a book blog

because I like books and wanted somewhere to write about them

[macbookamateur]

greetings :)

I'm Mac (they/them), the url is because that's my name and this is a book blog and I'm not a professional - unrelated, apple is a shitty corporation (tautological but whatever).

this blog is here to record and gush about the books I've read this year, and ideally it's a place to chat about them too so please feel free to message/ask!

I mostly go for fantasy and adventure etc. but welcome any and all recommendations, gotta broaden those horizons <3

vaguely chronological list of the books I've read so far, 2023:

Legends and Lattes - Travis Baldree

Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being in Love - isthisselfcare on AO3 (reread)

Beyond the Wand - Tom Felton

Ninth House - Leigh Bardugo (re-read)

Hell Bent - Leigh Bardugo

Women Don't Owe You Pretty - Florence Given

Between the Stops - Sandi Toksvig (ongoing)

Me vs. Brain - Hayley Morris

Red, White and Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston

Raybearer - Jordan Ifueko

The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern

Nimona - N. D. Stevenson

Tender Is The Flesh - Augustina Bazterrica (attempted a few chapters and now I'm vegetarian)

If We Were Villains - M. L. Rio

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab

Frankissstein - Jeanette Winterson

The Atlas Six - Olivie Blake

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin

Fourth Wing - Rebecca Yarros

Iron Flame - Rebecca Yarros

Shades of Magic (Trilogy) - V. E. Schwab (reread)

The Fragile Threads of Power - V. E. Schwab

Currently Reading: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir

Also currently reading a million different Dramione fics I have fallen off the wagon help me

Next up: Harrow the Ninth

Eventually I stg: The Atlas Paradox - Olivie Blake

xxx

[wizardarchetypes]

This month is the one year anniversary of posting my poem “Condolences” to TikTok and Instagram, where it amassed millions of likes and tens of thousands of comments.

Since, people have used the poem for adaptive art pieces, short plays, books, and class work. For your piece of art to be transformed into another…it’s difficult to describe.

After several rejections from poetry publications a decade ago, I decided to post my work online instead. The responses were overwhelming. I realized that an official publication doesn’t make you a poet. Writing poetry does, and bonus points if you manage to resonate with just one other soul who needed to hear what you needed to say.

I was utterly taken aback by the response to this piece. People have asked me many times to explain it, but from the response it was clear that the meaning can be explicated with a little time.

Some people who didn’t understand it until it was explained were angry when it came together. It wasn’t written for them.

I’m only grateful that it reached the people who needed it.

I feel that the imagery is part of the piece, but I know not everyone can or cares to listen to a video. Here is the poem:

———————

They buried a girl in my hometown today.

“A young woman, gone too soon, in the prime of her life,” they all said.

My friends and I all knew her. We grew up together.

We were in all the same classes and hobbies and we made up games together at recess.

But none of us went to her funeral. We weren’t invited, because the people planning it didn’t think we’d understand. They said it wasn’t our loss.

So we got together for drinks. We laughed all morning and played card games all day.

At 4 o’clock, we heard the church bells. We saw that long, sad procession of cars stretch like a creek through town, up the cemetery hill.

We heard strange rumors that night, that the casket was empty. That they put it hollow in the ground.

So we went to the plot first thing in the morning. They buried her empty box next to her dad, down the row from an estranged aunt she never really knew all that well.

There wouldn’t be a stone for months, but the little placard had my name on it. But not the one I go by these days.

“How strange,” we all said. “What a waste of good crying.”

All of this mourning for me, and I was down the street the whole time, laughing and drinking.

But some people will never understand. They’d rather plan a funeral than learn a new name.

My friend said she felt sorry for them, in some small way.

What a sad notion—to lose a daughter who never lived—

And a son who never died.

[wizardarchetypes]

Recently I performed at a poetry event and spoke a slightly updated version of this (not many changes) and someone accused me of plagiarizing myself, hahaha! It's not the first time that's happened when I've performed a poem I've posted online, but none have gotten so much attention as this one. Someone made a beautiful zine a few months ago adapting this piece, so it's been on my mind again. Thank you for all of the love.

[firstfullmoon]

Leila Chatti, from “The Moment When A Feeling Enters,” in Wildness Before Something Sublime

[text ID: I go on living. Deathtouched, changed, but my life arrives again / at yet. It’s May. I wake to it, thick and sweet as honey I’d forgotten.]

