There's A Stack of Books About a Mile High

Book blog of piratesandwaffles; fantasy, sci-fi, history, art, YA, graphic novels, and more

[treehousereads]

Vampires, Footnotes, and Secret Histories: How Carmen Maria Machado Reinvented “Carmilla”

This review concerns two different texts: Carmilla, a novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, serialized in 1871-2, and the edited, introduced t

[darling-child-tisarwat]

Ok I got the ARC let’s fucking goooooo (I’ll post this again with results once the book’s been released for a week lol)

[annleckie]

I see some squares that will definitely be called, but I'm not sure anyone's getting a bingo....

Of course, I may have forgotten something, or be seeing it from an odd angle. I still kind of feel like Translation State is a cozy, wholesome kind of book, even factoring in the cannibalism. So, I might not be the best judge.

[annleckie]

Soooooooon

[bludraws094]

i love fake plot holes

little inconsistencies that at first you assume "oh, the author must have fucked up", but then later on you realize that no, it was on purpose, they wanted you to think they fucked up but they hadnt

[masterboa]

related: when you think "this has Implications the author didn't think about" and then it turns out the author was thinking about them the whole time

[barleynaut]

@derinthescarletpescatarian callout post

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Unfortunately if you write like this it does backfire eventually because after a few rounds of "it wasn't a mistake, I wanted you to think about it and was aiming to address this the whole time!", the readers (reasonably) assume that anything incongruous is on purpose and you are never allowed to make a real mistake or not notice an awkward implication ever again.

[longseasons]

all these excellent books come from some random penguins house?

[treehousereads]

[treehousereads]

My dear friend corrected this review/blurb/summary because you really SHOULD KNOW what you are getting into

[c-leadraw]

Winter's Orbit by @avoliot

[treehousereads]

From Tiffany Daniel's post here!

[shxpeshifterr]

[treehousereads]

Am very excited to read Jennifer Dawson's The Ha-Ha.

However, MUST RAGE immediately about the intro by Melissa Broder. Never read her writing and cannot imagine doing so now. At the first level she commits the usual crime of an intro by giving away the whole plot (but many do this! I cannot hold it against her). Worse, she uses quotations around... multiple single words... in a sentence. Like: 'She conveys a reverence for the "genuine questions" about patients' rights' -- makes it seem like sarcasm?! Quotations of single words or common phrases are for people who don't know how essays and citations work, which SPEAKING OF, the pinnacle of laziness leads the whole essay. Broder quotes Google AI (no fucking joke, I didn't even put it in quotes) as to the definition of the titular ha-ha and I cannot believe the combo of starting your essay with a definition, choosing to QUOTE AI FOR THAT DEFINITION and apparently sharing with us that you didn't even bother to look that up until you were writing this essay. Because surely a person who had learned that definition from context clues and the dictionary would not be quoting GOOGLE AI in their litcrit. For crying out loud. If you are going to bother to quote the DEFINITION OF A WORD, perhaps because it is so deeply archaic to you that you can't imagine that not being something that needs no citation, you could quote an actual dictionary or farm-architecture source. But whatever. What is literature but something to be interpreted through AI.

[annleckie]

Yesterday I got a notification that a package was going to be delivered today. I had not ordered anything, so I was hoping it would be PAPER ARCS OF RADIANT STAR AND IT WAS

[annleckie]

and in other all caps news I JUST SAW A SCREENSHOT OF THE AUDIBLE LISTING AND IT SAYS ADJOA ANDOH IS NARRATING THIS IS NOT A DRILL

LOBOPOD RAVE🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐🦐

and onions just because 🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅

[dancecinema]

GREGORY HINES & MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV White Nights (1985) dir. Taylor Hackford

[jumpingd33r]

[skelotan]

This is what happens when you say yes to everything at the checkout.

[lovinglystar]

[everina-maxwell-updates]

Cover is UP! The stunning art is by @eliotbaum.

