#kurt is probably 18 or around there in apocalypse?

[make-me-imagine]

Change of Heart

30 Day Writing Challenge Day 24 - Enemies to Lovers /or/ Lovers to Enemies

*This is specifically 'Lovers to Enemies to Lovers.'

Pairing: Warren Worthington "Angel" x G!N Reader

Warnings: Fighting/Violence. Injuries. Mentions of death.

Word Count: 4.4k

A/Ns: **I’m not sure how old Warren is supposed to be in Apocalypse, but for the purpose of this fic, he is above the age of 18; preferably in his early-mid 20’s. ***Readers mutation is the ability to manipulate plants, like vines, branches, etc. A fitting hero-name would be “Root” lol. ****I don’t think anyone actually called him “Apocalypse” in the film, but I referred to him that way anyways, cause I’m not sure what else I should call him. He referred to himself with multiple names but no one really knew them throughout lol.

-

Your whole world seemed to freeze in that moment, when you laid your eyes on him. He was so different. His hair shaved, the sides of his head tattooed, his feathered wings were gone, and replaced by tall and sharp cascading metal wings. The look in his eyes was one of rage and power as he chased after Kurt into the pyramid.

You wanted to cry out to him, to scream his name, to tell him you were there. But all that came out was a desperate whisper, “Warren.”

What had happened to him that changed him so much? Kurt had mentioned a winged man he was forced to fight in Europe. Part of you thought it was Warren, but you weren’t sure until now. Is that what changed him? Made him hateful enough to fight alongside a destroyer of worlds? Your enemy. He was now your enemy. Was he? The thought made your heart ache.

As lightning rang down around you, you were brought out of your thoughts. Turning to the mutant in front of you. Warren would have to wait. You needed to help your friends.

~ ~ ~ Three Years Earlier ~ ~ ~

“I don’t understand, Warren.” Tears threatened to spill as you stared at him, you saw tears in his own eyes as he looked back at you.

“I don’t think I can do this.” He repeated, letting out a shaky breath.

“Do what? Warren, I don’t understand!” You said, your voice desperate as you took a step closer to him “You said you loved me, and now what, you- you want to break up? To end what we’ve worked so hard for, why? Tell me, I at least deserve that much!”

He let out an exasperated sigh as he ran his hands through his hair “I- I just. It’s too much, I can’t. I’m not-” He muttered out, unsure of what to do or say. Letting out an angry groan he smacked his hand against the table.

Warren was distant, private. It took a lot for him to let you into his life, to let you see through the anger and pain. But you stayed through all of it and you loved him nonetheless. But he was afraid again, building up the walls you thought you helped him tear down. But this time he was building them up to shut you out.

Neither of you had a home, or a family, until you found each other. Eventually that was all you needed. You’d talk of all the places you would go together. You even talked about a school for mutants like you that you had heard about. You thought about going, just to check it out. You were probably too old to be students, but maybe they’d let you stay. It was a place you’d be accepted for what you were.

You weren’t sure when he began to pull away from you, or why. Maybe it was his fear of commitment, or his fear of abandonment. But suddenly, one day, he seemed to distance himself. But you wouldn’t let him go without a fight. You promised each other you’d never let each other be alone.

He looked at you with soft eyes but you saw the fear behind them. “I love you Warren.” You said as you took a step closer to him “I will back off if you want me too, but I need you to know that I will always love you. And you can’t push that away, no matter how hard you try.”

A tear slid down his cheek and he brushed it away roughly, and shook his head “I can’t make you happy Y/n, you know that.”

You shook your head “I am happy Warren. With you. I love you.”

“No, stop saying that!” He yelled suddenly as he turned away from you “Stop.” He whispered.

“I won’t.” You said as you took another step closer “You can fight me all you want, but I won’t stop saying that I love you Warren.”

“Well I don’t love you!” He yelled as he turned to face you.

The anger on his face was only a facade. You could see the regret, the guilt, the pain behind his eyes. You shook your head “You don’t mean that.”

“I do.” He said as his face became stoic, though his eyes remained pained. “I don’t love you.” He repeated, as though trying desperately to convince himself, to make it true. And you felt your heart break. “You need to be happy with someone else.”Suddenly he moved past you, and out the door, leaving you alone.

The silence of your apartment became louder the longer you stood there, still, for what felt like hours. Tears fell, dried up, and fell again. And he never came back.

You waited for him for weeks, but he didn’t come back. He disappeared and you had no idea where he went. He had left you alone. He had broken his promise.

Knowing nothing else to do, you left. Your home was not a home anymore, not without his presence. Eventually, you made your way to Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. You thought it was a long shot that you’d find anything there. But you did. And much to your surprise, you were allowed to stay. And you were not alone anymore.

You never forgot Warren. You would never forget him, or stop loving him. And you held the hope that one day you would see him again. And that maybe, he would still love you too.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

After Kurt got the others on the jet, ready to leave, he came back for you. As he went to grab you, you stepped away, your eyes on Warren who began to stir after Kurt had knocked him out.

Kurt looked from you and to Warren. He turned back to you “He is the one?” He asked.

You looked at him and nodded. You had told him briefly of Warren after you questioned him about the winged man he fought in Munich. “Go.” You muttered and Kurt shook his head in protest. “Go!” You yelled and Kurt stepped back before reluctantly going back to the jet.

As Warren used his wings to escape where he was trapped he began to fly towards the jet. “Warren!” You yelled, your voice emitting a sense of strength you weren’t really expecting.

Spinning around, the look of anger on his face dissipated into surprise the second he saw you standing on the battlefield. As he dropped to the ground, you stared at him, your eyes glancing past him only for a moment as you saw one of the other mutants making her way to the jet. You worried for your friends, but you had to stop Warren now.

“Y/n?” His voice came out softer than you expected, as you saw an array of emotions pass across his face as he looked at you. The anger on his face was replaced by shock.

“What happened to you?” You asked as you looked him over once again.

He stared at you before taking a breath and shaking his head and stretching out his arms, his wings flexing out as he did so “I evolved. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been.” A smile formed on his face, as he took a step towards you and reached out his hand “I can't believe you're here." He let out a surprised laugh. "Join us, Y/n. We can finally live in a world where we are not hunted.”

You shook your head and took a step back, making him falter, his face falling. “No, Warren. This isn’t you. You are kind, compassionate, a protector, not a soldier. Not a killer.”

He grimaced, shaking his head. “Then you don’t know me.”

A sad smile formed on your face “You’re right. Maybe I don’t anymore.” You saw his mouth twitch as he frowned a bit “But I do know who you were once. You were the love of my life.” This made him falter a bit. “But now, you’re my enemy.” The last words hurt you to say, but you needed to wound him, to get under his skin. To break down the walls he had put up again. The ones that were now controlled by a power hungry wannabe God.

“You wont fight me.” He said as he shook his head letting out a dry laugh. He truly believed you wouldn’t, believed you couldn’t.

An angry smirk crossed your face “ Then I guess you don’t know me anymore either.”

You saw something akin to surprise cross his face before you used your powers. Using your energy to reach down into the Earth, you brought all of the roots, and plant-life underground together. Throwing your hands up in the air, the now large and strong roots shot through the round, hitting Warren and throwing him up into the air.

You saw shock cross his face as this happened, before he became defensive and used his sharp wings to cut at the roots. You continued to bring root after root up, re-forming them each time they were destroyed as you tried to pin him down.

You had seen the jet crash, and hoped that your friends made it out. Part of you knew they must have. Kurt would have gotten them out. You had to believe that.

Warren continued to dodge the roots and slice at them as he tried to make his way closer to you. He was surprised at your strength. These powers were nothing like what you used to be able to do. And the anger and power in your eyes was different to any he had seen in them before. Part of him felt guilty, because he was sure it was because of him.

Spinning around, he cut through the roots in front of you before reaching out and grabbing you. You let out a small gasp as he pushed up, flying up into the air, bringing you with him.

He couldn’t help the memory that flooded back of the first time he took you flying. You were scared, but you laughed through the fear, as you held on to him. He remembered promising he would keep you safe, that he would never drop you or let you fall.

Now, as you looked at him with disdain, looked at him as an enemy, he was unsure of what to do. “Please Y/n.” He said, his voice desperate. You grabbed onto his arms tightly as he held you close to him. “Come with me.”

He felt his heart ache as a tear slid down your face. The memory of him leaving coming back to his mind. He meant to come back to you. He did. But he was taken before he ever could. But he was sure you thought he had abandoned you for these past three years.

“No.” You muttered out and shook your head. “Look around you Warren. Look at all the pain you are helping him cause.”

Warren glanced around him, seeing the destruction of a city that was once full of people. Looking back at you, he tried to push down the guilt that was rising. “We are building a better world.” He said, trying to force himself to believe what Apocalypse had told him.

“No Warren, you’re destroying it.” You said with desperation. “I won’t help you destroy it. Because it’s the world that brought us together.” Warren took in a shaky breath as you spoke “I love that world Warren. Even through all it’s faults, it brought me, you. And we fought for that, together. Don’t you remember?” Your voice was soft as you spoke, desperate for him to remember.

He shook his head “It was also the world that tore us apart.” He muttered out, disdain filling his voice.

You shook your head now, part of you giving up. You could hear Charles’s name being roared out by the man you came to beat. You couldn’t let them fight him alone. Meeting Warren’s eyes you were afraid that the Warren you loved was gone.

“No Warren. You are the one that tore us apart.” As you said this, you saw pain pass over his face “You may not be willing to fight for this world Warren but I am. I am willing to fight for my friends, just as I was once willing to fight for you. The way I thought you were once willing to fight for me.”

As Warren stared at you, he was caught off guard when more of your roots rose up between the two of you. They wrapped around his wings and pulled him back, as you ripped yourself away from his grip.

Warren felt his heart stop when you fell from his grip and towards the ground. Your eyes met his as he reached out for you, though you were too far away. Suddenly, your roots wrapped around you as you safely landed on the ground, catching yourself with your powers. As Warren felt relief rush through him, he was yanked to the ground harshly by your roots, and pinned down.

You refused to look back at Warren as you ran to your friends. You swallowed your pain and let your anger take over to make you stronger. You stopped in your tracks as you saw Erik was now on your side once again as he tried to penetrate the shield surrounding the destructive and corrupt mutant.

Using your powers, you brought roots up through the ground below him and began to wrap him in them. You saw the others look your way in surprise. Seeing through the shield surrounding Apocalypse his eyes snapped to you, and you saw the anger in them. You met his eyes in return and glared, refusing to back down. He was the one who corrupted Warren. You needed to use that anger.

Reaching out his hand he tried to throw you back, but you used roots to keep you to the ground, as they wrapped around your legs. You groaned out as you controlled the roots in the ground to grab his hands and pull them down. He roared out in anger as he glared at you. You felt the Earth beneath you begin to rise up, cocooning your legs and slowly inching up your body.

The roots pinning Warren down suddenly disappeared back into the ground. Warren let out a groan as the pressure on his body was released. Hearing the sound of the fight in the distance he quickly lifted off and made his way there.

As he flew over head, he saw you taking on Apocalypse. Your roots grabbing and pulling at him stopping him from using his full power. As he glanced at you, he saw the ground rising up, beginning to swallow you. But you continued to fight, to use your strength to fight him off, even if you knew it was useless.

Hearing you cry out as you made more roots break through the ground, rushing at Apocalypse he was almost awed by your power and willingness to die fighting. And as Apocalypse began to move towards you Warren felt not only fear fill him, but anger. And it seemed that all at once, realization rushed over him. He was wrong. This was wrong.

As he saw Apocalypse continue towards you, he shot down with all the speed he could. Apocalypse reached out towards you, as your arms were swallowed up by the rising Earth. Your strength escaped you as it became hard to breathe, your roots turning to nothing.

He smirked at you, at the fear in your eyes, and just as he was about to kill you, a flash of metal landed in front of him as three metal spikes flew out and into his chest. Staggered back in surprise he looked up to see Warren in front of you, glaring at him.

Apocalypse let out a disappointed sigh before anger covered his face “You betray me, just as he has?” He said, gesturing to Erik who was now watching from above.

He looked at Apocalypse and straightened up “I’m done fighting for you. For this” He said, gesturing around. “It’s wrong. And I should have seen it. But I didn’t. Not until it was too late.” Warren swallowed before looking back at you. “I’m sorry.” He whispered.

Apocalypse looked behind Warren and to you before he smirked “Ahh.” He let out and Warren looked back at him “You are betraying me for them?” Warren swallowed as Apocalypse's smirk turned to a frown “Useless.”

Raising his hand, the Earth tightened around you more, making you gasp out in pain. Warren looked back at you before quickly moving towards Apocalypse “No!”

Apocalypse caught Warren by the throat and glared into his eyes “Love is weakness.”

Warren grabbed at Apocalypse and gasped out, his mind flashing back to you, and all the times he remembered loving you. All the times he fought for you, all the times he held you in his arms and knew everything would be okay.

“You’re wrong. Love is what made me strong.” Flexing his wings inwards, he stabbed them through Apocalypse's shoulders and pushed him back, throwing him, causing him to drop Warren. Apocalypse yelled out and used his powers to throw Warren harshly against the wall, knocking him out as his head smacked the concrete, before fusing him with it as he did with Scott.

You watched in fear, staring at Warren, wishing you could speak with him one last time. But as you watched Jean walk out of the torn down building, her feet stepping on air, you sensed a power coming from her that you had never felt. Erik pinned Apocalypse down, and he began to try and teleport away. But as the elemental turned on him too, he was left defenseless. You watched as he wasted away from Jean’s power. Your body being freed as he began to die.

When everything stopped, and he was gone, you ran over to Warren, who had fallen to the ground. Moving his head into your lap, you stared down at him and gently stroked his face. He had come back to you. He had come back to save you.

- - - - -

After explaining to Charles about Warren, and your past with him. You told him that he betrayed Apocalypse to save you. Charles was more than willing to give Warren a second chance. Just as he was giving to Ororo.

You wondered if he would take it, as you watched his sleeping figure in the hospital bed. The wound to his head caused him to remain unconscious for a few days. His wings were draped underneath him, wrapped in fabric so as to not scratch his skin. As the school was being rebuilt, you stayed in the hospital with him, waiting for him to wake. And when he finally did, you prepared yourself for him to try and run again.

After he opened his eyes, he looked around the room, his eyes finally landing on you. You were sitting by his bedside, and had a soft smile on your face. His heart immediately began to hammer in his chest when he saw you. You were here, sitting by his side, and he wasn’t sure what to do, or say.

You could see the hesitation on his face when he saw you, so you smiled at him, and spoke softly “Hello Warren.”

More than anything, he was surprised he was alive, as well as you. Did that mean... “What happened?” He finally asked.

“He’s dead.” You said softly and you saw the surprise cross his face “Ororo turned on him too, and helped us. He’s gone, Warren. We won.”

He nodded his head, unsure of how to react. “What’s going to happen now?”

You leaned forward, leaning your elbows on his bedside, he looked at you and studied your face. His eyes caught on the various cuts and bruises, and he felt guilt rush through him. “I told Professor Xavier about you, about us. And how you saved me, and helped us fight in the end. So, just as he is giving Ororo a second chance, he is giving you one too.”

Warren sat up, letting his wings stretch out a bit, the fabric falling from them. His eyes caught on the metal, and he was almost surprised to see they were still there. He looked back at you, “What do you mean?”

“I’m sure you know that he’s the head of that school we talked about?” He nodded and you continued “That’s where I was, where I went after you left.” You saw guilt cross his face and quickly continued “It was destroyed after he took Charles, but it’s being rebuilt. And he is offering a place there for you. With me. If you want it.”

Warren felt various emotions pass through him as you spoke. You had been at the school, you were there when he was. He was so close and he didn’t even know it. And now, even though he tried to help destroy the world, he was getting another chance. You were giving him another chance.

“I-I don’t deserve it.” He said softly, and you saw the pain in his eyes, the guilt. “After what I did...to all of those people, to- to you.”

“You didn’t hurt anyone Warren, Apocalypse did.”

“But I let him. And I-” He let out a desperate sigh.

Reaching over, you grabbed his hands, clearly catching him off guard. “Warren. I know you feel guilty about the part you played. But you were manipulated. Made to believe what you were doing was for the better. You had been hurt by a world you should have been able to live in peacefully. So you fought to change it. But because you felt that guilt, you changed your mind. Turned on him, helped us to defeat him. And now the world is different because of it. They can see now, that we wanted to save it.”

Warren stared down at your hands as you held his. It reminded him of the years before, when you had been together, happy. He remembered the first thing that came to his mind when Apocalypse told him of his plan.

“I planned to find you.” He said suddenly, softly. He glanced up at you, and saw the questioning gaze in your eyes. “He promised us a new world, where mutants would be on top, we wouldn’t be hunted or hated anymore. And I thought...that after that world was created, I would find you. I believed you would survive, and I would...we would...have another chance. But when I saw you there, fighting against it, I was so unsure of what to do. And then...he was going to kill you. And I realized that if he won, you wouldn’t be there anymore. And the only thing I really wanted would be gone. A world without you wouldn’t be worth living in.” He finished looking over at you, and seeing the small tears forming in your eyes he let out a sad scoff “I always make you cry.”

You let out a soft chuckle as you wiped away the tears. “Yeah well, this time it’s not a bad thing. Because you are good Warren. No matter the reason you did what you did, you helped to fix it…. and you deserve a second chance. You do deserve it Warren.”

He shook his head a bit and felt tears welling in his own eyes as he looked at you, desperate “But I don’t deserve you. Not anymore.”

