Tea, Cats, Video Games

I had kind of a crappy week but thank goodness there's books lol. I'm feeling self-conscious because earlier today someone put a post on my dash chastising people who read 30+ books a year when I am approaching my 50th book of 2026. I swear, I'm not reading so much performatively, I only read things physically (no judgment on people who use audiobooks but they are not for me), I'm reading every word and not skipping anything and trying to really think about what I read, I just read a lot because I have no life and like to read during work because I'm sick of my job and can get away with it.

Anyway. This week I finished both of the books I mentioned starting last week, and they both turned out about how I expected them to. Murder on Sex Island by Jo Firestone, the book for my book club, was 3 stars. The book club meeting was on Thursday and people generally seemed to enjoy it and we surprisingly had a lot to talk about, despite this being a pretty surface-level raunchy comedy. My big issue with this book is that Luella, our quirky detective protagonist, hides her competence from the reader. She spends so much of the book acting like a total buffoon - stumbling into clues, getting leads and never following them, and never narrowing down her list of suspects - until the very end, when she reveals that she had a plan and knew what was going on this entire time. Yeah, sure, it's a twist, whatever, and it allows the ending to be surprising for the reader, but it wasn't fun for me to be following this character who I assumed was an idiot for the majority of the book.

Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It by Brooke Averick was absolutely a 5-star read for me, though! It was exactly what I wanted. Phoebe is literally me, and look, I KNOW, I GET IT, relatability isn't the end all-be all of fictional characters but sometimes it's nice to feel seen and represented! This story is a romance but it's also more than anything about a character dealing with her mental illness, which is always going to be one of my favorite things to explore in fiction.

After finishing those books, I got back into my Deltarune flowers challenge. The last two flowers I have left are Aqua and Orange, and to represent them I am once again reading some cozy fantasy: The Dragon Has Some Complaints by John Wiswell for Orange, and The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune for Aqua. Both of these books are really good so far and will probably end up in the 4-5 star range.

So, another challenge I have set for myself is to read twenty-three books to represent my twenty-three comfort characters. I set this challenge last September and gave myself a year, so I have about a month left to read my last two. One of the characters I have left is Ice Bear from We Bare Bears - my prompt for him was to read a book set in Russia since that's where he comes from. I know I'm going to read The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden for that prompt, I just need to wait for it to become available at the library. The other character I haven't read a book for is Fred Bonaparte from Psychonauts. My prompts for the Thorney Towers patients all centered around reading a book with representation for their respective mental illnesses (e.g. schizophrenia, OCD, bipolar disorder). Fred is the only one I have left, and unfortunately, it is extremely hard to find books with DID representation, at least where the multiple personalities aren't gimmicky or treated like a villainous trait.

So here's my dilemma. I'm reading The Dragon Has Some Complaints, which is a book about a three-headed dragon named Garrodigh whose heads each have a different personality. John Wiswell's ouevre (of which I am very much a fan btw - I actually went to an author event where I got to meet him and he signed my copy of The Dragon Has Some Complaints, not really relevant to what I'm talking about now but I had to fit that in somewhere) is largely about disability and the perceived "monstrousness" of having these disadvantages which are othered. Garrodigh is physically disabled, with an injured leg and wing, but he is also mentally disabled, with the three heads each having devloped their own maladaptive coping mechanisms after the loss of their fourth head. I think a system could very well see themselves in this book, and I don't think that's an accident. HOWEVER, I feel weird using this book to correspond to Fred, because as comparable to DID as Garrodigh's situation might be, I don't feel comfortable saying he actually has DID. As traumatized as his heads are, I don't think it's actually unusual in this universe for multi-headed dragons to have multiple personalities. It's not quite the representation I wanted for my comfort characters challenge, but it might be the best I can get for now.

Still, I'm really loving The Dragon Has Some Complaints, and The House in the Cerulean Sea is good too. It's very similar in concept to The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, which I read and loved very recently, although The House in the Cerulean Sea is definitely more pointed, in terms of its political allegory. My only problem so far is that I don't love how Linus is written - it's not that I dislike him, but I feel like we're supposed to see him as this quiet, passive bureaucrat even though so far he's been nothing but defensive and annoyed and is constantly snapping back at people who upset him. There's a disconnect there. I also wish he wouldn't talk to himself quite so much. But it's a good book.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Date Everything! (Sassy Chap Games Video Game) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Abel (Date Everything!)/Reader, Abel/Dasha (Date Everything!), Stefan (Date Everything!)/Reader Characters: Abel (Date Everything!), Stefan (Date Everything!), Dasha (Date Everything!), Beverly (Date Everything!), Mr. Cluckles (Date Everything!) Additional Tags: Inspired by Tarot (Divination Cards), Gender-Neutral Player Character (Date Everything!), Polyamory, Pre-Poly, Bars and Pubs, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Pre-Relationship, Reader is currently dating Stefan, Abel is not yet with the reader or with Dasha, Relationship Wingmanning, Suggestive Themes Series: Part 10 of Divine Everything - A Date Everything! Tarot Series Summary: