:3 books :3

bookblr sideblog /// rory, 26, they/them

[readingaccountability]

updated pinned post!

this blog helps me track what im reading and when! i document what i read with reviews, links to playlists, and tags for title - author - genre - etc so that i can easily find what ive read before. i borrow a lot from friends and from the library, and it always makes me sad to return a book without having something to remember it by - hence this method of remembering!

i follow from my main, @loudfederationscreeching. im very welcome to any book recommendations as well, and usually do a lot of reblogging as well as posting! i try and maintain weekly posts on my reading progress. even if nobody interacts at least i can look back and know how often/consistently i was reading!

2021 goal = 52 books (GOAL MET!!! 54/52!!)

2022 goal = 75 books (GOAL MET!!!!!! 81/75!!!)

2023 goal = 85 books

tag architecture:

#reading progress update - for my generalized updates, sometimes these are short, sometimes theyre full reviews!

#book review - for final thoughts on finished books, tagged by genre

#favorites tag - what it says on the tin - my favorite books so far!

#talk tag - correspondence, i.e. asks, replies, and reblog chains

#playlist series - for any post that includes one of my playlists!

#original post - catchall for everything that isnt a reblog

i tag titles and authors (and series when applicable), and all reblogs will be tagged #reblog, then #fanart, #quotes, and #others thoughts divvy up reblogs further into self-explanatory categories!

#pride for books with queer rep, and #pridemonthbooks for specifically pride month reads!

feel free to drop me a line anytime!! <3

[system-of-cells-interlinked]

If this scene is not in the movie I'm gonna break things btw

[the-murderbot-chatlogs]

yall combat secunits have it worse actually. they're constructs too. they have the same capacity for emotions as regular secunits. they still see the consequenses of their orders and they still have to feel about it and they still have no way to escape those orders. murderbot is scared of them because it's not immune to propaganda and in fact i'd say it's especially susceptible to the propaganda spread by popular media as that was its very first introduction to the real world. its mindset is shaped by the tropes and norms presented by soap operas. it's just filled the role of "evil secunit" with combat secunits because it knows firsthand that regular secunits don't fit that trope. but it's still a trope. all constructs and even most machine intelligences possess the capacity for free will, and that includes the decision to hurt or help. don't take the unreliable narrator's opinions as fact

[what-even-is-thiss]

So many people who wanna argue with me about King Arthur clearly haven’t read the actual medieval texts. I know this because if they actually read the source material they’d know that when it comes to King Arthur, everything is made up and the points don’t matter.

[what-even-is-thiss]

“King Arthur couldn’t have fought the Roman Empire”

Try telling that to Geoffrey of Monmouth.

[what-even-is-thiss]

“You can’t just add in new characters”

Try telling that to Chrétien de Troyes. Aka the guy who invented Lancelot.

“Arthurian canon isn’t French”

Clearly you don’t own an air fryer. Also clearly you haven’t read literally anything written after the Norman invasion.

“Arthur needs to be a knight in shining armor”

If he lived at all he lived almost a thousand years before widespread adaption of plate armor.

“He can’t be in plate armor because that’s anachronistic”

Try telling that to Thomas Mallory.

“The fairy stuff is leftover from Celtic myth/Celtic gods)

A lot of that stuff including the lady of the lake wasn’t added until the 12th century actually. Centuries after England was christianized. It was also mostly added by the French poets.

[what-even-is-thiss]

God, I sure hope so.

[lovesongs4robots]

Ratthi, man. like, with everyone else it's all about recognizing murderbot's autonomy and personhood and rights and all of that, but Ratthi, he just jumps headfirst into My Friend The Gun. such an adoring little brother energy. Can I follow you please My Friend The Gun? Hey how are you feeling My Friend The Gun you're kind of scaring the rest of my friends with your brooding gloomy attitude and, well. also with being a gun. (not me though, i'm like, totally super brave, just so you know) (you're very cool i think. do you think i'm cool? you don't have to answer). Hey, check it out - I got a gun too, just like you (ok ok I'll put it down). oh my god OH MY GOD My Friend The Gun likes the show I like?? can it BE any cooler? Are we about to become Best Friends (please say yes)

...and then just as he thought his Friend The Gun is dead and gone and feeling so powerless to do anything about it, he sees it, and he is so excited, but it's not Friend anymore. it's just The Gun.

[shirehobbit]

not only does Snow kill all of Haymitch’s loved ones in 12, he erases any evidence of his love in the games. no footage of him and Ampert - any interaction let alone Haymitch raging after his death. nothing of his care for Lou Lou. gone is his attempt to save the district 11 kids. they don’t show his little doves. him and Maysilee look like barely allies instead of found family. the only necklace left to him after the games is his own.

