#you have to put up with don's disasterous love life for a while but even that is *worth it* imho

[theragamuffininitiative]

So... are you trying to tell me I should put Numb3rs on my To Watch list? :)

-Rain

...

Me coming over to your house with my Numb3rs dvds:

You resisting:

The Eppes Family and Co. winning you over:

(I know that flipped povs there just go with it ok) And then we say:

And watch my dorky math friends and their fbi besties solve crimes in increasingly ludicrous plots, where the fake draw is math... (and lots of fun guest stars!)

and the real draw is the familial relationships between the characters...

....

... The answer is yes.

Absolutely, yes.

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

Hello! How are you? I was just wondering if you have an book recs? I want to try read more next year :)

YES. YES I DO FRIEND. I HAVE MANY BOOK RECS THANK YOU FOR ASKING.

I was literally just talking to someone the other day about how much I love giving book recommendations because I just love the idea of getting to show people the books that I have enjoyed.

Now, you didn’t specify, and I could ask, or just take a guess at what genre you’re thinking about, but WHERE WOULD THE FUCKING FUN BE IN THAT.

For the Fiction genre:

Maria Lu’s Legend series is really enjoyable. It’s about a sort of pseudo-fantasy Roman society with magic and intrigue and spies and warriors and a pretty great twist on the tired old love-triangle trope.

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo is the fantasy Heist novel you never knew you needed. It’s got criminals and bad boys and best friends, old gods and the fall of empires, magic and mystery, betrayal, all sorts of good stuff.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin is my favorite series of all time by my favorite author of all time. It’s a story where there is no good guys, only the heroism and monstrousness of deeply complex human beings who are struggling to survive in a world they themselves have created and destroyed. It’s about the evils of imperialsim, bigotry, and abuse. It’s about the extraordinary way humanity has of surviving a thousand apocalypses throughout our existance. It’s about a mother and her children and her past and her future. It’s about a traumatized girl with the world at her fingertips. It’s about rage and love and beauty and death and failure and survival.

The Diviners by Libba Bray is a Historic Fiction Mystery novel with queer kids, ghosts, murderers, cults, occultism, girls’ friendships, vice and virtue and coming of age in the era of Prohibition. It tells stories of kids getting caught up in more than they can handle and doing what little they can to protect each other, no matter what the world has to say about their worth or their place in it.

Now, if you’re in the mood for Non-fiction, I’m still here for you friend! Bear in mind, that when I recommend non-fiction books and think pieces, it’s not because I agree with everything put forward by them or think they’re right about what they’re talking on, but because I think that the persepctive from which they are discussing a topic is fascinating, or because I think that there is a great starting point for a fascinating debate or conversation within their suggestions.

Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber is a fascinating perspective on the development of economic systems over the years. It talks about how the notion of debt as an economic force is both incredibly new and hilariously old. It demonstrates the different ways that debt appears throughout history, how the advent of paper currency and credit changed the entire economic layout despite the idea of one person owing something to another being a formative part of societal cohesion for millenia.

Sexual Features, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings by Maria Rodriguez is a excellent book that touches on not just the history and cultural development of queerness within the context of Latinx culture, but also the part that disidentification plays in any queer person’s social development, let alone in the development of QPOC.

Travesti: Sex and Gender among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes by Don Kulick is an incredibly challenging opportunity to expose yourself to the critical truth that while queerness as a broader concept has the potential to unite people across infinite cultures and contexts, the reality is that every society has its own queer culture, its own history, it’s own definitions, its own reactions, its own needs. Travesti is the documentation of many lifetimes of stories, tradtitions, and experiences of a group of transgender women in Brazil whose lives are a complicated blend of issues from their gender, to their sexuality, to their profession, to their local communities, to the imperialism of the west over their homelands, to their own personal desires. Reading Travesti gave me the chance to see both the similarities and the differences in the way I grew up understanding my and my family’s queerness as opposed to how these women experience their gender and sexuality. It was a beautiful exploration of the ways in which many of us US queers take our perspective on these issues for granted, and the infinite diversity which we so often forget or intentionally hide from view.

And lastly, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection by Anna Tsing is the first book I read on the subject of the man-made nature of environmental disaster. It talks about how blatantly racist, classist, and imperialist the natural disasters of the modern century really have been, from towns primarily made up of POC being the homes of environmentally disasterous resource production, to the way that climate change so often affects the impoverished and colonized more devastatingly than it affects the imperial west. If I’m recalling correctly, it even goes into some discussion of the way in which capitalism, classism, and colonization have turned the fires that used to burn across my home state as a natural part of the life cycle of the region have now grown out of control as a direct result of the man made abuses that the powerful have made against the land and the less powerful people who live on it.

When I opened this ask, I giggled for so long that Hubby looked over and said “oh no, I wonder if they realize what they’ve just created” and I have to say, this question has tickled me pink and I am thrilled to have the chance to refer ya’ll to some of the most interesting reads I’ve had in the last five years or so. Please let me know if you end up liking any of these, as I always have more books like them to recommend, and also let me know if you have any specific kinds of books you want me to recommend to you as well. There are so many genres I didn’t get the chance to mention here!