Of Literary Nature

Daisy Chaining; Or, Connecting the TBR!

Does anybody besides me like to find Connections between Seemingly/Largely Unrelated Books and use those connections to plot a route through the old TBR?? I don't know about you, but I have a LOT of books I want to read, and sometimes I get Whelmed™ by my choices. So I'll either pick a small stack and make that a particular month's micro-TBR (good if I have specific Goals!), OR I'll start with something I really want to read, and I'll daisy chain from there.

For example: I'd been waiting for TRANSLATION STATE to release in paperback since the hardback was announced (because Translators, my beloveds). So I annihilated that in a couple days (it was very good, all right??), and then I had to figure out where to go next despite cruising on the Translators High.

Because the Translators' fucked up body horror (which I mean mostly affectionately, but I'm side eyeing the matching pretty hard) was at times....goopy...I thought a book about a shapeshifter whose default form is an amorphous lump would be good next, which got me to SOMEONE YOU CAN BUILD A NEST IN (which I also enjoyed!! shout-out to @asexualbookbird for gifting it to meee!!).

Since NEST is Monsters in a Fantasy Forest with a side of Politics and Power, my next read is THE BUTCHER OF THE FOREST (because it's also...wait for it...Monsters in a Fantasy Forest with a side of Politics and Power). And after that, I'll come OUT of the forest with AT THE EDGE OF THE WOODS, which promises to be weird and vaguely monstrous but with a literary bent (I put it on one of my writing TBR lists, and my general "read this by the end of 2024" list).

So, yeah! That's how you daisy chain to get from SF to fantasy/horror to fantasy to weird Lit Fic in the span of four (4) books, while maintaining something like a continuity. By the end of the year, my Books Read shelf looks a little chaotic, but there generally really is a rhyme AND a reason about it!

(Please click on the photo for better image quality! I edited it weirdly compared to usual and it looks good on my screen but ah. Less So, in tungledlandia.,.,)

When I was younger and more abled, I was so fucking on board with the fantasy genre’s subversion of traditional femininity. We weren’t just fainting maidens locked up in towers; we could do anything men could do, be as strong or as physical or as violent. I got into western martial arts and learned to fight with a rapier, fell in love with the longsword.

But since I’ve gotten too disabled to fight anymore, I… find myself coming back to that maiden in a tower. It’s that funny thing, where subverting femininity is powerful for the people who have always been forced into it… but for the people who have always been excluded, the powerful thing can be embracing it.

As I’m disabled, as I say to groups of friends, “I can’t walk that far,” as I’m in too much pain to keep partying, I find myself worrying: I’m boring, too quiet, too stationary, irrelevant. The message sent to the disabled is: You’re out of the narrative, you’re secondary, you’re a burden.

The remarkable thing about the maiden in her tower is not her immobility; it’s common for disabled people to be abandoned, set adrift, waiting at bus stops or watching out the windows, forgotten in institutions or stranded in our houses. The remarkable thing is that she’s like a beacon, turning her tower into a lighthouse; people want to come to her, she’s important, she inspires through her appearance and words and craftwork.  In medieval romances she gives gifts, write letters, sends messengers, and summons lovers; she plays chess, commissions ballads, composes music, commands knights. She is her household’s moral centre in a castle under siege. She is a castle unto herself, and the integrity of her body matters.

That can be so revolutionary to those of us stuck in our towers who fall prey to thinking: Nobody would want to visit; nobody would want to listen; nobody would want to stay.

#it’s so so important to remember that representation is not one-size-fits-all#what is empowering to one person might be exhausting and oppressive to someone else#some people need stories about having the strength to save themselves#some people need stories about being considered worthy of being saved#some people need inspiration for their independence while others need validation that they don’t have to be able to do everything themselves#before you lash out against something PLEASE stop to consider:#is this inadequate and/or damaging representation?#or is it just something I don’t personally relate to? [X]

It’s been half a decade and I still haven’t found an articulation of the complexity of “representation” as concisely and precisely mindblowing as @hungrylikethewolfie’s here.

JOMP BPC || May 10 || Best Redemptive Arc: Moist von Lipwig from Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

The endpapers are magnificent 🔥

Day 3: JOMPBPC: Currently Reading

Custom Book Vase // Customs by Meena

Crochet Bookmarks // Claire Zhang

grabs your hand. you've had enough plot and exposition and character development lately im taking you to the beach episode

BEHIND THE SCENES!

These are a couple of paragraphs from the first two pages of WHEN THE ANGELS LEFT THE OLD COUNTRY. I highlighted Jewish vocabulary in GREEN and I highlighted in YELLOW the way I sneakily included explanations for those words. If you’re already familiar with the terms, you’d be reading these explanations as world-building: how is this author, in this book, defining sheydim? What do demons do at Yeshiva? But if you’re not familiar with the words, you’re learning on another level too: a sheyd is a fairy. A yeshiva is some kind of school.

We did a lot of these sneaky definitions during my editing process so that we could maintain a frequent use of Yiddish and Hebrew words while neither over-explaining nor leaving non-Jewish readers out in the cold

A few weeks ago a 15-year-old called me “Grandma” for being able to remember when the first Twilight film came out, and I still haven’t mentally or emotionally processed this

tag the age u were when twilight came out (2008) i was ten

I would give ANYTHING for a short story of whatever off-screen ART backstory led to Iris recognizing Murderbot as "Peri's Secunit." Did the whole crew know or just Iris? Did they have to pry the story out of it or did it immediately brag to them that it made a friend? What was Iris's thought process like when she realized that, despite the astronomical improbability, the secunit that had appeared out of nowhere to rescue them was, in fact, /Peri's/ secunit

Breathe: Journeys to Healthy Binding is out in the world and there are so many people I'd like to thank. First, of course, my co-author Sarah Peitzmeier who emailed me out of the blue back in 2020 to ask if I would be interested in adapting some of her research into a short zine. This topic, of safe and accessible trans health care, has only grown more urgent since we first started this project. Thank you Kieran Todd, Frances Reed, Meaghan Ray Peters, and everyone who contributed their voices to Sarah's research. I'm eternally grateful to Emily Mitchell, my agent, who found this book such a good home! And I want to thank Andrew Karre, an extraordinarily generous editor, and Anna Booth, the book designer who made both the cover and interiors look so good. Thank you forever to @ashleyrguillory who colored this book twice in two different incarnations! Also thank you to Barnes and Nobles Santa Rosa for hosting my book launch event and helping turn it into a fundraiser for Positive Images! Thank you Drew Crawford for joining me in conversation about binding, health, gender euphoria, and the creative process. I am grateful to my family, who have supported me both as a queer person and an artist. And to my friends, so many of whom are queer, trans, authors, artists, activists; watching you make art and fight for justice and freedom, for harm reduction and healthcare and an end to genocide, gives me so much hope and strength. ~Maia

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can't stop thinking about tamsyn muir's choice to present her deep, morally and politically complex science fantasy world with a central web of magic, secrets and lies reaching back ten thousand years through the eyes of three characters who:

1. tune out and start thinking about hot women whenever the magic system or worldbuilding are being explained

2. experience hallucinations on a daily basis, have brain damage and are being deceived and misled by their peers, authority figures, themselves and God

3. don't know who they are, have spent their entire life in one place and are, on all levels but physical, six months old

Every time I sit in the chair by the window to read, my girl begs for her spot back

My second shelf of unread books is almost full of unread books, I finally needed to move my can thing over to help my dvds stay upright.