You moved to sit on the bed beside him, looking into his eyes you shook your head “I think I’m the one who gets to decide that Warren.” You reached out and placed your hands on his face. He let out a soft breath as he pressed into your palms, desperate for the touch of your hands again. “I love you Warren.” His eyes shot to yours, and you saw the shock cross his face “I do. I told you I would never stop, and I haven’t, I won’t.”

Warren felt as though his chest was going to burst as a tear escaped, streaking down his face, and stopping as it hit your hand. “Why?”

You smiled sadly at him “Because I remember how we were. I remember how you made me feel, and who you are in here.” You pulled your hands away from his face, moving one hand to point at his heart. “I don’t know what happened after you left, how you got to Munich, how you got involved with Apocalypse, but I do know that who I am looking at here, the one who risked his life to save me, is the same man I fell in love with. He is still here, and he is still worthy of love and happiness.” As another tear escaped his eye you reached up and wiped it away.

“I lied.” He said suddenly “That day I left, when I said I didn’t love you anymore.”

You smiled softly “I know.”

“I loved you so much, but I was so afraid, I don’t even remember of what anymore. But I loved you. I still do. So much.” His voice was almost breathless as he spoke. He reached out and placed his hand on your face, his thumb gently stroking over your lips.

You leaned forward and pressed your forehead against his, and you both breathed in. “Please stay Warren.” You asked.

Part of Warren was telling him to leave, to run, telling him he would hurt you again. But he pushed it away, because he knew that he would only regret it, that it would destroy him. “I’ll stay.” He breathed out, and felt as though a heavy weight was lifted off of him “I’ll stay.” He repeated, barely audible.

You smiled “You’ll love it at the school Warren, I promise.”

He met your eyes, and felt himself smile, a true smile for the first time in ages. He stroked your face again, “As long as you’re there.” He said and you nodded.

His eyes grazed over your lips and he found himself pulling your face to his as he kissed you. It was a desperate and loving kiss as he wrapped his arms around you. Finally able to hold you again, something he feared for so long he might never get to do again. And for the first time in a long time, he felt that things would be okay again. As long as he had you.

xx End xx

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[quicksilverrwrites]

𝐏𝐀𝐈𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆: peter maximoff x reader 𝐒𝐔𝐌𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐘: you can’t sleep and neither can peter, but at least you both know exactly how to comfort one another. 𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐃 𝐂𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐓: 2.4k 𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒: 18+, fluff, peter and reader are early to mid twenties, british reader 𝐀𝐔𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐑'𝐒 𝐍𝐎𝐓𝐄𝐒: y/n is known by the mutant name “scribe” and is charles xavier’s niece.

It’s eleven-thirty, and you can’t sleep.

Your thoughts shift to your lessons in the morning; to how tired you’re going to be; to that iced coffee you’d had while getting your assignment done after class; about how that drink was definitely a bad idea considering how you’re lying awake now. It had tasted good then, and it had given you the energy you needed to fire out five thousand words in the span of a few hours… but now you regret it.

Sighing, you roll over. Your eyes glaze over the objects on the nightstand beside your bed. Your alarm clock, rectangular in size and wooden in material, glares at you. Eleven thirty six. Eleven thirty seven. The time seems to spiral, and you realise that you might as well do something with yourself if you’re awake.

You eye the books stacked on top of the alarm clock; you’d been reading one before and it had bored you half to death, so you can’t bring yourself to pick up any again. What else? What else?

Your gaze settles upon the picture frame on the dresser next to your nightstand, and you let out a sigh as you settle upon the silver-haired speedster within it. You’re next to him, a mere blur since he’d sneakily taken the camera from your hand and taken a picture with an expression that radiates cheekiness, but you’d liked the picture enough to keep it.

You’ve got a few more picture frames scattered around your room—photos of you with Scott, Jean, Jubilee and Kurt. Even some of Charles. You might not be close, but he is your uncle, after all. He’s still family.

And yet it’s Peter you keep your eyes on. It’s Peter's mischievous aura which calls to you across the room.

What would he be doing right now? He’s probably playing video games or practicing on one of his guitars. You’d been surprised to see him play well; you’d been surprised to see that he actually had the attention span it takes to successfully learn an instrument. You would know: your mother used to nag you about practicing the piano to perfection. Practice makes perfect, she’d always said, and yet she’d always left out how much energy it took to practice in the first place.

Is it too late to reach out to him? The two of you have a specific way of speaking to one another across distances by now, although even the thought of doing such a thing due to the time seems rude. Your mother had always told you that it was your duty to be polite, and your father had by example. You think you picked it up from him rather than her, but—

Don’t think of him right now. Don’t think of what happened. Don’t.

As if in an effort to push the memory of that night from your head, you move. You pull the drawer attached to your nightstand open to reveal a mess of junk inside, but what you need—and what you spy—is a pen and paper. You pull it from the drawer and slam the nightstand drawer shut quietly, and after, you get to work writing:

Are you up? Can I come over?

Your fingers buzz with azure energy as you feel your mutation working in your favour. A tiny portal of blue opens before you, one you could make larger if you wished but one which you keep small for now. It’s no larger than a letterbox would be, and the faint sound of music from the other side tells you that Peter is very much awake.

You slip the note through the portal, and then you leave it open as you wait.

When you receive no response for a solid fifteen seconds but can hear movement on the other side, you wonder if this was a mistake after all. It’s too late, you scold yourself, mentally preparing for rejection. Oh, god, this is going to be awkward. What if he—

An empty Twinkie box falls at your feet.

You blink at it, momentarily confused, and then you pick it up. You glance about the dessert’s display as you begin to turn the box over in your hands. Nothing on the front, but on the back—

Scrawled in pink glitter pen—probably his sister’s—, the box reads on the back: Yeah. Come through.

You grin lazily as you set the box down on your bed and extend the portal with your fingers like you’re prying open a heavy door. The orange light from Peter’s basement slips through and becomes one with the light of your dorm, which is yellow and warm with your room’s wooden accented walls and flooring. And as you slip through the portal and your bare feet touch the soft tartan carpet of his room, you let the portal shut with a soft shum behind you—

But Peter Maximoff does not look his best. In fact, he looks downright miserable.

His eyes are red as if he’s been crying, his hair is messy—messier than usual, at least—and he’s wearing a band tee and some tartan pajama bottoms that look intended for comfort rather than style. You were about to say hey, but you stop in your tracks. You tilt your head as you look at him.

Peter is still. It’s strange, especially since he’s usually so eccentric. He blurts out, “What?”

You frown, momentarily stuck for what to say. “Nothing,” you respond, but it doesn’t seem right.

Peter stares at you. You stare at him. You’re both quite similar, so it strikes you then that you both know that you’re each not telling each other something.

“You okay?” You ask, suspicion clear in your tone.

Peter shrugs nonchalantly. It’s a rigid movement. “Yeah,” he says, far too confidently to be true. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

You narrow your eyes on him. His tone of voice has all but solidified your suspicions. “Okay, first of all,” you say, crossing the small space of the room between you and the sofa, “you use a very distinctive tone when you lie.” You settle down on the sofa as you cross your legs under you. “Second, your eyes are really red. Have you been—?”

“No.”

Crying, you were about to ask, but he cut you off. You narrow your eyes again.

Peter sighs and averts his gaze, running a hand through his hair. “Tonight’s just… not a good night.”

You press your lips together as sympathy wells in your eyes. “Why not?”

“Can’t sleep.”

“That makes two of us."

Peter inhales deeply, and before you know it, he’s sitting on the sofa next to you. You’re used to how fast he moves by now. Something warms your heart in the way he sits with his body angled towards you. Like he’s opening himself up to you.

“Wanna stay here tonight?” He asks.

You glance at the other end of the sofa and then back to him. You’re reminded of how he took the sofa to sleep on that night after you guys got caught in the rain. “Here?”

Peter’s brows rise. “Is my basement not fancy enough for you?”

You know he’s joking even despite the lack of humour in his tone, and you let out a small huff of laughter as you flash him a lazy smile. You sit back on the sofa, reaching out your hand to intertwine it with his. Things between you are still blooming after your first date, but you both feel comfortable enough to do this. Peter’s fingers wrap around yours as he starts drawing patterns on the back of your hand with his free one.

“I just mean,” you murmur, just loud enough to be heard over the backdrop of quiet music, “won’t your mom mind?”

“She didn’t mind when you stayed over last time.”

Your lips quirk upwards in gentle amusement. “That time you slept on the couch. This time I was thinking, I mean, if you want to, then maybe—”

“Oh,” Peter murmurs. His head lifts upwards in a sort of understanding motion. “Yeah, I mean… ah, I can deal with whatever safe sex talk she wants to give me in the morning.”

Your cheeks flush red. “I didn’t mean that. I just meant maybe we could…” Oh, god, embarrassment— “cuddle.”

Peter grins. “Cuddle, huh?” He pauses, until— “Okay,” he murmurs, reaching an arm around the back of the couch to wrap around you. “I guess I could be down for cuddling.”

You snicker softly as you lean into his touch, your head resting against his shoulder. “Do you want to tell me why you looked so upset when I arrived?”

Peter tenses. “It wasn’t because of you, if that’s what you were thinking.”

“Mm,” you murmur, “I think I’m confident enough in our relationship to know that your reaction when seeing me is generally excitement rather than the dread that accompanies sad under eyes and red markings around them.”

He pauses for a few seconds before he lets out a long breath of defeat. “That obvious, huh?”

“Mm,” you murmur, looking up at him. “A little.”

His lips twist to the side as he lowers his gaze. “I was thinking about my dad.”

It’s your turn to pause now, looking up at him in a way you didn’t before. You assess every detail of his body again: the way his shoulders slump, the way his head hangs low, the way his hair falls in the way of his view and his eyes are heavy with something you haven’t seen in him before. He’s usually so full of life.

Is this what he’s hiding deep down?

“Tell me about it,” you say softly.

Peter grimaces. “It’s a long story, and the stupid thing is it’s mostly my fault.”

Frowning, you sit up and face him. “I don’t believe that.”

Peter lets out a humourless laugh that might be bitter if he showed a hint of anger, but he doesn’t. “It’s true. The only time I’ve ever been too slow and it’s in finding the most…”

He trails off, pulling his arm away from around you so that they both now rest in his lap. He continues, “It’s a mess.”

“Start from the beginning."

So he explains, if not vaguely: about trying to find his father, about finding a house empty and police arriving on the scene. Peter had fled at the sight of them, and—

“His name’s Magneto,” he admits. “Erik Lehnsherr. You’ve probably… seen him on TV or something."

Suddenly, it all adds up. You weren’t at school to see what happened with Apocalypse, but you’ve heard about it from your friend group. Peter doesn’t talk about it very much, and now you know why; had he been part of that whole adventure because of his father? He hadn’t been involved with Xavier’s School before, that much you know.

You suck in a breath. Okay, Y/N, push the fact that his dad’s a known terrorist aside— “Does he know?”

Peter shakes his head. “Nah. I had the chance to tell him and I didn’t. I screwed it up. And now I’m right back where I was before all of it, because I have no clue where he is and no way of telling him the truth. I couldn’t even do it for Wanda.”

“Hey,” you murmur, your fingers moving to cup his cheeks. “Fight or flight, right? It’s normal. To see him right in front of you—to have to muster up the courage to tell him? Knowing what a change that would be for you? Peter, that’s normal.”

Peter’s eyes well with softness as he listens to you, gazes upon you, and you think you’ve never seen him look so vulnerable as he lowers his head to your shoulder. He takes in a shaky breath; wraps his arms around you; pulls you into his lap—

“Thanks,” he murmurs into your shirt. It’s not his shirt this time; you’re wearing a pyjama set that consists of blue silk shorts and a top. “Not sure I believe you, but thanks, Y/N.”

“Is there anything I can do to make you believe me?”

Peter takes a deep breath. “Aside from mind control? Not sure.”

You press your lips together and begin to stroke his hair. “To be honest,” you murmur, “I’m not sure I’d believe you if you tried to tell me something similar about my father, either.”

Peter lets out a choked laugh. “Maybe that’s why we work together.”

Your lips curve upwards, still stroking his hair. His face is still buried in your shoulder. “Maybe,” you whisper, pressing a soft kiss to his head.

Peter shifts so that he’s leaning against the back of the sofa and you’re in his lap again. You turn so that you’re straddling his waist, but your fingers find his jaw to cup the skin there. Your thumb brushes soothingly against his skin.

“You mean a lot to me,” Peter murmurs, staring up at you. It’s almost as if the music in the room has stopped; it’s almost as if the two of you are the only souls left in existence. His brows are slightly raised and there is awe in his voice as he says, “I don’t really believe you’re real half the time.”

You let out a soft laugh. “Definitely real, Peter. Definitely here.”

“Yeah,” he says, his tone riddled with amusement, “and here of all places. You could be anywhere. You’re like, perfect and—”

“Ssh,” you murmur, pressing a finger to his lips. “I don’t want to be anywhere but here with you.”

Peter tilts his head up towards you, a silent request for consent, and you kiss him in answer.

He wraps his arms around your waist as he deepens the kiss, your tongue slipping out to meet his own. He makes a low, guttural noise between pleasure and content at the feeling of it, and your free hand clutches at his shirt as your other hand remains at his jaw.

You spend the rest of the evening like that, whether it's on the sofa or in his bed, but in those moments together there’s nothing carnal about it. Your touches are soft and comforting rather than lustful and yearning, and as much as you’ve thought about him that way before, you know that now’s not the time.

Tonight, you both need this. Tonight, your sole purpose is to be there for one another.

“And for the record,” Peter murmurs between kisses, his words random and uncalculated, “I think your tragic backstory’s way worse than mine.”

#peter maximoff x reader #peter maximoff imagine #xmen imagine #peter maximoff fluff #peter maximoff fanfiction #peter maximoff fanfic #peter maximoff x y/n #xmen x reader #quicksilver x reader #quicksilver fanfiction #quicksilver fanfic #xmen fanfic

[bourbonstreetdevil]

More Headcanon Ramblings

If you don’t like mental illness headcanons or in-depth talk about mental illnesses then there’s no need to read further. It’s all gucci, go about your business my lovelies!

DISCLAIMER: I’m not a professional in any way. I just have a special interest in the brain and its many quirks and afflictions. I tend to see these things in characters I see or play. Remy, Kurt, Cole, Tim, and Klaus especially. But right now I’m gonna talk about Remy! Since. This is a Gambit blog lmao.

So without further ado: here are some disabilities I think fit Remy pretty damn well. Ones that have Pretty Much Canon Evidence will be normal. Anything that’s purely my headcanon will have (HC) before it.

-

PTSD! This one is probably the more obvious one. I think most X-Men who’ve seen battle have it at this point, with all the fucked up things they’ve seen. Remy has likely had it since he was little. Canonically one of his earliest memories is being cuffed to a fucking patio fence while the Guild strapped up a gator to see if he could slip the cuffs in time. He was two years old. Well if that’s not traumatizing I don’t know what is.

(HC) Katrina. In my Remy’s canon, he was around 13 which is when most mutant powers kick in. Especially due to, you guessed it: Stress! I’d say being pinned down in a flooding building counts as stressful! He blew up the rubble and almost died. That’s definitely a ticked box on the Trauma Checklist.

Let’s see... What else...

The life in the Thieve’s guild couldn’t have been easy, especially trying so hard to impress the guild and his ‘adopted’ father. He had to grow up fucking fast if he wanted to live.

Killing a man at 18 after just getting married.

Getting A Fucking Lobotomy! (Side note his head was shaved for that which I think is a fucking crime)

Learning that all this work was to lead a group of murderers to an innocent group of Morelocks!

Getting Fucking Gutted By Sabertooth!

Misc. traumas from living on the run/getting into fights/Belladonna’s death

Most of his ventures with the X-Men!

MYSTIQUE, who regularly manipulated his issues with self-worth and self-loathing!

Apocalypse/Getting turned into the Horseman of Death, which canonically HURT SO MUCH HE HAD TO BE STRAPPED DOWN.

Numerous kidnappings/torture sessions by various villains!

BEING ACTUALLY BLINDED FOR SOME TIME.

Probably more from comics I haven’t read yet!

-

Depression. Self-loathing, self-worth issues, and self-harm specifically. It’s no secret that Remy LeBeau has had one hell of a fucked up life. Abandoned at birth over his mutated eyes, stolen into a family of thieves, basically used as a tool all his life. He’s been used and subconsciously trained to think he’s only worth something if he’s useful. Thus self-worth issues.

(HC) He had no outlet for his self-loathing, but he did have a neat power to charge shit with kinetic energy. Vibrational kinetic energy is, well, vibrational. He holds something and focuses, and it vibrates. He could manipulate an object to vibrate so much that it would heat up. Easy way to cause burns. Easy way to self-harm without being noticed. If people asked why he had burns, he could say he was trying to practice and the thing blew up. Nobody actually cared enough to ask, which made it worse. This is why my Remy has no feeling in his palms! He’s burned all the nerve endings out, whoops!

He outran his use to the Guild when he killed Belladonna’s brother, even in self-defense. The point of the marriage was to settle a feud between the two guilds, to bond them. While they still held the truce despite Remy killing the man, he was exiled from New Orleans. Abandoned for a second time in his life, by someone who likely convinced him he “Should be thankful he was taken in by the Guild.” and how Jean Luc “Stuck his neck out for him.” (Let’s remember I’m pretty sure he was 18 when they were married.)

