The temperature has been fluctuating between warm and suddenly cold and everyone is hurrying to get their flu shots.

• 📖
  • I’m still chugging along at A Day of Fallen Night. Finally familiar with the characters so my reading should be picking up from now.
  • Also trying to wrap up my reading of 和菓子のアン which I started in February! To be fair to myself, my Japanese reading pace has only recently improved so I feel like I’m finally in a good rhythm but I also desperately want to read something new.
• 🎧
  • Listening to the audiobook for The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna read by Samara MacLanen which is one of the cozier books I’ve read in a while. I always appreciate when narrators go all in on different voices and the entire cast of characters are delightful.
  • Relistening to The Magnus Archives in preparation for The Magnus Protocol which I’m very excited for 👻
• 📺
  • Finished Castlevania: Nocturne. The pacing got much better towards the end and I am now fully invested and excited for season 2.
  • Started and finished Bocchi the Rock! which was incredibly heartwarming, relatable and funny. Currently recommending it to anyone who appreciates indie rock bands, live houses and friendships 💖.
  • Started the new Goosebumps series on Disney+. A bit disappointed in the direction of aging up the characters and making it serialized instead of an anthology. Goosebumps is such a good intro to horror for younger demographics that they could have gone with a Stranger Things direction as opposed to something closer to Riverdale. While on my soapbox I also dislike the trend of making every remake incredibly visually dark in the sense that the blue filter makes it hard to see what’s going on. Horror can be bright! with colors! Leaning into a more campy, physical horror effects is also perfect for Goosebumps. However it does seem to have a fairly positive reception so far and I am not the demographic so I will keep watching to see where it goes.
• 📚
  • Trying to balance getting informed about what’s happening with Palestine and how I can help without getting sucked into doomscrolling. Being overly anxious or nihilistic about humanity is not going to be helpful right now.
• 🎪
  • Currently practicing for my first tsugaru shamisen performance. I have immense stage fright and I’ve never worked up the courage to play an instrument infront of people due to the way my hands shake so this will be a crazy big challenge. I suppose that even if it’s a disaster, it’s something that I can say I tried.
• 💸
  • Still sticking to my no/low buy trial leading up to 2024 and will be doing a write up soon. I did cave and resubscribe to Kindle Unlimited again since lots of indie authors I follow publish there and there are a good few manga series available for free. I prefer to buy and read manga physically for ease and to support the authors but it’s good to be able to try a few volumes of a series beforehand.
• 🔗
  • Free Ebooks for a Free Palestine! 🔗 https://www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/495-free-ebooks-for-a-free-palestine Haymarket Books has a great collection of books on Palestine and are currently offering 3 of those ebooks for free. The last free ebook bundle I received from them was during the BLM protests and those were also incredibly informative.

#weeknotes #languagelearning #books #reading #media #links

1. The League of Lady Poisoners – Lisa Perrin: This was an absolutely gorgeous book! Illustrated by the author herself, it’s a wonderfully researched book that explores the lives and legacies of women poisoners throughout history. Each chapter is dedicated to the story of a different woman and while written in a fairly accessible and lighthearted tone, care is taken to humanize the people involved and shed light on the socioeconomic circumstances that made poison a strategic weapon of choice for many women who may have felt like they had no other options. There were so many women that I had never heard of before and the author points out how even in gruesome murders, factors like beauty, age, nationality and race often favored some over others. I definitely learned a lot! I received a digital ARC of this one but I would love to get my hands on a physical copy.

2. Atlantic’s Last Stop: Courage, Folly, and Lies in the White Star Line’s Worst Disaster Before Titanic – Bob Chaulk: I am a bit of an ocean liner nerd and I love learning about pre-WWII ships and shipwrecks in particular. I’ve been a Titanic ship nerd for most of my life but I’ve never read much about Atlantic, something that the author has set out to change. The book does a great job of breaking down all the moving parts involved in leading up to the tragedy, the disaster itself and the fallout afterwards. It’s extremely well researched and full of detail. My only issue was that since the book is largely divided into categories rather than chronology it sometimes requires a bit of mental reorientation to where in the timeline we are but that’s the tradeoff for the categorical organization which makes the book a great reference book. There is also a collaboration documentary with the Youtube channel Part-Time Explorer that gives an excellent visual so I recommend that as part of the reading experience.

3. Sanctuary with Kings (Tempting Monsters #3) – Kathryn Moon: This is the final book in the trilogy and one I had been looking forward to for a while. If I can wax poetic about monster romances for a moment, the best-written ones in my opinion are the ones that have strong themes of acceptance. This usually means wholehearted acceptance of bodies, genders, sexualities and anything else that can fall outside the norm. Kathryn Moon excels at this, constantly giving us protagonists with the capacity for lots of love and acceptance and translating that to relationships and sex. This time our protagonist is an immortal daughter of the goddess Hedone, kept in captivity by the antagonist Birsha at his pleasure houses for hundreds of years. She is able to escape and is able to begin the healing process. This book tackles a lot of heavy topics such as sexual slavery, depression, loneliness, suicidal ideation so it is much heavier than the other books. This is balanced well by the relationships and how all of the characters learn to love each other. This book leads up to the final battle and includes lots of characters from the previous books so it was a hefty read that did eventually drag in some places but still thoroughly enjoyable.

4. Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi: This was such a beautifully written, profound book and I learned so much. This book follows the lineage of two half sisters from Cape Coast Ghana; one who marries a white slaver and remains in Ghana and another who gets sold into slavery in America by that same slaver. Each chapter follows the next descendant of the previous person and alternates between the US and Ghana all the way to the present day. I was worried that this would make it hard to follow but everything weaves together so seamlessly and even when the characters themselves are unaware of who they are or where they come from, the readers are able to draw the line from the very beginning and see how we are shaped (or not) by the actions of those before us. As someone descended from slaves and indentured workers who can only trace my family history back to my great-great grandparents, getting to read a full ancestral history like this was both affirming and heartbreaking. This book says a lot about history, generational trauma, the choices we have (or don’t) and what it means to seek home. Highly recommended.

5. The King’s Spinster Bride (Royal Wedding Series #1) – Ruby Dixon: Although I spent a solid chunk of time reading the entire Ice Planet Barbarians series back in 2021 during an awful bout of anxiety and insomnia, Ruby Dixon’s books are hit or miss for me. If I can get into the series then they’re really good fluffy reads but this one was a bit too much fluff and not much of anything else for my taste. It’s quite short and sweet but the characters themselves didn’t leave any impression.

6. Heart, Haunt, Havoc (The Gideon Testaments #1) – Freydís Moon: I’m quite a fan of Freydís Moon’s writing and I was excited to read this. They are one of my favorites for dark romance and horror as they write very relatable morally grey characters and are able to treat sensitive topics like religion, depression, gender and sexuality with the appropriate respect and weight that allows the narratives to have lots of emotional impact. This is primarily a haunted house story which our main character Colin, an exorcist, is hired to cleanse of ghosts. Like all haunted house stories there is an additional layer of mystery along with lots of occult elements that felt well research and grounded and were very fun to read. The relationship between the main characters happened a bit too fast for me but that’s excused due to the length of the book. Otherwise I was fully invested in the characters themselves and the overall plot so I immediately started the second book.

7. Wolf, Willow, Witch (The Gideon Testaments #2) – Freydís Moon: For the second book we switch to Tehlor who appears in the first book and follow along with the aftermath of book one. This was just as enjoyable as the first and I think I enjoyed the narration a bit more due to Tehlor’s plucky personality. While the first book had more of a cozy horror feel due to the enclosed nature of a haunted house, this one had more of a heart-pounding thriller energy as the characters are forced to involved with a religious cult and the stakes are raised. Fair warning this ends on a cliffhanger so while I’m very invested, I will have to wait until book 3 next year to see how it ends.

8. 魔入りました！入間くん (Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun) – 西修 (Osamu Nishi) Volumes 10-13: I’m enjoying these so much and I’m happy to see that my Japanese reading speed has increased as a result. This series continues to both enrich and subvert classic shonen manga tropes in the most delightful of ways.

#reading #bookreviews #readingwrapup

I have a terrible memory compounded by my adhd so keeping track of everything that I do/feel/think is absolutely essential in confirming my existence as a multifaceted human being and not just a single note of “whatever-is-happening-in-the-here-and-now”.

The additional layer of autism on my neurodivergent brain sandwich means that I tend to obsess over tracking things but I also get immense satisfaction in seeing data put together with all its fun trends and patterns.

Which brings me to reading.

A big part of reading is keeping track of what you read in some way. As a result, anyone who’s ever been a reader for more than 5 minutes on the internet has most likely heard of or used Goodreads at some point. This is the de facto method for all literary inclined folk to track their reading, leave reviews and engage in the bookish community.

I joined Goodreads as a teenager who had just discovered the YA genre via the Twilight boom and was amazed at the sheer numbers of books there were to be read. Not to mention the droves of people having wonderful gif-filled emphatic conversations about them.

After being on it for several years, my personal experience of the site was a TBR list of gargantuan proportions, ever increasing bookshelf tags (the thing to do at one point was express strong feelings through shelves entitled things like, “this-book-owns-my-soul” or “made-me-want-to-throw-up”), abandoned book clubs and a growing anxiety around meeting my yearly reading goal.

This was all self-inflicted of course but the annual Goodreads Reading Challenge never failed to make me feel like I was perpetually falling behind while everyone else somehow managed to read so much more.

I eventually deleted my account in large part to trying to support Amazon as little as possible, in small part to the realization that my TBR was impossible and I was spending more time looking for books to read than reading them and in tiny part to the secondhand embarrassment of seeing all the books my teen self considered the height of literature.

