2023 Draw My Reads
Here is a full list of all the books I read in 2023 and links to the art I’ve made for them.
Just a few quick notes. I didn’t make art for everything I read. I also fell off the wagon a bit toward the end and went through an art block. Not sure if I’ll continue this project into 2024 but I might do some variation. We’ll see.
Also, I read some absolutely filthy (and ridiculous) stuff sometimes. So be warned.
*Sequels will have an asterisk. First book in series will be in parenthesis.
January
1. Alpha Wolf* by Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti (Caged Wolf)
2. Feral Wolf* by Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti (Caged Wolf)
3. Constantine: Distorted Illusions by Kami Garcia and Isaac Goodhart
4. The Ballad of Never After* by Stephanie Garber (Once Upon a Broken Heart)
5. Wicked Beauty* by Katee Robert (Neon Gods)
6. Vicious by V.E. Schwab
7. Hell Bent* by Leigh Bardugo (Ninth House)
Total (so far): 7
February
1. How Y’all Doing by Leslie Jordan
2. Vengeful* by V.E. Schwab (Vicious)
3. A Court of Mist and Fury* by Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses)
4. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
Total (so far): 11
March
1. Kingdom of Flesh and Fire* by Jennifer L. Armentrout (From Blood and Ash)
2. The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake
3. Cinder by Marissa Meyer
4. Scarlet* by Marissa Meyer (Cinder)
5. Cress* by Marissa Meyer (Cinder)
Total (so far): 16
April
1. Winter* by Marissa Meyer (Cinder)
2. A Soul to Keep by Opal Reyne
3. Sorcery of Thorns by Margaret Rogerson
4. Lauren’s Barbarian* by Ruby Dixon (Ice Planet Barbarians, spinoff series)
Total (so far): 20
May
1. Harvest House by Cynthia Leitich Smith
2. The Song of the Marked by S.M. Gaither
3. A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab
4. Fable by Adrienne Young
5. Bea Wolf by Weinersmith
6. Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes
Total (so far): 26
June
1. A Ruin of Roses by K.F. Breene
2. Veronica’s Dragon* by Ruby Dixon (Ice Planet Barbarians, spinoff series)
3. Willa’s Beast* by Ruby Dixon (Ice Planet Barbarians, spinoff series)
4. Over My Dead Body by Sweeney Boo
5. Window Shopping by Tessa Bailey
6. A Court of Silver Flames* by Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses)
7. Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
Total (so far): 33
July
1. Zodiac Academy: Beyond the Veil* by Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti (Zodiac Academy: The Awakening)
2. The Bridge Kingdom by Danielle L. Jensen
3. The Traitor Queen* by Danielle L. Jensen (The Bridge Kingdom)
4. The Little Library Cookbook by Kate Young
5. Sheets by Brenna Thummler
6. Cackle by Rachel Harrison
7. The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
8. The Borderlands Princess by Ophelia Wells Langley
9. Bride of the Shadow King by Sylvia Mercedes
10. Vow of the Shadow King* by Sylvia Mercedes (Bride of the Shadow King)
11. Angie’s Gladiator* by Ruby Dixon (Ice Planet Barbarians spinoff series)
12. Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree
13. Gail’s Family* by Ruby Dixon (Ice Planet Barbarians spinoff series)
14. Hanna’s Hero* by Ruby Dixon (Ice Planet Barbarians spinoff series)
15. Devi’s Distraction* by Ruby Dixon (Ice Planet Barbarians spinoff series)
16. Destination Alien Bride by Dee J. Holmes
Total (so far): 49
August
1. Destination Alien Mate* by Dee J. Holmes (Destination Alien Bride)
2. Gilded by Marissa Meyer
3. The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna
4. Cursed* by Marissa Meyer (Gilded)
5. Nadine’s Champion* by Ruby Dixon (Ice Planet Barbarians spinoff series)
6. Callie’s Catastrophe* by Ruby Dixon (Ice Planet Barbarians spinoff series)
7. Ice Planet Honeymoon* by Ruby Dixon (Ice Planet Barbarians)
8. Flowerheart by Catherine Bakewell
9. I’m in Love with Mothman by Paige Lavoie
Total (so far): 58
September
1. Cryptid Club by Sarah Andersen
2. Radiant Sin* by Katee Robert (Neon Gods)
3. Ice Planet Honeymoon: Raahosh and Liz* by Ruby Dixon (Ice Planet Barbarians)
