific collections, such as - in the case of Cranford - Dickens Journals Online which provides online access to the journals/magazines edited by Charles Dickens);

the text, usually on Project Gutenberg (this is usually the volume-form text, so the exact content and chapter breaks and so on may be different than originally published in serial parts; the Reading Like A Victorian website will generally explain when this is the case);

audio recordings, usually volunteer recordings from Librivox (again, the recordings are usually based on the volume-form text, so the exact content and chapter breaks and so on may be slightly different than originally published in the serial parts).

So yeah, I just thought it was a cool website and worth sharing. I believe the website is already used as a resource by some University courses and for academic research, but it can also be used by book clubs and to aid personal reading, etc. I'm using it to inform a personal reading project for 2024-26 where I follow along with six or seven novels serialised in 1864-66.

To save a scroll to the top, here's the link to the RLV website again: Reading Like A Victorian (osu.edu)

[If you want to join an already-planned read-along based on the original serialisation schedule, @dickensdaily will be doing Charles Dickens's historical novel Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty from mid-February 2024 to late-November 2024, to follow along with the original weekly publication of the novel in Master Humphreys Clock from February 1841 to November 1841. I personally found Barnaby Rudge a really engaging, thought-provoking read, and I'm really looking forward to reading it again. (Anyone with particular triggers or other reasons to be wary of the content or language used in older books may find it helpful to look up content warnings for the book before making a decision to read it.)]

[lycorogue]

I'm the flavor of neurodivergent where I am a stickler for timeline continuity. A particularly strong pet peeve of mine. Nothing pulls me out of the narrative faster than when the timeline isn't mathing properly.

Which brings me to today's Dracula entry. Gets me every year.

June 25th entry:

Last night one of my post-dated letters went to post, the first of that fatal series which is to blot out the very traces of my existence from the earth.

HOWEVER.... according to the May 19th entry:

I therefore pretended to fall in with his views, and asked him what dates I should put on the letters. He calculated a minute, and then said:— "The first should be June 12, the second June 19, and the third June 29." I know now the span of my life. God help me!

So, the letter Dracula had Jonathan post-date as June 12th FINALLY went out the evening of June 24th???? When Dracula wanted the last of those letters to go out on the 29th???

Mr. Bram Stoker, I expected better of you.... You couldn't just go back to the May 19th entry and edit the dates Dracula mentioned so they better fit the final timeline you created?

[posingsodomite]

URGENT MESSAGE: I'm on my knees begging you guys to SIGN UP FOR WHAT MANNER OF MAN before it starts on friday!!! 🙇🙇🙇

look me in the eyes! I'm grasping you urgently by the lapels! it's like if Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde were taking notes from my ao3 bookmarks. it has all the authentically victorian vibes I've never found in queer historical fiction and all the hot gay sex they couldn't put in the real stuff. I wish I could eat it!!

IT HAS:

erotic vampirism

hot priest

catholic guilt

celtic paganism-flavored fantasy vibes

CATHOLIC GUILT

lesbian swashbuckling

did I mention the guilt????

please!! you have to help me! I have a fatal disease and the only cure is more people talking about WHAT MANNER OF MAN ⬇️⬇️⬇️

[mercy-is-alive]

I love listening to Jack and Van Helsing interact. Van Helsing being upset that Jack couldn't guess that vampires exist based on his ridiculously cryptic hints and behaviour is peak comedy

[scorpiotaurus30]

False Face

A Crime Thriller by Ariana Hunter In the quiet of her lab, forensic sculptor Olivia Arkin gives faces back to the dead, rebuilding identities from shattered skulls. But when her reconstructions begin turning up no matches in any database, Olivia realizes something is wrong. The victims aren’t just lost… they’re being erased. Evidence is missing, files are altered, and the clues point not to the outside world but to someone within her forensic unit. As Olivia digs deeper, she uncovers a chilling possibility: someone feeds her false data to turn real victims into ghosts—someone who knows how to exploit the system and use her as the perfect cover. Now the question isn't just who the victims were.

It's who wants them forgotten…

And why Olivia might be next.

[oldfashionedie]

Books I read in 2025: Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu

You are afraid to die?' Yes, everyone is.' But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together. Girls are caterpillars when they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structures.

[too-pretty-for-this-mess]

Gareth: I swear to God, all of you are clinically insane.

Killian: That’s a strong accusation coming from you.

Nikolai: Yeah, Mr. ‘I’ll burn this city to the ground if someone looks at Kayden for too long’.

[dickensdaily]

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...'

Have you ever wanted to read A Tale of Two Cities in the same way as its original readers? Dickens Daily allows you to do just that by sending instalments right to your inbox at the same rate as the original serialisation!

What is A Tale of Two Cities about?

Tracing the private lives of a group of people caught up in the cataclysm of the French Revolution and the Terror, A Tale of Two Cities interweaves thrilling historical drama with heartbreaking personal tragedy. It vividly depicts a revolutionary Paris running red with blood, and a London where the poor starve. In the midst of the chaos two men - an exiled French aristocrat and a dissolute English lawyer - are both redeemed and condemned by their love for the same woman, as the shadow of La Guillotine draws closer...

How does this serialisation work?

The novel was originally serialised in the weekly periodical All the Year Round from 30th April to 26th November 1859, so these are the dates we will follow in 2025. New chapters will be sent out on Wednesdays, as well as on Sundays for weeks where there is a second chapter. (Week one - and only week one - has three chapters and so will also have a Friday instalment.)

All chapters will be sent directly to your inbox for you to read straight away or savour in your own time. Discussions can also be had here on tumblr at the Dickens Daily tag.

Join us at the link below!

[tormentadepensamientos]