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Bookclub

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Comments

  • "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    Unrelated, but, do you guys have any opinion on what is the good entry point to fantasy of this whole overthought muh-majeek-systumz trend that's usually considered to have been founded by Brandon Sanderson? 'Cause I figure that if I don't make an effort to get to know it first-hand, I'm gonna quickly lose any right to complain.

    So far, I've read two thirds of the Powder Mage Trilogy, which was written by one of his proteges, and - frankly, it's good adventure writing, but not much more to me. I'd take it for a train ride, but hardly call it a classic. Worldbuilding is average, characters are rather generic and their motivations relatively bland, and even magic seems to be based on a single good concept liberally mixed with the desire to provide characters with a bunch of cool powers.

    I'm probably sounding harsh, but in truth I actually enjoyed this series, the good parts are just not relevant to the topic I wanted to bring up.

    Like, I am of that opinion that applying hard sci-fi mentality to fantasy means doing it wrong. Go too far that road and it becomes some sort of speculative sci-fi, like Flatland. I feel like nerds are ruining fantasy by applying their autistic ways, honed by years of D&D and MMORPGs, to something that is best approached differently.

    Now, now, guys, put down those pitchforks, that is merely my impression. My personal taste in fantasy seems to be at odds with a major trend within the genre. I think I can see the appeal of it, but, it just conflicts so much with my notion of what fantasy is. (Perhaps I'm as autistic as the nerds, but focus on different issues.)

    And now I feel like I defeated my own argument, perhaps for the better. Anyways, I am curious about sampling thys style of fantasy for myself and seeing on the basis of its best how much will it influence my concerns.

    Having said that, there's one more issue I want to raise.

    Like, in recent years there seems to have arisen a counter-trend to this one, which appears to be spearheaded by "ethnic" writers. I don't really follow global fantasy literature too closely, but there's been a bunch of not really WASPy names growing to prominence, and some of them openly challenged Sanderson's precepts. And, well, I'll put it this way: since they're not white, or not male, or not straight etc. etc., they have the edge in the debate. They can present their style as not just an aesthetic choice, but also one stemming from some sort of minority viewpoint. This seems to be in the air even though they don't bludgeon anyone with it. (I know of no cases of Sanderson's style accused of being too western or something, fortunately.) So, this seems to be the direction fantasy fiction will follow for a while.
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    do you guys have any opinion on what is the good entry point to fantasy of this whole overthought muh-majeek-systumz

    I only read YA, mom books and occassionally sci-fi, so I'm of no help here.
    but hardly call it a classic

    Oh yeah this reminds me, at one point I thought Little Fires Everywhere could be the next American Classic, but in this same thought I also realized it felt like I was reading something that had been processed through an algorithm to create the Great American Novel. Having read more, I'm erring very close to the latter.
    I feel like nerds are ruining fantasy by applying their autistic ways, honed by years of D&D and MMORPGs

    Well, probably. I mean people who read high fantasy complain heavily when magic systems are basic so the audience gets what it wants deserves.
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    I finished Little Fires Everywhere. It occurs to me that the book is written very heavily in sequence, as if primed to be adapted into a script (or maybe it was one and all that changed was the prose). I heavily admire the author's ability to write in this way, but I think it limited the story's depth at times.

    At a lot of points, I was merely told what to feel, rather than allowed to think for myself. At one point, exactly one I think, there was an actual question in the prose, and it was oddly jarring.

    This book operates in like, reality, but hyper-reality, so feelings trump logic and such. However, there were points where this failed to work. The whole ending is very quick, and everybody's emotions kind of are wrapped up very conveniently except for Izzy's. Pearl is practically nonchalant as her whole life changes forever, with Mrs. Richardson seemingly more concerned about the facts of Pearl's conception than she is.

    In fact, the last part, throughout the ending, feels very gluggly. The book so far was cynical and insane, featuring inept people whose actions speak volumes and tip the balance of life the wrong way. However, in the ending, everything seems to be in a dream state.

    Mia, who is a surrogate-child-stealing tragic figure stuck in a permanent kidnapping, is presented as an Oprah like Mary Poppins who can see into people's souls, a feature not actually even present in her art at any point before this. Even so, her Goop-era Gywneth Paltrow abilities achieve nothing.

