Janai Reads

Blog where I talk about books I've read

[janaireads]

Welcome to My Blog!

This is a small blog where I will be rating some of my favorite books, talking about different plot points, and hearing what other books people are interested in!

Some helpful links:

Books I’ve Reviewed

My Storygraph Link

Linktree

[janaireads]

I’m just out here minding my business listening to The Sun is also a Star audiobook and I just got attacked in the last 30 minutes

[janaireads]

Wearing my I survived The Prisoner’s Throne badge

[xiranjayzhao]

A full explanation of #reviewbombgate, a major scandal that broke on Booktwt this week.

Please support the books and authors impacted the most:

Kamilah Cole - So Let Them Burn

Bethany Baptiste - The Poisons We Drink

Molly X Chang - To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods

Frances White - Voyage of the Damned

KM Enright - Mistress of Lies

RM Virtues - the Gods of Hunger series

(PS. I know people love to jump to "YA authors are always acting up" and assume any author with a femme-sounding name writes YA so lemme say right now that this author writes adult sci-fi.)

[teashoesandhair]

Other books affected, because more are coming to light since this video:

Road to Ruin - Hana Lee (another debut)

Wrath, Goddess, Sing - Maya Deane (a trans reimagining of the Iliad, which was also review bombed last year in an unrelated incident)

[janaireads]

Self care is going to Barnes and Noble right after the dentist and picking up one of your highly anticipated reads

[janaireads]

I love reading fantasy because the first two chapters are always gibberish as you learn the world and once you do I start getting invested in the story then bam I’m transported away from this lowly world

[janaireads]

Question for bookish people: that period after you binged a book without caring for basic needs, what do you call it?

[neil-gaiman]

Hi Neil! I also volunteer with a prison book program. Prison Book Program in Quincy, MA is one of the oldest in the country, and sends books to all 50 states as well as prisons in Puerto Rico and Guam. They have a list of other programs here as well: https://prisonbookprogram.org/prisonbooknetwork/

Prison book programs are so, so necessary because US prison libraries aren't required to provide anything but legal texts, but books are a lifeline for incarcerated people. It's some of the most fulfilling work I've ever done!

Thank you so much! Here's the link for people who want to get involved...

[murasaki-cha]

“The disturbing thing about Cardan is how well he plays the fool to disguise his own cleverness”

Holly Black, The Wicked King

“I had supposed he might not even know how to use his sword. He’d acted the fool, that his enemies might believe he was one.”

Holly Black, The Stolen Heir

[thebookwasbetterthough-deactiva]

THE STOLEN HEIR SPOILERS

Cardan to Oak: seriously whats your deal with that girl?

Oak: she bit me, made me kneel in the snow and wear a bridle and locked me in jail

Cardan....well shit man I didn't realise it was LOVE damn.

THESE LOSERS (I love them so much)

[readingpeacebypiece]

"The Folk adore Cardan, and they're terrified of my sister, two excellent things. I hope they rule Elfhame for a thousand years and then pass it down to one of a dozen offspring."

-Oak, just casually being one of us

[janaireads]

Constantly trying to chase the high that was The Cruel Prince

[olderthannetfic]

I recently downloaded TikTok because I embarked a depressive spiral and watching stupid videos for hours really helps taking my mind off of horrible feelings.

Anyways, I ended up on booktok and writertok, and I noticed that a lot of people advertise their novels through Ao3 tags (enemies to lovers, m/m relationship, fluff, etc) but rarely talk about the plot. This lead to me digging even more into "contemporary" advertising techniques, and found out that literally on every single platform (besides Goodreads) authors advertise their newest novel in those terms: Ao3 tags, and sometimes a very short blurb.

Maybe it's just me, but this annoys me a lot, because it feels like authors/publishing houses noticed how important the tagging system is for online reading communities, but then proceeded to not understand any of it.

