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“This Again?” Challenge day 9: A song of ice and fire 

(if we’re talking about gunfire, that is)

#books #photos #salt to the sea #ruta sepetys

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Nothing like reading a beat up old fave on the beach 🖤

#i loved this book so much when i first read it #then somehow it disappeared from my shelves #and i dont think i ever bought a second copy #wicked lovely #melissa marr #books #photos

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HIS DARK MATERIALS Season One (2019) | BBC/HBO, Bad Wolf Productions

#im excited #i hope its good #i oughta reread the books #his dark materials

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Famous authors, their writings and their rejection letters.

Sylvia Plath: There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice.

Rudyard Kipling: I’m sorry Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.

Emily Dickinson: [Your poems] are quite as remarkable for defects as for beauties and are generally devoid of true poetical qualities.

Ernest Hemingway (on The Torrents of Spring): It would be extremely rotten taste, to say nothing of being horribly cruel, should we want to publish it.

Dr. Seuss: Too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling.

The Diary of Anne Frank: The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the ‘curiosity’ level.

Richard Bach (on Jonathan Livingston Seagull): will never make it as a paperback. (Over 7.25 million copies sold)

H.G. Wells (on The War of the Worlds): An endless nightmare. I do not believe it would “take”…I think the verdict would be ‘Oh don’t read that horrid book’. And (on The Time Machine): It is not interesting enough for the general reader and not thorough enough for the scientific reader.

Edgar Allan Poe: Readers in this country have a decided and strong preference for works in which a single and connected story occupies the entire volume.

Herman Melville (on Moby Dick): We regret to say that our united opinion is entirely against the book as we do not think it would be at all suitable for the Juvenile Market in [England]. It is very long, rather old-fashioned…

Jack London: [Your book is] forbidding and depressing.

William Faulkner: If the book had a plot and structure, we might suggest shortening and revisions, but it is so diffuse that I don’t think this would be of any use. My chief objection is that you don’t have any story to tell. And two years later: Good God, I can’t publish this!

Stephen King (on Carrie): We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.

Joseph Heller (on Catch–22): I haven’t really the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say… Apparently the author intends it to be funny – possibly even satire – but it is really not funny on any intellectual level … From your long publishing experience you will know that it is less disastrous to turn down a work of genius than to turn down talented mediocrities.

George Orwell (on Animal Farm): It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.

Oscar Wilde (on Lady Windermere’s Fan): My dear sir, I have read your manuscript. Oh, my dear sir.

Vladimir Nabokov (on Lolita): … overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian … the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. It often becomes a wild neurotic daydream … I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit was turned down so many times, Beatrix Potter initially self-published it.

Lust for Life by Irving Stone was rejected 16 times, but found a publisher and went on to sell about 25 million copies.

John Grisham’s first novel was rejected 25 times.

Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen (Chicken Soup for the Soul) received 134 rejections.

Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) received 121 rejections.

Gertrude Stein spent 22 years submitting before getting a single poem accepted.

Judy Blume, beloved by children everywhere, received rejections for two straight years.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle received 26 rejections.

Frank Herbert’s Dune was rejected 20 times.

Carrie by Stephen King received 30 rejections.

The Diary of Anne Frank received 16 rejections.

Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rolling was rejected 12 times.

Dr. Seuss received 27 rejection letters

#bookish #good stuff

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When the Nazi concentration camps were liberated by the Allies, it was a time of great jubilation for the tens of thousands of people incarcerated in them. But an often forgotten fact of this time is that prisoners who happened to be wearing the pink triangle (the Nazis’ way of marking and identifying homosexuals) were forced to serve out the rest of their sentence. This was due to a part of German law simply known as “Paragraph 175” which criminalized homosexuality. The law wasn’t repealed until 1969.

#important #pride month #history #tf #christ #wtf

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Finished!

#say nothing #patrick radden keefe #books #photos

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Ashling - Tristan Elwell Book cover for the fantasy novel by Isobelle Carmody

#art

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Jusepe de Ribera - The Sense of Touch.

#took me a second to orient #art

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New arrivals and new, very beautiful, bookmarks by the Bookdepository

#the travelling cat chronicles #hiro arikawa #books #photos #elizabeth macneal #the doll factory

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Say Nothing - Patrick Radden Keefe

In brief: A portrait of the IRA and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, with a focus on trauma, revenge, and fear—and on one particular woman who was disappeared.

Thoughts: This was everything I like in true crime and a good piece of narrative non-fiction to boot. It’s well-written, impeccably researched and cited, and manages to portray a very difficult and complicated subject even-handedly and with compassion for all sides. It also deals a lot with morality and ethics and generational pain and anger, carries the story up to a couple years ago, and asks questions about repercussions and statutes of limitations and reconciliation without answering them.