Plus they abandoned him at a crucial part of his life: His powers starting to get too powerful for him to handle. This drives him to seek help. Unfortunately for him, that lands him with the Marauders. He almost dies trying to save the Morelocks after figuring out what the Marauders had been up to, but he pretty much fails. That’s a huge part of his life that he hates.

Right off the bat with the X-Men, he’s mostly tolerated instead of accepted. Nobody trusts him, so he gets bitter and self-isolates. That just kinda goes downhill from there.

-

Here’s the weirder one of mine... Borderline Personality Disorder! Remy shows pretty much all the symptoms of BPD which are as follows, at least from all I’ve seen. I’ll bold the ones that apply, and summarize some examples.

Fear of abandonment.  Already gone over this one.

Unstable relationships. *Will Smith meme at his numerous flings and escapades and also ROGUE.*

Unclear or shifting self-image.  At the beginning of the 2012 Gambit miniseries, he mentions he doesn’t feel like himself anymore. He has a lot of issues with it throughout the series. I’ve seen it in other comics too but he has a lot of trouble being torn between X-Men, the Thieve’s Guild, and his past with the Marauders.

Impulsive, self-destructive behaviors.  Thievery, reckless and numerous sexual encounters, pretty much no regard for his own health in battle, alcohol.

Self-harm.  Already went over this, still pure headcanon.

Extreme emotional swings.  He’s seen getting regularly frustrated with people, even those he loves. Especially with people that he finds annoying. Then other times he’ll be extremely apologetic or upset for almost no reason. The smallest thing can trigger it, like being called a thief too many times or being rejected by someone he cares about.

Chronic feelings of emptiness.  I’m not sure how to explain this one. It just shows, to me. Maybe the same instance as the shifting self-image.

Explosive anger. (haha get it) He’s actually really good at keeping his anger in check unless it has to do with people he cares about.

Feeling suspicious or out of touch with reality.  He’s really fucking paranoid. He’s paranoid that people will leave him or won’t trust him with anything. He’s suspicious of anyone new, wondering when they’ll leave him, etc.

Thanks for coming to the TED Talk no one asked for.

#Screwy visits #Screwy Rambles #Mental illness talk #headcanons #gambit headcanon #x-men headcanons #mental illness headcanons #Let Me Project On My Muses

[loki-sun]

Some Scott & Peter being roommates headcanons

A while I ago I stumbled upon a post or something which implied that Scott and Peter shared a room together after Apocalypse and I've thought that needed to be explored a tad. This almost turned into a fic whoa

Their first meeting after the whole Cairo and apocalypse crisis is less than stellar

When the mansion’s finally ready for students to move back in, Scott’s given his own room. Again, which pleases him. The company of other mutants doesn’t bother him, Jean, Kurt, Jubes even the newcomer Ororo, they’re all nice and great, but he prefers having a place he can call his own.

A day after that when he and Jean go for a walk she tells him she now shares a room with Jubilee and that it’s kinda cool she now has someone, so she’s not completely isolated, but she’s still afraid she’ll unintentionally hurt her in her sleep or something.

Scott playfully boasts that he still managed to keep his own room.

That doesn’t last long

That same afternoon there’s a knock on his door.

It’s the silver haired guy; the exact same one who saved almost everyone from the explosion.

At first he doesn’t say anything, just watches him coolly, leaning against the doorframe.

 Scott’s a man of action “Yeah?” “Summers?” “That’s me.” In a millisecond the seriousness disappears from the guy’s face and all of a sudden he’s standing in the middle of Scott’s room, buzzing around and he reminds Scott of some kind of a bumblebee that took a dip in a jar of silver color.

The silver guy scans the room “Kinda boring but it’ll do.” He points at the tidy desk by the window “You’ll need to move that tho, I’m gonna have my bed there.” “I’m sorry, who are you?” Scott rebukes at the stranger wandering in his room like he owns the place “And what are you doing in my room?” “Peter Maximoff.” The guy suddenly appears in front of him, a strange glint in his eyes “and I think you mean, ‘our room’.” “What?!” “Oh, I’m guessing Charlie didn’t tell you? Oh, this is awkward.” “Told me what?” Peter smirks “We’re roomies from now on.” Something inside Scott promptly dies.

 Scott goes to talk to Charles about it, who tells him that Peter, while no longer being a student, will be staying at the mansion and join their X-Men team. There’s a shortage of free rooms but Charles is sure that Scott doesn’t have a problem with giving half of his to Peter.

Scott, in fact, has a problem, but Charles doesn’t need to know that.

When he returns to their room, he notices Peter has already set up his stuff and oh hello, there’s even a bed there and a few video game arcades where his desk and sofa used to be.

At first Scott’s semi okay with it, because Peter seems like a good dude.

 “So, Summers, I’ve noticed that you don’t talk much, huh? That’s OK; I talk enough for two people.” Scott mentally groans. This will not end well.

He’s right.

He soon finds out that Peter, fucking Peter, doesn’t sleep much or at all. He can go days without even a little nap and while Peter’s totally okay, Scott’s bags under his eyes have bags because the speedy asshole is just not quiet throughout the night. He’s either loudly munching on food, listening to music at top volume, playing videogames, tapping his foot impatiently against the floor, shuffling around….he’s. not. Still. At. All.  Jean and others notice Scott’s exhausted appearance of course. “So, what’s like to bunk with Peter?” “I’m more likely to catch a unicorn than a good night’s sleep.” “That bad?” “I lost my peace, most of my room and my ability to sleep at night. What do you think?”

Jean suggests him to talk to Peter about this issue.

He takes her advice. Peter doesn’t really get it.

“Remember sleeping? Sleeping was nice.” Scott says to him when he comes back to their room ”Perhaps you should try it. When’s the last time you slept?” “When was the last time I slept? Well, let’s see…it’s a Thursday…so…” “Today’s Monday.” “Today’s a what?!” Oh boy.

Unfortunately, despite Scott’s best tries, It doesn’t go well at all. In fact, it all goes downhill from that point on.

A few days later Peter, high on energy, takes a good look at Scott, who’s barely standing on his own feet. “Jesus, what happened to you?” “You did.”

 Another thing Scott soon learns about Peter. He was right. He. Never. Shuts. Up. Seriously. He’s always muttering about something, singing along to a song, talking to himself, chuckling while reading a comic book…Scott feels a volcano of anger inside him ready to erupt. “Do you ever shut up?” “Do you ever say anything besides asking me to shup up?” Peter shoots back “Oh, sorry, I forgot that you’re shy.” “I’m not shy, I just don’t like talking to you.”

 It all goes to hell from then on.

Scott’s annoyed with Peter and Peter’s annoyed because Scott’s annoyed with him.

“I went from having an entire basement to myself to having to share a room with a fucking baby!” “I was here first!”

They both ask Charles to give each of them their own room.

Charles refuses.

One day Scott’s sugar drops and all of a sudden the currently abandoned box of twinkies on Peter’s bed look curiously inviting.

It was the last straw.

“You bastard!” “I’m not going to pick a fight with you.” “Well, too bad because I’m picking one with you. Square up, dipshit, let’s get rowdy!”

 “Asshole.”

 ”Dickhead.”

They use duct tape to evenly split the room in half. Peter even took the door. “How the fuck am I supposed to go out now?!” “I left you the window, use that! Be happy I didn’t take that as well.” “How generous of you.” “You know it.” “Seriously, you’re the human equivalent of those lumps that form in rancid milk.” “Wow, what the fuck Summers!? Rude?” “Yeah. It’s supposed to be.”

The tension between them’s obvious and it comes to a point when Charles sits them down and asks them to at least pretend to stand each other for others’ sake. 

They try but fail miserably. “You are a disgusting individual.” “I will not stand here and be lectured by a 12 year old.” “I’m 18.” “You’re literally a baby!”

“Hey you got an award in the mail.” “Really? Where’s it from?” “The National Council on Assholing. It says here you won Best Asshole of the year.” “...Why are you such an asshole? Do you like getting hit or something? Wait! Don’t answer that, I don’t wanna know.”

At one point even Raven asks Charles if putting the two of them together in the same room was a good idea. “They balance each other out. Trust me, Raven, they need this.

Turns out he’s right. 

It takes a while but much, to everyone’s surprise, they mysteriously, somehow manage to work it out without killing each other in the process.

A few days later Scott’s studying for one of his exams and his pen dies. He realizes he left the rest of his pen stash in Jean’s room and isn’t feeling up to go get them. Peter nonchalantly gives him one of his own. True to his poor luck Scott breaks it. “Hey, um...I broke your pen. Sorry” “That’s okay – I stole it.” Peter doesn’t even look up from his comic book. Scott blinks. “...Why are you Like That?” “Look, I have superpowers. That’s not going to change. What else am I supposed to do with them, sit in our room and watch tv? Don’t judge me.” “...I’m not.” Peter finally looks up from his comic and takes in Scott’s disheveled appearance.  “I take it studying isn’t going well?” A groan’s his only reply. “Dude chillax, you're more nervous over this stupid exam than when we were in Cairo. The fuck?” Scott sighs “If I have to choose between saving the world and passing my chemistry exam…the end of the world is bad and all, but McCoy is scary.” For the first time since moving in Peter laughs. Sincerely.

Scott fucks up then and accidentally hurts Peter’s feelings “You know, you kinda remind me of my brother.” “Should I take that as a compliment or an insult?” “Both.” Peter doesn’t take offense but just stares as Scott’s face crumbles. “Your brother?” “Alex.” Scott replies “You know, the one you left to die.” Scott doesn’t mean it literally, he knows Peter’s not responsible for Alex’s death, but his words cut the speedster like a knife. For the first time since he’s moved in, he’s quiet throughout the entire night. Scott doesn’t question it at first. He has an exam to study for.

Peter’s nowhere to be found in the morning. When he doesn’t show up for training, that’s when others take notice and become worried. Charles doesn’t seem to be though, but he’s sporting this sad smile and it’s not a good sign.

His disappearance bothers Scott more than it should because the room is suddenly too quiet, there’s no one to bother him. He keeps on waiting for a certain silver blur to come by but he. just. doesn’t.

During one of their many daily strolls around the mansion, Jean brings the topic of Peter up and asks him if perhaps he said something or done something that might suggest his whereabouts.

Initially, Scott shakes with head.

Until he finally realizes.

He feels like a dick.

Jean assures him he’ll probably return soon, but reprimands him anyway.

When it’s evening and Peter still doesn’t return Scott considers going to Charles, but just as he’s about to do it, there’s a knock on the door.

It’s Peter.

Scott is relieved and immediately starts apologizing. Peter tells him that it’s okay. 

Peter actually sits down and apologizes for not arriving in time to save Alex. 

It turns out Peter’s feeling extremely guilty over what happened to Scott’s brother.

Scott tells him that he doesn’t blame him and that there was nothing he could’ve done.

It takes a while for both of them to calm down after this emotional talk. Peter honestly appreciates Scott’s words.

“You’re not so bad Summers. You know, for a baby.” “You’re not so bad yourself Maximoff. For a grandpa.” “Oh, the hair, I get it.”

“So I take it you’ve missed me.” “Everyone’s been wondering where you were. They knew that if I’d killed you, I’d keep the body for display.” Peter snorts “As if you could catch me.”

“Sorry for fucking off by the way. I tend to do that sometimes.” “It’s okay. It was my fault anyway. Just...don’t do it again, okay.” “Can’t promise, but mmkay.”

Seeing Peter and Scott actually getting along for the first time since they became the X-Men is shocking. Jean’s a telepath so she kinda already knows why they’re suddenly on good terms. Kurt and Ororo are clueless. “Since when are you two buddies?” “We’re kindred spirits” “By which he means that we utterly disgust each other.” “Yeah.” “But you’re always bickering and fighting with him.” “Yes, and I would also die for him. Try to keep up, blueberry.”

They’re best buddies.

Peter soon figures out that Scott as this not so secret crush on Jean. He doesn’t bring it up though, waits for Scott to slip up or admit it out loud.

He does.

“Can you keep a secret?” “Sure, but why would I?” “I’ll ignore that.”  “So, what is it?” “I...kind of like Jean.” “Dude, I thought you said it was a secret.” “Is it that obvious?” “You need to stop making googly-eyes at her all the time. It’s weird and frankly, kind of creepy.”

“Scott I need to tell you something as well.” “Go ahead.” “...Magneto is my father.” Peter blurts out “Just thought you should know.” Scott stares at first and then burst into a laugh, thinking it’s another joke. He stops when he sees Peter’s serious expression. “You’re not kidding.” “I’m definitely not kidding.” “...You know that explains so much about you.”

Peter is slightly scared Scott will turn on him again because Erik was kind of involved in Alex’s death.

Scott tells him again that Alex’s death was an unfortunate accident and he doesn’t blame either Magneto or Ororo for what happened. He also assures him that he doesn’t care who his father is.

Peter’s relieved.

“Also my nameisnotPeteritsactuallyPietro” “...What?”

“Let’s just say I’m not a ‘you must reach friendship level 5 to unlock my tragic backstory’ person. I’m more like  ‘you have to reach friendship level 5 to know my real name’ type of a person.”

He prefers to be called Peter though so he asks Scott to keep that to himself.

Scott promises to keep it a secret.

Peter promises to help him win Jean’s heart.

Turns out he’s the best wingman Scott could ever have.

When they’re hanging out together, Peter mentions to Kurt that Scott has a crush on Jean and doesn’t know what to do. Kurt, ever the romantic, suggests him to write her a letter. 

“Blueberry, no, JUST NO. Bad idea. He has the artistic ability of a short-sighted mongoose.” “Thanks Maximoff.”

Peter comes up with his own idea.

“What do you mean you hit on Jean for me, what the fuck Peter!?” “SOMEONE HAD TO DO IT SCOTT!”

Peter succeeds and Scott gets the girl.

“Ok, Pete, I’m going to have Jean over tomorrow night, so if you don’t mind-” Scott begins one day, weeks after their first date. “I don’t.” Peter winks “Ohhh I see where this is going.” “Don’t tell anyone, you know Xavier has rules and shit.” “I won’t IF you don’t tell him about my hidden stash of stolen sweets and the arcades.” “It’s a deal.”

“Just leave my bed alone. It’s a sacred place.”

Peter spends the night in Kurt’s room who finally starts to understand why Scott suffered from lack of sleep in their early days.

“Why exactly are you here?” “You’re too pure for this, blueberry.”

In the morning Peter decides he’s done enough waiting and barges in their room, waking up both Scott and Jean.

“Don’t you knock!?” “Considering it’s my room as well...generally, no.”

“I brought you two breakfast by the way.”  “I, um…thanks.”Jean seemed to genuinely appreciate his gesture. “It’s no trouble at all! Well, as long as you don’t make noises swallowing that the same way you did last night.” “PETER!” “dO YOU EVEN HAVE AN IDEA HOW THIN THE WALLS ARE HERE!?”

He runs off to Ororo before Scott could test his powers on him.  “Hey ‘Ro, what do you think I should do if somebody told me they were going to peel me like a potato.” “And by somebody, I meant Scott.” “Honestly Peter, I thought I knew a lot of threatening words, but that one’s new.” 

Peter continues teasing Scott for the rest of the day. Scott thinks he’s a menace. “Sometimes I want to tell you to go find someone to date already so you’ll stop pestering me, but then I remember what an inexpressibly annoying person you are and how no one deserves to deal with you.” “Thanks Scott, love you too, buddy.” “You know what, maybe you should find someone.” “I would rather be tied up, covered in honey, and left near a hill full of red ants. Naked.” 

Scott decides to return the favor and find Peter a date.

Turns out Peter does have a tiny crush on Ororo. “No, I don’t. The only crush I have is the crushing weight of my existence.” “But it’s a perfect match! You’re single and she has low standards!” “Is that supposed to be an insult, you unimaginative dishrag?!”

Peter’s known for staying up late, disrespecting the few sets of rules Charles has given to them. He hates the confined feeling of the mansion and seeks the comfort of the outside world all the time. Thus, he always comes back sometime past school curfew. Usually, no one but Scott notices, but even he has come to his breaking point.Plus he’s still mad at him for the stuff with Jean. So one day, when Peter’s way past his curfew again, Scott absolutely refuses to open the door to their room. “Summers, it’s me, a shambling mockery of a mutant being. I know you’re awake. Open the door.” “Sorry, I can’t help you, we’re closed for the day.” “That’s very funny, Scott. I get it, you’re mad I stayed out past school curfew, but you’re not really going to make me sleep in the hallway, right?” He does.

#xmen #quicksilver #peter maximoff #scott summers #cyclops #headcanons #i headcanon that peter is the oldest #followed by ororo who's like 22-23 #and then jean #kurt #scott is the youngest

[kurt-nightcrawler]

i’ve read a lot of people saying the didn’t like how focused the x men movies were on wolverine what’s your opinion on that?

Obviously, I’m no professional. I don’t know everything about the X-Men, but I have watched the movies and know quite a bit about them. (I need to read more comics lol) these are just my opinions, please don’t get upset over them.

—

Strap in lads we have a lot to discuss

Now, obviously wolverine is important to the xmen. and hugh jackman did a very good job playing wolverine and going through all the training and body conditioning even as he got older, so kudos to him for that. ANYWAY lemme spill tea

Love triangles?

The xmen movies are notorious for love triangles— specifically the Scott x Jean x Logan one. Obviously there’s sexual tension between them all in the comics, but that really doesn’t have to mean anything. One big reason why the last stand was so,,,, yikes... is because of said love triangle.

Sure X3 isn’t great, but if they dropped the love triangle I’m sure hey could have spun some bullshit around and made the film a bit better.

