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some people read an awful lot, but don't read very well. deep reading is itself a skill. being able to untangle the threads of theme, subtext, characterization, narrative style, and more are all things that it takes time and intentional engagement to learn.
if you've ever watched a movie with your film buff friend and chatted about it afterwards, that friend might have pulled hours more of conversation out of the same 90 minutes of screentime, and wondered how the fuck they did that - it's not raw intelligence, it's a skill that's been honed. And I learned a lot about film from talking to friends who knew about film, and reading critique by film scholars
literature works exactly the same. so if you want to get more out of your reading, there are things you can do to train that.
Find a book or short story you think you've got a pretty good grasp on, preferably from a widely read & respected author like Ursula K Le Guin or Ray Bradbury (if you're new at this don't swing for the Toni Morrison or the Samuel Beckett yet unless you feel very comfortable with the complexity of the text - the point is to develop a complicated new skill on good foundations). Then go to JSTOR, create a free account, and look up criticism on the story you've chosen. Find something that looks readable to you and at least somewhat interesting. Read that article, and look at what that writer got out of the same story you've read that you didn't get. Do you see the critic's points? Did they teach you something about the text? Go reread that story and see if the criticism has changed how you read it. Are you seeing more? Are you thinking about the implications of a line that you hadn't noticed before? Does the story feel richer now?
there are other more involved ways of finding criticism. Learning to use academic databases, going to your local library to do interlibrary loans, finding critical voices you appreciate; these are all useful subskills. Literacy isn't just being able to read words, it's being able to read words in context and think about what they tell you about the text, the author, or the time and culture in which the text was produced. Literacy is the skill of being able to look at the world with open eyes and think clearly about how its parts are connected. It'll change your life
this keeps getting shared around and ive seen some different tags responding differently so i just want to make some important clarifications and distillations
you don't have to read more deeply if you don't want to (but i'd recommend it, i genuinely think it makes you a better person)
if you want to learn to read more deeply, the resources are out there. try to find critical literature (that is, academic writing that analyzes the text) on works your familiar with so you can get a sense for how to do that analysis too
learning to deep read literature can help you deep read many areas of your life
writers tend to put a lot of work into their stories. if you learn to read that work you'll (probably) appreciate the stories you love even more. And if not, then you'll have developed your taste. This too is worth doing
i am trying to make some pants. many people #online are losing their gourd over how easy this pattern is and i'm contrarianfully a little peeved about the assumption of serger ownership, 3/8th topstitching that fails to enclose 1/2" turned over raw edges, general expected minor failure cases of a pattern you buy on etsy
BUT i got it all cut out from leftovers without buying any new fabric so that's my win
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it doesnt make sense that a penis would get bigger if yoiu jerk it off youre literally compressing it. go crumple a can rn and tell me its bigger im not buying this narrative
Hello everyone!
I have managed to find some clean cover art for delicious in dungeon, buried in some promotional italian pamphlet (JPOP Direct)!
Some of the files were even separated in layers, i'll put it after the cut
I'm not doing big blurbs for these like I have before because, well, I don't feel like it. Behind a cut tho b/c this is gonna get long.
The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804-2011 - Misha Glenny
Pretty good! Really laid bare how much of the history of the entire European continent is purely the result of like 5 different fucked up evil things they did in like the 1840s. Balkan nationalism exists partially because of the material circumstances but also because the Great Powers games of control through 1914 were entirely just about strip-mining this whole area bare of capital and human life. Sad and strange place.
The Tainted Cup - Robert Jackson Bennett
Extremely competently written detective novel set in a fantastical world based around the cultivated genetic modification of people into various semi-superpowered clades of people in service to a titanic empire that is constantly under threat of being murdered by Kaiju. It feels hilarious to say but this is like if Sherlock Holmes is an overstimulated mean old woman who adopts a fuckup with eidetic memory, which is a great dynamic.
Lords of Silence - Chris Wraight
Warhammer Novel, so feel free to ignore all of this. It's about the Death Guard, the nurgle-chosen Chaos Space Marines, and it's...fine. There's a great deal of little bits that I like a lot, but it's not like, gonna blow your mind. It's standalone, and it gets into the interesting parts that I never really interacted with in 40k (Nurgle, who I'd only ever ran into in one of the early Space Wolves novels when I was a much younger woman), getting deep into the whole decay, life and the cycle stuff that mostly just comes out as 'blerghhh im a gross guy who won't ever die' in other 40k stuff not focused on it.
