reddy reads

📚 books books books 📚 This blog contains opinions and reflections from a reader's perspective, intended for other readers. If you are the author of any books discussed here, kindly refrain from reading, thank you :)

[allsortsoffuckedup]

Hey hey, as a librarian, can I just say don’t pace yourself at the library. I get a lot of customers saying “oh I shouldn’t get too many books out at once” but like you should!!!! Max out your card, take everything we have on a subject you’re interested in, make a book fort in your home. We love that shit! It doesn’t matter if you read them or not; just take them for an adventure and bring them back whenever they’re due!

For public libraries, one of the ways we secure funding year to year is lending. Governments don’t want to fund more books if they’re not being used and the way we measure use is by issues. Regardless of whether you read it or not, whether you have it for a day or a month, if you issue it to your library card, we get the stats! It makes the library look good!

Help your local library; get books out even if you know you can’t read them all!

[lestatfag]

the man who owns and runs the thai restaurant in my town knows me by name. he is one of the kindest and most thoughtful men i know. i started ordering from his place back in january, which was when i got my fibromyalgia diagnosis. back then i was using a walker, had limited mobility in my entire body but especially my hands, and was very visibly in pain. i always ordered the same thing: yellow curry with no meat, potatoes and carrots only (i have texture and other dietary issues). he always made it a point to make sure i could get out the door and carry the food safely. he had his workers package the food so that it was easier for me to open. as i kept coming back and i told him a little bit about my health status, he would always encourage me to keep going. he told me about how the spices he used were good for inflammation and began to edit the recipe just for me so that spices that were even better for fighting inflammation were used. he’d give me extra portions and despite the fact that i would tip every time, i realized later that he never charged my card for them. as time went on and my condition began to get better, especially with the help of a physical therapist, he would make encouraging remarks and tell me how happy he was for me. the day i came in without my walker, he practically jumped for joy, and despite my insistence, he gave me my meal for free that day. i continue to make progress with my conditions and i continue to go to the thai place. this man who does not know me personally and who i hardly know anything about is one of my favorite people. it’s interactions with humans like these that make loving life easier. and his curry really does help my chronic condition. it’s comfort food taken to the next level.

[amovingmess]

This is what I think about when people ask what the meaning of life is

[reddy-for-more]

Romancing the vote is doing its thing again! I love to check out the offerings. (Links to the listings) There are handmade goods and lots of books (ARCs, out of print, signed editions, annotated by the author) and lots of reference and consultation offerings.

[reluctanttree]

i know everyone posts this one cause its just so well written but im still going to cause damn

[bloodydamnreaperofmars]

The Catalan Discworld edition is the best edition ever and you won't change my mind...

LOOK HOW PRETTY THEY ARE!!!

[remnantglow]

those foolish lilac eyes o|-<

[reddy-reads]

Well fuck Balin

This is one of my favorite lines! It makes me smile every time

thoughts with spoilers for murderbot 6

Reasons "Well fuck Balin" is a great line

JollyBaby going "nah Balin is a manager" and MB being like "wait Balin doesn't lift heavy things because it's a manager? UGH" is just funny and relatable

It's also MEMORABLE

This means that later on, when we learn more about Balin, I'm not like "uh whomst the fuck?"

(I have a so-so memory and frequently struggle to keep track of different characters' names)

AND it's important that we remember Balin

I seriously think this one line is just... really incredible from a "how does the story fit together" point of view.

It's memorable, but it doesn't draw too much attention to itself. It's short and unobtrusive.

It's memorable because it's funny. It's not obvious like a character, I dunno, ominously standing in the shadows with its eyes/indicator lights turning red.

It helps the story function. Imagine how much worse the story would function if Balin was completely unmemorable.

And that's why "Well fuck Balin" is one of my favorite murderbot lines of all time.

[whumpster-fire]

Tbh I can't be mad at Balin for going "Not my job" either because yes, it would be an incredibly obnoxious thing for a manager to do under normal circumstances, and yes it is physically more capable of doing that than the humans, but it's also absolutely the bot equivalent of asking the only woman on the team to make coffee or clean things suspiciously often and Balin was working at that port for like 40 years. It probably got real sick of being asked to move heavy things that were only tangentially related to its job because it was the nearest bot instead of the humans calling someone whose job it actually was.

It's a microaggression, Murderbot knows it's a microaggression because it's annoyed about being asked to move random furniture when it's a Security Consultant, and then it gets pissy about Balin the Customs Inspector or whatever being asked to do it because MB is unfortunately kind of chauvinistic about bots so it did the exact same microaggression itself

[reddy-reads]

I love that!!! Thank you thats a really good insight

[reddy-reads]

Finished The Bezzle (Cory Doctorow) it was very good

Next options:

* someone you can build a nest in

* how to lose a goblin in 10 days

* a wizard of earthsea

* dragonfruit

[reddy-reads]

Books that I own that I havent read (yet)

Dont worry I have wayyyYYYY more than this 🥲 a whole shelf on my bookshelf is just books i havent read yet

[reddy-reads]

I finished the baby dragon cafe!

