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#and if nora was like sjm or something
play-exy-be-sexy · 2 years
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let’s just all be grateful Nora never made Andrew or Kevin “growl” because...no❤️
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earlgreyteaforhere · 4 years
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book recommendations?
Hello Anon! This is very vague, but I will take this as an opportunity to recommend some wonderful books across all sorts of different genres. Put on your seat belt, wear a mask, log into your goodreads app, and prepare to be bombarded with an even longer never ending TBR list. 
||Nonfiction||
Notes of A Native Son by James Baldwin: If you haven’t read anything by Baldwin yet, this is a great place to start. This book is a collection of ten nonfiction essays primarily focusing on issues of race in America and Europe. Baldwin’s writing style is unlike any other, and in my opinion, is the equivalent of jazz on the page if such a thing does exist. His words will get you lost and challenge your understanding of the world as you know it, only to bring you to the profound realization that you did not in fact know the world very well at all. 
The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison: I wouldn’t necessarily call this a medical memoir, rather this book is a collection of essays focusing on empathy via stories relating in some way to medical topics. Jamison’s writing style is highly engaging and she forces the reader to ask themselves some very difficult questions about themself and their role in the world. Empathy is a complex thing, and if you’re interested in understanding the nuances of the subject, and perhaps learning more about yourself, I would very much recommend this book. 
||Historical Fiction||
Small Island by Andrea Levy: Set in and around WWII, the story follows the main characters Hortense, Gilbert, Queenie, and Bernard in a rather nonlinear recounting of events taking place in Jamaica, England, America, and India. The novel explores the complicated issues of Great Britain’s colonization of Jamaica, and the rough transition for Jamaican’s living in England to help support the wartime effort. I listened to the audiobook for this one and the voice actors did a fantastic job of giving each character a distinct and easily identifiable voice and personality. I think there is also a BBC adaptation of the book. 
The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto by Mitch Albom: Not sure if this technically qualifies as historical fiction, but I’m putting it here because it does a great job of tracing a lot of the evolution of modern popular music. I will never stop recommending this book. The novel is narrated by the entity of music and follows the life of Frankie Presto in a sort of Forrest Gump like fashion. I won’t say much about the plot, but I will tell you this book will make you laugh, cry, and everything in between. Please read this book. 
||Fiction||
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis: This book is told from the pov of Clay, a wealthy kid from California who goes to college in the Northeast. The novel follows his time at home during winter break and highlights the more unsightly aspects of the rich elite on the West Coast. This book made me feel sort of dead inside and pessimistic about the world, so I’m not sure it would be the best book to read right now given current events. But if your mental health is stable and in a good place, this is a quick read and an all around good book. 
Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan: While the movie received some harsh criticisms, I really enjoyed this book. Kwan has a unique style and is able to tell the story from many different points of view without the characters getting lost or blending together. Often times I have a difficult time keeping track of names and relationships if there is a large cast of characters, but Kwan does a fantastic job. If you enjoy juicy family drama and heartwarming friendships, I recommend giving this a read. It’s also set in Singapore which was a first for me to read about and definitely convinced me to add a trip to Singapore on my bucketlist. 
||YA Fiction||
We All Looked Up by Tommy Wallach: I read this book in two days when I was fifteen and it immediately found a permanent place in my heart. This book is about the potential end of the world from the perspectives of high school students in a style reminiscent of The Breakfast Club. I remember reading this and thinking “wow, this dude just really gets it” because Wallach perfectly captures my teenage angsty self. This is also a fitting read since it seems like the world is ending these days. I also recommend Thanks For the Trouble by Tommy Wallach because it’s an incredibly unique, intriguing, and just plain weird story. Wallach enjoys ambiguity in his stories, so if you’re into that kind of negative capability, then his books might just be a good match for you. 
The Illuminae Files by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff: This is technically YA sci-fi, but this is my list and I’m putting it here anyway. I’m personally not much of a sci-fi reader, so I don’t remember why I thought to pick up this series, but I am so glad I did. Illuminae has pretty much every sci-fi trope you can think of all wrapped into one marvelous multi-media kick-ass space story. The books themselves look thicc, but don’t let that turn you away. Despite the books having many pages, the story is told through emails, security camera footage logs, journal pages, text messages, and many pictures which makes for a speedy read. I recommend the Illuminae Files for those who don’t read sci-fi, but are willing to give it a try. 