The solo movies—

Origins: what. The. Fuck.

That movie was too, a mess. Which sucks ass, because if it actually did well, there would probably had been more origin movies about other characters! (Victor and Logan, brothers???¿¿ was that a fever dream????¿ did I miss something¿?)(Did you know the script got changed so much that for some scenes the actors wouldn’t get the ‘official script’ until the night before/day of shooting said scene? yeah, hot mess) and I know this movie was made bc the whole point of Logan in the movies was “I don’t know my past! Help me find it chuck!” But idk. It was the motivator that got Logan to do stuff and stick around the xmen but they didn’t have to really hyperfixiate on it.

Wolverine 2–

Better than origins, but honestly? I thought it was meh. I watched it and I just couldn’t get through it, so I never finished it. I thought it was meh.

Logan—

Holy grail, I know, I know. It was good, heart wrenching, and pretty creative. Best out of the three solo movies.

Overall, I feel like the regular xmen movies were a tad Logan centered.

Obviously, fox saw how good/popular hugh jackman was at wolverine and they wanted to gain profit from that, that’s what any big company would have done. But also, there’s a difference between using something a lot and milking the cow until it’s dead

The new xmen trilogy cameos were dumb. There, I said it. They were dumb. Days of future past was creative and gave Logan a purpose and it was a decent movie, but we are talking about first class and apocalypse.

There was no point to have the scene where charles and erik track logan down and try to get him to join the team, only to get blown off. He wasn’t the first person they went to, and when they’d go to someone and were faced with hesitation or disinterest in the xmen, they’d still manage to convince them to join. With logan, they just left. He was like “Fuck you” and they just walked out. ??? This didn’t do anything. It didn’t add to the plot, and it wasn’t funny. I mean sure, at first it was kinda cool like, “oh! wolverine! The glue holding the xmcu together!” But looking back on it, the reason he held the xmcu together was because fox spun him that way. He didn’t need to hold the franchise together, the xmen has thousands of diverse, powerful, interesting characters— a lot which aren’t even in the movies and cartoons— to the point where if done correctly, you don’t need just one person carrying the load.

Also the xmen apocalypse cameo was stupid. I know it was supposed to like, show how the “timeline” changed since dofp, but it didn’t really do anything and most people I know are always like “I was so confused as to why he was there” and even after me explaining it they still don’t really get it. Again, they didn’t the wolverine cameo. Sure, this time he added a bit more to the plot— killing all the guards for Scott, Jean and Kurt— But they could have done something themselves without fox having to get hugh. Also the “bonding moment” where Jean “freed a piece of his mind” and Logan escaped into the snow? 1) made me hella uncomfortable because the situation had high sexual tension, and Jean is supposed to be 16-18 in xmen apocalypse. Logan is ??? (He’s like 200 years old? But he looks 45 ish so that’s still not great when having a moment with a minor/barely legal person) also Scott was right there which makes me go back to my original point about the love triangle— it’s dumb and unnecessary.

Overall, Logan’s character obviously added a lot to the xmcu— good and bad— and he will be remembered for a long time, but there were also other characters the light could have shined on for even a second, and would have been just as, if not, more interesting. If fox didn’t act like they could only use Logan, they could have had a lot more success and maybe, just maybe, not sold out to Disney.

But those are just my thoughts, what do I know? ¯\ _(ツ)_/¯

#x-men #ask #anon #wolverine #hugh jackman #marvel #disney

[nathanielwharton]

My 2018 in Pop Culture

Same plan here as usual. This is what meant most to me last year in pop culture.

Top Forty Things From 2018

40. King Kong on Broadway I wrote about this as an adaptation of the Kong story over at SportsAlcohol.com, but here I'll just say that while I was really disappointed with this as a musical, the execution of Kong himself on stage was breathtakingly rad.

39. Rhyming "is nae" with "Disney" in Anna and the Apocalypse In theory, I don't have much of an appetite left for a zombie comedy, having been well and truly sated by Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, and the wave of imitators that followed them. I felt like I'd seen all of the moves that are possible with that particular genre mash-up, and then I read about a Scottish zombie comedy that ALSO threw in the musical and the Christmas movie. So it was almost with a sense of grudging obligation that I accepted the inevitability that I'd see Anna and the Apocalypse. It won me over. It's got a winning cast, catchy songs, and a surprisingly effective melancholy tone. But I have to admit, the moment that really won me over was a moment in the song "Hollywood Ending" where "is nae" ("is not" in a Scottish accent) is rhymed with "Disney."

38. The Conners/The Roseanne Revival This was a real roller coaster in 2018. I was excited and apprehensive about the revival, and only slightly relieved when it began and was mostly pretty good. Still, there was an uneasiness with the way that the Roseanne character had been conceived for the revival and that basically exploded thanks to the behaviour of the real Roseanne. Still, overall I've enjoyed the revival and The Conners, and while I'm sad about what happened to TV Roseanne and real Roseanne(for different reasons)

37. "The Queen" episode of Castle Rock I liked the show pretty well overall, but oh man did this episode stand out. For most of the run, I'd just thought it was a cute bit of casting to have Sissy Spacek playing what seemed like a strangely minor role. Then this episode happened. It's a real acting showcase for Spacek and it satisfies with suspense and emotion in equal measure.

36. Kurt Russell performing "Santa Claus is Back in Town" in The Christmas Chronicles I'm a sucker for a Christmas movie, and this one is agreeable enough. There is some attempt at telling an emotional story that might hit you if you're in the right mood, and there is pleasant hint of Gremlins in the movie's portrayal of Santa's elves, but mostly it is a pretty satisfying expansion of the thought, "what if Kurt Russell was Santa Claus?" Russell is a hoot in the role, and the movie hits a peak when his Santa ends up in jail and breaks out into a jailhouse rendition of "Santa Claus is Back in Town." Downloaded and added to my Christmas playlist.

35. Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert This new wave of live musicals on TV hasn't always resulted in a great show (I honestly have forgotten a lot of the Peter Pan and Rocky Horror broadcasts), but sometimes they end up with some really cool television. Grease Live still reigns as the champion of these things, but this production of Jesus Christ Superstar was exciting and energetic and featured some neat ideas in its staging. It's shows like this that keep me hoping they'll continue to try these live musical shows.

34. The Death of Stalin Wrote about this for SportsAlcohol.com.

33. Isle of Dogs The visceral aesthetic pleasure of this film might outweigh the delicate emotional effect all of Anderson's films tend to achieve, but even if the complicated story and worldbuilding in the film kept it from succeeding for me fully on a first viewing, it did get me to want to watch it again (and again).

32. Keira Knightley in The Nutcracker and the Four Realms The movie as a whole is a good enough time in the way that all of these lavishly produced live-action Disney fantasy movies tend to be. But Keira Knightley, as the Sugarplum Fairy, single-handedly drags this movie up a notch with her fantastically daffy performance. To explain all the ways that her performance delights would be to spoil what happens in the movie, but I'll just say that she finds a few different registers to play in the film and she is amazing in each one. Think of this snub when you watch the Academy Awards.

31. The Favourite A three-hander where each leg of the triangle is different and spectacular. Turns out that acidic dialogue works just as well in the Yorgos Lanthimos world as alien affectedness, and the cast he's got for this one hurl barbs with aplomb.

30. Ash vs. Evil Dead Series Finale The third season of this show lost a bit of a step for me, not quite balancing the goofs and the horror quite as deftly as the show had done at its best. But it really brought it back around for the last couple of episodes. The finale in particular had some surprisingly big action and an ending that felt perfectly Evil Dead. If that's the last we see of Ash, it feels right.

29. DuckTales The first season wrapped up with some good adventure and some ambitious emotional storytelling. And the second season has seemed, if anything, even more confident so far (including an excellent Christmas episode).

28. Eighth Grade What a lovely, humane, gem of a movie.

27. The Old Man and the Gun I was head-over-heels in love with this one like halfway through the opening scene. If it had ended after that scene, I might have been satisfied, but the rest of the movie was truly wonderful too.

26. A Series of Unfortunate Events Season Two There's no twist for book readers as great as what they did with the Parent characters in the first season, but this second season of the show continued to be really great.

25. Rusty Lake: Paradise & Rusty Lake: Paradox This year I played all of the Rusty Lake/Cube Escape games, and it's probably a good thing that it takes a while between game releases or I might just burrow into these Twin Peaks inspired puzzles and not come out.

24. The last 20 minutes of Halloween I pretty well loved the entirety of this 40-years-later sequel, but the last twenty minutes or so were just next-level great. Basically, once everybody gets to Laurie's compound, this film was as scary as I wanted and as fist-pumpingly thrilling as I didn't know I could have expected.

23. Lost in Space Season One Might have loved this if it was just the one thing after another space survival show, but when you layer on an intriguing mystery and then add on Parker Posey's slitherly Dr. Smith? Yep, loved it.

22. The Haunting of Hill House Mike Flanagan has been doing cool horror work on smaller movies for a few years now, and I'm glad he seems to have found a patron in Netflix. The broader canvas of Haunting of Hill House allows him to do pretty much everything he's so good at, and even allows for some new tricks (like that "one long shot" episode, or the creepy background ghosts that go uncommented on in the story).

21. Creed II Creed was so great, and the notion of Stallone returning to the Ivan Drago well so worrisome, that I was a little apprehensive that this one would disappoint me. What a great surprise, then, that this was basically a best-case scenario for how this could have worked out. Even the Drago stuff is pretty compelling! I'd love to see more with Adonis and Bianca sometime, and I certainly still love Rocky himself, but for this round of playing with fire, I am satisfied.

20. Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters & Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle The first two (out of three) animated Godzilla films hit Netflix last year and they were much more curious and idiosyncratic than I expected when they were first announced. Slowly paced, with an intentional disregard for the expectations of kaiju fans, they take a brilliant concept and proceed to use it to explore the perils of various belief systems. Each of these ends on a cliffhanger, so the success of the whole thing might depend a bit on how Godzilla: Planet Eater wraps things up, but for now it's a fascinating experiment.

19. The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs I can't say I sat around missing the horror host thing (I also love and regularly watch the family-friendly Svengoolie), but I was still surprised by how enjoyable and how nostalgic I found the experience of sitting back down with Joe Bob to watch a trashy horror movie. I didn't watch this as a marathon, but it did make for a bunch of swell weekends catching up with some movies I'd never seen and a charming film buff I hadn't seen in a while.

18. Bad Times at the El Royale Everything about this, from the cast to the aesthetic to the story, was just right up my alley. There was a moment late in the film where Maggie and I turned to each other, our jaws literally dropped, and we burst into nervous laughter.

17. BlacKkKlansman Wrote this one up over at SportsAlcohol.com.

16. Three Identical Strangers This documentary knocked me out. It's an amazing story with a bunch of incredible twists and turns and fascinating characters. It also poses some really intriguing questions and left me with a lot to think about. Don't read anything about it, just see it!

15. Disenchantment As a big fan of The Simpsons and i (and knowing the similar arcs they followed pretty well), I was pretty excited for a new Matt Groening animated show, and the first season of Disenchantment might have surpassed my expectations. It's funny, visually appealing, and takes some effective swings at the kind of emotional storytelling that it took the earlier series a couple of seasons to really nail. The finale sent me scrambling to the internet to see if it had been picked up for more episodes.

14. Nancy by Olivia Jaimes As a regular and avid comic strip reader, I propose that I was more blown away than most of the internet by the new Nancy. I regularly checked in on the soggy Gilchrist version of the strip, so imagine my surprise and delight at the change! It is neat to see a newspaper strip make any kind of impact in the culture again. Plus the strip is really fun!

13. Star Wars Star Wars: Rebels came to a close with a run of really exciting episodes and a really excellent finale. The comics continued to be really good. And Solo: A Star Wars Story showed up with smaller, not so fate-of-the-galaxy stakes and still just nailed the iconic characters it was digging into in exactly the ways it needed to. In a year where Star Wars fandom was showing itself to be home to a lot of the same toxicity as other fandoms, Star Wars itself kept up its end with lots of fun stuff.

12. The Last Best Story I thought I had a good idea what to expect from a high school newspaper riff on His Girl Friday, and this book certainly (thoroughly, delightfully) satisfies that. But I wasn't exactly prepared for the emotional depth and lovely observational detail in Maggie's book (I mean, I probably should have been, but it still sneaked up on me). I finished and just wanted to read it again.

11. "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat" episode of The X-Files This second (and seemingly final) revival season of The X-Files boasted a more confident ratio of hits to misses than the previous one (even the nutso mythology episodes showed a stronger grasp of how the show works and what it means in the current moment) but the highlight, again, was a virtuosic episode written and directed by Darin Morgan. It was brilliantly funny, very X-Filesy, and sneakily provided a hilarious alternate series finale for fans in the event that Chris Carter would botch the actual one a few episodes later (luckily, he did as well as I might have hoped, really).

10. Arrested Development - Season 5, Part 1 I disagreed with most of the complaints people lobbied against the fourth season of Arrested Development, but I do think the batch of fifth season episodes released last year did fall prey to some of the shapeless storytelling and clunky greenscreen they were accused of before (I thought the fourth season did wonders with having the characters separated, while they flailed to meaningfully integrate Lindsay in the fifth season). And because episodes weren't as clearly defined in their storytelling, it left some of the character stories feeling both too dragged out and thinly developed (thinking here of Gob's struggle with his sexuality and Tobias's relationship with Murphybrown) by the time the half-season ended on a slight cliffhanger without really building significant momentum. But for all that, I love these characters so much and the show particularly really does right by the way that Michael and George Michael try to navigate their relationship with each other after the events of the fourth season.

9. Mary Poppins Returns This movie had impossible shoes to fill, and you can tell that everybody involved took that seriously. I saw this one twice. The first time, I really enjoyed it. The second time, it made me cry.

8. Marvel Cinematic Universe Black Panther was so fantastic, Avengers: Infinity War felt like a really special theater experience, and Ant-Man and the Wasp was a delightful trifle with an amazing, playful gut-punch of a stinger. Really, I had a great time will all three movies they put out this year and I loved the ride they took us on all the way through to the final text card in the Ant-Man credits.

7. Surprise, it's The Cloverfield Paradox! Sure, this is easily the least of the Cloverfield movies so far (it's still a fun haunted-house-on-a-space-station movie with an overqualified cast), but I don't imagine there'll be a more fun way to see one of these. I was already feeling that familiar Cloverfield excitement as the online marketing game started spooling up, but I pretty much leapt off the couch when Katie and I saw the Super Bowl ad that announced it would be dropping soon on Netflix, and freaked out even further when I looked on Netflix and saw the tag that it would debut after the game ended! We stayed up and watched it that night, and I went to sleep in the glow of a new Cloverfield. Gonna be hard to top that for excitement next time, but I'm looking forward to seeing them try.

6. Support the Girls Basically a "day in the life" movie about a manager of a Hooters-style sports bar, this movie (starring a perfect Regina Hall) is warm and human and reassuring because of the way it eschews the normal reassurances of this kind of thing and just plays it real. It's a beautiful movie.

5. GLOW I loved the first season of GLOW, and I think this second season is even better. It digs a little deeper into the supporting cast, doubles down on its resonance with things happening in the culture right now, includes that delightful episode within an episode, and ends on a perfect and delicate emotional note.

4. American Vandal Here's one of those shows with a perfect first season taking a shot at a follow-up, and they nailed it. Whatever trades are made in taking on a case with less personal involvement for our investigator leads are made up by the incisive observational writing (and hilarious bathroom jokes), this time throwing race and class into the mix. I'm sorry we won't get to see them take on another case and format, but these first two seasons are perfect.

3. Ready Player One I am in the tank for pretty much any Spielberg movie (I've loved the dramas he's done in the last few years) and here he's made a movie with cameos from King Kong and Mechagodzilla. I enjoyed the book this was based on, but I loved the movie even more. The visuals and action (and that amazing Shining sequence) are terrific, but the way that they restructured the game tasks build to make a moving argument for the ways even popular art are used for communication and connection, and Mark Rylance's portrayal of the Wonka-esque Halliday makes it all land.

2. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs I wrote about this one over at SportsAlcohol.com. I loved it.

1. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts One & Two To be quite honest, this would be hard to beat in any event since I got engaged to be married between Part One and Part Two. Luckily, the show was a really special event even beyond that personal association. A surprisingly moving epilogue to the Harry Potter stories (and more satisfying in performance where the performances of the actors makes up for some of the ways the supporting characters seemed more thinly conceived in the script than they did in the books), it was also a dazzling theatrical experience. The variety of tricks employed to bring the wizard world to the stage meant that just as you figured out how they pulled off one big effect you were met with three other nifty flourishes. I dig Rowling's continued noodling around in her wizard world through things like this play and the Fantastic Beasts films (I enjoyed Crimes of Grindelwald) as a way to tell new stories and explore nerdy minutia without undoing the lovely bow of that original series of books. (Side note: Because my pleasure reading time has been so heavily curtailed as I get through this first school year, I'm only about a third in on Lethal White. Really digging it, but don't feel like I can include it on this list properly.)

Top Twenty Things I'm Excited About in 2019

Godzilla: King of the Monsters Never would I have believed that we'd be getting a big-budget American Godzilla film that would prominently feature Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah as the third film in a shared Godzilla/Kong movie universe. Now it is happening, and everything they've released to do with the film (trailers, posters, etc) have looked incredible. Gonna be hard to top this one for excitement this year.