    Then we come to Izzy, who quickly graduates from being a bit angry and slight instances of assault to a long, drawn out premeditated arson. By the end of the book, when Izzy has run away from home, her mother has forgiven her, and believes this is what Freedom looks like. I'd have assumed she'd be more afraid of what her fear created in her daughter, rather than looking at her destroyed home with what is essentially awe.

    Also, it's hilarious that the subplot; that Bebe's baby is taken in by the McCollough family after she abandons it at a fire station, but now she wants it back, is so irrelevant that it barely factors into talking about the book.

    Anyways, the big notes.



    Quite the wacky plot, this book.
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    I watched Little Fires Everywhere, the show. I'm pretty sure the only reason this exists is so if you didn't believe the book was Art, you definitely would when you compared it to the (frankly terrible) show.

    Also, I feel like that super angry MS Paint meme guy just thinking about the casting of the teenagers.

    Unlike other reviewers, who apparently cannot stand the existence of Kerry-Washington-as-Mia. I mean, I don't think this Mia is the one from the book at all, so I think that's colored my perception of her. I don't see her as a bad actress, I see her as a phony photocopy of a faulty fax of the character from the book.
  • edited 2020-05-22 15:43:51
    "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
  • edited 2020-05-26 11:29:24
    There is love everywhere, I already know
    I am currently reading One of Us is Next, the sequel to YA megahit of a few years ago, One of Us is Lying.

    I've just finished up the first half, or "Part One". I really dislike books that think distinctions like this matter when they're within the same binding and there's no real distinction between the parts aside from plot progression. It's dumb.

    It did at least remind me not to scarf it all down in one sitting.

    This book isn't really a "sequel", because it's set in the same universe but is about a whole other set of characters. Since the day I saw that this book would be coming out, I had a feeling that it was because the author was trying to recapture her glory days of times past.

    Her last novel, Two Can Keep a Secret, quite literally stole it's whole design aesthetic (and naming convention) from her first. As far as I can tell, it was nowhere near as successful, and even I didn't care enough to read it.

    By releasing a sequel, she and her publisher can force everybody who read the first book to be mildly interested, and then convert a lot of that into sales.

    Anyways, this book's premise is much less stable than the first's, and the latest twist genuinely involves amnesia, which is just sad.

    I think, after this, I'll probably institute a policy where I only read books from before 2015 so I can skip the inevitable part where straight white men are quite explicitly blamed for all of society's ills. In this book, it was to a seventeen year old's face, whilst he'd done nothing wrong at all. Frankly, it was (very light) racism right to his face, but whatever. It's YA, after all.

    Funnily enough, the retort came from a non-white character who had no personality and existed entirely just to get this dig in and then immediately disappear.

    I don't think YA authors actually care about all of this hullabaloo as much as they claim, and (clearly) neither do readers. I certainly don't want it in YA books at all, so that counts as caring in a way.

    Otherwise, there's no way they would be getting away with complaining about gender stereotypes when the character complaining is is constantly reminding us that the only straight white male protagonist is worth caring for because he "might be hot someday". Especially in a book where "worthy male" seems to be code for "should have really really big muscles".

    I'm not complaining about the concept, I mean, I certainly don't think I'd want to read much about the protagonists being in love with guys who aren't hot*. The book, however, is.

    *Wow there are a lot of potholes I could've stepped into with this sentence, this one is the one I'm most comfortable with.

    And another thing; there's actually a lot of venom directed at jocks and other sportsball types in this book. I know nerdy kids are the sorts who tend to read, but this book is about how the protagonists are mistreated and get a lot of flack when their secrets are exposed, and so people should be more understanding. So it's weird that they aren't.

    Or, maybe, this book is genuinely about how constant human hypocrisy will never end and therefore showing us by how it too is extremely hypocritical!

    Prolly not.

    I think, for a book that kept me quite enthralled, I should have been more positive. Anyways, it's YA, so of course I quite like it even with the plodding plot and absolutely nonsensical inclusion of the main characters from the first book, who all stand out like sore thumbs whenever they show up.

    To reiterate; it's a pretty fun book.
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    O-kay, I've finished One of Us is Next.

    When I was younger, I was always amazed when people could figure out the various twists in a book. In this book, I figured out the whole plot about 300/375 pages in. Of course, I didn't figure out the final twist, which was irrelevant, extremely out of left field and stupid.