[firstfullmoon]

hi!! if you could only read 10 poems again, which would those poems be? I just went through all of my collected poetry and created a top 10 list of poems that mean the most to me, and i thought it was a really fun and challenging exercise! i'm curious if we have any poems in common <3

OUGH. okay hardest question ever. keeping in mind those would be the only 10 poems I could ever read, I picked ones that are seminal to me & my relationship with poetry

“The Same City” by Terrance Hayes

“Magdalene—The Seven Devils” by Marie Howe

“October” by Louise Glück

“Having a Coke with You” by Frank O’Hara

“Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L.” by June Jordan

“[I aborted two daughters]” by Diane Seuss

“Snow and Dirty Rain” by Richard Siken

“Late Poem to My Father” by Sharon Olds

“The Colonel” by Carolyn Forché

“Turtle, Swan” by Mark Doty

[bilover]

if i bring a book someplace it doesn't necessarily mean i want to read it mayb i just want to take her on a walk. Get her some fresh air and a change of scenery

[inkskinned]

actually i will write a poem about it, because i used to genuinely believe i wouldn't live to be 30. i said it isn't right for me. i said i just sense it: it was an inevitability. what i wasn't saying was the other thing: that i knew it would be by my hand, my actions. by my own deed.

and what would i tell myself, really, honestly, at 22. back in 2016. it's been ten years - a decade - and they've slipped by both so slowly and impossibly quickly. a third of my life in a blink.

there are so many bad things. it's hard not to start with that. i've always been a "bad news first" person anyway, and there's so many tragedies coming. personal and political. for a long time it felt like i had a stretch of bad luck, and the bad luck just wouldn't stop coming.

in 2016 it was still about a year before someone would spike my drink, and a bad thing would happen to me. in another six months i'll break up with my public embarrassment of a boyfriend. the world never really heals from this year, but i don't know that it was really ever whole in the first place.

what could i tell you about your life, though. there are funerals coming that you cannot still figure the shape of. you lose all of your grandparents, you lose other family members, the cancer is diagnosed in your cousin. for about two months you'll be fully blind, half blind for six months. you go through three cars, although only actually crash one of them (the other two were old, there was nothing you could do but turn them in, crying about it). you're actually still looking for a new car after that incident, honestly, currently driving a stick shift subaru.

and that's the thing: you drive now, you're no longer terrified of it. you love trains again, the panic attacks have subsided. the world is certifiably on fire, that is immediately true: and... I'm proud of you for surviving to 32.

you will rekindle friendships that you thought you'd lost due to distance; you literally live down the street from jason and the two of you spend many saturdays talking and laughing. you haven't started your weekly dnd sessions yet, that's another three years down the road. you meet terrible people, sure, and you get your heart shattered (and then something even worse), but: you also meet people that are destined to be on road trips with you, howling at the moon. you meet nick and amity house and all of them. you discover you're actually not a terrible cook once you venture away from making plain pasta, you fall in love with baking and with painting and with crafts you've never even heard of. you meet alison's daughter, who is perfect and just like her mom, you'll love her. in four years you meet your dog, he is going to save your life. you meet your nephew, and you're now close with your family. you see concerts you never thought you could afford, read books and watch movies that you didn't think you'd be alive for. you've now gone abroad, conquered your fear of planes multiple times, have been to cities you used to only recognize by name. you come out first as bisexual and then as a nonbinary lesbian (which fits more accurately), and your mom is so okay with it that she consistently tries to set you up with people from her office. remember thinking you could never escape, never really find home? you discover you can make it. you are now in a suburb of boston, still writing (of course).

oh and you have a book out, you're a proper "author" now, your childhood dream come true. you're working on your second one already, actually, and a close friend is coming over tonight for a "wine wednesday writing session" (yes you still do those, they're still lovely), but you won't meet that friend for another eight years and six months. you have met the person you are currently roommates with, and your house together is fucking amazing. plants cover every fucking inch. the two of you have only one house rule: do whatever you want, forever.

you are so fucking lucky these days it is glittering. holy shit. bookstores and beach trips and so many people that you love and that love you back that you are endlessly, furiously happy about it. you are rabidly, obnoxiously happy, the kind of happy you used to think was faked; the kind of happy that pours out of you. you have dinner parties and friends over every weekend and music out of your speakers. you once wrote a short little paragraph about hoping you'd still find the beauty in things, and i have great news: you are still in love, if not moreso, with everything. little flowers and children in snowsuits and bunnies running and sunrises and the curl of oatmilk in your coffee (oh. oat milk is gonna be a thing).

this is the year that you start taking therapy seriously, thank you for that. and yes, we're still in therapy (like i said, a lot of bad things have been happening), but we are so much better. something you find impossible: we finally stopped self-harming. we get tattoos over the worst scars in five years pretty much on the dot. we have such a fucking good relationship to our body; we finally have an excellent relationship to food and to eating. we still dance, we still make art, we are still singing. we laugh so much more now, though. we are so much more confident, a version of ourselves we never thought possible: funny, and fun-loving, and healthy. healing.