I recognize the hypocrisy in that I still sporadically use Kindle Unlimited to discover indie authors in the romance genre but it is what it is.

After leaving I became increasingly aware of what can be summed up as “Goodreads review drama” where the review sections of books become a platform for authors to bully reviewers, reviewers to bully authors and for reviewers to bully each other. There is an ongoing debate about whether authors should even read reviews of their work much less comment or offer public backlash if the review is not positive.

External reads:

Author Goes on a Viral Rant About Four Star Review “Ruining Her Average”

As someone who enjoys reviewing and recommending books I can easily imagine the added stress of wondering if a less than favorable review will make you a target from the author themself. On the flip-side and perhaps more damaging on a wider scale, many indie and marginalized authors have experienced having books that were not even released yet spammed with low ratings (called “review bombing”) which negatively affected their press and sales.

External reads:

How Extortion Scams and Review Bombing Trolls Turned Goodreads Into Many Authors’ Worst Nightmare

The Wrath of Goodreads

It’s a morbidly fascinating topic but either way, the growing consensus is that Goodreads has been largely abandoned by Amazon and is doing more harm than good for reading

External reads:

Goodreads Is Terrible for Books. Why Can’t We All Quit It?

I still needed to track everything I read so I switched to The Storygraph in 2019 which is billed as a more ethical, black-owned alternative to the Jeff Bezos Empire. The design of the site helped reduce the social media element to book reviews that permeates Goodreads and added an additional element of content/trigger warnings which could be added to a book by the readers after completing it.

The community aspect is still there too but hidden well enough that if you are someone who prefers simply tracking then that’s all you really need to do. I don’t think I’ve ever felt compelled to read reviews of a book on Storygraph before starting it. Overall, their stats are comprehensive and the team behind the site is open and responsive so new features get added regularly like buddy reads.

I enjoy and still highly recommend The Storygraph but finally made the choice a couple months ago to move all my reading stats to a personal Notion database.

The problem is that even with a less socially inclined site like The Storygraph I’m still far too easily influenced by what other people are reading. To be a bit dramatic, it’s that internet panopticon phenomenon and I find myself caring way too much about the optics (ha ha) of how I read. Even though the option of having a private account is there, just being able to see what other people are reading or what’s popular/not popular affects how and what I read.

In the back of my mind, I’m always wondering what my book lists and my shelves say about me as a reader. Am I starting the right challenges? Everyone’s talking about this one so should I bump it higher on my TBR? Did I read too many short books in a row? Can I count a comic book as reading? Posting on platforms like Instagram or blogs adds an extra element of the performative. Suddenly there’s the extra, “how do my books actually physically look?” Not to mention how it all stacks up to other people versus, just…you know…actually reading.

The linked article below says it best where:

There’s a desire stirring in our culture, both in reaction to the digitization of life and in line with the trendy factor that digital platforms foster, to be seen as someone who reads overshadowing the reading itself

- The Gamification of Reading Is Changing How We Approach Books

On top of that, book communities (especially for romance and fantasy fiction which I read the most of) still heavily favor books that feature characters who are white, able-bodied, cisgendered, heteronormative and young. Not that any of these denote a bad book but even with all of the wonderful work that has been done to mitigate it, we can still do more to promote diverse books.

Increasingly I’ve found myself extremely underwhelmed or disappointed by books that are constantly raved about in book circles so I’m making the effort to choose books based off of personal interest only and not simply because, “everyone is talking about this one” because eventually things become an echo chamber.

The shift to visual versus text platforms means that there is a constant push and demand for new or more books (what’s a single TBR book against a sexy, sexy bookstack) with the added consumerist pressure of gorgeous special editions and subscription book boxes. I love sprayed edges but these seem to be coming in faster and faster as everyone tries to build up the prettiest bookshelf. As someone with a limited book budget even on the best of days I wish that there were less special edition hardcovers and more paperbacks but the market is understandably skewing towards the former. With the rise in popularity of book annotations (which I personally love) there is also the precedent of owning the book in order to annotate them.

Maybe I’m just salty and poor but I wish a community that centered reading didn’t also focus so much on acquisition and if I’m not careful I fall into that trap.

The best part of switching to Notion is that I can no longer add books to my TBR list on autopilot. I am also not affected by the community rating of a book before I read it so I can start books with less expectations and hopefully a more organic reading experience. I see fewer books in general and so I feel less pressure to buy all of the new releases and can instead focus on saving for the ones that I really want.

I’m still learning to use all the available tools so this is fairly basic but my tracker so far uses multiple databases and two-way relations in order to populate the different categories like in each table like author or genre.

I also have a calendar to keep track of upcoming releases that I plan to purchase or borrow from the library. I’ve included a couple screenshots of my current setup and I fully acknowledge the irony of making a public post about choosing to make my reading private…

It is more work and not as snappy but since everything is manual, it has forced me to spend a bit more time with the books that I read and the books that I want to read which I hope makes for more intentional consumption.

#reading