    But, having figured it out, I realized exactly why the rest of the book had basically been characters going "I could find something out now but I'm going to wait till the chapter is over instead". Plus why there was amnesia. It needed to be padded out.

    I think the book was engaging to an extent, but it's not worth much.
  • A book club is a club shaped like a dictionary
  • edited 2020-05-29 10:26:12
    "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    A newspaper club is a Millwall brick.

    In other news, due to corona-related (but not exactly caused) circumstances I have barely read a paper book since, like, months. I was beginning to get concerned, but then I realized I spent that time (among other things) reading books on my computer. I read Lest Darkness Fall, which is rather naive by modern standards, but charming and influential ime travel story, and Imagined Communities, which is a book on the beginnings and development of nationalism. The latter is particularly an interesting read. Read the former if you have a mind for the classics of the genre, and in particular if you also have The Man Who Came Early by P. Anderson at hand. Anderson's like a Socratic gadfly of old-timey SF, poking holes in bloated egos of hard SF writers of his time.
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    *walk in on previous page* hoooooooly shbeep i missed something

    Anyway, I have a stack of paper books next to me every day but I keep on not getting around to reading any of them because I keep on having stuff to do on my computer that's more urgent and/or easily accessible as opposed to "I have to commit to this larger task".

    And I just end up kicking myself.
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    Another big reason I want to focus on reading older books is that at some point everybody agreed that it was 100% cool to just have everybody swear in their books. Even in YA of all things; One of Us is Next contains at least 10 instances of the F word. I don't think it adds much, and it might actually detract from the richness of storytelling.

    Even the sorts of names you can call somebody using explicit language don't convey what other similar words could.

    So, thanks Superbad. You blazed the way, which ended up being paved over for use by middling YA authors.
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    In 1786, Goethe set out on a journey to Italy to fulfil a personal and artistic quest and to find relief from his responsibilities and the agonies of unrequited love [...] this is also a moving account of the psychological crisis from which Goethe emerged newly inspired to write the great works of his mature years

    When you write sad emo break-up diaries but you're Johann Wolfgang von Goethe so 300 years later some copywriter has to make you look good.
  • "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    So, I've finished reading Albion's Seed by D. H. Fisher and this is what I learned:

    4ab9iv.jpg
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    bumping this thread to float it to the top
  • "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    You know guys, I just realized UFOs are a cosmic horror story. As in, the UFOs as seen by ufologists and conspiracy theorists, not so much by military investigations, although those are considered a part of the mythos by the former two.

    You are forced to realize that there are forces out there beyond your comprehension, to which you or all of humankind are nothing in comparison, and which you can at best hope they are well-intentioned or can be reasoned with because that at least obscures the truth enough that you can hope for a glimmer of meaning in it.

    Like, The X-Files are a fun conspiracy monster-of-the-week show until the myth arc kicks in, where it turns out you can't help, it's all gonna end, and the bad guys are the closest to actual good guys since there is a slim chance their scheming might just preserve some of humanity.

    I think I might've even read it somewhere that there already were attempts to link Lovecraft's writing to the modern UFO mythos. Well, replace squids with grays, or even don't since Mi-Go are already there, and you're good to go, so there's some merit to this hypothesis.

    What do you think? Does it make sense? I'm curious.

    Now we can talk freely.
  • "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    Quote
    GlennMagusHarvey
    And, jumping back to me actually being me, I personally don't have much to add to this topic. I guess you might have a point, though I think this might be generalizable as just projecting "fear of the unknown" onto aliens in general. Which is how a lot of other horror stuff works anyway.

    Quote
    Stormtroper
    It's important that in a cosmic horror work there's an element of humanity/Earth/life not mattering in the grand scheme of things, which is contradicted by things like alien abductions or conquest. Or rather, that's what I keep hearing from the million arguments about cosmic horror being done wrong everywhere, I've never read an actual cosmic horror work.
    Which brings me to something I had been thinking about for a while after watching a video that touches on it tangentially: you often hear about how works with body horror, tentacled fish monsters, unpronounceable names etc. etc. are doing Lovecraftian horror wrong, but it strikes me as undue to expect its narrative to also follow Lovecraftian horror, like there's something wrong with drawing inspiration from the aesthetics and nothing more. It's as expecting any work with Frankenstein-esque monsters to be about playing God.
  • "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    For the record, what I had in mind were UFO stories as depicted in The X-Files, or "real abduction" films like Fire in the Sky. (Not really books though, but I hope you guys'll let that slide.) There definitely are abduction tales which do not depict the event as traumatic; one case I'm thinking of at the moment involves a local farmer who could've just as well been accosted by ethnography students on field work, or any other kind of silly-ass city folks. But the stories that ended up on TV usually play out the event as horrifying even when the aliens are trying to be polite.