[reddy-reads]

Just got back from the library. Borrowed 11 more books. Spent half the money in my bank account on groceries ouch. Bless the library. Went with fantasy this time since the mysteries arent quite hitting. Looked for some Hugo winners but then ended up just browsing

[reddy-reads]

state of the bookshelf 2026.6.12

You have to understand, I'm a person who normally has 13 alarms set over the course of the day in order to keep on track. My work days are very structured. Without my work structure (which extends before and after the workday to stuff like meal prepping), it's a dice roll whether I'll even take a shower

So I went to the library and borrowed 12 books. (Okay, I borrowed 16 books, fine). here are my thoughts so far

The Baby Dragon Cafe, AT Quireshi - I own this one; it's not a library book. I've been trying to finish it since January and I'm 40 pages out. It was a gift, and what's worse it was a gift I picked out for myself. I am a prisoner of my own greed

The Bezzle, Cory Doctorow - another gift I picked out, but more recently so the guilt isn't as thick on the tome

The Clocks, Agatha Christie - just finished this one. That was SOME BULLSHIT, I gotta say. The idea of the simple crime that is done up to look more elaborate is good. The spy stuff and long-lost secret parent thing? What???

The Big Four, Agatha Christie - just DNF'ed one. As much as I love a book with Hastings, this one isn't for me. Based on an n of 2, Agatha Christie's spy books aren't for me. Also, and I'm not expecting Agatha Christie to be escaping the historical moment in which she lived, I'm not into the whole... thing the characters have going on with Chinese people. It ain't for me.

Hooking for Trouble, Betty Hechtman - nonsense, but the kind I can go along with. It's fun to read a mystery where there's no actual body so there may not have been an actual murder. It's also nice that the main character's response was kind of proportional? At least compared to the 3rd Murder Pie book where the MC was prepared to set herself on fire over a suspected murder with no body. The MC of Hooking for Trouble instead was like "well I'm going to keep snooping but not destroy my own life about it yet"

Pouncing on Murder, Laurie Cass - honestly? Really enjoying it so far. I'm enjoying the way the characters are introduced and given color without getting bogged down in a thousand names of interchangeable white people

My library has a summer reading challenge and the big finish line is 8 books and I've got 3 so far. It's been hard to sit down and make my squirrel brain concentrate long enough to read ANYTHING but I want to try. I miss Book :(

[reddy-reads]

Ended up with 12 books from the library let's see if I grabbed some winners

[superbnature]

Cedar Waxwings by jocelynefeizo1 http://ift.tt/1RM3Kk0

[manyblinkinglights]

#do cedar waxwings ever eat anything besides photogenic red berries#do cedar waxwings ever do anything besides eating photogenic red berries#is there any way this child can get its parent to stop feeding it photogenic red berries

[speciesofleastconcern]

watch how many berries I can cram into this other bird

[fullmetalfisting]

Tbh germ theory DOES sound crazy. Like if you told a regency-era nobleman that tiny creatures lived on the surface of everything and THAT’S what causes consumption, they’d be like “ah, I see you are a lunatic. Would you reside in my hermitage? Rantings and ravings do so amuse my guests”

[mysteryteacup]

But if you told a Medieval person this they would probably go "Ah, so when the miasma settles on surfaces it gains evil life. I understand."

[alarajrogers]

Yeah, actually, it would probably be pretty easy to explain germ theory to a Medieval person as tiny evil spirits that live on everything, but they can be purified by soap and water, or by alcohol, because that is why God has granted us those things. And because they can float in the air, if you cough or sneeze after they have infested you, that can cause them to infest others. And when you are sick, the angels God has deputized to defend the bodies of His beloved children are at war with the evil spirits, and, sadly, sometimes they lose, but the best way to help your angels win their battle is to rest, drink plenty (this would probably be small beer in this time period, not water, because the water was also infested), stay clean, and for the sake of God do not allow anyone to let your blood, for the angels need that blood in their war against the evil spirits. Bloodletting is good for some types of illnesses but not the kinds caused by the tiny evil spirits.

[chekhovs-raygun]

boiling as a sterilization measure is also easy to explain. water returns to the air when heated and it rises as steam back up to the floodgates of heaven; we know God created the world in seven days, He's not up there making more water every time it rains. it circulates. the returning of water to heaven also purifies the water of unclean and malign influences. you know wormy water from a muddy puddle will kill your kid. you know you wouldn't wade into a bog and have a slurp. water that remains in the low places of earth absorbs all that is unclean from our waste and it may also sponge up new diseases from hell, we're not totally sure about that one, but it seems likely. God set up the heavenly water cycle so that the earth's waters wouldn't totally fill up with gunk.