Emergency Contact by Mary H. K. Choi: I read this book at pretty much the perfect time in my life and I think that’s probably why I enjoyed it so much. The book is about Penny and her journey as she begins college at UT Austin and the anxieties/challenges that come along with that. Friendships, mother/daughter relationships, romance, drama, and a whole lot of social awkwardness. I’d recommend this to college students and or those about to go to college because I think most will find this book quite relatable in at least some way. The book reassures us that we are not alone in our awkward transition stages of life. 
All For the Game by Nora Sakavic: This series is about a fictional sport called exy. Yes, that’s right, I’m recommending you books about a sport. Exy is sort of like lacrosse, but like better, more aggressive, and more drama. The series is about the main character, Neil Josten, who is on the run from his mob boss dad. Neil finds solace in exy and is actually not that bad at it. He goes to college, joins the Palmetto State Foxes exy team, and it’s all uphill (downhill?) from there. This series has unforgettable characters, lots of drugs and violence (don’t read if that triggers you), lots of gay, and lots of exy. For a book series about a sport, All for the game is amazing and I recommend it to everyone looking for a binge read. Note: I’ve heard physical copies are hard to find, but the ebook version is available through the kindle app and probably other places too. 
||YA Fantasy||
Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas: oooooookay here we go. This series makes me weep just thinking about it, that’s how much I love it. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that just hit me. so. hard. So many emotions. The series follows Celaena Sardothein, an assassin, and essentially her journey to becoming herself. Vague, I know, but I seriously cannot give anything away. SJM’s worldbuilding is next level and her characters are probably my favorite aspect of any and all of her books. I’ll also recommend her A Court of Thorns and Roses series here for the same reasons even though it’s been rebranded as “new adult fantasy.” Celaena is probably my favorite main character of all time, and I cannot fully express how much her story means to me. Throne of Glass is easy to follow and great for getting into the fantasy genre if it’s something you’ve never read before. Please give these books a try, I am begging you. 
The Remnant Chronicles by Mary E. Pearson: The first book of this trilogy easily has one of the most shocking plot twists I have ever read. If that doesn’t pique your interest, I don’t know what will. Sorry. The Remnant Chronicles is a sort of milder fantasy than Throne of Glass, but fantasy nonetheless and super underrated. I’d recommend this series to people who enjoy stories about the politics of fantasy worlds, romance, and friendship. I let my little sister read my copies and she got through them in less than a week (I think) and could not stop raving about them. 
The Raven Cycle by Maggie Steifvater: I think magical realism is a better genre for these books, but I’m putting them here under YA fantasy anyway. Fight me. Above anything else, you will fall in love with these characters. Set in Virginia, the Raven Cycle is honestly strange (in a good way) and tells the story of a group of friends’ quest to find some sleeping Welsh king. While the series is mostly about finding that damn king, there is a healthy amount of romance, swearing, clairvoyance, yogurt, latin, and all around good times. Steifvater’s writing style is unique, and with that it is admittedly a bit difficult to get into at first. But please stick with it! I promise it’s worth it! One of my favorite series ever, highly recommend. 
||Short Stories||
Here is a list of short stories I enjoy. Not gonna do a whole synopsis for each, but take my word for it and pls read them.
-Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta by Kate Braverman
-Two Kinds by Amy Tan 
-The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
-Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot by Robert Olen Butler
-The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin
-Girl by Jamaica Kincaid
-The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe
-The Secret Goldfish by David Means
-The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
-A Temporary Matter by Jhumpa Lahiri
-The Cavemen in the Hedges by Stacey Richter
-The Bad Graft by Karen Russell
-Eveline by James Joyce
I hope these recommendations are helpful in contributing to your summer reading and on-going TBR list. This is probably not what you were expecting when you simply asked “book recommendations?” but here you go. Happy reading, whoever you are. 