    So, that might be the matter of me selecting the sources to suit the thesis. In this case, let's assume there is a minor genre of alien abduction horror and that's what I speak of. (Or something like that, I guess? lol idunno)
    It's important that in a cosmic horror work there's an element of humanity/Earth/life not mattering in the grand scheme of things, which is contradicted by things like alien abductions or conquest. Or rather, that's what I keep hearing from the million arguments about cosmic horror being done wrong everywhere, I've never read an actual cosmic horror work.

    So, yeah, it seems to me that even when the horror seems to be about bad men doing bad things to you that make you feel sad, in the end, it's about not mattering to them. Like, even if Earth or life does matter overall, it doesn't in comparison to the aliens. Compare Cthulhu. He might not matter anymore than we do in the grand scheme, but in the, shall we say, slightly less grand he will still wake up and make us go crazy. The UFO folks might be subject to the same laws of biology, but have such a massive head-start to us, that it's, like, all the same.

    Also, it's been pointed out on the topic of Lovecraftiana that as much as Earth was supposed to be a not-mattering-at-all random piece of rock, it seems to draw quite a lot of extradimensional entities. (Wild Mass Guess: it's the Elder Things' fault, they drew the attention.)
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    A few months ago I got a whole bunch of books about Lancashire, the county in England, because as it usually goes I arbitrarily decided this is one of my favorite places in the world.

    One such book is a collection of folk tales (well, one of many such collections) and I started reading it recently since it takes about 15 minutes to get through each of the (longer) stories.

    It turns out Lancelot from King Arthur's Round Table was the inspiration behind the name (Lancelot's Shire=Lancashire) so there are a bunch of stories about him.

    Buuuut there's also one about how some tween boys at a boarding school accidentally summoned the devil (for some reason, summoning the devil in this stories is always kind of vaguely easy) and their headmaster had to send him back to hell by making him count all the letters in the bible and the devil becomes intensely dyslexic when he looks at bibles I guess, so it works.

    In one Lancelot-centric story (the one that's not about his mom not noticing that a water faery spirited him away at 1 month old for 18+ years entirely because she was depressed about his father's death), Lancelot has to fight the saxon Sir Tarquin, who has been kidnapping all the lower knights of the round table and filling his dungeons with them.

    And also Sir Tarquin eats babies for breakfast (this is not a joke) just so you know he's really evil.

    Anyways, at one point during their fight, Sir Tarquin punches Lancelot's sword, instantly shattering it, which seems very anime.

    Also apparently coastal/farmland English dragons are actually not normal at all.

    They're parasitic creatures that can be passed down the male bloodline and they just
    infrequently turn one member of the family into a murderous worm thing.

    "Not normal" when compared to Welsh dragons I guess, which are "normal" dragons.
  • "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    for some reason, summoning the devil in this stories is always kind of vaguely easy
    Some people would have you believe all you need to do is play some D&D.
    and their headmaster had to send him back to hell by making him count all the letters in the bible and the devil becomes intensely dyslexic when he looks at bibles I guess, so it works.
    Tricking the devil is a classic. There's a poem about a guy who got out of the deal by having the devil spend some time with his wife.
    Anyways, at one point during their fight, Sir Tarquin punches Lancelot's sword, instantly shattering it, which seems very anime.
    Our old pal Beholderess once spoke about her experience of reading Orlando Furioso: I'll spare you half-remembered details, but what I got out of it is that apparently a classic chivalric romance runs on shonen logic.
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    I think Indian mythos works the same way, except every other battle scene ends with flowers raining from the sky from an undetermined source.
  • edited 2023-05-14 16:28:05
    There is love everywhere, I already know
    I've been rereading the first book in the Thousandth Floor series, and I'm surprised at how much I still like it. There are a lot of plot-points I just outright don't even remember. In fact, I remember disliking Mariel in later books because she seemed overly obsessed with a girl she'd only casually dated, but it turns out her thing with Eris was much more serious than I first expected.