First of all, the tagging system works only if you use it correctly: I might use it to find a story whose plot is "fluff and angst," but I might also use it to exclude stories that contain self harm. Authors/publishing houses only use """positive""" tags: I have yet to see a novel that brings to the possible readers' attention the fact that the story contains SA, or an abusive relationship, or domestic violence. A while ago, there was a minor scandal because a writer advertised her novel as being "dark romance, erotic, enemies to lovers" and completely forgot to mention the extensive abuse and sexual violence the male character inflicts upon the female one, causing readers to drop the book and leave negative reviews.

Second of all, writers on Ao3 still use summaries. Fic writers continuously complain about how hard writing good summaries is because that's what they use to catch the readers' attentions. Tags aren't enough. You're not telling me anything with "M/M, friends to lovers, coffee shop AU, mutual pining." Readers need an idea of what the plot is going to be too!

And before people try to drag me for thinking that books need to have "tags visible" and complain about how fics aren't supposed to be the only things you read and not everything is Ao3: I AM AWARE OF IT, THANK YOU. I'm talking about this new way of advertising novels that people have been using, where it originates from, and what they do wrong with it.

--

Many of those books will sell better if they don't reveal how little of a plot they actually have.

[malcolmschmitz]

Okay, not to kick the hornet's nest on my professional blog, but please believe me when I say that 90% of the authors who advertise their works this way are annoyed by using-AO3-tags-in-advertising at best and actively hostile to the concept at worst. You have to do it anyway, whether you want to or not, especially if you're writing romance, YA SFF, or (gods help you) YA SFF romance.

traditionally published authors hate writing summaries just as much as fic authors do. how do you sum up your giant magnum opus in the space of a tweet? summing up your magnum opus in five (5) ao3 tags is even worse. No one wants to do it. even romance writers (who often write with AO3 tags in mind) don't want to do it.

so why the heck are we doing it, if it sucks so much? well.

AO3 has by no means killed the traditional novel, but it has kneecapped the market for midlist genre fiction aimed at young women. If you want a cozy comfort read you don't have to think too hard about, are you going to spend your hard-earned cash on a brand new story you may or may not like? Or are you going to go to AO3 and read about Blorbo and Scrungly getting together again?

if you want to become a professional author, especially if you want to become a professional author of The Kind Of Stuff That People Do Fandom About, you're competing with infinite quantities of Blorbo and Scrungly. there is no way to comfortably make a living as a midlist SFF author for young women anymore without doing something to stand out amongst the Blorbos and Scrunglies. you've basically got three options at this point.

Option one: Grow up in fandom. Write good fic. Organically grow a friendcircle and a fanbase. When you get traditionally published, people in fandom already know you, know your fic is good, and know that you are a person they'd be willing to pay money to see happy and succeed. They might be willing to spend some money on your original IP- to make your stuff their fandom- because they've already been fanning over it for years.

Option two: Write something so weird and evocative that it will get people's attention just because it's so freakin' weird and evocative. We're talking "lesbian necromancers in space". We're talking "murder mystery in a halfway house for Portal Fantasy survivors". We're talking "Hamlet in a vaguely West African milieu, but the story's being told by a space god that's shaped like a giant boulder and is using the mortal intrigues to her own ends".

If neither of these options are open to you- if, say, you don't have the imagination to write something batcrap wild, and you don't have the fandom friend circle in place to help support you- you have to try to get Fandom People's Eyes On You in whatever way you can. because if you're writing YA, fandom is your target audience, and fandom is the audience who will make you or break you.

you have to convince fandom people, whether it's booktwt people or booktok people or bookblr people, that your book is worth, not only reading, but shelling out money for. and thus far? no one's found a good way to do that. if you're an indie writer, you can at least avoid making a fool of yourself in the process, but if you're going traditional? your publisher is going to insist that you do things to market yourself to fandom.