Call Me Traitor is the story of a living weapon fighting her way towards personhood and the awful lesbian she's doing it with. I keep calling it 'the sapphic Winter Soldier wizards' book despite being told we can't put that in the blurb.

STORY:

En is a weapon. Battle spells are carved into her skin, she’s trained to work through pain, and she’s magically compelled with loyalty to the archmagi. When she's sent on a mission to retrieve a group of infamous traitors from exile in a land of unpredictable and deadly magic, she's forced to team up with a common soldier to have any chance of success, or survival.

Tamol is a disaster. En isn’t fooled by the soldier’s silver tongue and good looks. Tamol is flighty, cowardly and the worst soldier En has ever met. But she’s also brilliant at magic and kinder than En has any right to expect. When she saves En’s life, it takes everything En has not to start falling for her. That is, until En discovers Tamol is one of the very traitors she seeks.

The empire never forgets. Years ago, the exiled traitors were just normal students with a vision for a better kingdom. They put their lives on the line fighting for it and lost. So they were exiled to the Far Peninsula to die. But now, the empire discovers the traitors may yet live, and they’ve unearthed something in the wilderness that the archmagi will pay any price to get.

But the might of an unforgiving empire isn’t the greatest force in all the land. Something monstrous is living in the Far Peninsula that does not discriminate between soldiers, traitors, and kings.

Out October! Preorders (every one of them highly treasured for obscure publishing industry reasons) are up here!

[avoliot]

So this is the book I have spent the last few years on! I think it's the best thing I've written. I am both nervous and hugely excited. Reblogs massively appreciated if that is your thing, and if you are inclined to preorder, they do help me out a lot with my publisher, but I completely understand that not everyone is in a position to. All interest treasured and appreciated!

(Also: HOW gorgeous is this art! I am unspeakably in love with it! How it captures these two idiots so accurately, and the incredible dawn clouds and the mountain and the sea. I pushed for Eliot Baum for the cover ever since he was among the initial artist suggestions because of the gorgeous way he does characters, and this both showed me that was the right choice and also completely blew me away. Highly recommend the follow: @eliotbaum. I am also a big fan of the title design, which is by Jess Kiley!)

[finelythreadedsky]

your tags. yeah. it's not that they are progressive or feminist or even written by women -- but they are doing something with women that is complex and worth paying attention to, and in many cases they are the reason we have a version of a particular woman's story at all

yeah that's one of the marketing conceits of the myth retelling novel industrial complex that bothers me, it's the framing as if no one has ever paid attention to these female characters who are buried unnoticed in the myths when often the most complete or the most authoritative version of the character's story that survives from antiquity is in tragedy, a genre that is notoriously interested in bringing female characters out of the house and putting them on stage in active roles, and in using those female characters to explore issues of gender and the place of women in contemporary society.

like to a certain degree it makes sense for the homeric women who don't appear in (extant) tragedy, like briseis or the hanged women in odyssey 22, but we have stories where clytemnestra and deianira and medea insist on make narrative space for themselves to tell their own stories from their own perspectives, refusing to be silent about the violence their society inflicts upon women and the lasting damage it does. they're called aeschylus' agamemnon and sophocles' trachiniae and euripides' medea. and maybe you want to retell those stories for modern audiences, changing things or emphasizing different aspects of them! and that's great! but framing it as if they've been ignored and their stories are as-yet-untold is just not accurate, and it's a cheap way to paint your work as innovative and subversive.

[jpechacek]

hawthorn

[maryrobinette]

What MRK Read and Loved in 2025

I read some truly wonderful books in 2025, and I want to share them (and my reviews!) with you. When you click on a book below, it will take you to Bookshop.org, so you can support both fabulous authors and independent bookstores. Please note, these are affiliate links. It does not impact your cost, and it helps fund my own writing. Black Water Sister Zen Cho Zen Cho has an uncanny gift for…

What MRK Read and Loved in 2025