Mind the Palace

i read slowly & often. 37. queer black librarian. anti-oppression educator. youth lit scholar & reviewer. #critlib | #kidlit | #spectrumscholar | #trekkie🖖🏾

[darkliterata]

Dear Internet! I've made an #AntiOppression guide for my library. Please learn and share 💜

LibGuides: Anti-Oppression: Anti-Oppression

LibGuides: Anti-Oppression: Anti-Oppression

[kvothes]

a good thread

[elumish]

I agree with all of this. But! I think it is also important to recognize that there are subgenres where it is significantly harder to find certain things, and it's actively unhelpful to readers to pretend that you can just find whatever type of book you want to read if you just know how to look for it, especially if you are sticking to trad publishing.

It is possible to find both sapphic SFF and M/M fantasy. It is significantly harder to find, say, aro urban fantasy. Or trans romantic suspense. Or intersex mystery.

A lot of the advice above only really works for trad published or popular books and for identities/subgenres/content that aren't too niche.

So here's some advice if the advice above isn't working for you (either because you can't find books with what you want or because the books you are finding don't end up being the vibe you want), from someone who reads a few hundred books a year:

Find websites or lists dedicated to the specific thing you are looking for. They will generally have more variety and will post you to examples that don't show up in regular rec lists. (ex: aro book recs, ace book recs, intersex #ownvoices database, sapphic books). Goodreads lists can (sometimes) also be your friend.

Get comfortable reading self-published and small press books. Trad publishing has its blind spots.

Check Reddit for recommendations

Start figuring out what it is specifically that you like and then start making your searches more specific. This can be subgenre (if you want urban fantasy, you're rarely going to find it just searching "fantasy"), tropes, plot devices, vibes, etc.

Look at the "readers also bought" on Goodreads/Amazon, similar books on Storygraph, etc. if you read a book you like. Even if you don't end up reading the one you click on, it can show you similar authors (similar to looking at the blurb on a cover), especially because far fewer books have blurbs now.

Check out the Literature Map for similar authors.

[nipple-brains]

Another fantastic resource is @queerliblib !!

They have lists on Libby with very specific topics and will answer questions on Tumblr about recs for people after very niche stuff and almost always have a starting point for someone!

[captainhaterade]

BREAKING: Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service

The headquarters is going to Utah. Every regional office is being shuttered. The research program is being destroyed.

“More than fifty research and development facilities across thirty-one states. Gone. Consolidated into a single location in Fort Collins, Colorado. And ‘consolidated’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, because what it actually means is that decades of place-based, long-term ecological research—the kind that literally cannot exist anywhere else because it depends on specific forests, specific watersheds, specific ecosystems studied over generations—will be snuffed out.

You cannot move a thirty-year watershed study. You cannot relocate a decades-long old-growth monitoring program. You cannot box up a forest and ship it to Colorado. When these facilities close, the experiments die. The datasets end. The partnerships with universities that took generations to build collapse. And the institutional knowledge of the scientists who ran those programs walks out the door, because the administration damn well knows most of them won’t follow a forced relocation to a single consolidated office that has nothing to do with the ecosystems they’ve spent their careers studying.”

[abandonedniche]

oh so some people can just listen to a song and understand the lyrics

[abandonedniche]

what if you’re all lying

[abandonedniche]

not even an exaggeration

[depsidase]

[hotvampireadjacent]

I’ve been trying to share this since I found out. They are moving onto harassing people in Memphis.

Memphis is “under full-blown occupation” by ICE. Here’s why you may not know that.

Community members face retaliation for trying to spread the word out, a lawsuit alleges.

Everyone was lovely in getting the word out about Chicago and Minnesota. I want to spread that awareness for folk in tennessee.

[twunkish-cleric]

As a librarian I know that a lot of people get scared or embarrassed about telling us that they damaged a book, but I need everyone to know that it actually has a really important reason, particularly for water damage, like if you got the book wet. Tears and such are relatively mild problems depending on the rarity of the book, but wet paper molds very easily, so if you get a book wet and we don't know, it can mold and that mold can spread to other books and potentially become a health and safety hazard.

So when librarians tell you to report any damage, please don't be too scared to! We're not going to yell at you, there are actual reasons why we need to know!!

[magicratfingers]

my kingdom for a pair of tortoiseshell cateye glasses that aren’t too thick too thin or too pointy and don’t have with gold accents or extra stuff all over them or “sassy bits” I’m going to work ok not the librarian sex dungeon

[theabigailthorn]

okay but do you know where the librarian sex dungeon is, do you have directions to the librarian sex dungeon, i need to get there to the librarian sex dungeon

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

and would it be too mean if I said that when it comes to discovering new books to read it seems like of people would rather just act willfully helpless and blame tiktok for "ruining literature" instead of putting in a very small amount of effort to find the damn books?

[heedra]

unsung benefit i think a lot of ppl are sleeping on with using the public library is that i think its a great replacement for the dopamine hit some ppl get from online shopping. it kind of fills that niche of reserving something that you then get to anticipate the arrival of and enjoy when it arrives, but without like, the waste and the money.