....there's a reason I've chosen to indie publish my adult fiction and make it pay-what-you-want. I can't compete with AO3. No one can compete with AO3. but because a handful of easily-fandomizable YA/adult books have blown up in the last decade- usually, easily-fandomizable books by authors who already had a fandom presence- the publishing industry as a whole hasn't figured it out yet.

so the ao3 tags trend, and the book aesthetics trend, and the MAKE A FANCAST trend, and every other publishing trend that looks like it's designed to pander to fandom? they're all absolutely designed to pander to fandom. we all know this. we all hate it. we all know that it doesn't work, that we're making a fool of ourselves, that we're actively discouraging a huge chunk of our target audience from reading our stuff.

i guarantee you most of the writers who are doing this on insta or booktok or wherever are going offline and screaming about how much they hate having to do this. i double guarantee you the writers who are doing it enthusiastically and don't get why it's dumb and pandering are going to regret it later.

[olderthannetfic]

Interesting. I admit that YA is pretty much a hard NO for me. I mostly read indie m/m that is not YA, and what I see there is that AO3 hasn’t at all cornered the market. There’s still a ton of interest in novel-length stories with guaranteed conclusions, which do exist on AO3, but not in anything like the quantity of stories there overall, and often not in a way where the characters are built up enough to make you care if you didn’t already care.

[alexseanchai]

is there a second lesbian necromancers in space? because Gideon the Ninth and sequels are by a Homestuck BNF

is fandom really that big a chunk of the reading-for-pleasure population? like, yes lots people stood up at Worldcon when AO3 won, but lots people didn't, and it seems to me like, comparing people invested enough in creating fiction to show up at Worldcon to people who merely enjoy reading enough to buy a book on occasion, the first group is a lot more likely to be people invested enough in creating fiction to have an AO3 account

[bisexualbaker]

If there's also a second "murder mystery in a halfway house for Portal Fantasy survivors", I'd like to know, because IIRC Seanan McGuire also got her start via fandom, and was also writing and publishing for adults long before "Every Heart a Doorway".

[coolcurrybooks-deactivated20230]

All of these books are queer, but they all have back blurbs that don’t say they’re queer. While this can be a pain if I’m scouting for queer SFF, it can come in handy for people in a situation where they don’t want to be reading queer books openly. 

Please do note that I don’t have hard copies of the books on hand so it’s possible that an author quote or something mentions one being queer (I feel like this isn’t super likely, but I don’t want to rule it out). Some might also have author biographies mentioning that the author is queer. Also, some may be shelved as LGBT on Goodreads or categorized as queer on Amazon. So if you’re planning on asking for any of these as holiday gifts, I would suggest going to the Amazon page or where ever your relative is likely to buy it from and double check that it’s something you’d be comfortable with sharing openly. 

I wish I had more pansexual books, but the ones I know of tend to mention queerness in the back description. 

With the exception of The Spy with the Red Balloon, these are all books I have read or are currently reading. If you want to recommend others, feel free to do so in the replies!

You can find my other queer book recommendations here.

Links to the queer books database (or Goodreads if the book hasn’t been added yet) are available below the cut. You can find information on content warnings there.

Keep reading

[s-n-arly]

Clariel by Garth Nix can be shelved with YA or adult dark fantasy, and the protagonist is aromantic asexual.

[xiranjayzhao]

“The false ruler Lady Wu has an unpleasant personality and a lowly birthright. She has the heart of a snake or lizard and the nature of a wolf. She is hated by both men and gods, and heaven and earth cannot allow her to exist.”

Iron Widow 2: HEAVENLY TYRANT

Coming Spring 2023

After suffering devastating loss and making drastic decisions, Zetian finds herself at the seat of power in Huaxia. But her world is not as it seems, and revelations about an enemy more daunting than she imagined forces her to share her power with a dangerous man she can no longer simply remove from her way. Despite having vastly different ideas than him on what they are to each other and how the world should change, Zetian must join him in a dance of truth and lies and perform their roles to perfection in order to take down their common enemy and get back the loved one she lost.

Teasers:

Keep reading

[penis-siz3-average]

Other YA protagonists going through emotional break downs after having to make hard choices that cost lives.

Zetian after waterboarding and helping drown the strategist that tortured her co-pilot for years:

[isanarte]

I spent all past days without internet so here have some Iron Triangle memes I redrew.