This one...is tough. I like Fate a lot, broadly. I think Fate/Stay Night's mechanics as a vehicle for storytelling rule and are fascinating, and clearly it kicked off a remarkable media empire. I don't like these novels. I think there's a fantastic start to it, and it started literally as a joke, so it had to commit to all those jokes it started with, but the real crux of my problem with it is that this becomes a novel series that is just 'hey, it's that guy' over and over and OVER AGAIN. I like Baccano, which is that but for Narita's own guys, but this feels like I'm being jacked off and Narita keeps turning to me and going 'hey, Luvia is in this one, aren't you excited' and I have to grit my teeth and pretend to smile as I get more flaccid by the second.
The Reverse Healer Case Files - Hiyodori
This is a sequel to The Lowest Healer and the Highest Mage, which I read in 2025. Episodic detective story set after the previous book. It's fun. I don't have a ton to say beyond that it has a very cute central romance which they are letting marinate, and I like it. I do think it's interesting that it's digging into the fact that the main character absolutely isn't unique, and that somebody can figure out how to do the stuff she does, which puts her in a fun and unique spot as a juxtoposition to her girlfriend, The Kraken, the girl with infinite magic, who is having to relearn all of it again. Fun levels of disability stuff going on with it.
Inside Man - K.J. Parker
Read this one as prep for his series coming out later this year, which I also read, which we'll get to later. I liked it - it's novella length, and technically a follow-up to Prosper's Demon, but presenting the inversion to what we're taught in that one, that Demons possess people. Actually, they're all fallen angels of the Invincible Sun (the Catholic Church analogue here in Parkerverse), and some of them are doing good deeds, and others are doing Bad, but all of it is in service of The Plan, a grand sweeping Plan for The World. Not much is made of what that plan is, and it's so long term and sectioned off that nobody has the whole view of it, which means everyone's tripping over everyone's dick (positive).
China in Global Capitalism: Building International Solidarity Against Imperial Rivalry - Kevin Lin, Eli Friedman, Ashley Smith
Picked this up in a Haymarket Books sale along with some other stuff. I picked up some good info along the way here I didn't know about, from the way that social services are directly linked to where you live, preventing people from accessing the social safety net if they leave their home province, but...I didn't like it very much. 224 pages and fully 2/3 of it felt like it was jacking off about how China is dangerous to the US and/or the world but not in a racist way, if you get what I'm saying??
Apothecary Diaries: Volume 13-15 - Hyūganatsu
Still good. Really excited to see people get to the stuff that happens later, considering the anime has only adapted 4 volumes of the light novel at this point. They don't even know...
Sister Svangerde and the Not-Quite-Dead - K.J. Parker
K.J. Parker does something I adore - release a trilogy in the same year. These come out spaced out by like 3-6 months, until it's done, then he goes away for a bit and comes back with something new. Here, we get an unnamed monk who is in the service of the Church of the Invincible Sun, often paired with a nun named Sister Svangerde, and they get up to hijinks. The monk is an atheist scribe-cum-forger, Svangerde is very good at killing things, and they end up at a major Church function fighting an unnatural horror from the monk's homeland. Great fun, a lot of time is spent on the nature of faith, the world and fate and various interpretations of them. Really fun.
The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolken
Reread for Shelved by Genre's Lord of the Year. Really fun, in all the ways that novels so rarely are, and breezy in the extreme.
Consider Phlebas - Iain M. Banks
First book of The Culture series. Fascinating to jump back to, well, not early sci-fi but maybe foundational for how a lot of other sci-fi would style itself. Fascinatingly retrograde in many ways, but it's clearly far less so than some of the more conservative stuff in it's era I've read. Looking forward to continuing it later this year.
The Stranger - Albert Camus
Wild novel. I'm still marinating in it, I feel like. I may reread it again before November for Limbus, but we'll see. Really fascinating novel.
The Colour in the Steel - K.J. Parker
I'm working back through the K.J. Parker catalogue, since I've kinda just jumped around, but I'm gonna go back and read everything I haven't in chronological order, so this will be fun. This is the first book, about a fencer (who settles legal disputes on behalf of his clients with swordplay) who gets involved in defending his mercantile city from being sacked and destroyed by a tribe bent on revenge for the city's historical murder of many of the leader's tribesmen in the distant past. Really good, has solidified my stance on viewpoint changes in a real way - if you can't give me enough of the character's interiority to feel like I understand them, don't bother.
