#resding

my attempt to do a photoshoot with lady midnight and lord of shadows....these covers are so fucking gorgeous 😍😍😍😍

i’ve thinking about how TDA is really THAT bitch. like she has diversity, phenomenal writing, gorgeous covers AND julian blackthorn???? my morally grey, demisexual king! diana wrayburn: a trans woman of color??? all the bisexuals???? a shadowhunter with autism???? a polyamorous relationship???

i can’t even begin to pick favorites in this series. i love the family dynamic between the blackthorns, julian and emma’s relationship, and the overall plot of TDA. it went on to reflect the current shitstorm of politics at the moment so beautifully through the shadowhunters fantastical world.

IN CONCLUSION, CASSIE SNAPPED

also: THE FACT THAT ALEC LIGHTWOOD BANE IS CONSUL AND MARRIED TO MAGNUS BANE— the wedding scene was so beautiful, a bitch was sobbing,,,,alec’s whole dedication to magnus was just 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

Are your parents reading a lot ?

How many books where in your parents house when you grow up ?

Would your parents being concernted if you would not like to read as child?

Also like was reading a normal Hobby around your friends when you grow up?

My mother is an intellectual snob. She grew up in the university scene of the late 70s, in those circles where having extensive literary knowledge was basically a requirement if you wanted any social credibility. So she’s always been an avid reader, but specifically of “cultural and literary references,” and she despises what she calls trash literature or literature for idiots. She literally says you lose fewer brain cells watching a reality show than reading that kind of stuff because it fries the same neurons (lol)

She has a room in her house that’s both her office and a small personal library, and I was always allowed to take any book from there. Thanks to that, I started reading certain things very early. Beyond Harry Potter or A Series of Unfortunate Events, which I started when I was very young, I never liked other children’s or young adult sagas, and of course nothing in the romance YA or romantasy genre. In my house, that kind of romantic or YA literature was totally frowned upon by my mother, because she considers it cheap literature for people who don’t think.

As a teenager, I started reading her books — authors like Gabriel García Márquez, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, George Orwell, Camus, Sartre, Faulkner… I’d grab books by Nietzsche or Kant — whatever I could find — because I also had a problem: I used to get really bored in class, so I started bringing books to distract myself, since not being able to follow the lessons gave me anxiety. Reading was my substitute.

Over time, I developed my own taste, especially after discovering the Beat Generation and authors like Hermann Hesse or Irvine Welsh. Later, I decided I would only read literature written by women, with a few exceptions. Nowadays, I only buy books written by women unless it’s something very well-reviewed or on a specific topic written by a man.

But yes, my mother reads a lot. Now that she’s retired, one of her hobbies is book clubs, she’s in two different ones, one in spanish and another for Catalan literature. She has tons of books at home; in fact, she doesn’t even have a TV anymore. If she watches a series or a movie, she does it on her tablet, because she never uses the television.

My father is a whole different story. He dropped out of school at 14, never went to university, and couldn’t care less about all that. He’s the one who taught me about music, since that’s his passion, but he’s never paid much attention to reading. He’s more into physical hobbies: sports, fishing, playing football, boxing, that kind of thing. But he’s a huge film buff, and when I was a kid, he was the one who took me to the film archive and showed me classic films. So all my audiovisual culture comes from him. My dad actually lives on a boat now, kind of like a hippie, so he doesn’t have many books, but oh well.

As for whether they’d have been worried if I didn’t read… My mother wouldn’t have cared if I read or not, she cared what I read. For example, if I had liked romance or young adult sagas, she would’ve been seriously worried, because she thinks those books make you stupid and mess with girls’ heads, literally. She would’ve preferred I didn’t read at all than see me reading that kind of stuff. Luckily, I never liked them anyway; they disgusted me, lol. My father wouldn’t have cared either, honestly. He never paid much attention to those things.

My friends are all reformed intellectual snobs. When we were teenagers, everyone in school knew us as the insufferable, cynical “culture kids.” We were really into literature, cinema, and politics, and we were way ahead of our classmates in that regard. We thought our teachers were mediocre as hell (which they were, and assholes too), so we’d use what we knew or read to be unbearable in class, question everything, and challenge them constantly. We despised people we considered “dumb,” and we acted like we were above everyone else.

Aside from my group of friends, I was also involved in politics. I started political activism when I was 15, and if you wanted to be taken seriously at that age, you had to be informed. So I immersed myself in Marx, Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, and later read thinkers like Foucault, Žižek, Popper, Chomsky, etc. It wasn’t exactly a requirement to be in those circles — a lot of people were just parroting things they didn’t really understand — but I was very proud back then and hated being lectured, so I made sure to educate myself.

So yeah, in all my social circles, people read, or at least made sure I did.