what does this have to do with boiling your surgical tools? well look, the boiling water releases bubbles of steam which carries the malign influences up to heaven. you boil a knife, you send all the miasmic particles off with the steam to heaven. if you rinse the knife off in a bucket the water isn't hot enough, the particles go into the water and then right back on to the knife. you gotta boil it to get the particles all the way away. how can a tool or rag or a bed have miasmic particles on it when you can't smell them? humans have a lousy sense of smell. look at your dog on the hunt. are there no rabbits in the woods just because you can't smell them? we know that miasma is carried on the air, and is what makes stench so dangerous, and we know that humans can't smell worth a damn compared to dogs cats horses etc. a dog can smell if a rat died in a corner of the room last week. you can't. do you think licking the spot where the rat died is going to go well for you? luckily, what humans lack in snout we make up for in brains. we have extra brains where our sniffers should have been. God set that up for a reason.

and why does a rinse with wine spirits work? man, look how fast alcohol evaporates. my guess is that because wine contains a lot more vice than water, it evaporates a whole lot faster, in sort of an equal and opposite way that a rock falls faster than a feather. if you want the miasmic particles to get off there FAST, you dunk it in something that's going back to heaven at a gallop.

what's up with honey? it just preserves things against corruption. doesn't clean them off. honey doesn't evaporate at all. probably because bees don't sin. it's not good for ridding a tool of particles-- it's sticky-- but fine for preserving anything you don't want to go to heaven OR hell. this is why you wash the wound with wine spirits or purified water FIRST, to sluice the miasma out, then slap the honey on AFTER. and boil the damn bandage, too. you wouldn't put a rotten door in a sound doorframe and expect it to keep out bandits, would you? cmon.

[ariaste]

Medieval people also already knew that putting things out in the sun helped to keep them clean (UV radiation killing bacteria). So everyone knows that after you use a butter churn, you rinse it out, give it a scrub, and set it out in the sun to dry, or else it will go sour and everything you make with it will go bad fast. Likewise with when you want to get sheets and clothes really clean and fresh, you boil them with lye soap and then lay them out in the sun to dry.

[cricketcat9]

Medieval paesant: yes, yes, makes total sense

JFK Jr: I take my grandkids to swim in a sewer and dig roadkill

[intimatevoid]

This kind of process is called "headology" in Discworld and is the foundation for an entire branch of witchcraft in the series.

[reddy-reads]

Reading a new cozy whodunnit and I gotta say

Stop! Dating! Cops!

Like damn girl there has to be someone else in town. Especially the grumpy protective controlling angry cops. Ew.

[gingersnapwolves]

The Emperor and His Dragon: Spring Sale!

In celebration of finishing the series, the first four books of the series are on sale for $1.99 a piece if you buy the e-book directly from Lulu!

Book One: The Emperor’s Mirror

A valuable artifact has been stolen from an isolated monastery, and Tallis will have trouble finding it when the temple elder won’t tell him what it is. The monks have good reason to be secretive, given the centuries of religious persecution after the fall of the Emperor who represented their gods. That’s to say nothing of the cult leader enchanting disciples in the next town over, or of the boy they keep hidden underground while they prepare him to be the new Emperor. Tallis, an orphan himself, feels an instant connection with Brannon, the young boy who can channel the power of the gods but is deeply resentful of the monks who have imprisoned him to keep him safe. Tallis soon finds himself struggling to unravel not only a theft, but the murder of the last Emperor, which fractured the world a thousand years before.

Book Two: The Warder’s Oath

Upon graduating from the Warder Academy, Brannon’s first assignment is to stop someone from systematically destroying the monasteries where he grew up. Although still bitter about his treatment at the hands of the monks, Brannon is determined to prove himself as a Warder. Unfortunately for him, he’s not the only one holding a grudge about what happened. With Tallis at his side, Brannon struggles not only to apprehend the criminal, but to fight the men who are determined to make him the Emperor and control his life.

Book Three: The City’s Secrets

As Brannon’s nineteenth birthday approaches, the priests in charge of the old religion are more determined than ever to force him to accept his mantle as Emperor. With Tallis’ assistance, Brannon researches his history and learns more about the machinations of the men who would put him on the throne. Then one of the few people who could reveal the truth to him is murdered, and everyone in the sacred city is a suspect… including Brannon himself.

Book Four: The Oracle's Answer

In the year and a half since Brannon regained the memories of the last Emperor, the world has spiraled into chaos. Civil war is all but certain in multiple Nation-States, and both he and Tallis are being worked to the bone, leaving Brannon no time to search for the Divine Right that will allow him to assume the throne. As if that weren’t bad enough, the cases he and Tallis are being assigned seem hand-picked to prevent him from doing just that. The case assignments are done by the Oracle, one of the three most powerful Warders in the world. If he’s been corrupted, there may be no way to stop him, and the Warders may be torn apart from the inside.

Book Five - and final!: The Dragon's Fate

As Brannon and Tallis search for the Divine Right, strange things are happening in the Nation-States closest to Kan Shou. With their enemies plotting an attack against the Warders, things go from bad to worse when Petrus suddenly disappears. Brannon is caught between his duty as a Warder, his love for the only father he ever knew, and his fate as the Emperor … and time is running out.

These books have it all! Dragons! Magic! Mystery! Romance (of the M/M variety)! Adventure! Found family!

Sale lasts until April 30th - try the first one out today!