:)
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spaceshipkat · 5 years
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Hi Kat. I’m about to go on a rant. I hope you’d read this to end, because while you might get mad, id hope you’re the type of person who understands. I am so sick of the ya community and book twitter in general. I’m so sick of the double standards and self-serving behavior. The ‘motto’ is to call out bad behavior,and everyone touts it as the right thing to do. Well bull shit. The motto apparently only applies until you’re afraid of your career tanking before it begins and that is so (1/x)
(2/x) mother effing screwed up and twisted - if you dare call out ONE popular author you’re done for, even if they act like an asshat. No one says boop about sjm on twitter, it’s all subtweets and vague comments from people who could MAKE AN IMPACT - aveyard, Dennard, bardugo, Ireland, tahir, McKinney, Stone, the Pitch Wars community, and dozens others. But they don’t. And while I was hoping it would be different for Tomi Adeyemi, since aaaaaaaaaaall these folks love to preach about pointing
(3/x) out wrongs with a big stage light, all that’s been shown is that people. Don’t. Change. And by people I mean ya authors. Even you, Kat. I hate to say it. Tomi needs to be held accountable by people who matter to HER and as much as I’m sure she’d like to pretend no one is her peer, that’s on you guys. Not one damn ya author DIRECTLY stated what Adeyemi did was wrong with falsely accusing NR. NO ONE, point out a tweet if I’m wrong. And now with her snubbing writing mutuals in this manner
(4/x)it’s even worse. Would you all stand up for yourselves, for each other, for ONCE, and shine the light on the ugliness she and other people want to wish away by ignoring it? Yes it would be ugly. It would be horrible. People would lose precious followers and friends and be attacked. Yet after all that, MAYBE other authors down the road will consider consequences before thinking they are invincible. If you give passes to Maas, to Adeyemi, to ANY author who acts this way JUST because
(5/x) because their books are ‘revolutionary, inspirational, LIFE CHANGING’ then you’re the real problem. It’s like letting a cardiac surgeon off a drunk driving charge with a little slap because he or she saves lives, because they do good things. I’m so over this shit. So over it and yet I’m not able to walk away bc being an author is my DREAM and I have to stomach all this ugliness and pettiness and double standards, and be like YOU if I want to have a chance at seeing my name on a shelf.
(6/x)So if you read all this, Kat, thank you. You probably hate every word I’ve hurled at you. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the villagers will rally with pitchforks. That’s ok. Good night.
i agree, i wish more authors would speak up about so many things that go on in the industry, but the main reason authors don’t often speak up about author behavior (and often the content of their books) is bc we’re all in this one business together, and speaking up against another author in public would be the equivalent to loudly talking about a coworker’s behavior while you’re gathered around the water cooler. in the book industry, 90% of the things that go on happen behind closed doors rather than out in a public forum such as twitter. i’ve had to talk to friends who tweet something that might be 😬 but we always do it in private. it’s typically what happens when it comes to authorial behavior vs problematic content in books. as i’m sure you’ve seen, problematic content does get called out (though not nearly as often as it should be, and it largely is only pointed out to debut authors rather than established ones such as sj/m), bc that’s what matters to the reading community at large. 
it’s the same reason most authors don’t speak up unless they’re unafraid of hurting their careers. as you saw with Tomi and Nora, Tomi’s career was likely impacted in terms of her reputation and future readers, since many people (fans of Adult and YA alike) have said that they won’t be reading Tomi’s books after this. while Tomi’s tweet was 100% wrong, it’s a good example of what would happen if someone did decide to speak up. for what it’s worth, i do speak up on twitter about sj/m’s books, though i don’t do it exactly how i do here bc this is a different forum from twitter and thus has a different set of rules to follow, largely in terms of how candid you can be. when you’re an author, your reputation is one of the most important things to keep clean. it’s why authors often don’t rate books on goodreads, since, again, you don’t want to be loudly complaining about someone you work with while you’re standing at the water cooler. 
