#book discussion club

[thephoenixandthecrocodile]

Official Launch of Around the World Bookclub!

Today I’m officially launching the Around the World Bookclub! This is a virtual bookclub dedicating to reading authors from all over the world. We’ll be reading books of all genres and formats, fiction and non-fiction, and they’ll all be focused on either colonialism and/or asymmetrical warfare.  Subscribe * indicates required Email Address *Sign up Now! Book ClubPodcast Updates We will meet…

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#book club #book discussion club #bookclub #history bookclub #patreon exclusive #second italo-ethiopian war #the shadow king

[communistkenobi]

stealing this screenshot from a post correcting people about what liminal spaces are, because I want to say something kind of unrelated and don’t want to bother the op - it’s funny this wiki article identifies airports as one of these non-places, and one of the “criteria” for a non-place is somewhere where you are able to remain anonymous, because (at least in north america, I can’t speak globally), one of the primary terrors of airports is its ability to render you a known quantity at basically any time, to bring you into public attention specifically by cops and security people identifying who you are. Airport security, bag inspections, police, surveillance cameras, etc do this security theatre routine at airports in a way that is more intense than other public spaces. Like I just don’t think this state of remaining anonymous in the airport applies to muslims or other religious and racial minorities the state deems to be a “high risk population” vis a vis border security, I think if you want to make the argument that these places allow anonymity, a fundamental part of this analysis has to include the fact that this anonymity is premised on visiting state violence, surveillance, and coercion on largely non-white and religious minorities, particularly and especially muslims, to “protect” and secure this space of (largely white) public anonymity 

#the guy who coined it is a white French anthropologist so . well actually I don’t need to say anything else #book club #not really I’m reacting to a partial summary of a Wikipedia page this is kind of a fish in a barrel situation #geography #<- for place discussion

[heph]

do you think gale shadowheart and wyll would share smut recommendations with each other? based off that one party banter of wyll and shadowheart sharing lines from a smut novel they read

Yes! I have thoughts about this!

I think Astarion mostly reads non-fiction, books that inform him about the world around him, books about certain types of magic and bits of history. He reads a lot of it, but doesn't remember most of it. I think he reads mostly to forget his miserable existence back in Cazador's Palace.

Wyll and Shadowheart I think love their romance novels, spicy or otherwise. From fictitious Bawdry to fluff friends to lovers ^_^

My boy Gale stays flexy and likes both types! So he can have a book club w the romance girlies talking about the intricacies of the romantic novel of the week as well as a private one with Astarion to discuss stuff like history, where Astarion just listens to Gale info dump and occasionally asks questions or adds on tidbits to keep the conversation going

#i also think as fun as the romance book club is. gale probably prefers non fiction books too #the man likes his studies #and both astarion and gale wish to be more powerful #i need them to debate angrily about the meaning of certain words in books about magic #yelling at each other about the meaning of spells and authors intentions #gale is quieter in the romance novel discussions not bc hes shy but bc in groups of more than 2 he probably cant info dump as hard #heph answered

[therealamylee2]

i have a feeling elphaba already knew in her heart she was going to leave shiz and never come back, and that’s why she brought glinda along, because she wanted to at least properly say goodbye to her. 

even if everything went well with the wizard, she still would’ve left. she couldn’t deal with being under madame morrible’s thumb, couldn’t deal with the murder of dr. dillamond. she couldn’t deal with that school.

so she brought glinda along, for company, and maybe because she thought having a nice gillikinese girl along with her would help with her plea to the wizard. better presentation, a rhetoric sort of thing. but most importantly because she had a plan, a plan to say goodbye.

or, she didn’t know what she knew, she knew half of it, had half a plan. she at least knew she wasn’t ever going back to shiz. maybe a part of her hoped glinda would stay with her, would leave shiz too, if all went well with the wizard, if she didn’t have a reason to go “underground.” maybe she would’ve let glinda go underground with her, if things weren’t so dire. she'd stay up all night, nervous about their meeting with his ozness, but nervous about other things, too. how to tell her? how to tell her i’m leaving, and i want her to come with me? how to tell her i’m leaving, and i DON’T want her to come with me? not necessarily in a lovey, romantic way, but in an “acknowledging she (elphaba) can’t be alone” kind of way. she can’t be alone, not now, when she’s gotten so used to how the other half lives, but she also can’t bear to put glinda in danger. so she ponders, wondering what will happen, wondering if she’s made the right choice to have even asked glinda to come with her, if that was right of her, morally, and feeling the girl nuzzle in closer suddenly and deciding yes, she needs this.  

