#ds recommends

Been a almost a year since I did recommendation posts and I've been reading!

Today's rec is an Original Series Star Trek novel called Doctor's Orders by Diane Duane!

There's no audiobook available for this book as far as I was able to find, so you know it had to be worth it for me to sit my butt down and physically read the thing with my eyes.

This book is only very slightly younger than me and so beautifully ahead of it's time. Trekkies are good like that. If you like classic sci-fi, or if you're like me and you're just in it for the characters we've come to know and love, this book is a safe harbor from the old-fashioned ideology that can often get mixed up with those things.

Thanks for the tag, @solomonara!

Rules: You can usually tell a lot about a person by the type of music they listen to. Put your playlist on shuffle and list the first 10 songs, and then tag some ppl if you like!

My playlist is currently recovering from the festive season so... this should be interesting lol The only thing I can reliably predict is Taylor Swift. I would be shocked if, even with only 10 songs out of *checks* 271, I didn't get at least one Swizzle. The saturation is high.

Nobody by Selena Gomez

Jacob & Sons (Color of the Coat) by the original Canadian cast of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat

High Infidelity by Taylor Swift (ah HA! See, that didn't take long lol)

champagne problems by Taylor Swift (oh... are we just done with variety now? Am I about to be Very Exposed? lol)

You All Over Me by Taylor Swift (ok... it started as a joke but it's not funny anymore... oops lol)

Start of Something New from High School Musical

Your Move from YU-GI-OH! Music to Duel By (no, I'm not kidding. this is real.)

The Great War by Taylor Swift

Focus by Ariana Grande

Bang Bang Bang by Selena Gomez & The Scene

Keep in mind that this isn't just, like, every song I own. I chose these songs as ones I wanted to listen to at high frequency relatively recently. Yes. Even the yugioh song LOL

Would anyone like to play? @kiwilisland @katsukifatale @kaeviche @airu27 @sixclawsdragon @bakathief @kingdomoftyto @hiromiikunn @angelicsentinel

If you’re like me, you may have lived a long time thinking you didn’t LIKE the romance genre. Boring, right? Where’s the sword fighting? Why am I reading this? But one of my favorite authors (Jae) had this book in her repertoire so I gave it a try. Turns out, the reason I didn’t like plain romance was because, in my experience up til that point, it had all been het. THIS book was an utter delight. Relatable, sweet, such an eye-opening read for me. Turns out representation really matters. Go figure, right?

Not the Marrying Kind includes a great range of realistic responses to LGBTQ+ people and relationships: positive, negative, and in between. Also great food metaphors. I really appreciated and enjoyed the inclusion of not only lesbian characters and relationships, but also ace and pan.

Available in print and audiobook!

Today's recommendation is an excellent option for show bingeing! She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is packed full of plot, wit, and representation - what more could you want!

Love cozy mysteries but frustrated with the lack of diversity in them? I sure was when I reached out to my local library and asked a librarian to recommend something more diverse. This was one of their recommendations and it DELIVERS.

I'm not gonna try to list aaallll the races and cultures represented cause there are SO MANY, but I'll say there was a non-binary person easily and naturally referenced with their appropriate pronouns, there's a lesbian MAIN CHARACTER, AND a bisexual who plays a significant role! And it was all so NATURAL. It did not AT ALL feel like "let's just cram in all the diversity we can for the sake of representation" which I myself have probably been guilty of doing. It just felt like "hey, this is the setting - it's a diverse community where this all takes place. No big." The mystery was pretty cool too. I will say: Heed the content warnings at the beginning of the book. I did think that this had slightly less of a "cozy" feel to it, simply because they did a really good job addressing the realities of murder investigations more than cozies usually bother to do. But, while that may detract from the cozy mood, I'm HERE FOR IT. I think that stuff is so interesting.

The cherry on top: This book is available in print and audiobook format!

Vampires!!!!

Available in print and audiobook! The AA element is pretty heavy for the first 3/4 of the book (which, I mean, it's literally the PLOT of this book, of course it's prevalent, and it seems really well done!). I'm not that into that particular subject matter but I gave this book a try anyway because, in my experience, anything Jae is even remotely involved in is gold. I have yet to be proven wrong in this line of thinking :)

Today’s recommendation is an utterly BRILLIANT murder mystery series available in print and audio! Seriously, I can’t hype this series enough.

The first book is a slow start. I very nearly stopped reading it when I first picked it up, but fortunately the narrator was so lovely to listen to that I stayed long enough for gay bistro owners Gabri and Olivier to make it onto the scene and then I was like… well if it’s gay, I’ll stay LOL I’m SO GLAD I DID too, because once you get past that first book this series will just knock your socks off. Awesome.

Did I mention this was recommended to me by library staff? It's like they know what they're talking about or something

Short on time? Short on attention span (like me)? Here’s a series of bite-sized novellas with excellent representation of so very many flavors, available in print and audiobook!