you have a long road to walk. i think you'd have asked me: is it worth it? all the scars, the indignity of trauma.

and i'm telling you: even one moment of it is worth it, my love. even one drop of the future that's waiting for you. and while i wish none of the bad shit happened: holy shit, i cannot wait for all of the good that you live through. every single sunbeam was worth it. every walk with your dog. every quiet morning. every time you watched the soft purr of the grey and lifting fog.

it is worth it, and i'm so glad you're here now. it was worth it all. i know you feel aging is one long and terrible fall. i am telling you i am waiting for you there, at the end of the tunnel. i am waiting in the light and the growing spring.

you should stay for another decade. the birds are coming back. i can't wait for you to hear them sing.

[inkskinned]

the cultural milieu is over for it but you really did have a lot of feelings about that "man or bear" conversation. you think often of how this stupid and barely-feminist take got, like, thousands of men violently angry. and it's that anger that's so hard to explain to someone else, isn't it, it's that anger that is what makes you "choose the bear" or say "all men should die".

because in your private life you actually love men. a lot of men are close to you, are your family or your dearest friends or your partner; are symbols of the good ones. and you've met so many good men, really, have so many good memories with them. and if you were genuinely pressed about it, you'd say that all genders have the same capacity for evil, it's just shaped differently depending on societal expectations. after all, your high school bullies were other girls.

but how can you tell other people about the anger. because it isn't the first-burn anger, it isn't the obvious knife-in-the-dark. it is the second anger that does it for you. that when you say i'm scared, the response is not curiosity and gentleness, but instead a desire to reform. that they resent you for being scared, for being unwilling. that you had the gall to say no. that you had the temerity to dare to say - i'm not comfortable with that behavior in my home.

because, yes, isn't the assumption of your guilt? you should have given him a chance or been better-natured or sweeter or less like a nagging bitch. there's always something the woman could have done, and then of course the man wouldn't have attacked her - men are protectors, right, so something you did must have made him broken. (you googled it once. to your knowledge, there is no study that proves that men are instinctually more "protective" than women - in fact, most studies you found suggest that there's no gendered difference there whatsoever).

and that anger is different, and it smells different, and you know it is different, because it tastes like iron. if it had been a bear, for example, and you'd said - there's been a bear sighting on the path, i'm bringing bear spray while i go running - no one would blink an eye. yes, bring the spray! wear a bell! in fact, everyone would call you stupid if you died without doing those things. you know this.

but if you say - i don't walk in that part of town anymore, i got followed once and it scared me - the anger, then. as if you are taking something from someone, rather than deleting freedom from your own life. you have to make sure your friends have your location before a date. you can't just get in the uber, you need to send info about the ride. you can't ride the train in that outfit, you need a specific "between outfit" you throw over everything. you can't lose your phone or your wallet or your keys, what if something happens. you can't leave your drink unattended. you can't even really turn someone down, have mastered the art of doing it delicately.

you have all the tricks and then some. how many times have you (with no boyfriend to speak of) said - i have a boyfriend. or invented a cop dad. or made up some - good!! - man in your life, to sit as a bulwark between you and another man. and be good when you do it. they get angry if it's too obvious that you find this interaction spooky.

and still that anger. how quickly it floods into each of these interactions. in the comments or in the mouths of people who you thought were your friends. and, like, you're aware of the statistics - it wouldn't be a stranger or whatever. you're not that worried about a bear, either. but then the anger comes out, after - and you see it on the lips and tongues of so fucking many. the anger that you even dared to say "i would chose the bear and die happy."

and it's not just this specific moment, because it happens fucking all the time, but it's the amount of hand-holding and gentle explanations and all of it, the placating. while in this silly, milquetoast critique, all you have effectively said is: "i am very scared, and this world feels like it punishes me for having this body." and yet the response was immediately: i hope you die about that. like you, being scared - it's incredibly aggravating. like they find your discomfort - even metaphorical - to be stealing from them. like if they could just force you into understanding, surely you'd find their point of view, underneath.

"protectors" indeed. instead of comforting you, they all show their teeth.

[neenarchive]

characters who refuse to heal. characters who change but only for the worse. characters who are trapped by their grief and rage. characters who unravel throughout the narrative. i am putting them in my pocket for later

[larkstonguesinaspicpart1]

Reading hitchikers guide for the first time was really funny because it was like ohhhh THIS the writing that every unfunny nerd has been trying to emulate from like ‘00-‘12 . But good.

