When you've got a library card

Having fun isn't hard, as the homies used to say 📚 sideblog for all my book obsessions

[primulaceas]

James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

[sunflowermp4]

"RICHARD GOLDSTEIN: When I consider what a risk it must have been to write about homosexuality when you did...

JAMES BALDWIN: You're talking about Giovanni's Room. Yeah, that was rough. But I had to do it to clarify something for myself.

GOLDSTEIN: What was that?

BALDWIN: Where I was in the world. I mean, what I'm made of. Anyway, Giovanni's Room is not really about homosexuality. It's the vehicle through which the book moves. Go Tell It on the Mountain, for example, is not about a church, and Giovanni is not really about homosexuality. It's about what happens to you if you're afraid to love anybody. Which is much more interesting than the question of homosexuality."

"Go The Way Your Heart Beats: An Interview with James Baldwin", The Village Voice, 1984

[soggypages]

Hmm I want to slurp James Baldwin's writing like a warm soup. or maybe sip on it like a red wine.

[reasonsforhope]

"The trouble is we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."

—Ursula K. Le Guin

[rosenkranz-does-things]

finished my whiteboard doodle of Paige (b&w version under the cut)

[thomasmomwell]

can't get over having "is one of the most popular Men’s Hockey RPF writers on Archive of Our Own, with over two million words and twice the page views of the next most popular writer" as your author bio on Penguin Random House dot com. girl at any point as you sat there collating other writers' page views did you doubt yourself or

[crashtesting]

I feel like Octavia Butler does not get enough credit for her work in deeply uncomfortable and thought-provoking erotic power dynamics.

(and I mean that with the greatest appreciation--I would've read her works much sooner if I knew how weird some of them get)

[buckmink]

One thing I think about constantly with Octavia E Butler’s work is the recurring theme of resentment of being dependent in a symbiotic relationship especially when it’s unexpectedly thrust on one party (the origin of the pattern and the accidental ensnarement of the original 5 telepaths who eventually become more stable with Mary during her transition in Mind of my Mind) or that party has limited choice in the matter (Lilith and the other humans with the Oankali who are able to extend their lifespan and cure grievous injuries and illnesses but as a result of the union she and the other humans are biologically unable to leave their alien mates for too long). Like, yes, they get numerous benefits and their quality of life is greatly improved but there’s a limit to the amount of freedom that party has as a result of the relationship and yet they cannot escape it.

[knownqueerbaiter]

SEPARATE CHURCH (AO3) AND STATE (TRADPUB)

[glavilio]

[gcantread]

Illustrations by John Burgoyne from The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer 1/3

[honeybaskethilt]

"Why then have we permitted the dominance of economic systems that commoditize everything? That create scarcity instead of abundance, that promote accumulation rather than sharing? We've surrendered our values to an economic system that actively harms what we love. Our metrics of economic value like GDP count only monetary value in the marketplace, of that which can be bought and sold. There is no room in these equations for the economic value of clean air and carbon sequestration and the ineffable riches of a forest filled with birdsong."

The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer

[ordinaryheavenn]

the serviceberry - robin wall kimmerer

[soggypages]

Robin Wall Kimmerer audiobooks are top tier, I could listen to her talk for hours

[stranglingfruitloop]

"Yeah, with regards to the Crawler—growing up, I was drawn to Salvador Dalí. He studied the old masters and acquired techniques so that he could render reality as reality. And then he chose not to. Even when he didn’t, there are still certain elements of the paintings that display the skill of someone who can do mimetic reality, just applied to this larger canvas with a different purpose.

The Crawler is composed of all these incredibly minute, specific details of texture and appearance. They’re kaleidoscoping—some readers use the word 'abstract.' But in actual fact, it is what the biologist is seeing and experiencing. If she has any failing, it’s because she’s trying to convey the tactile experience of constant morphing. That’s a challenge for the novelist: you have to have readers experience it viscerally. You cheat because you can never really be in a character’s head. The biologist, left to her own devices and not required to be the protagonist of my novel, would be doing field notes. But a character is an artificial construct. You’re not including all of them, just trying to get as close as you can so that you’re still creating narrative as opposed to moments.

[James Joyce’s] Ulysses probably gets closest to recording moments. I admire it, but it’s also hard to read because you don’t know what has importance and what doesn’t. To some degree, Ulysses abdicates the novelist’s responsibility to actually choose the elements that are in the novel in favor of some other idea of what a novel is. I admire that as well. Novels are made of approximations—that includes the description of the Crawler. In theory, the biologist might have later done field notes that were more clinical, not this 'in the moment.' But for purposes of a novel, which has to have scenes, you get panoply, montage."

Jeff Vandermeer, The Hegemony of What Was Real, in LARB, November 29, 2024.

[mal-studyblr]

hey quick PSA but “reading before bed to wind down” only works if you’re normal about books btw. if you aren’t you are going to end up awake at 2:52am after finishing the whole book just trust me on this one

[catie-does-things]

if you want your female characters to both have agency in the story and be complex human individuals then sometimes bad things have to be their fault