i vote that next year instead of reading Dracula we do a Jeeves & Wooster Book Club. those two never got the rabid tumblr shipping fandom they deserved (disqualified for the sheer technicality of being published a century too soon). we must correct this injustice
The Scooby gang are friends. The Scooby gang are BEST FRIENDS. THEY ARE BEST FRIENDS AND THEY LOVE EACH OTHER SO MUCH. THEY TRAVEL AROUND SOLVING MYSTERIES FOR AS LONG AS THEY CAN BECAUSE THEY HAVE A PASSION FOR IT AND BECAUSE IT MEANS THEY GET TO SPEND TIME TOGETHER WITH EACH OTHER. THEY ARE BEST FRIENDS.
They don’t hate each other. Maybe they get annoyed and cause they’re together all the time it might get a bit much sometimes but at the end of the day, they really deeply care about each other. They live out of a van most of the time and are on the road constantly out of CHOICE. TOGETHER. for crying out loud.
They are four teenagers and a Great Dane. They’re a family.
As much as I adore conlangs, I really like how the Imperial Radch books handle language. The book is entirely in English but you're constantly aware that you're reading a "translation," both of the Radchaai language Breq speaks as default, and also the various other languages she encounters. We don't hear the words but we hear her fretting about terms of address (the beloathed gendering on Nilt) and concepts that do or don't translate (Awn switching out of Radchaai when she needs a language where "citizen," "civilized," and "Radchaai person" aren't all the same word) and noting people's registers and accents. The snatches of lyrics we hear don't scan or rhyme--even, and this is what sells it to me, the real-world songs with English lyrics, which get the same "literal translation" style as everything else--because we aren't hearing the actual words, we're hearing Breq's understanding of what they mean. I think it's a cool way to acknowledge linguistic complexity and some of the difficulties of multilingual/multicultural communication, which of course becomes a larger theme when we get to the plot with the Presgar Translators.
(edit: if you wanted to know my personal interpretation... watch the can in bones' hand. and the colors mean things loll. i think i'll make an explanation tomorrow just for fun)