Burned and buried mementos indeed.

[mirkwoodest]

Obsessed with the fact that this really happened😳

[wan-shailu]

When I was a student at Oxford, both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were lecturing there, Lewis magnificently and Tolkien badly and inaudibly, and the climate of opinion was such that people explained Lewis’s children’s books by saying ‘It’s his Christianity, you know,’ as if the books were the symptom of some disease, while of Tolkien they said he was wasting his time on hobbits when he should have been writing learned articles…

I imagine I caused Tolkien much grief by turning up to hear him lecture week after week, while he was trying to wrap his lectures up after a fortnight and get on with The Lord of the Rings (you could do that in those days, if you lacked an audience, and still get paid). I sat there obdurately despite all his mumbling and talking with his face pressed up to the blackboard, forcing him to go on expounding every week how you could start with a simple quest-narrative and, by gradually twitching elements as it went along, arrive at the complex and entirely different story of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale – a story that still contains the excitement of the quest-narrative that seeded it. What little I heard of all this was wholly fascinating.

– Diana Wynne Jones

[elodieunderglass]

I think about this a lot, often in the context of "the remarkable amount of resources that Tolkien was able to funnel into LotR" but often because I just really like Diana Wynne Jones

[skygemspeaks]

i love how much of an unreliable narrator maia is

it's not something that's ever really, like, addressed? but it's something you slowly come to realize over the course of tge, and the most clear example we get of how unreliable he is is through his relationship with beshelar.

maia has this tendency to believe that everyone hates him by default. and for good reason!! i mean, after the childhood he's had? and to be fair to him, there ARE a lot of people that will hate him at first meeting, just by virtue of the circumstances of his birth, and the circumstances of his ascension to the throne, and just plain old racism.

but there's also a good number of people who are either neutral or even favourable of him from the beginning, but he has a hard time actually recognizing this.

throughout a good portion of the book, maia is constantly describing beshelar as being disapproving, and thinking about how much beshelar must look down on him or despair over what a horrible and incompetent ruler he is. as the book goes on though, it does become clear that beshelar is actually quite fond of maia and has a lot of respect for him, not just as his emperor, but also as the young man he spends the most time with other than cala. and throughout all this, his behaviour doesn't really change much. it's more that maia learns to read him better. and when you as the reader look back on the events earlier in the book with a clearer understanding of who beshelar is as a person, you start to realize that he was likely never as harsh and judgemental as maia had imagined. he's just upright, and proper, and terribly earnest in his own way. but he's also very keen on behaving properly according to his station, and that can come off as him being unfeeling.

once you realize that, you start to wonder who else in maia's court perhaps wasn't quite so antagonistic of him as we were led to believe.

i, for one, don't think esaran actually hates maia. sure she was a little prickly at the beginning, but from everything we know about varenechibel, he wasn't exactly a gracious employer, and esaran was going through a lot when she first met maia - they'd only known about the crash for a few hours at that point, and the household wasn't ready for their new emperor to have arrived yet, and she was likely bracing for a dressing down. varenechibel may not have been the kindest ruler, but he was the devil she knew. she knew how to manage him and how to minimize the damage. she knew how to protect her people from him. but this new young emperor. he's an unknown. and he has every reason to be angry and bitter and triumphant, after a childhood spent in relegation.

by the morning of maia's birthday, she seems to have mellowed out a lot. she doesn't seem hostile anymore, at least. I like to think that over time she will become just as fiercely loyal to maia as the rest of his household is.

[findafight]

In my heart I know this happened at some PresAux gathering

[ashadowonsnow]

I remember the racy, dreamy, light-headed pleasure of that morning's haul in the sunlight over the abysses.

The Left Hand of Darkness

[swordrogue]

I love Gideon the Ninth because you open with Harrow and Gideon going into Canaan House terrified of having their Big Con pretending to be a normal necromancer and cavalier primary, right? Classic stuff, high tension, lovely. But by the end of the book you realize like half the group is doing this.

Cam and Palamedes have gone about this all the wrong way, they're probably only there to meet Dulcie frankly. Cam sticks out like a sore thumb because she's a damn good fighter but has never learned a fencing rule in her life and also they might be up for some light treason while they're flaunting the natural order of their binary gender roles. Then of course the Tridentarii and their pet Babs are there with an even BIGGER secret with HIGHER stakes and honestly they're doing a shit job at covering it up. But no one catches on bc they're too busy gawking Abigail and Magnus who aren't young anymore and can't be bothered to hide their taboo, rules breaking heresy.