[nonimaginaryfriend]

bonus it ALSO fills that dopamine hit of in-person shopping. “oh I didn’t go in looking for this but hmm, I’m tempted… I can’t resist… oh ho ho I have made some irresponsible decisions at the library today [carrying my stack of ten random books]” and then it doesn’t even matter if you don’t like them because a) free b) you’re gonna give them back anyway

[grumpy-cardigan]

Librarian here! Please please please please PLEASE do this! We don’t have any way to know if you read them, and we don’t care! We’re happy to see those books go out because that helps our stats. And that affects how much money we can get.

So grab that silly paperback romance, and maybe this new YA fantasy, oh and check for the new movies too! And don’t forget to check Libby and hoopla for music and ebooks and e-audio.

[lakemojave]

Renee Good. Say her name.

[lakemojave]

I don't care what her occupation was. I don't care whether she was a US citizen. I don't care whether she complied with ICE's demands or not. Even if she was an unemployed non citizen actively resisting arrest, no one should get away with brutally gunning her down in the street.

[kkelenca]

CBS’ article on her murder, for further reading

[punished-venom-solitair-e]

classmate made a harry potter reference within earshot and i saw this menu appear in front of me

[tikkunolamorgtfo]

I don’t think a lot of people understand that no matter how progressive or well-read you are, there are always going to be moments in your life where somebody pushes back against something that’s so culturally ingrained you never even considered it before. And you’ll say “Huh, it never occurred to me to challenge this but you’re right,” and that doesn’t mean you were “morally toxic” before, it means you’re a non-omniscient human capable of growth.

Also, some preferred terms for things will change and evolve, and terms we prefer now might eventually be considered gauche or even offensive, and that doesn’t mean you were a bigot at the time for using them. It means we evolved as a society and chose new terminology to reflect that change.

Nobody is a fully formed realisation of progressivism that can predict all shifts and modes of thought. The world will always change, and hopefully you will, too

[porterdavis]

[myrandomstuffpage]

Support your local library 📚

[afronerdism]

The conversation surrounding cultural appropriation has been so severely mutilated by white “allies” that the original intention behind that conversation has become almost unrecognizable in most social contexts.

[afronerdism]

To explain what I mean, the conversation around cultural appropriation was started by black and native people to discuss the frustrations we feel at being punished socially and financially for partaking in our cultural heritage while white people could take, I.e. appropriate, aspects of our culture that we are actively shamed for and be heralded as innovators. It was about the frustrations we feel when the same white people who shamed us would take our culture and wear it as if they were the ones who created it while still actively shaming us for doing the same.

The original push behind naming cultural appropriation and having these conversations were so that we as a society could evaluate why we were punished for our heritage while white People were not. It was supposed to be about seeking solutions. The idea was to create a society where we could celebrate our cultures with impunity. It was never about telling white people that they “weren’t allowed” to do certain things. We did ask that white People stop doing certain things because they weren’t doing them respectfully and were not invited to do them, but the primary reason we asked them to desist was to reclaim the things they had stolen and to reassign them culturally back where they belonged.

White “allies” saw these conversations happening and instead of trying to aplify our own voices or even try to learn about the complexities behind why we were saying what we were saying, they instead began screaming over us and creating a narrative that was hardly even the bones of what we originally set out to say. It was like they took the conversation we were trying to have, completely decontextualized it, and stripped it of all it’s nuance in order to gain social currency by seeming progressive.

So the conversation around cultural appropriation went from “This aspect of our heritage belongs to us and we find it egregious that we are shamed for it. What steps can we take to address the racism that’s creating this situation as well as rehome the things that have been stolen” to “you’re not allowed to do that because if you do that you’re racist, we don’t really understand why that’s racist but you’re not allowed to do that and if you do that you’re a klansman no exceptions. So you’re not allowed because because”

At the end of the day, did I like the fact that sally was wearing dreads? No. But my primary concern was not that sally was wearing dreads but rather that sally could wear dreads and I couldn’t. THAT was the intended focus of those conversations. It was about addressing the inequality. It was about us. Now the conversation is just about sally and were completely forgotten.

White People are always asking me what they can do to help. You want to know? Stop talking. Aplify our voices and shut the fuck up because you all have pretty much derailed this conversation and many more like it to the point that we no longer are trying to make steps to understand and dismantle the racism around cultural appropriation and instead are just using it as social shaming tactics.

[afronerdism]

TL;DR: read my post. Most things worth learning about can’t be summarized in the bullet points of a buzfeed article. Don’t come into academic circles and complain because everything hasn’t been conviently summarized for you. Stop pretending that things aren’t accessible to you because you refuse to do the intellectual labor that is learning.

[severeannoyance]

Oh thank god, this. It’s become a new and shiny way to punish people for engaging in their culture, with a side order of letting white “allies” police what they think someone from said group should look like, and who should be allowed to participate. Which helps no one.

[storm-of-feathers]

a childs most likely abuser is their family or a family friend so no i dont think isolating children to only their families, including online, will protect them ever.

[beardedmrbean]

[lonergirlmonologue]

"i wonder if we ever think of each other at the same time."