4. The Okay Witch by Emma Steinkellner
5. Throne in the Dark by A.K. Caggiano
6. Ice Planet Honeymoon: Aehako and Kira* by Ruby Dixon (Ice Planet Barbarians)
7. A Soul to Heal by Opal Reyne* (A Soul to Keep)
8. Ice Planet Honeymoon: Rukh and Harlow by Ruby Dixon* (Ice Planet Barbarians)
9. The Barbarian Before Christmas by Ruby Dixon* (Ice Planet Barbarians)
10. Penny’s Protector by Ruby Dixon* (Ice Planet Barbarians spinoff series)
11. Mari’s Mistake by Ruby Dixon* (Ice Planet Barbarians spinoff series)
12. Raven’s Return by Ruby Dixon* (Ice Planet Barbarians spinoff series)
Total (so far): 70
October
1. Bridget’s Bane by Ruby Dixon* (Ice Planet Barbarians spinoff series)
2. Steph’s Outcast by Ruby Dixon* (Ice Planet Barbarians spinoff series)
3. Sam’s Secret by Ruby Dixon* (Ice Planet Barbarians spinoff series)
4. Daisy’s Decision by Ruby Dixon* (Ice Planet Barbarians spinoff series)
5. Flor’s Fiasco by Ruby Dixon* (Ice Planet Barbarians spinoff series)
6. R’jaal’s Resonance by Ruby Dixon* (Ice Planet Barbarians spinoff series)
7. Forged by Magic by Jenna Wolfheart
8. A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow
9. A Curse for True Love by Stephanie Garber* (Once Upon a Broken Heart)
Total (so far): 79
November
1. The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
2. Namesake by Adrienne Young* (Fable)
3. Blackwater by Jeannette Arroyo and Ren Graham
4. Surviving Skarr by Ruby Dixon* (Ice Planet Barbarians Spinoff series)
5. Squad by Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Lisa Sterle
6. Mysteries of Thorn Manor by Margaret Rogerson* (Sorcery of Thorns)
7. Destination Alien Treasure by Dee J Holmes* (Destination Alien Bride)
8. Zodiac Academy: Origins of an Academy Bully by Susanne Valenti and Caroline Peckham* (Zodiac Academy: The Awakening)
9. When She’s Ready by Ruby Dixon
10. When She’s Married by Ruby Dixon* (When She’s Ready)
11. When She Purrs by Ruby Dixon* (When She’s Ready)
12. When She Belongs by Ruby Dixon* (When She’s Ready)
Total (so far): 91
December
1. The Dreaming Forest by LB Black
2. Gold by Raven Kennedy* (Gild)
3. Chained to Krampus by KL Wyatt
4. Once Upon a Dream by Liz Braswell* (Series of standalones)
Total Reads For 2023: 95
My goal was to read 90 books and I beat that by 5. I think I’m going to set my reading goal to just 80 this year. Just to give myself a little more freedom. I did read a lot of really short books just to get my number up and I’d rather just focus on reading whatever I want.
Shortest book read: Ice Planet Honeymoon: Raahosh and Liz by Ruby Dixon
Longest book read: Winter by Marissa Meyer
Current read started in 2023 but will finish in 2024: The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
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I'm having incoherent thoughts about clone danny again from the clone/clone^2 au (when am I not?) but more specifically I'm thinking about his reaction to finding out he's a clone. The standalone clone au digs into that a little more than clone^2, which is more focused on Danny and Damian's relationship. But neither (so far) really get into Danny's issues about finding out he's a clone after 15 years of thinking he wasn't.
Because he resents his parents for not telling him for so long. He resents the way he found out; through a trivial school project rather than a sit-down talk. He resents the fact that, apparently, they had meant to tell him sooner. But forgot. He resents the fact that they never told him because finding out feels like something was stolen from him when it had the chance to not be.
Danny Fenton, just fifteen, cloned not even half a year ago, knows what that personal violation of autonomy feels like. He knows what it's like to be cloned and while he loves Ellie, he does, she's his sister, and in this au his twin. But he is still left with that feeling of unsafety after realizing he'd been cloned. Being cloned is violating. The onset realization that it's so easy to get DNA without the other party noticing, and that what was stopping someone from trying to clone him again?