Marvel Cinematic Universe Captain Marvel looks like a lot of fun, I'm sure Spider-Man: Far From Home will be great, and I'm pretty interested in whatever Marvel Studios ends up doing for the Disney+ streaming service, but the main event this year is obviously Avengers: Endgame. Whatever form this big finale for the first decade of MCU stories takes, I cannot wait to see it.

Star Wars As with Marvel, there's plenty to look forward to this year, with The Mandalorian presumably accompanying the debut of Disney+ along with the revival of The Clone Wars, but the biggest deal will of course be Episode IX, the grand finale of the main Star Wars saga and the story of the Skywalkers.

Arrested Development The original run of the series was nearly flawless. The fourth season is, in some ways, even more ambitious and special. And even though the first half of this fifth season was, to my eyes, guilty of some of the baggy, formless storytelling that season four had been accused of (and splitting the season like this meant that the first half felt weirdly unsatisfying), it still had a ton of joke that I really loved and developed the relationship between Michael and his son in a way that I did find satisfying after the fourth season cliffhanger. Excited for more of the show and crossing my fingers that it nails the landing.

Stranger Things III This one drops on my birthday! Setting the story in summer sounds fun to me, and I'm pretty excited to see these characters again after a year off.

The Twilight Zone The original series is a deep foundation of my pop culture world and I even found things to like about the UPN revival in the early 00s, so I'm predisposed to be interested in this. But giving it to Jordan Peele (also so psyched for Us) seems like a masterstroke and the trailer they just released is so perfect (both for the obvious love it displays for the original and the new energy it promises) that it's driven me to distraction. Cannot wait for this.

The Addams Family I was obsessed with The Addams Family back when the two Barry Sonnenfeld films came out in the 90s. I loved the 60s sitcom, the movies, and the animated series (and more recently was bitterly disappointed by the Broadway musical). But most of all I adored the Charles Addams cartoons. This latest animated film has been kicking around in some form of development for a while now (there was a time when it was reported that they were trying to get Tim Burton to give it the stop-motion treatment) and I'm a little apprehensive that it ended up with Illumination Studios. Still, a new animated Addams Family film is a must see.

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance This sounds pretty special, and in any case it is exciting to get an ambitious new puppet project from the Henson Company delivered right to my Netflix queue this year.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood & The Irishman A new Tarantino film would be on this list no matter what, so those photos they released a while back were most exciting to just get a look at what he's going for aesthetically. And of course I'm intrigued and excited to hear that Netflix is throwing money at Scorsese to make a crime film starting De Niro, Pacino, Keitel, and Joe Pesci.

The French Dispatch Not sure if this one will actually hit this year or end up seeking out some awards-friendly release next year, but it's a Wes Anderson film about journalism with a predictably great cast. Exciting whenever it comes out.

Knives Out Rian Johnson writing and directing another mystery film with this cast? Let's do this now.

Little Women Lady Bird was sooo good that I'd be pretty into whatever movie Greta Gerwig made next, so the incredible cast she's assembled for this follow up is just icing.

The Righteous Gemstones When Jody Hill and Danny McBride make another HBO show, I'm going to watch it. Make it about a family of televangelists and make John Goodman the patriarch, and I can't wait to watch it.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters Volume 2 The first volume was a surprise highlight of 2017 and it was a bummer to see this follow up slide further and further back on release calendars. Hoping it finally arrives this year, but the original was so wonderful that I'm ready to wait as long as it takes.

Missing Link There are other animated movies I'll be really excited for by the time they come out this year (Toy Story 4 and Frozen 2 will surely be huge events) but I'm probably most excited that Laika is back with a new feature.

Star Trek It looks like, as an attempt to get people like me to actually keep up their CBS All Access subscription outside of the two months they're offering new episodes of Star Trek Discovery (and I am pretty psyched for this second season!) they are planning on keeping us in new Star Trek as often as possible. An animated Trek comedy! A new series about Picard! More of those very cool Short Treks! I'm pretty into seeing what they have in store this year.

Looney Tunes Cartoons After years and years of grousing about Warner Bros' treatment of the Looney Tunes characters (even when they have something that kinda works, like Wabbit or New Looney Tunes, it has felt like they're on the C-list; and no, Space Jam 2 does not make me feel better), I'm intrigued by this series and am anxious to see some footage to see what they're cooking up.

Penny Dreadful: City of Angels I loved the original series, I'm a sucker for stories set in America in the 30s, and  I like the cast they're lining up, so I'm definitely into this.

Amazing Stories I don't even know if or when I'll get to see this (we already have so many streaming services and if I'm adding another one this year, it'll be Disney+), but I love the idea of a new Amazing Stories and if Spielberg directs an episode or two it'll make this a must watch somehow.

[wemajormanafemaleuniverse]

Glee actually time line

Ok I think I put together rough time line for most of the episode. Idk exactly when puckerman Bros where in LA but school ran till 22nd they probably had the next 2 weeks off as USA does that for winter break. So Bram woke up on 22nd they said four days till apocalypse.One of those days Brittany gave out gifts. And one of those days they did apocalypse club thing as well as mirrage so probably 2 days bramming. Artie's parents must have kept him home for 2 days do to concussion. As he wasn't around with gifts or for apocalypse meeting. But Marely was able to get his help on what seemed like the 22nd. So Artie probably hit his head like on the 19th. Probably when Burt took Blaine up to see Kurt starting on 19th. Blaine's parents are easy going so when Burt asked they where sure even if his dad was a little weird when Blaine was younger. Blame Marely for making me figure this out I wanted to know if I needed to be mad at her as she said she called Artie for help. I'm not though I wonder if she noticed Artie kind of disappeared for couple days. Sometime on 20th is probably when Sue delivered the gifts to Milly and Marely. Sam clearly has had his 18th birthday or school would've contacted his gaurdian as he isn't with his parents when he was missing for couple days of school without being reported.Brittany is 19. Idk if Blaine is 17 or 18 if he is only 17 I'm sure his parents arranged for him to be out of school. Artie's parents called him in sick.I hope this made sense.

#Glee #gleeactually #artieabrams #blaineanderson #kurthummel #samevans #marely #brittany pierce #noah puckerman #Jake puckerman

[mymilkysu]

30 Questions thing

thank you @kirnoo for tagging me, and i know this is long overdue, but still.. here you go :)

1. Nickname: cila or milky

2. Gender: female

3. Star Sign: i’m an aries

4. Height: around 5'3 i guess? 

5. Time: 11:52 PM ^^

6. Birthday: April 11th

7. Favourite Bands: including boybands? ha. i have a lot. but these are the ones i listened to daily, or whose comebacks i’m always waiting for: K-Pop: Highlight, BTS, DAY6 (go listen to them, please!), EXO, DBSK/JYJ, and Winner Non K-Pop: The Script, Goo Goo Dolls, Bon Jovi, Boyzone, Backstreet Boys, N*Sync, 30 Seconds to Mars.

8. Favourite Solo Artists:  K-Pop: Suran, Ailee, Ben, Eric Nam, Sung Sikyung, Na Yoon Kwon, Yoon Mirae, and those OST singers i can’t lists them all, there’s too many lol. Non K-Pop: Ed Sheeran, Darren Criss, and the talented bunch on Kurt Hugo Schneider’s YT channel including himself. Instrumental composers: Dave Koz (such a 90s baby that i am *sigh*), Aaron Zigman (”The Best of Me” Original Score is 10/10), Hans Zimmer, Howard Shore (the geinus behind LOTR & the Hobbit trilogy), James Newton Howard & Kenny G (thank you for providing ”Dying Young” with such beautiful musics), and many more i guess. i love listening to original music scores so.. *sigh*

9. Song stuck in my head: hmm.. DAY6 - I Loved You. (please.. please do go and try to listen to them. they’re so underrated that it hurts.)

10. Last movie I watched: in the cinema? Spiderman: The Homecoming. if not in cinema, then..  X-Men: Apocalypse. They just played it on Fox Movies if i’m not mistaken XDD

11. Last show I watched: does K-Drama counts? hahaha. if yes, then the recent episode of “The King in Love” which makes me so frustrated. if not, then tvN’s “Home Food Rescue 3″ (Yoon Dujun!! <3)

12. When I created my blog: i completely forgot about this. it’s pretty old blog tbh.

13. What do I post: hmm i reblogged contents that i like, such as those k-pop/non-kpop artists related posts. i also reblogged those aesthetics photos? or some photos of foods, or some beautiful scenery. what do i post by myself? sometimes gifs, or photos, sometimes fanarts (just some editing things i did on photoshop, like fanfic posters, etc), and sometimes i also post random thoughts/random rants. but it’s pretty rare lol..

14. Last thing I googled: “composers of Dying Young OST” cause i totally forgot whose the other composer aside from Kenny G lol

15. Do I have another blog: yes! to fulfill my purely sugakookie (indulgence) it’s @sugakookierush :)

16. Do I get asks: rarely lol

17. Why did I choose this blog’s name: i… completely forgot why i named my blog mymilkysu. lol

18. Blogs I’m following: 479 blogs XD

19. Followers: let’s just say around 100 ;)

20. Favourite colours: mostly basic colors like white, black, grey, but sometimes i also like pastel colors.

21. Average hours of sleep: from 5 to 10 hours i guess…

22. Lucky number: probably.. 23.

23. Instruments: i didn’t play any instruments lol. though i did played for my school’s drum-band/marching-band on junior high, i mostly played for the melodies but i spent some time being the majorette?  

24. What I’m wearing: right now? my sleeping outfits lol. a sleeveless t-shirt, and shorts.

25. How many blankets I sleep with: one

26. Dream Job: can’t say for sure, but in the future i would like to be a writer.

27. Dream Trip: Salzburgh! hmm.. i really want to visit europe, mostly austria, england, and switzerland. don’t ask me why, i just wanted to lol. aside from that, i would love to visit hawaii as well as korea/japan :)

28. Favourite Food: i eat almost everything.. so it’s hard to pick favorites? but let’s just say noodles.

29. Nationality: i’m going to skip this one, thank you :)

30. Favourite Song Now: anything from DAY6. i’m serious. if you haven’t heard of them, go to JYP’s YT channel, and watch all of DAY6′s MVs. aside from DAY6′s songs.. i guess Jimin?BTS’ “Serendipity”? hahaha does that count? XDD

hee! it’s done! pretty long but fun nonetheless :) i’m tagging anyone who wants to do this! go ahead and answer these questions, you can also tag me so i can read it XD

thank you!! :)

#30 questions things #milky answers questions #lol #my post

[fashiontrendin-blog]

The 100 Books Every Man Should Read

http://fashion-trendin.com/the-100-books-every-man-should-read-2/

The 100 Books Every Man Should Read

Groucho Marx once said: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” We’re not quite sure what he meant either, but what we do know is that books are an essential for any man.

So, whether you’re heading off abroad and need a page-turner, or just want to have something other than Harry Kane’s ankle injury to talk about on a Tinder date next week, here are the 100 books that’ll broaden your horizons (and bulk out your bookshelf).

Classics

Men Without Women – Ernest Hemingway

Best For: Understanding Women Classic Hemingway subjects – bullfighting, war, women, more war – in a collection of short stories proving that masculinity lacking a softer touch is a dangerous thing. If you’ve been dumped, or you’re just missing your mum, then you need this.

A Picture of Dorian Grey – Oscar Wilde

Best For: When You’ve Found Another Grey Hair A handsome, innocent young man sells his soul to keep his dashing good looks – and of course it all goes pear-shaped. It’ll make you feel better about the march of time and skipping the gym, plus it’s full of classic Wilde quips you can fire off at the dinner table.

Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut

Best For: Reaffirming War Is Good For Absolutely Nothing Prisoner of war, optometrist, father, time-traveller, plane-crash survivor: Billy Pilgrim is all these and more in a miraculously moving, bitter and blackly hilarious story of innocence faced with apocalypse.

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Best For: The DiCaprio Nod Leo rarely puts a foot wrong, but even he couldn’t capture the magnetic Jay Gatsby as well as Fitzgerald did on page. Set in the summer of 1922, with the Roaring Twenties in full swing, this is a terrific unpicking of decadence, social change and excess.

A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

Best For: Bratchnys A merciless satire of state control, in which Burgess imagined a dystopian future of ultraviolence decades before it became a sci-fi standard. Much of it is written in the slang spoken by teen hero, Alex; ‘bratchnys’ are bastards (and so are Alex and his murderous crew.)

Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

Best For: Intense Moral Conundrum There’s no sugar-coating this one: a man obsessed with the 12-year-old daughter of his landlady and so marries the mother to be near her. From there, the ground only gets dodgier. The most controversial book on this list is a literary hot potato that will never cool down.

Brighton Rock – Graham Greene

Best For: Seaside Sins Brighton wasn’t always cocktail bars and vintage shops. In 1938, a gang war is raging, and ruthless Pinkie has just killed his first victim. In trying to cover his tracks, he only digs himself into a deeper hole.

1984 – George Orwell

Best For: A Jolt Of Future Shock No list of great books would be complete without this influential masterpiece, which gets more prescient year by year. Winston Smith rewrites the past to suit the needs of the ruling party, who run a totalitarian society under the watchful eye of Big Brother.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love – Raymond Carver

Best For: Toasting Don Draper A collection of brilliant short stories about the lonely men and women of the American Midwest who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time. Along with fellow US short-story master John Cheever, Carver’s words inspired Mad Men.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey

Best For: Breaking The Rules You’ve probably seen the film, but this really is a case of ‘the book is better’. Evil Nurse Ratched rules an Oregon mental institution with an iron fist until new arrival McMurphy, who faked madness to dodge hard labour in the joint, brings chaos and hope to his fellow inmates.

The Catcher In The Rye – J.D.Salinger

Best For: Angst In Your Pants Any book about the harshness of teenage life will resonate with anyone who is or has been a teen, but the misadventures of Holden Caulfield have become the set text, and rightly so. He is cynical, jaded, dickishly rebellious. And we have, in ways big and small, all been there.

Meditations – Marcus Aurelius

Best For: Getting Things Done The innermost thoughts of the Roman Emperor from 161-180AD are a genuinely practical and insightful guide to life almost 1,900 years later. Silicon Valley billionaires and their teams love this book and its ideas for the way it helps them to accept the world as it is, then rule it.

The Go-Between – L.P. Hartley

Best For: Keeping Secrets They say “the past is a foreign country”. Well, that’s because it’s the famous opening line of this novel, in which an old man recalls the summer he spent aged 13 at his friend’s country house, as he shipped illicit messages between his chum’s engaged sister and a local farmer.

Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

Best For: Page-Turning And Page-Burning In the America of the future, people are addicted to watching soap-opera-style shows on giant screens in their homes. Books are banned, firemen hunt down illicit volumes and burn them. A book about the magic of reading and how we must never let it fade away.

The Odyssey – Homer

Best For: Original Adventure The original homecoming tale – a king’s decade-long slog home after the Trojan War – contains: witches, monsters, betrayal, drugs, cannibals, disguises, a bit of war and quite a lot of slaughter. Every man-on-a-quest story and road movie owes a debt to this remarkable tale.

Bleak House – Charles Dickens

Best For: Epic Shenanigans To be fair, the Dickens pick on this list could have been one of a dozen. But this Victorian doorstop, with its massive cast (including the murky London underworld), is the most impressive and entertaining. A legal tussle over a will plays havoc with the lives of the potential beneficiaries and those around them.

Heart Of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

Best For: “The Horror, The Horror!” In 1890, the author captained a steamboat up the Congo River. A decade later, his novel about something very similar became a sensation. In 1979 it was very freely adapted into the epic Vietnam movie Apocalypse Now. Also, at less than 100 pages, you have no excuses not to finish it.

Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

Best For: The Sum Of Its Parts Yes, everybody now knows that the monster isn’t Frankenstein; that’s the mad scientist who makes him. But did you know that science-fiction was basically invented with this book, written by an 18-year-old girl challenged to come up with a ghost story? Still creepy and relevant despite being 200 years old.

The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler

Best For: Prime Pulp Fiction “The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.” “He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel.” “A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.” Just a sample of the hardboiled genius on display in this truly great detective yarn.

The Lord of The Rings – JRR Tolkien

Best For: Hobbit-Forming When it comes to fantasy, there is one story to rule them all. The massive success of the film trilogy based on it does not dim the power of the source material. Amazon is spending $1bn making the TV version. For many, though, the original remains the masterpiece.

Moby Dick – Herman Melville

Best For: A Whale Of A Time Sperm whale eats sailor’s lower leg; sailor tricks other sailors into crewing his revenge mission; it doesn’t go well. A tale of obsession, adventure, maritime manliness and beast-slaying that does not get old as it ages.

Modern

Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami

Best For: Brutal Beatlemania When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend, Kizuki. Delving into his student years in Tokyo, Toru dabbles in uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire.

Money: A Suicide Note – Martin Amis

Best For: Learning Restraint Wealthy transatlantic movie executive John Self allows himself whatever he wants whenever he wants it: alcohol, tobacco, pills, pornography, a mountain of junk food. It’s never going to end well, is it? A cautionary tale of a life lived without boundaries.

The Road – Cormac McCarthy

Best For: Going Hungry Of the many, many recent stories of survival in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future, this one is the toughest, smartest and the one which stays with you the longest. A father and son contrive to survive in the face of cannibalism, starvation and brutality.

The Sportswriter – Richard Ford

Best For: Knowing The Grass Isn’t Greener Frank Bascombe, it seems, is living the dream: a younger girlfriend and a job as a sports writer. But his inner turmoil and private tragedies show all is not always as it seems, even for those who seem to have it all.

