Books and Ghosts

This is not a good book blog. I am terrible at reviews, I just reblog books and quotes mostly cause I'm lazy. If you use the tag 'My Bullshit Opinions' you get to read original posts.  Or use the tag "Other Peoples Valid Opinions" for intelligent people I have reblogged and follow them. I use to have these as links but they stopped working and I can't remember how to do it again.

[erzvolnes]

immortal words

[oliviawhen]

Job hunting in a hostile environment. ✨

[inkwish]

[stefito0o]

Started this one today @oldshrewsburyian thanks for the recommendation!

I even convinced @themelodyofspring @appleinducedsleep and @mangoslixes to read it with me lol

[the-forest-library]

I love these covers

[starbuck]

me analyzing my favorite characters:

[mostlysignssomeportents]

First Second will publish the middle-grades graphic novel adaptation of my novella "Unauthorized Bread" on Apr 20, 2027.

The adaptation - by JR Doyle and Blue Deliquanti - is fantastic.

You can read the original novella here.

[agardenandlibrary]

Books Read in May 2026

Murderbot: Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Platform Decay. I’ve been re-reading the series while waiting for Platform Decay. Only got 3 books in before PD arrived at the library! It was good! 

The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova. Trying another Kostova novel went well! I really like her writing. But, look, you have to be in it for the meander through another country and slow gathering of clues and the alternating timelines. You gotta. Warnings for a prison camp in Bulgaria in the 1950s.

Darksight Dare by Lois McMaster Bujold. Look. If you’re the acolyte of the god of misfortune, sometimes the misfortunes happen to someone else and you just get to witness them. In this case, it was Horsegirl Cin finding the best horse in the stable that just happened to be the one horse that would draw absolutely everyone’s attention. They wouldn’t let him ride the horse back

Extra thoughts:

I really enjoyed both The Historian and The Shadow Land, so I'm gonna try Kostova's The Swan Thieves too. And it looks like she has another book combing out this year!

This past month I've spent a lot of time adjusting to my new job and also cat-sitting for my brother, which has meant less time to read, and my brain power gets allocated to things other than reading. Oh well!

also I've been really focused on my cosplay stuff for DragonCon, which takes up a lot of mental effort and time.

But I really enjoyed everything I read this month! So I'm happy :)

[tinyyellowflowers-blog]

After school care pulled me aside about my child dropping an f-bomb “without remorse” and I put on my concerned face and nodded a bunch.

Apparently he was building something with a younger kid “who really looks up to him and is just starting to make friends” and said “Hey, you’re really fucking good at this.” which is, in my estimation, really a parenting victory.

[tinyyellowflowers-blog]

I absolutely failed at doing this:

[interstellarfr0g]

"so you think a careless crayon scribble on a piece of paper made by a human is worth more than the most beautiful of masterpieces made by an ai—" Yeah I do actually

[pangur-and-grim]

Queer Books and Authors are at a Breaking Point

Authors, agents, publishers: every part of the industry is seeing the strain of five years of escalating anti-LGBTQ censorship.

[pangur-and-grim]

if you'd like to show support, here are some upcoming queer books:

When Life Gives You Corpses is a brilliant YA about a cursed praying mantis who falls for a young witch. Yield Under Great Persuasion is a raunchy, but surprisingly sweet story of two men repairing their relationship. Fabulous Bodies is a horror story about a queer rockstar rising from the dead.

This is Where the Future Bleeds is a fantasy set in a vividly imagined land, where two women (who happen to kiss) are the key to healing the broken sky. You're No Better is a story about a teen struggling in the shadow of his murderous parent. Oil on Canvas is about a woman who finds disturbing paintings in the home of her dead mother.

and then here's a list of 26 queer books by Black authors set to publish this year, and a 10 upcoming books by trans authors. if you want to fight back against queer censorship, use your wallet! or (if that's not an option) you can contact your local library and ask them to stock a copy.

[adventures-in-a-world-of-fiction]

Blood on the Icehouse Wall is a fantasy with a time travelling lesbian witch and her asexual werewolf girlfriend trying to undo their mistakes.

Salts of Mercury is the best book I've read this year and features a non-binary necromancer explaining why they did all that treason.

An Unexpected Attachment is an erotic novella about an android who's just got a penis attachment and wants to try it out for the first time.

Three Men in Orbit is inspired by Three Men in a Boat and tells the story of three men taking an excursion to a space station and then the moon. One of the characters is a trans woman and the author is openly trans.

[tiktoks-i-enjoyed]

Clip of Lucy Dacus on the Las Culturistas podcast.