I didn’t know a lot about the Troubles going into this, just that it was a brutal and bloody and traumatic period of Northern Irish history, fought between Catholics/Republicans, Protestants/Unionists, and the British Army, and that there was a lot of distrust and paranoia that caused tensions to flare up again and again. I have a much better sense of the climate now, and the causes, and the ways of thinking in both the IRA and the Army, and have a whole new appreciation for how bad everything got.

Keefe focuses on a few key figures in the IRA, and to a lesser extent, on Jean McConville, who was disappeared, a handful of journalists and academics, and a man in the Army. You get a really good sense of these people as the story evolves, and he does that thing I love where you don’t get information until just the right time and yet the time jumps and digressions work with the story and not against it. This is also very much not a sensationalist or particularly biased piece of journalism. There are no heroes, no villains, no titillating facts, and no heavy foreshadowing.

I really liked that the story didn’t swing straight to solving the Jean McConville case once the Good Friday Agreement went into effect. Keefe continues to track the IRA people as they go their separate ways and try to deal (or not) with the terrible things they did and had done to them, as well as going into other court cases and academic attempts to document the era. McConville’s still there, as a sort of focus and example case, but really, he’s digging into the a much wider and more convoluted situation than just one crime and its resolution.

And as you can tell from me reading this in four days, it’s engagingly written and mildly addictive on top of everything! (Also my commute has sucked this week.) It hit exactly the right mix of grim and historical for me and is going to be the narrative non-fiction to beat for the year.

To bear in mind: If you don’t know what the Troubles involved, it was essentially a brutal guerilla war. Expect discussion of murder, torture, bombings, hunger strikes, jail sentences, dehumanization of the opposing side(s), and disappeared people, with a side of racism, religious bigotry, anti-colonial anger, and radical politics, among other things. There are also orphanages with systemic sexual abuse, one other glancing mention of molestation, and Margaret Thatcher.

9/10

#book reviews #patrick radden keefe #say nothing #books #photos #TBR pile

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American Sorting Hat, which is just a beat up baseball cap: aight bro by the most righteous magics bestowed upon me i’ve scoped out ur brain and ur house is uh….. DRAGON ALPHA SIGMA DONG!!! lol

wizard bros of dragon alpha sigma dong: YOOOOOOOOOOOO 

freshman wizard: *crowdsurfs*

#lol #even this would have been better #harry potter and series #this is getting in the series tag cuz fuck it

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honestly I’m very very tired of fandom insisting SO LOUDLY that there is only one form of sibling relationship in the world, and it’s “constant roasting, nonetheless ride-or-die”

like yes, I’m sure that’s accurate to many people’s experience, and it’s definitely fun to watch in fiction!  but it’s not everybody’s dynamic.  stop crowing things like “you can tell these writers actually have real life siblings, because their fictional siblings insult each other constantly!”  idk man idk what to tell you. some families don’t do that

#yo me and my brother

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eggos. i know im potentially gluten intolerant, but i cannot wait to be back in the states so i can eat some motherfucking chocolate chip eggos. or hell, even the plain ones! just, any kinda eggo would be awesome

#a month and a half #thats all til im stateside again and get the diet of a fool #god i miss some of the simple things #its not bad living outside of the states #but it really makes me miss it sometimes

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Only 100 days left until the release of A CHOIR OF LIES, my novel about hopepunk, recovery from grief, and fantasy tulip mania – with FOOTNOTES!

Preorders for the hardback and ebook are available now wherever you buy books :)

Publisher’s Weekly starred review | Goodreads Indiebound | Amazon | Barnes & Noble  (background art by @linovadraws)

#oh my god #FOOTNOTES?? #i'm gonna live happily while reading this book <3 i love footnotes #books #photos #alexandra rowland #a choir of lies

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#cassandra clare #i did love them in their time :) #books #photos #city of bones #city of ashes #im not sure now #i think this is the name of the last one??? #the mortal instruments #city of glass

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I take my coffee with a bit of gothic lit

#rebecca #daphne du maurier #books #photos #i saw the movie for this once #in one of the oddest gaggle of girls ive ever hung out with

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7 Book Covers in 7 Days Challenge

Rules: Each day, I will post the cover of a book that I love and nominate someone new to start the challenge. No explanation, no discussion, just post the cover and by doing so spread some literary love!

Tagging: @six-of-ravens

#7 book covers in 7 days #books #booklr #bookblr #book photos #photos #My posts #if uve already done it no worries!