The 25th Hour – David Benioff

Best For: Clock Watching Facing a seven-year stretch for dealing, Monty Brogan sets out to make the most of his last night of freedom. His dad wants him to do a runner, his drug-lord boss wants to know if he squealed, his girlfriend is confused and his friends are trying to prepare him for the worst. It’s a lot to fit in.

We Need To Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver

Best For: Questioning Yourself The story of Eva, mother of Kevin, who murdered seven of his fellow high-school students and two members of staff. She’s coming to terms with the fact that her maternal instincts could have driven him off the rails. It’s made worse by the fact that he survived and she can’t help visiting him in prison.

American Pastoral – Philip Roth

Best For: Bursting The American Dream The Sixties was a time for sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and, erm, political mayhem. Swede Levov is living the American dream until his daughter Merry becomes involved in political terrorism that drags the family into the underbelly of society. Totally rad.

American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis

Best For: Career Killers The film is a contemporary masterpiece, but Patrick Bateman is even more evil on paper than he is on screen. An outright psychopath partly made by life on Wall Street, this bitterly black comedy is a classic that’ll keep you in line should you become a desk drone.

The Secret History – Donna Tartt

Best For: Murder Most Moral A group of eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a unique way of thinking thanks to their classics professor, which forces them to contemplate how easy it can be to kill someone if they cross you.

The Watchmen – Alan Moore

Best For: Picturing The Scene The most lauded graphic novel of all time concerns a team of superheroes called the Crimebusters, and a plot to kill and discredit them. Packed with symbolism and intelligent political and social commentary, with artwork as brilliant as the text.

The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen

Best For: Mother’s Day Appreciation After 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid wants to have some fun. But as her husband Alfred is losing his grip on reality, and their children have left the nest, she sets her heart on one last family Christmas. Virtue, sexual inhibition, outdated mental healthcare and globalised greed are all under the tree.

A Brief History of Seven Killings – Marlon James

Best For: Shadowy Thrills One evening in December 1976, gunmen burst into Bob Marley’s house in Jamaica, having shot his wife on the driveway, and shot Bob and his manager multiple times. No arrests were made. True story. James imagines what happens to the perpetrators, with appearances by the CIA and a ghost.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon

Best For: Nerd Nirvana The greatest superhero story ever told isn’t about costumed men, but the men who create them. Kavalier & Clay create The Escapist, at the start of comic books’ Golden Age in Thirties New York. He is super-popular; K&C miss out on the big money but can’t avoid the pitfalls of love and war.

Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

Best For: Magical Realism The tots of the title are all born in the first hour of India’s independence – midnight til 1am on August 15, 1947 – and they all have superpowers. One of them, a telepath, tries to find out why while reaching out to the others. Won the Booker Prize, and twice won Booker best-of votes on anniversaries of the award.

Robert Harris – Fatherland

Best For: Wondering What-If A most chillingly plausible alternate history, in which Germany won World War II (Oxford University is an SS Academy, and the Germans are winning the space race) and senior Nazi party officials are being offed in Sixties Berlin. Turns out there’s a conspiracy to silence the ultimate conspiracy…

The Stand – Stephen King

Best For: Good vs Evil The modern master of genre fiction’s magnum opus is the 1990 Complete and Uncut version of his 1978 novel. A virus has all but wiped out humanity. American survivors gravitate to either Las Vegas (the bad lot) or Boulder, Colorado (the goodies), then the two tribes ready for the showdown.

High-Rise – J.G. Ballard

Best For: Block Party Politics When the residents of a posh tower block find their sweet set-up falling apart, the response is feral. Minor social differences lead to floor-versus-floor violence. The well-to-do become savages, and what that nice Dr Laing does with his neighbour’s dog is decidedly un-vegan.

A Perfect Spy – John Le Carré

Best For: The Secret Life David Cornwell worked as a British intelligence officer for almost nine years before adopting the pen name of John Le Carré and quitting spookery. Of his 23 spy novels, this is the best, perhaps because it’s the most autobiographical, although the made-up secret-service bits are first-rate too.

White Teeth – Zadie Smith

Best For: The Modern World A cross-generational saga of North London life rooted in the British immigrant experience that’s much funnier than the first half of this sentence makes out. The dentistry of the title is what everyone here – Bangladeshi, Jamaican, white British or otherwise – have in common.

Spies – Michael Frayn

Best For: Playing Detective You’re trying to get through a wartime summer in London, but you find out your mum is a German spy. You bring one of your classmates in on the surveillance, but, without your knowledge, she enlists him in her mysterious deeds. Not a ‘whodunit’, more an outstandingly original ‘whoisit’?

American Tabloid – James Ellroy

Best For: Solving JFK’s Murder In the messed-up mind of Ellroy, crime fiction’s self-proclaimed demon dog, the CIA, FBI, Mafia and Hollywood are all involved in the assassination of “Bad-Back Jack”. The rat-a-tat-tat of Ellroy’s short, slang-centric sentences boosts what would still be a fine secret-history yarn to be something powerful and electric.

Style, Fitness & Mind-Enhancement

ABC of Men’s Fashion – Hardy Amies

Best For: Wardrobe Rules Classic style is forever – which is 99 per cent true in the case of this pocket encyclopaedia written in 1964 by a Savile Row legend. When you get to ‘B’, you can be amused by 150 words on ‘Bowler Hats’, but skip ‘Beachwear’ at your peril: “A plain navy blue shirt with white linen trousers will always outshine any patterned job.”

Men of Style – Josh Sims

Best For: Brushing Up Style guides can often be more decorative than useful, but this one, by the venerable fashion journalist Sims, profiles the best-dressed men of the past century so that you can steal for your look the things that make them so undeniably well-dressed.

Men and Style – David Coggins

Best For: Excavating Your True Look It is hard to be stylish if you haven’t grasped what ‘style’ means for you. Coggins understands that it stretches beyond clothes (although they are mightily important) to the influence of your father – yes, him! – your school days, your surroundings and more.

Thinking, Fast And Slow – Daniel Kahneman

Best For: Mind Games Why is there more chance we’ll believe something if it’s in a bold typeface? Why do we assume a good-looking person will be more competent? The answer lies in the two ways we make choices: fast, intuitive thinking, and slow, rational thinking. This book has practical techniques for slower, smarter thinking, so you can make better decisions at work, home and life in general.

How Not To Be Wrong – Jordan Ellenberg

Best For: Number Crunching If the maths you learned in school has slipped your mind, there’s something to be said for this book helping you to re-grasp numbers: a powerful commodity in a post-truth world. You’ll learn to how to analyse important situations at work and at play – and how early you actually need to get to the airport.

Happiness By Design – Paul Dolan

Best For: Living The Good Life As figures prove, we’re all stretched and stressed. So how can we make it easier to be happy? Using the latest cutting-edge research, Dolan, a professor of behavioural science, reveals that wellbeing isn’t about how we think, it’s about what we do.

The Chimp Paradox – Steve Peters

Best For: Retraining Your Brain Peters helped British Cycling, Ronnie O’Sullivan, and other pro sports stars win more. He says our brains are emotional (the chimp bit), logical (human) and automatically instinctive (like a computer). We can’t shut off the monkey, but with work, the other two parts can control it. Reading this won’t make you World Snooker Champion, but you will be empowered to make more successful choices in life.

Reasons To Stay Alive – Matt Haig

Best For: Mental Wellbeing Aged 24, Haig was diagnosed with severe anxiety and depression and contemplating suicide. His memoir of coming back from the brink is an honest, moving and funny exploration of triumph over failing mental health that almost destroyed him.

The World’s Fittest Book – Ross Edgley

Best For: Getting Into The Right Shape Quite the claim in the title there, but ‘fitness adventurer’ Edgley backs it up with straightforward and achievable ways to lose weight, tone up and get shredded. Less about following fitness plans (result) and more about applying basic concepts so you can exercise in the right way.

Feet In The Clouds – Richard Askwith

Best For: Running On Empty If you love exercising, you’ll love this dispatch from the world of fell running. If you don’t, then reading about the people who commit to running up and down mountains will help you understand why they love it, and maybe some of their motivation will rub off on you.

Real Fast Food – Nigel Slater

Best For: Cooking IRL Encouragement to eat out of the pan, ingredients in tins and the secret to a perfect bacon sandwich: Slater has over 350 recipes that take less than 30 minutes and don’t require much cheffing, written so any fool can follow them. His take on bacon? Smoked streaky, nearly crisp, untoasted white bread dipped in the bacon fat, no sauce.

Five Quarters – Rachel Roddy

Best For: Pasta Perfection Italian food done simply and totally authentically. The author moved to Rome from the UK on a whim in 2005 and taught herself how to cook like an Italian nonna. Veggies will find a lot to love in this one, too.

Roast Chicken And Other Stories – Simon Hopkinson

Best For: English Classics A book beloved by chefs and food writers, for good reason: Hopkinson makes everything, even the offal, sound absolutely delicious. He picks 40 ingredients, explains why they’re essential, then gives a few recipes for each. Cooking, he says, is about making food you like to eat, not showing off.

Made In India: Cooked In Britain – Meera Sodha

Best For: Takeaway At Home Totally debunking the ‘it’s too hard to make good curries’ myth, this splendid work also has pictures showing important stages of recipes, not just a food-porn shot of the final dish. Also tons of delicious things even curry-house connoisseurs might not have heard of.

Why We Sleep – Matthew Walker

Best For: Ruling The Land Of Nod Everyone knows that they should get more, better sleep, but actually trying to do so can be stressful enough to cause lack of sleep. This bestseller unpicks exactly what happens when your head hits the pillow. More importantly, it explains why and how to get your head right beforehand.

How To Be A Woman – Caitlin Moran

Best For: Opposite Sex Education Since this is the book that “every woman should read”, according to one of its many, many amazing reviews, then surely every man would benefit from reading it, too? A feminist manifesto disguised as a hilarious memoir (or is it vice versa?) from one of the UK’s funniest writers.

The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle

Best For: Spiritual Enlightenment The author was approaching 30 and borderline suicidal, when he had an epiphany, separating what made him happy real from what was, mostly, the bullshit dragging him down. Years trying to understand how he saw the light meant he can explain it, better than the others who have tried, so you can do the same, too.

Sit Down and Be Quiet – Michael James Wong

Best For: Boosting Body And Mind The genius of this yoga and mindfulness manual for the modern man is in the way it presents those two practices as things you already do in some ways (habits from childhood and sport, mainly). Then, the ways you’re not doing them – physical and mental techniques – are put forth in a non-preachy manner.

Knowledge

A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson

Best For: Well, Nearly Everything We could have put this in the science section, given it is a scientific history ranging from the Big Bang to mankind. Anyway: now think of your best-ever teacher. Bryson is like that – curious, witty, in love with his subject – and learning along with him is a pleasure.

Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari

Best For: A Selfie Of Ourselves Humans came to rule the world, according to this global bestseller, because we mastered fire, gossip, agriculture, mythology, money, contradictions and science. Harari himself is a master of distilling big ideas and concepts, and his book full of them will make your smarter.

Prisoners Of Geography – Tim Marshall

Best For: Mapping It All Out How and why countries do stuff to other countries because of the landscape, the climate, the culture and the natural resources available: that’s geopolitics. And to get a grip on why the world is how it is – no more important time to do that than right now – you read this.

Stasiland – Anna Funder

Best For: Cold War Stories In East Germany, the Stasi was the state security apparatus, which investigated the country’s citizens to an astonishing degree. A few years after the Berlin Wall fell, Funder met with former spies, handlers and resistance operatives, all with incredible tales.

The Plantagenets – Dan Jones

Best For: Past Glory One of the breed of young historians making history TV must-see again, Jones also writes big, juicy, novelistic books. This is the one that takes in 280 years of England and its kings from 1120, including Crusades, Black Death, civil war, war with France, heroes, legends, sacking of cities and all the rest of it. Truly stirring stuff.

Life 3.0 – Max Tegmark

Best For: AI, OK? Artificial intelligence is going to change humanity perhaps more than any other technology, so you kind of owe it to yourself to know what’s coming down the pipe. Tegmark smartly and succinctly puts forward all the arguments for and against the rise of the robots – because rise they will.

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics – Carlo Rovelli

Best For: Demystifying The World, Quickly As it says on the tin: between six and eight short essays about life, the universe and everything, which will tease and enlarge your brain, not tie it in knots. Perfectly formed into 96 pages that deliver a masterclass in relativity, quantum mechanics and mankind’s place in time in space.

The Sixth Extinction – Elizabeth Kolbert

Best For: Reaching The End Times No prizes for guessing that number six on the list of mass extinction events is happening now, as humankind reduces species diversity on Earth like nothing since the asteroid that finished off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. This book, grippingly, reports on what’s happening now, and those times before.

Behave – Robert Sapolsky

Best For: Why We Do What Do Every one of us is a student of human behaviour, so a book that gives you a distinct advantage over our classmates can only be A Good Thing. That it’s written by a scientist with a sense of humour nailing his mission to demystify complex science is a massive bonus also.

The Making Of The Atomic Bomb – Richard Rhodes

Best For: Explosive Insight An epic recollection of how mankind came to harness, then unleash, the power of the atom. From the first nuclear fission to the bombs that dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Rhodes marshals a huge cast of scientists (and spies) and leaves no stone unturned.

Inspiration

Long Walk To Freedom – Nelson Mandela

Best For: Genuine Inspiration The short version of Mandela’s life is widely known, but his detailed and moving autobiography, published in 1994, the year he became president of South Africa, is a never-to-be-forgotten account of his fight against apartheid.

I Am Zlatan – Zlatan Ibrahimovich

Best For: Ego Boosts And Footy Boots He is, by his own account, one of the greatest footballers of the modern age. Whether or not you agree, his life story is fascinating, and he gets stuck in on the page as on the pitch. “If Mourinho lights up a room, Guardiola draws the curtains.”

H Is For Hawk – Helen Macdonald

Best For: Grasping Nature’s Power This multi-award winning memoir has a most unusual premise. The author, when “a kind of madness set in” after the death of her father, drives up to Scotland from Cambridge to buy a goshawk for £800 and spends a year training it.

Do No Harm – Henry Marsh

Best For: Surgical Precision Marsh is a consultant neurosurgeon and this, his first volume of memoirs, is a glimpse inside his mind and, indeed, those of his patients. He has little time for NHS middle management, and is as precise with (literally) cutting remarks and insightful asides as he is with his scalpel.

Touching The Void – Joe Simpson

Best For: Life Or Death Scenarios Picture the scene (it starts on page 68 of this adventure classic, if you need some help): you are up a mountain, in difficult conditions, when you slip and fall. You are hanging from the rope tied to your companion, but he has to decide: if he doesn’t cut the rope, you likely both die. What would you do? A real-life version plays out in this astonishing story.

Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas – Hunter S Thompson

Best For: Madness And Mayhem The inventor of gonzo journalism recalls – lord only knows how – a drugs binge to Vegas with his attorney. In lesser hands, this would have been boring, because reading about other people being high is almost always dull. With Thompson in charge, this trippy travelogue fizzles with mad energy.

Unreasonable Behaviour – Don McCullin

Best For: Life Behind A Lens As life stories go, this one takes some beating. A 15-year-old with no qualifications ends up as one of the great war photographers, taking in Vietnam, Africa and the Middle East. He also takes a bullet in the camera and is pushed to physical and emotional extremes in the theatres of conflict.

Fever Pitch – Nick Hornby

Best For: The Fannish Inquisition The best book ever written about what it’s like to be a football fan, despite the glut of titles that has followed it since it was published in 1992. Hornby’s Arsenal addiction can be mapped onto any club, and his insight and honesty ring so very true.

The Story Of The Streets – Mike Skinner

Best For: Rapper’s Delight It will come as no surprise to anyone who has paid attention to lyrics by The Streets that the book written by the man behind them displays both a love of words and a refreshingly honest look at the world. Part guide to the highs and lows of fame, part unpicking of hip-hop as an art form, all good.

How Not To Be A Boy – Robert Webb

Best For: The Male Comedians’ memoirs are ten-a-penny, but this one stands out because the star of Peep Show goes deep into the difficulties of being ‘different’ as a boy in the 1970s and 1980s, his complicated early family life and what it means to be a man in today’s world. Of course, it’s very funny, too.

Steve Jobs – Walter Isaacson

Best For: Getting To Apple’s Core As well as the amazing tale of the rise, fall and rise again of Apple, and the stories behind its iconic products, Issacson’s official biog of geek god Jobs does one thing few official biogs do: print the negative stuff. Jobs could be, often, a douchebag, and learning that along with the positives makes this a must-read.

Fast Company – Jon Bradshaw

Best For: Taking A Punt Six profiles of legendary gamblers and chancers, including pool legend Minnesota Fats, tennis hustler Bobby Riggs and poker players Pug Pearson and Johnny Moss. “Money won is twice as sweet as money earned,” says Paul Newman as Eddie Felson in The Color Of Money. Here’s proof.

Killing Pablo – Mark Bowden

Best For: Crowning The Kingpin Even if you have watched Narcos on Netflix, this biography of Pablo Escobar will still make your jaw drop. That TV show, as good as it is, only scratched the surface. Bowden, a newspaper reporter, interviewed dozens of sources, allowing him to piece together Escobar’s remarkable ascent and descent.

The Right Stuff – Tom Wolfe

Best For: Reaching For The Stars “This book grew out of some ordinary curiosity,” said its author in 1983, four years after it was published. Yet there is nothing ordinary about it. Wolfe wondered what made a man want to sit on top of a giant tube of fuel and be hurtled into space. In the lives of US Navy test pilots and the Mercury astronauts, he found the answers, and with them wrote an all-time great non-fiction book.