[cowardsexual]

the thing about "eridian worldbuilding" is that you need to make 3 in-depth, separate cultures MINIMUM. then you need to give them all separate reasons to think the other is ridiculous. this is necessary so you can triangulate how most people on erid felt about first contact being established by someone like rocky, the same way i look at grace's white americanisms and want to bash my head against a wall

[cowardsexual]

#do the eridians even know the rest of planet earth is not That into burgers... #actually tags cancelled i just made myself cough-laugh imagining myself in grace's position #trying to get the eridians to use my cloned lab meat to recreate the humble bunnings sausage sizzle. #okay more seriously how much interplanetary diplomatic awkwardness was caused #by grace and rocky both confidently going 'humans are like this' and 'eridians are like this' #and they both just mean their respective cultures. theres nuance.

(tags via @grimark)

first of all lmfao, second of all YEAH!!! Hang on I need to yap about this, I have so many opinions.

To make an example: one of the details in the book I keep returning to is Rocky's attitude around eating. Weir mentioned in various interviews that the idea came to him as a subversion of how aggressively social the act of eating is for humans compared to other biological needs. Which is a fair enough place to start with, but this kind of social taboo is usually tied to reasons like sanitation and avoiding risk of infection. Which fits, since as monostomes the process of nutrition and waste disposal are inextricably tied for an Eridian (not to mention the whole Making An Open Wound Per Meal deal).

Thing is, that wouldn't necessarily extend to the preparation of food, but Rocky is still uncomfortable and asks Grace not to comment while preparing his meal. Meat on Erid requires butchering to separate the viable parts from the nonviable. The Eridians doc describes the act of manually tearing food to pieces as pleasurable, "similar to chewing good food for humans"... except butchering larger prey is something that would require collaboration, and (shared) pleasure is just as much of a biological incentive towards social behaviour as fear.

I think it would be interesting if this was a peculiarity of Rocky's specific culture! Or if there was another Eridian clan who, due to climatic or migratory reasons, had to deal with recurring food scarcity and was used to curing and preserving large quantities of food to stock up as a consequence. This would decouple food preparation from the (gross) act of eating itself, making it more positive and commensal.

Imagine Grace striking up conversation with the nutrition technician that organises his taste tests like, "hey thank you for all you're doing, I know dealing with food is super gross for Eridians. just want you to know i appreciate it a lot" and the technician is like "??? huh? oh—OH. saviour grace misunderstands. preserving food and making it edible very fun where I'm from."

"Seriously? Rocky always said it was embarrassing"

"Not surprising, Saviour Rocky ♩♪♫ Eridian. ♩♪♫ Eridians ridiculous about food."

In the end Grace gets invited to join the seasonal butchering (ie spectate from his xenonite enclosure and try to pay back the cultural exchange by badly recounting how to prepare a thanksgiving turkey). Rocky also insists on being there (he's jealous) except he just lurks near the periphery while visibly uncomfortable and not talking to anyone LMAOO

[grimark]

YES this is all so good. I feel like there's definitely gotta be regional variations in the Food Taboo. And it's also probably a thing that's changed over time as well (modern technology and convenience means you can afford to be more squeamish and solitary about your food! Which also makes me think about Eridian food supply chain logistics. Do modern Eridians have abbatoirs. What's the societal status of the people who work there?)

Aside from the very good points you make about the actual logistics of butchering and preparing prey, there's also the fact that iirc it's implied that Eridians need to do their sleep-coma after eating so they can sterilise their food and heal their ventral seam. I do think the 'open a wound in your otherwise completely sealed carapace once a week to eat' thing is a bit stupid, but I'm trying to yes-and canon here rather than outright discard the parts I don't like. So the preference for having someone watch you sleep kinda necessitates an amount of coordination around mealtimes! You need to tell someone when you're planning on eating, and you need them to hang around somewhere nearby so they can come in after a reasonable amount of time. In a pre-modern Eridian society without like, soundproofed building materials, I don't see how you could manage that while still having complete privacy while you eat. So I definitely think the eating taboo would have to be more relaxed across different cultures and time periods, depending on the logistical demands of their environment and lifestyle.

[a-ramblinrose]

“Finch always said there were certain places where it was easier to tell stories, and to hear them: around a fire at night, in the mist at dawn, on a porch at dusk. In-between places, balanced on the border between familiar and strange.”

― Alix E. Harrow, The Knight and the Butcherbird

[noordzee]

Dancing to the Golden Record at 78 rpm, with apologies to Bill Watterson.

Attempting to figure out how to draw Rocky by just kinda scribbling with a brush pen. I had to switch pens midway through the dance sequence, though, so the line quality varies wildly, haha.

Also: the original sketch, which I liked the energy of too much to ink over:

[kosmogrl]

[daddyfuckedme]