[milkchuggs]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#tbh my opinion on hichhiker's guide is that while i really enjoy it i feel like Terry Pratchett just kinda did everything Adams tried to do#but better and with more subtlety and greater depth of execution#So while i enjoy and appreciate it every time i pick it up im just kinda like#“whoah i should be reading terry pratchett”#and then i pick up praychett#and im like woah this guy was a fucking genius and did everything adams tried to do but more and better and in such a way to where its#hard for people to be annoying about it bc it possesses a lot of subtlty that#while adams is good he definitely lacks to the extent pratchet has#Also while pratchett practices absurdity he maintains a coherence of theme and idea that while carried by some overarching themes#adams definitley leans into the zany galaxy roadtrip at the detrement of coherence where pratchett generally succeeds

I think the key difference here is that Pratchett was a dedicated writer who wrote with intentionality and focus, whereas Adams was hurriedly throwing up half-baked radio play scripts in between his actual paying job of editing Doctor Who and then later procrastinating severely on forcing those scripts into novel and tv show formats while his agent tried desperately to figure out what pub he was getting drunk at so they could force him to come home and do some actual work.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#imma be so fr#comparing hitchhikers to any of pratchett's work is frankly insane#and makes me think you fundamentally misunderstood what at least one of them was trying to do#like these do NOT occupy the same conceptual space#this isn't one guy doing a thing okay and another guy doing it great#this is one guy doing one thing and another guy doing a vaguely related thing#you wouldn't say spaghetti is mediocre because fettucine is flat#like you recognize that that sounds insane right?

[allloversbetray]

“There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean (feel like) on Sunday morning at 7 AM, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth; while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while tasting our new possibilities and strengths.”

— From Poetry Is Not a Luxury (1985)  by Audre Lorde

[savoureuxx]

"The Resemblance Between Your Life and a Dog" by Robert Bly

[canthaveshitingotham-crucified]

i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. like in the airbnb i was at i guess it used to be a kids room cause you could see the imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. like that's a poem already what's the point

[canthaveshitingotham-crucified]

you get it. you get the themes. i dont have time to do it justice. just look at it its on the ceiling

[brenna]

[teaboot]

[wheresmyphonemp3]

[fadingponycookiedream]

[andsorrowsend]

[werefeathers]

[aces-spade-palace]

Dead Beat cover reveal day!!

[chthonymph]

‘Be selfish,’ he whispered. ‘Be brave.’

[wordlessmelodies]

starting a collection

[bookofmirth]

end-of-year book ask

How many books did you read this year?

Did you reread anything? What?

What were your top five books of the year?

Did you discover any new authors that you love this year?

What genre did you read the most of?

Was there anything you meant to read, but never got to?

What was your average Goodreads rating? Does it seem accurate?

Did you meet any of your reading goals? Which ones?

Did you get into any new genres?

What was your favorite new release of the year?

What was your favorite book that has been out for a while, but you just now read?

Any books that disappointed you?

What were your least favorite books of the year?

What books do you want to finish before the year is over?

Did you read any books that were nominated for or won awards this year (Booker, Women’s Prize, National Book Award, Pulitzer, Hugo, etc.)? What did you think of them?

What is the most over-hyped book you read this year?

Did any books surprise you with how good they were?

How many books did you buy?

Did you use your library?

What was your most anticipated release? Did it meet your expectations?

Did you participate in or watch any booklr, booktube, or book twitter drama?

What’s the longest book you read?

What’s the fastest time it took you to read a book?

Did you DNF anything? Why?

What reading goals do you have for next year?

[macbookamateur]

I love Ninth House (Leigh Bardugo), so when my Boston accommodation fell through at the last minute I booked a room in New Haven and took pictures of every significant secret society house mentioned in the book, plus some bonus locations. Enjoy!

Starting off strong with St Elmo (how far they've fallen):

Then we have Manuscript! Took me embarrassingly long to find, peep the circle of bricks on the wall:

Then Wolf's Head (which I think was Leigh's society if memory serves?), very walled and difficult to photograph:

Now Skull and Bones:

Next up we have Book and Snake (opposite the graveyard which features a lot in the book too), with some fence detail. Hopefully the cars give an idea of scale but my GOD some of these buildings are massive, and there's no sign of any windows or even ventilation except that front door. But yeah Book and Snake:

And now we have Scroll and Key, also massive and mausoleum-like:

Last of the main ones, here's Berzelius:

And now a little bonus, Rosenfeld Hall (which used to be St Elmo):

And also the Hutch! I think it's the top single attic window:

FAQs

Could you have found out what these looked like online? Yes!

Did you know that before you did this? No! I didn't think it through I just got excited!

How did you navigate New Haven? Using only the map in the front of the book for some godforsaken reason. It worked though.

Do you have more pictures? Yes! Of the graveyard and of the Sterling Library, with as many parts of the Gauntlet as I could remember, plus some other cool buildings.