The Black Company - Glen Cook
First book in The Company series, one of the foundations of military fantasy novels. It makes perfect sense this was written by a Vietnam veteran. Really fun in a startlingly dry way, every joke is delivered like the narrator is telling me my family just died, which is appropriate given the overall grimness of the setting. This is rub some dirt in it writing at its finest.
Sister Svangerde and the Devil You Know - K.J. Parker
Second of the trilogy, with a great escalation of the story from the first novel, in a direction I fully did not expect it to do this soon. Much of the novel is two characters traveling across the world, but it's so fun the entire time through that it doesn't faze me in the least. Banger.
Seeing Like a State: Why Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed - James C. Scott
Nonfiction. Extremely good. The main thrust of the book is that throughout history, the governments of the world have sought to flatten the world into a set of inputs and outputs it could understand, and to organize the world around these same principles, in order to maximize the final result for the government in question. Using examples from the german scientific forestry, the failure of Brasilia, and the forced villageization of Tanzania demonstrate the ways in which states which value high-minded goals over local knowledge and understandings of facts on the ground in favor of bureaucratic simplifications of the world will always fail to create the results they desire, often at the massive detriment of the people subject to it. Highly recommend.
Hild - Nicola Griffith
A fictionalized narrative of the life of Saint Hilda of Whitby, an early English historical figure who rose from humble origins to become adviser to 5 kings and founder of an abbey. Lushly described, extremely deeply focused on Hild's mind and the idea of a woman who was born to a widowed peasant and her rise to the highest echelons of society in her era, it crafts a compelling narrative of her taking on the role of seer. That said, it falls flat as a single book - it has a follow-up, but its clear from its length that it got away from the author and had to come out as is. It ends more or less where I would expect it to, but moment to moment, I sometimes felt lost in trying to intuit where it is attempting to lead us - perhaps intentional for Hild's overall presentation and life as a seer divining messages from the world around her and guiding the King to her preferred answer, but difficult nonetheless. I liked it.
They're calling Holden Caulfield the first BPD girlie in history. The Joker of the 50s, so obviously the product of a reaction against the prevailing masculine upper-class culture of the time in New York and the eastern seaboard broadly. Fascinating case study in elision and unreliable narratorhood, a master of Holden doing one thing and saying another to the listener. The disaffection and pain of youth feels so legible and straightforward and yet portrayed with a kindness unlike many I’ve ever seen. It’s one of those books anyone can read anything into: you take what you already have into it, and you walk out with something new afterwards.
Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072
A fictionalized accounting of the rise of commune systems in New York City in the wake of the collapse of the US government, told by oral interviews without commentary of key figures in various sections thereof. I don't think this one is very good. Its usage of its format is extremely limited, and its interest in its own historiography is thin to the point of absurdity. It calls to mind World War Z, but without the narrative throughline or clear players in its history. Things are mentioned in single lines and you're supposed to imagine the gaps, presumably, but it just reads as swiss cheese to me. Its single greatest sin is that it feels uninterested in the world it creates, skimming the very top line of what it wants to talk about, which is family abolition and collective living, but feeling like it's obligated to talk about christian cults and Iran and fighting fascists. Not bad, but very disappointing in a way that unfortunately makes sense.
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divingbelles are mermaids in the selkie family who use humanoid skins to house aquatic forms instead of the other way around.
as this lovely lady demonstrates, some of the more delicate divingbelles that take after jellyfish or molluscs hold onto their skins kind of like snail shells. they dislocate the pieces to unfurl from the spaces between when under water, and pull the bits back together when they want to hide or walk around.
a basket star divingbelle getting ready to go for a dip.
while some hold onto their human skins while swimming, the sturdier types hide them in burrows or caves when they hang out in the water doing their water business (a very cool and not nightmare level spooky thing for divers to stumble onto).
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Apparently some people still need to hear this so: using an 'ai checker' is still using ai. If you are feeding someone's fic to one of these checkers, you will still not be sure their fic is ai because they are not 100% accurate, but you can be 100% sure that you are using ai. For fic. Furthermore you are doing the work of an ai scraper for them. You are, personally, feeding the machine. There is no actual excuse for using an ai checker on fanfic as a hobby. YOU are the problem.
If you think a fic is ai, mute it and move on. That's it. That's all you do.
blakekathryn
ellievsbear
turnnoffyourmind
gummygunk