The Lost City of Z – David Grann

Best For: Exploring Your Options One of the reviews called this “the best story in the world, told perfectly” and that’s fair enough, really. In 1925, British explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett went missing in Brazil while searching for a mythical settlement. This book investigates why, and the author embarks on his own Amazonian quest.

Outliers: The Story of Success – Malcolm Gladwell

Best For: Secrets Of Success Gladwell is most well known for The Tipping Point, but this book about what high achievers have in common is a more in-depth and engaging read. A big part of what makes people make it big is the hard yards: doing something for 20 hours a week for a decade, or about 10,000 hours. Start tomorrow? Why not?

Hit Makers – Derek Thompson

Best For: Being In With The In Crowd If you want to know why Star Wars is so popular, and why nothing ever really goes viral, then Thompson is your man. His study of pop culture’s most beloved items ranges from Game Of Thrones and Taylor Swift to Pokémon Go and Spotify.

Factfulness – Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Best For: Rebooting Your World Knowledge Bill Gates has a website on which he posts book recommendations, and liked this one so much he paid for every US college graduate in 2018 to get the ebook version. You might want to join those four million ex-students and be delighted to have much of what you know about the world put right by fascinating hard facts.

Bad Blood – John Carreyou

Best For: Fraud Or Flawed? It’s the story of the age: 19-year-old founds a medical start-up; raises $700m on the promise of a blood-testing machine that never really exists; her $10bn company collapses, with $600m of investors’ money gone. Was it just Silicon Valley hot air or a massive, deliberate fraud?

Doughnut Economics – Kate Raworth

Best For: The Future Of Your Money Experts are divided about Raworth’s ring-shaped model of how economics should be – the flow of money and trade keeping humans and Earth in good shape – but they are all talking about it. She recognises systems and effects, such as climate change and social movements, which standard economics ignore. Her argument is powerful.

Distraction

Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris

Best For: First-Person Hilarity The best of several collections of brilliant essays from the American humourist deals partly with his moving to Normandy in France, and partly with his life before that, in rural America and New York City. One of these every morning on the way to work would banish commuter blues immediately.

How To Lose Friends & Alienate People – Toby Young

Best For: Tragic Tragicomedy Young is now a right-leaning columnist and social media ‘star’. In a previous life, he got a job on the American magazine Vanity Fair, and dropped the ball spectacularly. Anyone who’s ever felt like a square peg in a workplace round hole (so, that’ll be everyone, then) will find much to laugh at here.

Our Dumb Century – The Onion

Best For: Mocking The Decades In terms of jokes-that-work-per-page hit rate, this is probably the funniest book in the world. Before social media, The Onion’s parody news site was the funniest thing online (they still do pretty good). This special project magnificently takes the Michael out of news and newspapers from 1900 to 1999. In today’s fake news era, this has become even more hilarious.

Spoiled Brats – Simon Rich

Best For: Eye-Watering Laughs Rich writes the sort of charming and amusing essays that Steve Martin and Woody Allen used to do, and there are a dozen in this volume. But it’s the novella Sell Out that makes this a must-read. A Brooklyn pickle-maker falls into the brine and is fished out 100 years later, to face the hipsters who have taken over his town. Your correspondent cried with laughter.

I, Partridge – Steve Coogan

Best For: Pitch-Perfect Parody A spot-on mocking of celebrity autobiography and a celebration of Britain’s best-loved failed chat-show host and digital radio DJ. Even better than reading this with Partridge’s voice in your head is listening to the audiobook, with Coogan-Partridge in absolutely magnificent form.

The Photo Ark – Joel Sartore

Best For: All Creatures Great And Small As ambitions go, it’s lofty and admirable: take a picture of all 12,000 species living in the world’s wildlife sanctuaries and zoos before an increasing number of them become extinct. As of May 2018, 12 years in, Sartore was two-thirds of the way there. This book covers the first 6,000 species.

Essential Elements – Edward Burtynsky

Best For: Seeing The World Through New Eyes Burtynsky is a Canadian photographer who uses a large camera to take vast-scale images of our changing planet, from seemingly endless rows of workers in Chinese factories to aerial views of oil fields in California. He makes the sort of images you can spend hours finding new things in.

Greatest Of All Time: A Tribute To Muhammad Ali – various

Best For: Knockout Storytelling Anyone saying “print is dead” hasn’t encountered this beautiful object, which has collector’s editions at £11,000 and a regular version 110 times cheaper yet almost as powerful. Ali is still sport’s most celebrated story, and the words and pictures on the 652 foot-square pages here tell that tale in the absolute best possible way.

Kenneth Grange: Making Britain Modern – various

Best For: Design Classics, UK Style A hero of industrial design as good as his more famous peers at Apple or Braun, Grange devised dozens of iconic products including Kodak cameras, Anglepoise lamps, Wilkinson Sword razors, parking meters and the Intercity 125 train. This catalogue of his career is a beautifully designed book full of beautifully designed things.

The Classic Car Book – Giles Chapman

Best For: Four-Wheeled Nirvana Quite simply a treasure trove of thousands of photos of awesome automobiles from the 1940s to the 1980s, with nerdy spec data and potted histories of cars, marques and makers.

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The 100 Books Every Man Should Read

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The 100 Books Every Man Should Read

Groucho Marx once said: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” We’re not quite sure what he meant either, but what we do know is that books are an essential for any man.

So, whether you’re heading off abroad and need a page-turner, or just want to have something other than Harry Kane’s ankle injury to talk about on a Tinder date next week, here are the 100 books that’ll broaden your horizons (and bulk out your bookshelf).

Classics

Men Without Women – Ernest Hemingway

Best For: Understanding Women Classic Hemingway subjects – bullfighting, war, women, more war – in a collection of short stories proving that masculinity lacking a softer touch is a dangerous thing. If you’ve been dumped, or you’re just missing your mum, then you need this.

A Picture of Dorian Grey – Oscar Wilde

Best For: When You’ve Found Another Grey Hair A handsome, innocent young man sells his soul to keep his dashing good looks – and of course it all goes pear-shaped. It’ll make you feel better about the march of time and skipping the gym, plus it’s full of classic Wilde quips you can fire off at the dinner table.

Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut

Best For: Reaffirming War Is Good For Absolutely Nothing Prisoner of war, optometrist, father, time-traveller, plane-crash survivor: Billy Pilgrim is all these and more in a miraculously moving, bitter and blackly hilarious story of innocence faced with apocalypse.

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Best For: The DiCaprio Nod Leo rarely puts a foot wrong, but even he couldn’t capture the magnetic Jay Gatsby as well as Fitzgerald did on page. Set in the summer of 1922, with the Roaring Twenties in full swing, this is a terrific unpicking of decadence, social change and excess.

A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

Best For: Bratchnys A merciless satire of state control, in which Burgess imagined a dystopian future of ultraviolence decades before it became a sci-fi standard. Much of it is written in the slang spoken by teen hero, Alex; ‘bratchnys’ are bastards (and so are Alex and his murderous crew.)

Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

Best For: Intense Moral Conundrum There’s no sugar-coating this one: a man obsessed with the 12-year-old daughter of his landlady and so marries the mother to be near her. From there, the ground only gets dodgier. The most controversial book on this list is a literary hot potato that will never cool down.

Brighton Rock – Graham Greene

Best For: Seaside Sins Brighton wasn’t always cocktail bars and vintage shops. In 1938, a gang war is raging, and ruthless Pinkie has just killed his first victim. In trying to cover his tracks, he only digs himself into a deeper hole.

1984 – George Orwell

Best For: A Jolt Of Future Shock No list of great books would be complete without this influential masterpiece, which gets more prescient year by year. Winston Smith rewrites the past to suit the needs of the ruling party, who run a totalitarian society under the watchful eye of Big Brother.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love – Raymond Carver

Best For: Toasting Don Draper A collection of brilliant short stories about the lonely men and women of the American Midwest who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time. Along with fellow US short-story master John Cheever, Carver’s words inspired Mad Men.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey

Best For: Breaking The Rules You’ve probably seen the film, but this really is a case of ‘the book is better’. Evil Nurse Ratched rules an Oregon mental institution with an iron fist until new arrival McMurphy, who faked madness to dodge hard labour in the joint, brings chaos and hope to his fellow inmates.

The Catcher In The Rye – J.D.Salinger

Best For: Angst In Your Pants Any book about the harshness of teenage life will resonate with anyone who is or has been a teen, but the misadventures of Holden Caulfield have become the set text, and rightly so. He is cynical, jaded, dickishly rebellious. And we have, in ways big and small, all been there.

Meditations – Marcus Aurelius

Best For: Getting Things Done The innermost thoughts of the Roman Emperor from 161-180AD are a genuinely practical and insightful guide to life almost 1,900 years later. Silicon Valley billionaires and their teams love this book and its ideas for the way it helps them to accept the world as it is, then rule it.

The Go-Between – L.P. Hartley

Best For: Keeping Secrets They say “the past is a foreign country”. Well, that’s because it’s the famous opening line of this novel, in which an old man recalls the summer he spent aged 13 at his friend’s country house, as he shipped illicit messages between his chum’s engaged sister and a local farmer.

Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

Best For: Page-Turning And Page-Burning In the America of the future, people are addicted to watching soap-opera-style shows on giant screens in their homes. Books are banned, firemen hunt down illicit volumes and burn them. A book about the magic of reading and how we must never let it fade away.

The Odyssey – Homer

Best For: Original Adventure The original homecoming tale – a king’s decade-long slog home after the Trojan War – contains: witches, monsters, betrayal, drugs, cannibals, disguises, a bit of war and quite a lot of slaughter. Every man-on-a-quest story and road movie owes a debt to this remarkable tale.

Bleak House – Charles Dickens

Best For: Epic Shenanigans To be fair, the Dickens pick on this list could have been one of a dozen. But this Victorian doorstop, with its massive cast (including the murky London underworld), is the most impressive and entertaining. A legal tussle over a will plays havoc with the lives of the potential beneficiaries and those around them.

Heart Of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

Best For: “The Horror, The Horror!” In 1890, the author captained a steamboat up the Congo River. A decade later, his novel about something very similar became a sensation. In 1979 it was very freely adapted into the epic Vietnam movie Apocalypse Now. Also, at less than 100 pages, you have no excuses not to finish it.

Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

Best For: The Sum Of Its Parts Yes, everybody now knows that the monster isn’t Frankenstein; that’s the mad scientist who makes him. But did you know that science-fiction was basically invented with this book, written by an 18-year-old girl challenged to come up with a ghost story? Still creepy and relevant despite being 200 years old.

The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler

Best For: Prime Pulp Fiction “The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.” “He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel.” “A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.” Just a sample of the hardboiled genius on display in this truly great detective yarn.

The Lord of The Rings – JRR Tolkien

Best For: Hobbit-Forming When it comes to fantasy, there is one story to rule them all. The massive success of the film trilogy based on it does not dim the power of the source material. Amazon is spending $1bn making the TV version. For many, though, the original remains the masterpiece.

Moby Dick – Herman Melville

Best For: A Whale Of A Time Sperm whale eats sailor’s lower leg; sailor tricks other sailors into crewing his revenge mission; it doesn’t go well. A tale of obsession, adventure, maritime manliness and beast-slaying that does not get old as it ages.

Modern

Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami

Best For: Brutal Beatlemania When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend, Kizuki. Delving into his student years in Tokyo, Toru dabbles in uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire.

Money: A Suicide Note – Martin Amis

Best For: Learning Restraint Wealthy transatlantic movie executive John Self allows himself whatever he wants whenever he wants it: alcohol, tobacco, pills, pornography, a mountain of junk food. It’s never going to end well, is it? A cautionary tale of a life lived without boundaries.

The Road – Cormac McCarthy

Best For: Going Hungry Of the many, many recent stories of survival in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future, this one is the toughest, smartest and the one which stays with you the longest. A father and son contrive to survive in the face of cannibalism, starvation and brutality.

The Sportswriter – Richard Ford

Best For: Knowing The Grass Isn’t Greener Frank Bascombe, it seems, is living the dream: a younger girlfriend and a job as a sports writer. But his inner turmoil and private tragedies show all is not always as it seems, even for those who seem to have it all.

The 25th Hour – David Benioff

Best For: Clock Watching Facing a seven-year stretch for dealing, Monty Brogan sets out to make the most of his last night of freedom. His dad wants him to do a runner, his drug-lord boss wants to know if he squealed, his girlfriend is confused and his friends are trying to prepare him for the worst. It’s a lot to fit in.

We Need To Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver

Best For: Questioning Yourself The story of Eva, mother of Kevin, who murdered seven of his fellow high-school students and two members of staff. She’s coming to terms with the fact that her maternal instincts could have driven him off the rails. It’s made worse by the fact that he survived and she can’t help visiting him in prison.

American Pastoral – Philip Roth

Best For: Bursting The American Dream The Sixties was a time for sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and, erm, political mayhem. Swede Levov is living the American dream until his daughter Merry becomes involved in political terrorism that drags the family into the underbelly of society. Totally rad.

American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis

Best For: Career Killers The film is a contemporary masterpiece, but Patrick Bateman is even more evil on paper than he is on screen. An outright psychopath partly made by life on Wall Street, this bitterly black comedy is a classic that’ll keep you in line should you become a desk drone.

The Secret History – Donna Tartt

Best For: Murder Most Moral A group of eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a unique way of thinking thanks to their classics professor, which forces them to contemplate how easy it can be to kill someone if they cross you.

The Watchmen – Alan Moore

Best For: Picturing The Scene The most lauded graphic novel of all time concerns a team of superheroes called the Crimebusters, and a plot to kill and discredit them. Packed with symbolism and intelligent political and social commentary, with artwork as brilliant as the text.

The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen

Best For: Mother’s Day Appreciation After 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid wants to have some fun. But as her husband Alfred is losing his grip on reality, and their children have left the nest, she sets her heart on one last family Christmas. Virtue, sexual inhibition, outdated mental healthcare and globalised greed are all under the tree.

A Brief History of Seven Killings – Marlon James

Best For: Shadowy Thrills One evening in December 1976, gunmen burst into Bob Marley’s house in Jamaica, having shot his wife on the driveway, and shot Bob and his manager multiple times. No arrests were made. True story. James imagines what happens to the perpetrators, with appearances by the CIA and a ghost.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon

Best For: Nerd Nirvana The greatest superhero story ever told isn’t about costumed men, but the men who create them. Kavalier & Clay create The Escapist, at the start of comic books’ Golden Age in Thirties New York. He is super-popular; K&C miss out on the big money but can’t avoid the pitfalls of love and war.

Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

Best For: Magical Realism The tots of the title are all born in the first hour of India’s independence – midnight til 1am on August 15, 1947 – and they all have superpowers. One of them, a telepath, tries to find out why while reaching out to the others. Won the Booker Prize, and twice won Booker best-of votes on anniversaries of the award.

Robert Harris – Fatherland

Best For: Wondering What-If A most chillingly plausible alternate history, in which Germany won World War II (Oxford University is an SS Academy, and the Germans are winning the space race) and senior Nazi party officials are being offed in Sixties Berlin. Turns out there’s a conspiracy to silence the ultimate conspiracy…

The Stand – Stephen King

Best For: Good vs Evil The modern master of genre fiction’s magnum opus is the 1990 Complete and Uncut version of his 1978 novel. A virus has all but wiped out humanity. American survivors gravitate to either Las Vegas (the bad lot) or Boulder, Colorado (the goodies), then the two tribes ready for the showdown.

High-Rise – J.G. Ballard

Best For: Block Party Politics When the residents of a posh tower block find their sweet set-up falling apart, the response is feral. Minor social differences lead to floor-versus-floor violence. The well-to-do become savages, and what that nice Dr Laing does with his neighbour’s dog is decidedly un-vegan.

A Perfect Spy – John Le Carré

Best For: The Secret Life David Cornwell worked as a British intelligence officer for almost nine years before adopting the pen name of John Le Carré and quitting spookery. Of his 23 spy novels, this is the best, perhaps because it’s the most autobiographical, although the made-up secret-service bits are first-rate too.

White Teeth – Zadie Smith

Best For: The Modern World A cross-generational saga of North London life rooted in the British immigrant experience that’s much funnier than the first half of this sentence makes out. The dentistry of the title is what everyone here – Bangladeshi, Jamaican, white British or otherwise – have in common.

Spies – Michael Frayn

Best For: Playing Detective You’re trying to get through a wartime summer in London, but you find out your mum is a German spy. You bring one of your classmates in on the surveillance, but, without your knowledge, she enlists him in her mysterious deeds. Not a ‘whodunit’, more an outstandingly original ‘whoisit’?

American Tabloid – James Ellroy

Best For: Solving JFK’s Murder In the messed-up mind of Ellroy, crime fiction’s self-proclaimed demon dog, the CIA, FBI, Mafia and Hollywood are all involved in the assassination of “Bad-Back Jack”. The rat-a-tat-tat of Ellroy’s short, slang-centric sentences boosts what would still be a fine secret-history yarn to be something powerful and electric.

Style, Fitness & Mind-Enhancement

ABC of Men’s Fashion – Hardy Amies

Best For: Wardrobe Rules Classic style is forever – which is 99 per cent true in the case of this pocket encyclopaedia written in 1964 by a Savile Row legend. When you get to ‘B’, you can be amused by 150 words on ‘Bowler Hats’, but skip ‘Beachwear’ at your peril: “A plain navy blue shirt with white linen trousers will always outshine any patterned job.”