    Relatedly, reading Katherine McGee's current series, American Royals, it's odd to see an author become more cautious about using teen drinking and drug use the further along she is in her career. Rylin starts out as a full-on "I'm good with casual drug use" type, though she does soon realize the error of her ways, and though Leda has a terrible relationship with future-drugs, the way she thinks of them is also quite casual and not very scare-them-straight.

    In American Royals, nobody uses drugs at all, except the one time Daphne drugged somebody else and caused them to fall into a coma, which isn't very "pro-casual drug use". Similarly, the characters don't drink as excessively as the Thousandth Floor cast do.

    Apparently, the last time I read this series was almost 7 years ago now.
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    I learned about the BookWyrm platform from some folks on Mastodon.

    https://joinbookwyrm.com

    It's part of the "Fediverse" -- it uses ActivityPub to hook into the larger ecosystem of federated platforms like Mastodon, Misskey, etc. -- but it's basically an open-source federated version of a social book-listing site, akin to GoodReads I think.

    I've never used GoodReads before, but I went and made an account on a BookWyrm instance.

    https://bookrastinating.com/user/ReedLindwurm

    Bookrastinating isn't the flagship instance, but I tend to prefer being on somewhat smaller instances anyway as far as fediverse accounts go. It doesn't really make a difference anyway though.

    Anyhow, it does also have quite good coverage of books. You may notice that on my to-read list I have a mixture of fiction (including light novels), nonfiction (including a textbook), and even a tabletop RPG sourcebook. I think it's able to draw from multiple databases.

    I made a goal to read 6 books this year. It's mid-May and...yeah, I haven't finished anything yet lol.
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    I've read a lot this year, mostly because we have a lot of downtime at work and I prefer it to staring at my phone.

    I'm stuck between wanting to join this site because I find Goodreads current platform super annoying (though they did fix the way they number books) but this looks like the sort of place that would be even more full of left-leaning types than normal book sites. I also find the "anti-corporate" stance off-putting.

    As expected of a site built by majority male internet autists, the YA database is very poorly filled out.

    Also I prefer just keeping my own lists of whatever nowadays rather than signing up tow websites.

    I'm glad to see people on the internet are still trying their darndest to build new sites rather than just permanently coalesce around the most popular sites.
  • edited 2023-05-15 21:13:16
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    That "YA database" looks more like "these are probably the only books that users on this particular instance bothered to look up". There are others on other instances -- see https://bookwyrm.social/author/61391/s/katharine-mcgee for example for the same author -- which this site can pull from. And even if no instance has it yet, users can draw from Inventaire and Open Library, or even manually add books. It's not really the MAL of books as much as it is just a tool for people to build their own lists.

    As for being "anti-corporate", the "fediverse" isn't actually against corporations per se, but rather, the idea of a federated network (of platforms and sites that can all intercommunicate) is a reaction to major companies with centralized control of social media platforms and such -- both because they can do stupid things (e.g. Twitter) and for other reasons such as them being closed-source. Mastodon (and to a lesser degree of similarity, Misskey/Calckey) being similar to Twitter is the most obvious example and probably the most famous fediverse thing at this point, but there are others -- BookWyrm can be seen as "open-source Goodreads", and there's also PeerTube, Friendica, Matrix, and others (as alternatives to YouTube, Facebook, Discord, etc., respectively).

    Sidenote: WordPress now supports the ActivityPub communication protocol, which means it can communicate with, say, Mastodon. Also, Tumblr expressed interest in supporting ActivityPub but it's not yet a thing.

    (Another sidenote: I did mention Matrix, but it doesn't work with ActivityPub, and isn't really part of the "fediverse"; it's just its own decentralized communication network. Also technically Matrix is the protocol name, not the platform name, but I think it's more specialized so it's referred to by its protocol rather than by any particular platform.)
  • edited 2023-07-08 15:19:27
    There is love everywhere, I already know
    I feel like at least once a week, I mention the Rainbow Magic book series by "Daisy Meadows" (ie four entire different women, including a British-Indian lady). First it was just because toy company extrordinaire Spin Master was releasing a new TV show based on the Unicorn Academy book series, which is literally just Rainbow Magic but with the core concept of fairies replaced with Unicorns.