Followed only after with the rest of the inexplainable mix of feelings of being cloned, the rest of that inner conflict and panic that's an ugly mocktail of emotions that range from horror to fear. Trying to imagine what it's like to be cloned from the cloned party, and I imagine that it leaves you with the feeling of needing to crawl out of your own skin with discomfort.
And then he gets put on the other side of it. Danny Fenton, only fifteen, was cloned not even half a year ago, finding out he is a clone. And reactions, I imagine, can vary from person to person. But to him, it feels like something got stolen from him, like someone took a hole puncher and stuck it right into his chest and stole a chunk of himself from him.
It changes nothing about him and yet it changes everything. It's a betrayal on it's own to just find out he was a clone and they didn't tell him for fifteen years -- it shouldn't mean anything, because he's still Danny, and yet it means everything. It's him, it's him, it's about him. It's his personhood. It's about the fact that a load-bearing rock in his identity just crumbled beneath his feet and now there's a rockslide.
Because then he finds out that they used the wrong DNA. Its like pouring salt in an open wound. He's not even related to his parents or his sister, when for years he thought he was. It's the fact that pieces of his identity that he's been so secure in for so long just got ripped away from him in an instant. Then they tell him -- only through his own horrified prompting -- that the person whose DNA they used -- Bruce Wayne -- didn't even know he existed. That they accidentally used the wrong DNA, then didn't tell the person whose DNA they used.
The betrayal of being lied to for years turns really quickly into horror at his own existence. Something very similar to the horror he felt at being cloned and the skin-crawling discomfort that made him feel like his own skin wasn't really his. And then its not. It's actually not. Nothing but his own name feels like it belongs to him anymore -- not his hair, not his eyes, not his heart or his lungs, nothing feels like his anymore and he didn't know what that felt like until it was gone.
It's a question of Nature Vs. Nurture -- where does the line of "nature" begin and where does the line of "nurture" end? What of him is actually his? What of him is Bruce Wayne's? It's not logical, it's not supposed to be. It's a load-bearing wall on the house of his identity being destroyed and now everything else is caving down in on him. What belongs to Danny, what belongs to Bruce Wayne?
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☆ love; heretical and divine
{☆} characters tsaritsa
{☆} notes cult au, yandere, drabble, gender neutral reader
{☆} warnings blood
{☆} word count 0.8k
To love a God is heretical. It is an act of blasphemy– it is to drag them down from their throne of hollow gold, to topple the pedestal the worshipers uphold on their shoulders like lambs at the herders heel. It is the act of forcing them to their knees and ripping that beating heart of glorious gold and beautiful, cruel divinity from their chest, so pure it burns.
To love a God is to make them sin. To make them painfully, horribly human.
To love a God is to sin.
The love of a worshiper is no love at all, brilliant in its raw purity, untainted by sin. It is fear and obedience masked by adoration so overpowering it corrupts. It makes the lamb so unquestioning in it's faith it will never question the knife that cuts, the teeth that rip, the claws that tear. If the Creator deemed them unworthy of the very life crafted by their hands, then they must have committed a sin so grave there lay no salvation for their horrid soul.
But she is no worshiper– her lips speak of heresy as easily as she breathes, her words nothing but lies, cold and cruel like the ice that crawls along her skin like webs.
She loves a God like a lover should.
A damned sinner reaching longingly for the heavens.
She loves a God in the subtle brush of their lips, their muffled voices behind closed doors as they indulge in curiosity untamed. She is a sinner through and through, but she feels herself fall further with every brush of her hand across their cheeks, every touch she bestows upon them like a lover. She memorizes the imperfections of their body like memorizing a map– every scar, every mark, every line drawn on their body like a canvas, her touch the brush that stains the pristine white.
No devoted lamb shall ever see the painting they create in these stolen moments– it is for the eyes of a heretic so vile it makes them shudder, their body dirtied by the love of a woman so vile even their divinity is obscured by the ice.
The lambs may be satisfied with fleeting glimpses of gold and empty words from lips that guide them to the jaws of the wolves, but she is not. Her hands crave them like a starving hound, aching to touch that imperfect skin hidden by the veil of gold that obscures the painfully human body beneath. She longs to free them from the golden cage that binds them– to see their wings blot out the sky, their divinity tainted by sin and making them all the more beautiful for it.