Then there's Dulcinea—who, as you may recall,

[badgerjaw]

some of my favorite little things about harrow that go overlooked a lot:

she runs hot enough to notice through several layers of clothing

she wears gloves and takes them off to fidget with them

a lot of her fidgeting is hand based, such as bending back ends of fingers against each other, nail biting, finger/hand/wrist manipulation often hidden in her sleeves (modern benefit of hoodies btw)

she keeps a diary (i’m amused by how little this factors into fanworks despite the potential it has, i’m personally going to start incorporating it more)

the textual reality of harrow’s relationship to food (making jokes about it or otherwise not engaging with it seriously counts as overlooking it i’m afraid)

she’s almost painfully self-aware of what she does and why she does it (her interaction with ortus in htn ch35 pg326 is a good example that i personally keep returning to, but the bubble chapters are full of illuminating harrow introspection as a whole)

harrow is an unreliable judge when talking about her skills outside of her Main Skill, and this is bc she is comparing them to her mastery in her Main Skill in which she is a genius and trailblazer

“Her development suffered from neither ego nor apprehension.” (htn ch3 pg49)

[beroebluejeans]

Whenever I am thinking very hard about The Locked Tomb, I find it important to remind myself Tamsyn Muir did compare the series to the KFC Double Down.

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/muir_interview/

[cheetopuffpaws]

Never NOT reblogging this every time I come across it

[floral-ashes]

Always worth re-sharing this.

Trans Rules of Engagement - INTO

We are all flawed, traumatized humans at the end of their rope.

[headedoutleft]

Principles

1. We are all flawed, traumatized humans at the end of their rope. Many of our actions say more about the conditions we live under than who we are as people.

2. No one is disposable. No one is unsalvageable.

3. Life holds greater value than being right or comfortable. Hurt is preferable to death.

4. No one should be deprived of community.

5. Harm does not require further harm. Punishment does not equate protection or healing.

[houndmother]

read this one too. while i’m giving homework.

[notquiteaghost]

i am getting so very caught on gurathin putting murderbot In His Brain. for obvious reasons if you know me at all. i really need there to be more implications to that than just 'weird opinion/memory bleed', like. don't get me wrong i love the opinion/memory bleed!! but. also. they were already uniquely equipped to Understand each other, in ways no one else they know is, and now they were briefly one entity... gurathin does not need to look for murderbot, gurathin knows exactly where it is going and does not need to put in effort to work out its path. gurathin is getting kidnapped with mensah, probably, because he knows what it'll do and what graycris will do in response. once they're both back on preservation they're finishing each other's sentences. from different rooms. murderbot turns up to a social gathering holding the beverage gurathin has been idly craving all day. gurathin has permanent custody of one of murderbot's drones. if you message one of them in the feed it's 70/30 which of them replies, again entirely regardless of their relative physical locations. but also murderbot's location is probably within five metres of gurathin. murderbot paints its nails, gurathin's clothing triples in pockets. it's actually lowkey genuinely concerning everyone else because it's becoming less 'codepedent honeymoon period' and more 'identity collapse death spiral' and neither of them want to hear it at all. their first actual fight is about the network effect survey because murderbot can't go alone (without gurathin) but also they can't leave mensah alone (without murderbot or gurathin), & oh BOY does being separated add several fun layers to All Of That. immediate divergence for system collapse because gurathin gets onboard ART and flattens murderbot to the floor and says Start the trauma treatment or I'm pulling your neural wiring out with my teeth.

[notquiteaghost]

bookmarking this thought for when i do not need to leave for work in 17 minutes. list of things they know about each other at the start vs. after hardwiring vs. after the memory mindmeld

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

Honestly we already knew that part of Harrow’s obsession with Gideon is that Gideon doesn’t lie to her but coupled with the reveal in Harrow The Ninth that Harrow has the unholy combination of being both psychotic and haunted and holy hell no wonder Harrow clings to her like rot to a wound. Imagine suffering delusions in a place where everyone will automatically agree with you. Imagine being told how wonderful you are constantly while also being told you’re the product of a genocide. Imagine puppeting the corpses of your parents for years and everyone tells you they’re still alive.

It’s mentioned that Harrow often used Crux as a reality check and that’s why she’s so attached to him, and let’s face it, Gideon acting out can’t have been great at creating a stable environment for Harrow to draw from. But even if he can tell her whether she’s hallucinating or not, Crux still worships her and that makes him inherently unreliable. Gideon loves Harrow’s hate because at least she gave her attention. Harrow loves Gideon’s hate because at least she hated her clean.

[clockedtomb]

As a person with, as they say, the right kind of body, Harrow the Ninth is genuinely extremely good psychosis representation and maybe the only media I've ever seen that really gets it right. I do not know if this explains her liking Gideon for me, but I do exclusively date people who would tell me something painful rather than lie to me, so maybe.

[avatar-roko]

the most unrealistic thing about the locked tomb is that no one ever loses these glasses