    The stories are also wildly different, but basically these are factory-written children's books that tell mostly standalone stories that are set in the same universe, because it doesn't have to matter what order they're read in.

    Rainbow Magic at this point should have like 1,000 separate books, each based on a unique fairy (after a while it got really silly, like "Pottery Fairy", the "Trampolining Fairy" and the "Star Spotter" fairy, who is literally just a paparazzi I'm assuming). If you like a thing, and it's relatively PG, there's 100% a Rainbow Magic fairy for it.

    Rainbow Magic isn't even over! It is literally a 20 year old book series that is currently ongoing. The latest book, Kimi the Bubble Tea Fairy (no jokes), came out two days ago. There was even a Coronation tie-in book (Rainbow Magic is British).

    Honestly, Rainbow Magic is the book series of 2023.

    Meanwhile, Unicorn Academy is more about the unique horses and their Riders I guess, but the books are basically the same thing. Spin Master literally stripped the series of everything and turned it into yet another CGI Dreamworks cartoon a la the latest incarnation of Spirit but with more magic stuff.

    Anyways, I was at my local bookstore a few weeks ago when I discovered Magic Ballerina, which appears to be the exact same book-packaging thing as Rainbow Magic, except at least this time the series is divided into 1 protagonist every 6 books. I also like the idea better honestly, because I actually like ballet and they seem vaguely educational (if learning about Swan Lake counts as education).

    This week, I discovered two more insane series. For example; the American classic Little Women completely transformed into some sort of American Girl knockoff, and then a series based on the Breyer Horses toy line where, in an alternate universe, the horses have butterfly wings and are the size of a... well, mini-horse toy.

    Then there's the Sticker Dolly Stories book series, which is based on the Sticker Dolly Dressing series of activity books, which were kind of my thing for a few months a few years ago (they have very good historical ones). I really can't wait to read these, especially considering how kooky the developmental backstory is (how does a series of sticker books become a series of real books?

    I really like how Sticker Dolly Stories has at least one male protagonist once in a while, none of these other series do. Rainbow Magic has like, two whole male fairies total and one is the literal Current King of England.

    Last but not least, my absolute favorite series of these sort of books, the Fashion Fairy Princess line, which was sadly extremely unpopular and extremely poorly distributed (so I mean, of course it's my favorite). I loved the artstyle, but I can't say I have any hope to read one anytime soon. That isn't to say I won't try really hard to get a few eventually.

    Update: It turns out "Daisy Meadows" has been writing the Unicorn Magic book series for a while now. I hope "she" and Spin Master get into a massive legal fight over this.
  • "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    So, like, yeah, we actually have this thread and I already posted links to free book repositories in here, so for the posterity I'm reposting the link from Updates: https://doabooks.org/
  • edited 2023-07-09 00:41:13
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    I accidentally read more than half of the first volume of Altina the Sword Princess in a day.
  • edited 2023-07-23 14:04:11
    There is love everywhere, I already know
    Recently read When Marnie Was There. Short, sweet, powerful and thematic. No wonder it was made into a Ghibli movie.

    Currently slogging through American Royals III. I need to stop being such a battered spouse with YA. It's preachy, overly long and extremely obvious. I just want to finish this and the fourth and never read YA ever again.

    (Until the next time, of course).

    Speaking of, conservatives are currently on a bender about the gay "adult content" in "children's books" (ie, YA), specifically, certain scenes from Red, White and Royal Blue.

    If it's something like Gender Queer or The GayBCs, they're generally right, but the latest in buzzworthy unrealistic gay YA fiction is basically par the course for what passes as "PG13 books" these days. Example from American Royals III.

    Whilst I think none of this should be in PG13 books, the fact that they probably didn't look hard enough to realize this is endemic to YA in general rather than an insidious plot to turn straight male YA readers (pffffffffffffffff) gay is annoying me.
  • Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    And now I've read the first two volumes of Altina the Sword Princess.

    On one hand, yay, I actually read books.

    On the other hand, I'm not really getting certain other books read that I've meant to read.
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    Reading for fun is a better way to spend your time than not reading at all...?
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