It is a longing that leaves a festering wound that cannot heal, will not heal. Even if it could, she would not let it.
For as much as she tries, deny it as she may, she is no better then the blind lambs following the herder who holds a blade in their hand, glittering like gold in the sun, stained by dull red.
She is a fool, and what a fool they make of her with the touch of their hands against her skin– so cold it leaves frost on their fingertips. Yet they do not fear the cold, mapping out every inch of her imperfections, carved into her body by her own hands.
She has always been a heretic, cursing the divine until she could speak no more, but if divinity can be found in them – in this love that consumes, that burns her hands and her lips – then she is a Saint, praying at the altar until her throat bled.
But in the end, she has and will always be a cold woman with hands stained with blood. Until it is all she can taste, until it is all she can smell, until it is all she can feel. These hands of hers, heretical and divine, will bleed the God from their veins– she will become the wolf to their lamb until the rivers of Teyvat run gold with their ichor, until the gold bleeds into red, the taste of their divinity on her tongue.
Until she drags a God from their lofty throne and makes of them a monster.
There is no greater triumph to the heretic then to love a God into sin. To make a God sin to love.
To love is to be human, and they are no God.
Even if she must tear the gold from their very being until all that's left is something human. Even if Teyvat crumbles and decays, even if it begins over and over again..
She will do it again and again, until the gold can bleed no longer. Until her sins grow too great for Teyvat to contain.
To love a God is to devour, and be devoured. An endless cycle of sin that dulls the glow of gold into something new– something horrifying and divine, in it's own right. Something just as horrid as her, just as divinely corrupted by the sins she carries on her shoulders like a trophy, as gold as the sun and as cold as ice.
Divinity, carved into something human by love all consuming, until it all bleeds away and they begin their dance anew, for as many cycles as it takes.
An eternity, if she must, of dooming this world of theirs to fire and decay for a glimpse of the being snared by their golden shackles.
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In watching more interviews with Liv about Van and the escalation of Van's pragmatism to such dark degrees, I find myself genuinely baffled that anyone could ever think Van the bad guy. I mean, I'm perplexed at finding ANY of these girls The Bad Guy. The bad guy is the situation. It's being lost. It's freezing. It's starving. It's being scraped down to the barest bone of being alive. They make choices that might be snippy, or cruel, or hard-headed, sure--Shauna refusing to just hash it out with Jackie; Jackie being too stubborn to come inside; Taissa refusing to discuss her situation plainly; etc--but by the time we reach the end of season 2, it doesn't even matter. Petty bullshit doesn't matter. Jealousy doesn't matter. Those things are still going to be present and complicated, because--for all their choices, for all the distancing they're trying to do--these kids ARE still human beings. But it isn't the point.
The point is survival. Plain, simple, straightforward. Van's pragmatism is survival. It is the difference between living another day with blood on your teeth or dying pretty. It is the difference between fighting forward through the fire and the snow and the hell of it all, and laying down to die. Van knowing, in watching the ritual violence of Shauna beating Lottie nearly the death, that they will be killing and eating one another soon. Van coming up with the cards for the hunt. Van not blinking when the moment comes, Van choosing a weapon that doubles as a tool to bring the body back, Van refusing to apologize for staying alive--it's not evil. It's not Bad Guy behavior. It's purely about survival, because there is nothing else left to her--or to any of them. They can play the pretty little Sweet Angel Girl game and die, or they can get dirty, bloody, horrific and fight. Van chooses the fight. Van chooses to fight for herself, for her lover, for her team, even knowing not everyone is going to make it out...because the alternate path there is that no one makes it out. Van knew the baby wouldn't live. Van knows the rest of them won't, either. Not unless they start making the hard choices.
And, honestly, the fact that Van sees this narrative coming. Comes up with this plan. Brings out the cards. To me, that is the opposite of Bad Behavior. That is as close to justice as anyone can find in the wilderness. If someone else came up with an idea, maybe it would have come down to voting--but that would have had such a human element to it, with bitterness or hostility or whatever ultimately petty shit always comes of humans selecting who to Other. The cards don't leave room for that. It isn't fair, because the situation isn't fair, because Man vs. Nature isn't fair, but it's as close to a just system as they could possibly find. It's the kindest solution to an unwinnable game. Not to bring it back to American Gods again, but all I can think is "it's easy, there's a trick to it: you do it, or you die." Van gave them that.
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