the love you find here

30+. INTJ. Previously a Gintama blog, now just sundry vibes

[y-orozuya]

If anyone is looking for a unique sci-fi/fantasy book rec, I've been emotionally victimized by Hiron Ennes' The Works of Vermin and want to spread the pain (+love).

I would describe it as:

85% finding your bearings within the insane setting, which is a city called Tiliard that is embedded inside a partially-dead giant tree trunk. There is a rigid and brutal class hierarchy but also astonishing art, as the populace is obsessed with opera and spectacle. Imagine the most baroque and maximalist fever dream and up it by 50x and that would be but a dim approximation of Tiliard and the author's gorgeous writing. Also the bugs. There are innumerable bugs, including silverfish the size of kittens, edible grease beetles, and giant reality-deforming centipedes.

It's an ensemble cast, but we mainly follow Guy Moulène, a pest exterminator who's not very good at his job and up to his neck in debts but desperate to protect his kid sister from the same fate of being contracted, and Aster Vost, a consumptive perfumer (in a world where scents can physically and mentally alter both the wearer and the scenter) contracted to the city's terrifying Marshal (basically the head of the military) who IS very good at her job.

15% getting punched in the throat with emotions once you've gotten your bearings

It's also very queer and even manages to fit in an obsessive M/M relationship straight out of Chinese webnovels! Truly cannot overstate the multitudes that this book contains

[apoemaday]

The Myth of Innocence

by Louise Glück

One summer she goes into the field as usual stopping for a bit at the pool where she often looks at herself, to see if she detects any changes. She sees the same person, the horrible mantle of daughterliness still clinging to her.

The sun seems, in the water, very close. That’s my uncle spying again, she thinks — everything in nature is in some way her relative. I am never alone, she thinks, turning the thought into a prayer. Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer.

No one understands anymore how beautiful he was. But Persephone remembers. Also that he embraced her, right there, with her uncle watching. She remembers sunlight flashing on his bare arms.

This is the last moment she remembers clearly. Then the dark god bore her away.

She also remembers, less clearly, the chilling insight that from this moment she couldn’t live without him again.

The girl who disappears from the pool will never return. A woman will return, looking for the girl she was.

She stands by the pool saying, from time to time, I was abducted, but it sounds wrong to her, nothing like what she felt. Then she says, I was not abducted. Then she says, I offered myself, I wanted to escape my body. Even, sometimes, I willed this. But ignorance

cannot will knowledge. Ignorance wills something imagined, which it believes exists.

All the different nouns — she says them in rotation. Death, husband, god, stranger. Everything sounds so simple, so conventional. I must have been, she thinks, a simple girl.

She can’t remember herself as that person but she keeps thinking the pool will remember and explain to her the meaning of her prayer so she can understand whether it was answered or not.

[life-of-heaven-and-waters]

Phil Greenwood. "Arran." Greenwood.

[redlipstickresurrected]

Jie Song (Malaysian, b. 1982, Malaysia, based Kuala Lumpur, KL, Malaysia) - Flourish in Radiance, 2025, Paintings: Oil, Acrylic on Canvas

[lilaccatholic]

Oh to be eleven years old and finding a life-changing obscure paperback in the library

[antifainternational]

[weepingwidar]

Paul Evans (British, 1954) - Incredible Winter Light, Near Lavenham (2024)

[publishersweekly-deactivated202]

From Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

[y-orozuya]

#i dont know if bolano won the fight he waged in 2666 but he did create a unique record of a beautiful and gutwrenching fight#for which he well deserves the indulgence to compare himself to kafka and dickens and flaubert and melville

[apoemaday]

Not Horses

by Natalie Shapero

What I adore is not horses, with their modern domestic life span of 25 years. What I adore is a bug that lives only one day, especially if it’s a terrible day, a day of train derailment or chemical lake or cop admits to cover-up, a day when no one thinks of anything else, least of all that bug. I know how it feels, born as I’ve been into these rotting times, as into sin. Everybody’s busy, so distraught they forget to kill me, and even that won’t keep me alive. I share my home not with horses, but with a little dog who sees poorly at dusk and menaces stumps, makes her muscle known to every statue. I wish she could have a single day of   language, so that I might reassure her don’t be afraid — our whole world is dead and so can do you no harm.

[secretmellowart]

"Is not one pardonable, if one at last refuses! Can the inexhaustible have any right? Are not chains which are endless above human strength?" -Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

I learned how to make shadow puppets and animated one of my favorite lines from Les Miserables, for @valvertweek.

[greengableslover]

THE GREEN KNIGHT (2021) dir. David Lowery

[y-orozuya]

From Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams

[wishgrub]

terroir 🌱🐁

[titusandronicusonice]

Bertolt Brecht, "On the Suicide of the Refugee W.B."

[ladyofthebookcase]

before reading annihilation i was like "lol why does this book make everyone insane" and now I Get It. im also insane now. the fungus.

[tephrahedron]

is there something in the corner of your eye that you cannot get out?

[y-orozuya]

Re-read the first three Southern Reach books by Jeff Vandermeer for the first time in 10 years in preparation for reading Absolution and realized that I had retained only 10% of everything that had happened in Authority and Acceptance.

I was definitely rushing through those two books trying to get answers, and the outcome was getting a soak in the vibes with minimal retention of concrete details lol even though I've recommended those books -- especially Annihilation -- countless times since I first read them.

I appreciate Authority so much better this time around. The bureaucratic one-upmanship, the slow wading through confusing tidbits that never cohere into a full picture, the molasses-like build up of dread as Control hurdles unknowingly towards some form of destruction. It's a book that knows exactly what effect it wants to achieve and accomplishes it perfectly. Also the effect is much better appreciated on a re-read when you know more than Control and can spot the signs.

Amazing to go back to a series 10 years later and find it still has the power to rearrange my brain. Working through Absolution now and will probably have to lie down for a few days afterwards in a catatonic fugue to process it