Literary Leviathan

🐬🐋📘Books and Sea-Beasts📘🐋🐬 also some Opinions. Currently reading Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. You can find me on Storygraph as abomine, if you're interested.

[balaenabooks]

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Plushies: @plushie-palooza

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[picturebookshelf]

An Illustrated History of Urban Legends (2024)

Text and Art: Adam Allsuch Boardman

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

Have you read The Neverending Story by Michael Ende (orig. Die unendliche Geschichte, 1979)?

yes

no

I didn't finish it

I've never heard of it

Remaining time: 6 days 13 hours

[godzilla-reads]

🐳 Reading: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

[redlipstickresurrected]

Rudolph Belarski (American, 1900-1983, b. Dupont, PA, USA. d. Westport, CT, USA) - Cover Art (detail) for The Three Coffins aka The Hollow Man by author John Dickson Carr (American, 1906-1977)

[lychens]

pov you're in middleschool in 2012 and you ask to borrow a book from the weird kid next to you that only draws wolves. these are your options.

[itscolossal]

Los Angeles Public Library Unveils the World’s Largest Pop-Up Book

[nurgetih]

[museum-of-artifacts]

The only taxidermied blue whale in the world, 1865 CE, now housed at the Natural History Museum in Sweden. The public was allowed to enter it up until a couple was found having sex inside it; now its jaws are opened only for special occasions like Swedish election days

More

[a-bit-obsessively]

It's in my town!

The whale is opened on election day because election in swedish is val, and whale is ... val.

It's also open on Walpurgis night, because that is called Valborg in swedish...

There is also a persistent rumor that there used to be a café inside of the whale, but there never were.

[kaijutegu]

I wonder if that rumor came from the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs? There was a dinner served inside the Iguanadon just a few years before the whale was taxidermied- it obviously wasn't taxidermy, but doesn't that sound like something people would do in a whale?

[picturebookshelf]

Bluey: Goodnight, Fruit Bat (2021)

Story and Art: Unknown

[macrolit]

Inferno, Dante Alighieri Word Cloud Classics editions all feature custom end-paper that matches the book’s theme and colors. 

[thatsbelievable]

[ltwilliammowett]

Illustration for Moby Dick, by Kent Rockwell, 1930

[wearethekat]

June Book Reviews: The Eye of Leviathan by MA Carrick

I received a free copy from Orbit Books via Netgalley in exchange for a fair review. Release date July 14th, 2026.

I thought author team MA Carrick's previous series (starting with A Mask of Mirrors) was interesting but not quite to my taste, so I was willing to give them another shot with this book in a new universe. In The Eye of Leviathan, sixteenth century Spain has expanded from the conquest of the New World to pillaging Faerie using their secret portal. A faerie plots to substitute themself with their friend's unwanted daughter in order to topple Spain's empire, but finds that the conquistadors may be more difficult to defeat than they thought...

The book's narrative is split into two POVs, one for the child sent to fairyland and one for the changeling left behind to replace her. Overall, it's a very worldbuilding-forward story, and the authors have an excellent touch with the details. The central premise is a Spain that managed to not only murder their way through the New World, but also pillage the lands of Faerie—baptizing their people into mortal slaves, looting magic items, and binding Faerie islands to the map. It's brutally well drawn, and it's obvious the authors did their research into the historical side of things. The Inquisition is genuinely chilling but not sketched with too heavy a hand, and the bits about Estevan in university were particularly good. I didn't know there was a bullfighting part to your thesis defense... Still, I did regret the lack of detail on the course of alternate history in the New World itself. There's references to the same debates over the rights of indigenous people there, but both Estevan and the authors' attention is firmly fixed elsewhere.

However, while the worldbuilding was well done, the plot and characters were a bit more standard fantasy tome for my taste. The plot is straightforward—Estevan plots to infiltrate the Spanish portal administration council and the girl trapped in Faerie tries to escape. Especially for a big doorstopper of a novel, my taste runs to twistier books. On the character side, I would have preferred for Estevan's point of view to be a bit more inhuman. He feels exactly like the girl's perspective—but perhaps the point is that the inhabitants of Faerie are just as human as their conquerors, who claim that they are soulless. I also appreciated that the authors took religion seriously as a major force in the period. It's a nice touch that the girl's lifelong fear from being told she'll dissolve into nothing when she dies is a major contributor to her initial attraction to the conquistadors' side.

The compact POVs and engaging historical setting worked well for me, and overall I liked the style better than the Rook and Rose series. Although the more standard fantasy style isn't quite to my taste, I think it's worth it to read the sequel for the worldbuilding alone. Pair with Bardugo's The Familiar.

[balaenabooks]

This book hits different if you're a mother yourself.

[bookpatrol]

Stained glass with books

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

Have you read There's a Hair in My Dirt!: A Worm's Story by Gary Larson (1998)?

yes

no

I've read parts of it

I've never heard of it

Voting ended onJul 22