Men of Style – Josh Sims

Best For: Brushing Up Style guides can often be more decorative than useful, but this one, by the venerable fashion journalist Sims, profiles the best-dressed men of the past century so that you can steal for your look the things that make them so undeniably well-dressed.

Men and Style – David Coggins

Best For: Excavating Your True Look It is hard to be stylish if you haven’t grasped what ‘style’ means for you. Coggins understands that it stretches beyond clothes (although they are mightily important) to the influence of your father – yes, him! – your school days, your surroundings and more.

Thinking, Fast And Slow – Daniel Kahneman

Best For: Mind Games Why is there more chance we’ll believe something if it’s in a bold typeface? Why do we assume a good-looking person will be more competent? The answer lies in the two ways we make choices: fast, intuitive thinking, and slow, rational thinking. This book has practical techniques for slower, smarter thinking, so you can make better decisions at work, home and life in general.

How Not To Be Wrong – Jordan Ellenberg

Best For: Number Crunching If the maths you learned in school has slipped your mind, there’s something to be said for this book helping you to re-grasp numbers: a powerful commodity in a post-truth world. You’ll learn to how to analyse important situations at work and at play – and how early you actually need to get to the airport.

Happiness By Design – Paul Dolan

Best For: Living The Good Life As figures prove, we’re all stretched and stressed. So how can we make it easier to be happy? Using the latest cutting-edge research, Dolan, a professor of behavioural science, reveals that wellbeing isn’t about how we think, it’s about what we do.

The Chimp Paradox – Steve Peters

Best For: Retraining Your Brain Peters helped British Cycling, Ronnie O’Sullivan, and other pro sports stars win more. He says our brains are emotional (the chimp bit), logical (human) and automatically instinctive (like a computer). We can’t shut off the monkey, but with work, the other two parts can control it. Reading this won’t make you World Snooker Champion, but you will be empowered to make more successful choices in life.

Reasons To Stay Alive – Matt Haig

Best For: Mental Wellbeing Aged 24, Haig was diagnosed with severe anxiety and depression and contemplating suicide. His memoir of coming back from the brink is an honest, moving and funny exploration of triumph over failing mental health that almost destroyed him.

The World’s Fittest Book – Ross Edgley

Best For: Getting Into The Right Shape Quite the claim in the title there, but ‘fitness adventurer’ Edgley backs it up with straightforward and achievable ways to lose weight, tone up and get shredded. Less about following fitness plans (result) and more about applying basic concepts so you can exercise in the right way.

Feet In The Clouds – Richard Askwith

Best For: Running On Empty If you love exercising, you’ll love this dispatch from the world of fell running. If you don’t, then reading about the people who commit to running up and down mountains will help you understand why they love it, and maybe some of their motivation will rub off on you.

Real Fast Food – Nigel Slater

Best For: Cooking IRL Encouragement to eat out of the pan, ingredients in tins and the secret to a perfect bacon sandwich: Slater has over 350 recipes that take less than 30 minutes and don’t require much cheffing, written so any fool can follow them. His take on bacon? Smoked streaky, nearly crisp, untoasted white bread dipped in the bacon fat, no sauce.

Five Quarters – Rachel Roddy

Best For: Pasta Perfection Italian food done simply and totally authentically. The author moved to Rome from the UK on a whim in 2005 and taught herself how to cook like an Italian nonna. Veggies will find a lot to love in this one, too.

Roast Chicken And Other Stories – Simon Hopkinson

Best For: English Classics A book beloved by chefs and food writers, for good reason: Hopkinson makes everything, even the offal, sound absolutely delicious. He picks 40 ingredients, explains why they’re essential, then gives a few recipes for each. Cooking, he says, is about making food you like to eat, not showing off.

Made In India: Cooked In Britain – Meera Sodha

Best For: Takeaway At Home Totally debunking the ‘it’s too hard to make good curries’ myth, this splendid work also has pictures showing important stages of recipes, not just a food-porn shot of the final dish. Also tons of delicious things even curry-house connoisseurs might not have heard of.

Why We Sleep – Matthew Walker

Best For: Ruling The Land Of Nod Everyone knows that they should get more, better sleep, but actually trying to do so can be stressful enough to cause lack of sleep. This bestseller unpicks exactly what happens when your head hits the pillow. More importantly, it explains why and how to get your head right beforehand.

How To Be A Woman – Caitlin Moran

Best For: Opposite Sex Education Since this is the book that “every woman should read”, according to one of its many, many amazing reviews, then surely every man would benefit from reading it, too? A feminist manifesto disguised as a hilarious memoir (or is it vice versa?) from one of the UK’s funniest writers.

The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle

Best For: Spiritual Enlightenment The author was approaching 30 and borderline suicidal, when he had an epiphany, separating what made him happy real from what was, mostly, the bullshit dragging him down. Years trying to understand how he saw the light meant he can explain it, better than the others who have tried, so you can do the same, too.

Sit Down and Be Quiet – Michael James Wong

Best For: Boosting Body And Mind The genius of this yoga and mindfulness manual for the modern man is in the way it presents those two practices as things you already do in some ways (habits from childhood and sport, mainly). Then, the ways you’re not doing them – physical and mental techniques – are put forth in a non-preachy manner.

Knowledge

A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson

Best For: Well, Nearly Everything We could have put this in the science section, given it is a scientific history ranging from the Big Bang to mankind. Anyway: now think of your best-ever teacher. Bryson is like that – curious, witty, in love with his subject – and learning along with him is a pleasure.

Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari

Best For: A Selfie Of Ourselves Humans came to rule the world, according to this global bestseller, because we mastered fire, gossip, agriculture, mythology, money, contradictions and science. Harari himself is a master of distilling big ideas and concepts, and his book full of them will make your smarter.

Prisoners Of Geography – Tim Marshall

Best For: Mapping It All Out How and why countries do stuff to other countries because of the landscape, the climate, the culture and the natural resources available: that’s geopolitics. And to get a grip on why the world is how it is – no more important time to do that than right now – you read this.

Stasiland – Anna Funder

Best For: Cold War Stories In East Germany, the Stasi was the state security apparatus, which investigated the country’s citizens to an astonishing degree. A few years after the Berlin Wall fell, Funder met with former spies, handlers and resistance operatives, all with incredible tales.

The Plantagenets – Dan Jones

Best For: Past Glory One of the breed of young historians making history TV must-see again, Jones also writes big, juicy, novelistic books. This is the one that takes in 280 years of England and its kings from 1120, including Crusades, Black Death, civil war, war with France, heroes, legends, sacking of cities and all the rest of it. Truly stirring stuff.

Life 3.0 – Max Tegmark

Best For: AI, OK? Artificial intelligence is going to change humanity perhaps more than any other technology, so you kind of owe it to yourself to know what’s coming down the pipe. Tegmark smartly and succinctly puts forward all the arguments for and against the rise of the robots – because rise they will.

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics – Carlo Rovelli

Best For: Demystifying The World, Quickly As it says on the tin: between six and eight short essays about life, the universe and everything, which will tease and enlarge your brain, not tie it in knots. Perfectly formed into 96 pages that deliver a masterclass in relativity, quantum mechanics and mankind’s place in time in space.

The Sixth Extinction – Elizabeth Kolbert

Best For: Reaching The End Times No prizes for guessing that number six on the list of mass extinction events is happening now, as humankind reduces species diversity on Earth like nothing since the asteroid that finished off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. This book, grippingly, reports on what’s happening now, and those times before.

Behave – Robert Sapolsky

Best For: Why We Do What Do Every one of us is a student of human behaviour, so a book that gives you a distinct advantage over our classmates can only be A Good Thing. That it’s written by a scientist with a sense of humour nailing his mission to demystify complex science is a massive bonus also.

The Making Of The Atomic Bomb – Richard Rhodes

Best For: Explosive Insight An epic recollection of how mankind came to harness, then unleash, the power of the atom. From the first nuclear fission to the bombs that dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Rhodes marshals a huge cast of scientists (and spies) and leaves no stone unturned.

Inspiration

Long Walk To Freedom – Nelson Mandela

Best For: Genuine Inspiration The short version of Mandela’s life is widely known, but his detailed and moving autobiography, published in 1994, the year he became president of South Africa, is a never-to-be-forgotten account of his fight against apartheid.

I Am Zlatan – Zlatan Ibrahimovich

Best For: Ego Boosts And Footy Boots He is, by his own account, one of the greatest footballers of the modern age. Whether or not you agree, his life story is fascinating, and he gets stuck in on the page as on the pitch. “If Mourinho lights up a room, Guardiola draws the curtains.”

H Is For Hawk – Helen Macdonald

Best For: Grasping Nature’s Power This multi-award winning memoir has a most unusual premise. The author, when “a kind of madness set in” after the death of her father, drives up to Scotland from Cambridge to buy a goshawk for £800 and spends a year training it.

Do No Harm – Henry Marsh

Best For: Surgical Precision Marsh is a consultant neurosurgeon and this, his first volume of memoirs, is a glimpse inside his mind and, indeed, those of his patients. He has little time for NHS middle management, and is as precise with (literally) cutting remarks and insightful asides as he is with his scalpel.

Touching The Void – Joe Simpson

Best For: Life Or Death Scenarios Picture the scene (it starts on page 68 of this adventure classic, if you need some help): you are up a mountain, in difficult conditions, when you slip and fall. You are hanging from the rope tied to your companion, but he has to decide: if he doesn’t cut the rope, you likely both die. What would you do? A real-life version plays out in this astonishing story.

Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas – Hunter S Thompson

Best For: Madness And Mayhem The inventor of gonzo journalism recalls – lord only knows how – a drugs binge to Vegas with his attorney. In lesser hands, this would have been boring, because reading about other people being high is almost always dull. With Thompson in charge, this trippy travelogue fizzles with mad energy.

Unreasonable Behaviour – Don McCullin

Best For: Life Behind A Lens As life stories go, this one takes some beating. A 15-year-old with no qualifications ends up as one of the great war photographers, taking in Vietnam, Africa and the Middle East. He also takes a bullet in the camera and is pushed to physical and emotional extremes in the theatres of conflict.

Fever Pitch – Nick Hornby

Best For: The Fannish Inquisition The best book ever written about what it’s like to be a football fan, despite the glut of titles that has followed it since it was published in 1992. Hornby’s Arsenal addiction can be mapped onto any club, and his insight and honesty ring so very true.

The Story Of The Streets – Mike Skinner

Best For: Rapper’s Delight It will come as no surprise to anyone who has paid attention to lyrics by The Streets that the book written by the man behind them displays both a love of words and a refreshingly honest look at the world. Part guide to the highs and lows of fame, part unpicking of hip-hop as an art form, all good.

How Not To Be A Boy – Robert Webb

Best For: The Male Comedians’ memoirs are ten-a-penny, but this one stands out because the star of Peep Show goes deep into the difficulties of being ‘different’ as a boy in the 1970s and 1980s, his complicated early family life and what it means to be a man in today’s world. Of course, it’s very funny, too.

Steve Jobs – Walter Isaacson

Best For: Getting To Apple’s Core As well as the amazing tale of the rise, fall and rise again of Apple, and the stories behind its iconic products, Issacson’s official biog of geek god Jobs does one thing few official biogs do: print the negative stuff. Jobs could be, often, a douchebag, and learning that along with the positives makes this a must-read.

Fast Company – Jon Bradshaw

Best For: Taking A Punt Six profiles of legendary gamblers and chancers, including pool legend Minnesota Fats, tennis hustler Bobby Riggs and poker players Pug Pearson and Johnny Moss. “Money won is twice as sweet as money earned,” says Paul Newman as Eddie Felson in The Color Of Money. Here’s proof.

Killing Pablo – Mark Bowden

Best For: Crowning The Kingpin Even if you have watched Narcos on Netflix, this biography of Pablo Escobar will still make your jaw drop. That TV show, as good as it is, only scratched the surface. Bowden, a newspaper reporter, interviewed dozens of sources, allowing him to piece together Escobar’s remarkable ascent and descent.

The Right Stuff – Tom Wolfe

Best For: Reaching For The Stars “This book grew out of some ordinary curiosity,” said its author in 1983, four years after it was published. Yet there is nothing ordinary about it. Wolfe wondered what made a man want to sit on top of a giant tube of fuel and be hurtled into space. In the lives of US Navy test pilots and the Mercury astronauts, he found the answers, and with them wrote an all-time great non-fiction book.

The Lost City of Z – David Grann

Best For: Exploring Your Options One of the reviews called this “the best story in the world, told perfectly” and that’s fair enough, really. In 1925, British explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett went missing in Brazil while searching for a mythical settlement. This book investigates why, and the author embarks on his own Amazonian quest.

Outliers: The Story of Success – Malcolm Gladwell

Best For: Secrets Of Success Gladwell is most well known for The Tipping Point, but this book about what high achievers have in common is a more in-depth and engaging read. A big part of what makes people make it big is the hard yards: doing something for 20 hours a week for a decade, or about 10,000 hours. Start tomorrow? Why not?

Hit Makers – Derek Thompson

Best For: Being In With The In Crowd If you want to know why Star Wars is so popular, and why nothing ever really goes viral, then Thompson is your man. His study of pop culture’s most beloved items ranges from Game Of Thrones and Taylor Swift to Pokémon Go and Spotify.

Factfulness – Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Best For: Rebooting Your World Knowledge Bill Gates has a website on which he posts book recommendations, and liked this one so much he paid for every US college graduate in 2018 to get the ebook version. You might want to join those four million ex-students and be delighted to have much of what you know about the world put right by fascinating hard facts.

Bad Blood – John Carreyou

Best For: Fraud Or Flawed? It’s the story of the age: 19-year-old founds a medical start-up; raises $700m on the promise of a blood-testing machine that never really exists; her $10bn company collapses, with $600m of investors’ money gone. Was it just Silicon Valley hot air or a massive, deliberate fraud?

Doughnut Economics – Kate Raworth

Best For: The Future Of Your Money Experts are divided about Raworth’s ring-shaped model of how economics should be – the flow of money and trade keeping humans and Earth in good shape – but they are all talking about it. She recognises systems and effects, such as climate change and social movements, which standard economics ignore. Her argument is powerful.

Distraction

Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris

Best For: First-Person Hilarity The best of several collections of brilliant essays from the American humourist deals partly with his moving to Normandy in France, and partly with his life before that, in rural America and New York City. One of these every morning on the way to work would banish commuter blues immediately.

How To Lose Friends & Alienate People – Toby Young

Best For: Tragic Tragicomedy Young is now a right-leaning columnist and social media ‘star’. In a previous life, he got a job on the American magazine Vanity Fair, and dropped the ball spectacularly. Anyone who’s ever felt like a square peg in a workplace round hole (so, that’ll be everyone, then) will find much to laugh at here.

Our Dumb Century – The Onion

Best For: Mocking The Decades In terms of jokes-that-work-per-page hit rate, this is probably the funniest book in the world. Before social media, The Onion’s parody news site was the funniest thing online (they still do pretty good). This special project magnificently takes the Michael out of news and newspapers from 1900 to 1999. In today’s fake news era, this has become even more hilarious.

Spoiled Brats – Simon Rich

Best For: Eye-Watering Laughs Rich writes the sort of charming and amusing essays that Steve Martin and Woody Allen used to do, and there are a dozen in this volume. But it’s the novella Sell Out that makes this a must-read. A Brooklyn pickle-maker falls into the brine and is fished out 100 years later, to face the hipsters who have taken over his town. Your correspondent cried with laughter.

I, Partridge – Steve Coogan

Best For: Pitch-Perfect Parody A spot-on mocking of celebrity autobiography and a celebration of Britain’s best-loved failed chat-show host and digital radio DJ. Even better than reading this with Partridge’s voice in your head is listening to the audiobook, with Coogan-Partridge in absolutely magnificent form.

The Photo Ark – Joel Sartore

Best For: All Creatures Great And Small As ambitions go, it’s lofty and admirable: take a picture of all 12,000 species living in the world’s wildlife sanctuaries and zoos before an increasing number of them become extinct. As of May 2018, 12 years in, Sartore was two-thirds of the way there. This book covers the first 6,000 species.

Essential Elements – Edward Burtynsky

Best For: Seeing The World Through New Eyes Burtynsky is a Canadian photographer who uses a large camera to take vast-scale images of our changing planet, from seemingly endless rows of workers in Chinese factories to aerial views of oil fields in California. He makes the sort of images you can spend hours finding new things in.

Greatest Of All Time: A Tribute To Muhammad Ali – various

Best For: Knockout Storytelling Anyone saying “print is dead” hasn’t encountered this beautiful object, which has collector’s editions at £11,000 and a regular version 110 times cheaper yet almost as powerful. Ali is still sport’s most celebrated story, and the words and pictures on the 652 foot-square pages here tell that tale in the absolute best possible way.

Kenneth Grange: Making Britain Modern – various

Best For: Design Classics, UK Style A hero of industrial design as good as his more famous peers at Apple or Braun, Grange devised dozens of iconic products including Kodak cameras, Anglepoise lamps, Wilkinson Sword razors, parking meters and the Intercity 125 train. This catalogue of his career is a beautifully designed book full of beautifully designed things.

The Classic Car Book – Giles Chapman

Best For: Four-Wheeled Nirvana Quite simply a treasure trove of thousands of photos of awesome automobiles from the 1940s to the 1980s, with nerdy spec data and potted histories of cars, marques and makers.