with giving passes, i don’t think i’ve done that here at all. Tomi is undoubtedly being talked to by her friends and her team in the wake of the Nora situation, but that’s going to be occurring in private. it’s why a manager calls you into their office to detail what you’ve done wrong, rather than just standing in the middle of the workroom to talk to you about your behavior. and that’s one thing you need to remember: publishing is a business, first and foremost, and like any business there are rules and protocol to follow. it’s why you don’t blog about being on submission, why you don’t tweet that you just got your first offer of rep and are so excited it about it, bc agents do look you up (for example, my agent looked at my twitter when he signed me and we talked about the publishers and editors who followed me) and when they see that they’re likely to just throw up their hands and walk away, even if they were interested in the writer’s work, bc they won’t see the point in throwing their name in as well for a writer who is already squeeing over offering agent #1. 
so when you say that we need to stand up for each other and ourselves when it comes to calling out authors, we already do. it just happens where you can’t see it for all the reasons i’ve listed above; it’s why i always say that this industry is minuscule, but all of us talk. there are so many cases where authors have news to share that they can’t talk about until they’re given the green light by their agent/editor/publisher. book deal announcements typically come monthsssss after the author has signed the contract. i know someone who was told the announcement was going up that day, but it kept getting pushed back and back and back until the news finally dropped a couple weeks later. 
there are a lot of things that have made me disenchanted with the YA community because it has changed a lot in the seven years i’ve been involved in it. i don’t really like spending time on twitter, for example, bc there are some things about how authors act on there that i really dislike. (for example, to reference what i said in the above paragraph, i really dislike when authors tweet “omg i have big news to share uwu can’t wait for everyone to know it!” bc it comes off as very braggadocios and bc it really rubs it in the nose of other authors and writers who are struggling that this person has news to share and they can’t wait and they want to tease us with it for…reasons. don’t get me wrong, i am thrilled to pieces for some authors when they have good news, but i could do without the teasing, bragging part of it.) but regardless, we can’t publicly state that for the reasons i’ve listed above. 
this is the kind of industry where you have to smile on the outside even if you’re screaming on the inside, because you never know if you’ll one day end up on a panel with that writer you talked about on twitter, or they’ll switch to your publisher, or they’ll sign with your agent, so on and so forth. your reputation and platform in this industry are as important and integral as good writing. thus, those two things are our guidelines for how, when, why, and where to speak up about an author’s behavior or problematic content. 
i hope this clears things up! and you never have to be afraid of sending asks like this, bc i try to make this blog a place where anyone can feel safe to speak up (unless someone tells me to kill myself, in which case they can go to hell). 
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spaceshipkat · 5 years
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Am I the only one that doesn’t understand the pedestal the anti community seems to hold game of thrones on? Like don’t get me wrong, sjm’s plagiarism is bad and the worldbuidling is better than throne of glass, but game of thrones is oddly put on a pedestal by a lot of people and I don’t think I’ve seen anyone talk about how a lot of problematic elements of tog are potentially things carried over from got/ other things sjm takes “influence” from?
i think got is really only put on a pedestal bc of its worldbuilding, rather than everything else GRRM includes, and even if it is upheld as more for other reasons, i haven’t seen any anti shy away from talking about the fuckery in that series (of which there is a lot). popular fiction has a habit of being overlooked in terms of critique largely for the same reason we antis do our best to stay out of stans’ sights bc we really don’t want the harassment. i mean, remember what happened with Tomi Adeyemi and Nora Roberts? Nora is a huge name, and the fact Tomi made that one tweet (i think she forgot that she is a bestseller with a following of 53k, not a small unpublished writer who can tweet something like that and mostly go ignored) made her life upend itself. it’s always a gamble to go up against names like Nora’s or GRRM’s, so critique often falls by the wayside. 
and yes, i absolutely think that a lot of t0g’s and ac0tar’s problems come from other work that sj/m likes (or claims not to like, despite the fact alien becomes Dany from the show), but i think one reason there is that sj/m doesn’t read to learn, she reads to find inspiration--which is often fine, until you go overboard the way that sj/m has. if she read to learn, she probably wouldn’t be burping up stuff that went out of style back in 2008 (the hypermasculine, possessive love interest in YA, for example). it almost comes across like sj/m uses other books and movies as a recipe, but she ends up using sub-par substitutes of the ingredients that the recipe calls for, which makes a cake that looks similar but really doesn't taste like a cake. 
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