Slightly Biased Book Reviews

[slightlybiasedbookreviews]

Books read in June 2026

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson 🎵 read by Bernadette Dunne 📚 (finished in May, missed on last post)

Murder By Memory by Olivia Waite 🎵 read by Blair Baker 📚 🏳️‍🌈

Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle 🎵 read by Mara Wilson 📚 🏳️‍🌈

Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot by Alexis Hall 🎵 read by Samara MacLaren 📚🏳️‍🌈

A Power Unbound by Freya Marske 🎵 read by Josh Dylan 📚🏳️‍🌈

Passing Through a Prairie Country by Dennis E Staples 🎵 read by Charlotte Flyte 📚🏳️‍🌈

Alice Isn't Dead by Joseph Fink 🎵 read by Jasika Nicole 📚🏳️‍🌈

The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling🎵 read by Barrie Kreinik 📚🏳️‍🌈

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir🎵 read by Moira Quirk 📚🏳️‍🌈

Currently reading

Dracula by Bram Stoker📱 Dracula Daily

Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown 📖📚

The Spirit Bares Its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White 🎵 read by Raphael Corkhill 📚 🏳️‍🌈

[salazar-bollinger]

[rebeccasteventaylor]

Aw, Quincey Morris saying he’s going to have ‘a pretty lonely walk between here and kingdom come’ but he spends those days surrounded by friends, fighting beside those friends, dies to protect them, and dies in their arms.

Being turned down by Lucy didn’t make him lonely, it made him even more loved and gave him a family.

[godzilla-reads]

Finding comfort in reading a book a friend told me about.

📖 Sandry’s Book by Tamora Pierce (The Circle of Magic Quartet #1)

[sallyisdrawing]

Ninth Saint

[cover-art-showdown]

Round One, Match 742

Which cover do you prefer?

O Pescador

Human Acts

Remaining time: 5 days 1 hour

O Pescador / The Fisherman (John Langan), DarkSide Books 2022. Cover by Retina 78.

Human Acts / 소년이 온다 (Han Kang), Hogarth 2017. Cover by Michael Morris.

[parkchanwoohoo]

[homoidiotic]

Gary Bowen in Transgender Tapestry 1997 (read some of his books free here)

[wiigiwaamcore]

omg, did not know his books were on archive.org, I went through so much trouble finding paper copies via ILL and scanning them hahaha. heads up if you're going to read Diary of a Vampire, it IS vampire erotica (with some interesting gender shapeshifting involved) but uh, trigger warning for incest. Queer Destinies has some fun short stories in it, esp scifi/fantasy type of things. You can also read a personal essay he wrote about being a mixed-race Apache gay trans man online here.

[retroscifiart]

Art by Darrell K Sweet for A Golem in the Gears by Piers Anthony (1986)

[70sscifiart]

I'm hard at work, writing a post about frogs in retro sci-fi art for my art blog newsletter...

[strangeboneyuriwoman]

My favorite thing about the “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!” tagline is that every part of it is technically wrong. Only one of the two main lesbians is a necromancer, the gothic palace is not haunted, and they are on Earth for 90% of the book.

[pluggedintosaverockandroll]

Dracula Daily Scarf - Week 9 Update

There is a rudimentary idea growing in Jack's mind.

[Colors below the cut] [What is a Dracula Daily Scarf?] [Scarf tag]

Jonathan Harker - Red (Bordeaux)

Mina Murray Harker - Purple (Grape)

Lucy Westenra - Pink (Antique Rose)

Jack Seward - Green (Hunter Green)

Arthur Holmwood - Blue (Open Sea)

Quincey Morris - Yellow (Dark Yellow)

[teenboystuff]

So the subplot of Holes is that Kate Barlow deals with the politically-sanctioned execution of her black boyfriend—who unlawfully kissed a white woman who was in love with him!!!—by becoming a serial killer who targets racist/sexist white dudes who harassed her, were rejected, then went after her boyfriend as revenge from the depths of the “friend zone”.

Go off Louis Sachar, let em know!

[anzozi-everywhere]

Don’t forget the main plot was a damning satire of the brokenness and inherent racism of the American justice and prison systems! Louis Sachar does not fuck about

[galaxianbitch]

It always fuck me up that older people don’t understand how this story is as essential to most american children as Gone with the Wind or Mary Poppins was.

[angrynebula]

unironically, this is one of the best books/movies for young people that exists

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

Kissing Kate Did Nothing Wrong

[aimmyarrowshigh]

And the technical writing of Holes is perfect. Like, it’s one of the most technically-perfect books ever written. Basically any plotting or pacing or characterization issue you’re having, read Holes and really study how Sachar did it. THE LIZARDS! THE LIZARDS.

[whilereadingandwalking]

the twisty prophecies! the lizards! the lipstick! the humor! this book doesn’t play. a true classic.

[1234713]

and! in a twist, it’s actually the most accurate depiction of archaeology across pretty much all media!

[doveywovy]

no matter how hard i try, nothing i write will ever be as fucked up as the stuff somebody who thinks they're creating a Wholesome AU with unexamined beliefs will make.

[jerboaoa]

couldn't leave this in the tags

[papenathys]

So was anybody going to tell me that the insanely hot butch lesbian in Feast While You Can is of Indian Bengali descent or was I just supposed to discover that after giggling and kicking my feet through 200+ pages of the novel.

[drchucktingle]

taking a break from tour posting for this important reminder

[unnamedmedicalprofessional2]

To be fair to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, if I wrote some pulp short stories for a quick buck and an obsessive fandom sprung up around it at a time when fandom culture as we now know it didn't really exist yet, and I had to witness people being insane about my characters while having very little precedent for what the fuck was going on, I would also be confused and frightened and desperately trying to escape from the situation I'd ended up in.

[meduseld]

Well. They yassified Carrie White:

https://ew.com/carrie-tv-series-first-look-mike-flanagan-modern-twist-exclusive-12015053

Like..........

She's not even naked or bleeding, the fuck are these girls even recording???

Half of them are showing less skin than she is!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[meduseld]

Fucking:

It's the same picture. What are we doing here.

[meduseld]

Just make an original story and gooooooooooo. Carrie snaps after years of bullying, because as a kid she started preaching the gospel at the lunch room and they laughed at her. She was ALREADY a long standing target when the story opens. And also, her main bully was at home, but suddenly the iconically unhinged Mrs White is. Not abusive?

WHY MAKE CARRIE THEN. AT ALL

[shelterwoodpod]

Carrie is, like, thee book about how we fail fat weird girls with abusive parents. Shaving all the edges off doesn't just make a worse story, it ignores the fundamentally ugly truth that we STILL FAIL girls who are too ugly or strange to be considered worthy of sympathy, leaving them to the whims of parents who may well hate them. I don't understand why Flanagan has become so pathologically incapable of letting horror stories just BE DARK, but it's really de-fanging a lot of stories for a lot of people! Hill House is not about the power of family it's about how lonely people will literally kill themselves to feel any sense of belonging, no matter how fleeting. Carrie is not about a mother and daughter doing their best, it's about the real and present hatred that ESPECIALLY ISOLATIONIST CHRISTIANS have for any young woman and especially young women who are fat, weird, and/especially or refuse to conform. Much like the society at large. I'm losing my mind