then it goes wrong. the wizard won’t listen. the wizard is toying with her. her plan changes and she knows glinda suddenly can’t come with her, it’d be too dangerous, she feels herself becoming too angry. it’d be asking too much, and she realizes almost with a laugh that she doesn’t know why she’d even ever thought that such a thing was possible. and it almost trips her up when glinda asks, rather frantically, where elphaba is going. she thinks for a split moment that maybe it can happen, maybe she can come, but squanders it. she kisses glinda when she leaves because it’s the best thing she can do. she kisses her twice because she needs it for herself. 

she’s been alone for so long, and being alone for longer will have to do. because it’s the right thing to do, and elphaba always tries to do the “right” thing.

and glinda’s crying, because she’s now lost two very important people in her life. because her elphie doesn’t care about her.

and elphaba isn’t crying. because if she did, she wouldn’t be able to stop.

#wicked #wicked the musical #wicked the book #wicked the life and times of the wicked witch of the west #gregory maguire #elphie #elphaba #glinda #galinda #gelphie #headcanon #book discussion #book club #wizard of oz

[obscenicon]

everybody owes plaidos the biggest fucking apology btw yall have been fucking vile to her over literally nothing

#ummm shes racist!!!! bcs she has a book club where they discuss racism!!!!!!!!! #< voice of somebody who is clawing desperately to find a reason to be cruel to a trans woman online #yall are fucking evil actually. the whole 'omg white queers' thing only seems to come out when its a trans woman huh #and its never for a good reason. she didnt even do or say anything racist. oh my god #and then of course here come the people going 'stop derailing discussions of racism (real problem) with transmisogyny (fake problem) #completely fucking ignoring the trans women of color that have also been harassed and received the same 'ugh i hate white queers' treatment.

[junipernoon]

Alright white queer website - if you spent money on House in the Cerulean Sea then I challenge you to give money to the people whose story TJ Klune woobiefied and made about a white savior and oppressed magic:

National Indian Child Welfare Association

First Nations Development Institute

Association on American Indian Affairs

Native American Disability Law Center

Native American Rights Fund

Native American College Fund

#tj klune #house in the cerulean sea #personally - I really like NICWA and give monthly to them #I will not discuss this book further without being paid for my trouble / emotional labor #ko-fi.com/junipernoon #(homies in the book club got this shit for free but I still have 5 essays inside me)

[skittidyne]

I THINK YOU SHOULD ASK ME THINGS ABOUT MY BOOK

#i especially think we should talk about the sequel #(but not its release date i’m scared of that) #but please let’s discuss #esp since we might be STARTING A BOOK CLUB

[gremlingirlsmell]

hey it would be nice if major big accounts on here wouldnt take the first chance to hop on board of a transmisogynist harassment campaign, thatd be neat

#cringe never died they love using cringe and twist the words ppl say to just make them look bad #oh a homestuck fan is reading homestuck in a fan-group and discussing it like a book club and they actually try to discuss and identify the #racism in it. and thats somehow racist and bad? oh its because the OP is a transfem who dared to like homestuck. oh ok #transmisogyny #ALSO at this point ppl should know better than to spread anything Transmisogynist Harassment Enjoyer neotrances says about any transfem

[curiositysavesthecat]

*This poll was submitted to us and we simply posted it so people could vote and discuss their opinions on the matter. If you’d like for us to ask the internet a question for you, feel free to drop the poll of your choice in our inbox and we’ll post them anonymously (for more info, please check our pinned post).

#incognito polls #fanfic #fanfiction #fandom #fandoms #blorbo #comfort character #fandom discourse #fandom discussion #writing #reading #book #books #bookblr #book club #book community #books and reading #bookworm #reader #poll #tumblr polls #polls #tumblr poll

[gowns]

one more elena ferrante meme

#elena ferrante #i don't have a book club to discuss these but i do have my brain that has been cooking these for years. anyway go read elena ferrante

[fungi-maestro]

Questionable Images 1/2 - The Question #8 (1987)

#book club #the question #vic sage #dc comics #comics #questionable images #another one of my favorite issues #here you can see vic talk about second chances and get fucked up on drugs #also it contains at least two jokes about vic having no face. higher than there have been so far! #but seriously this issue is really fantastix #it shows you what someone who fights fire like fire is doing in the town of hub city #as well as discussing how 'innocence' can be subjective... #dr spaulding is one of my favorite one off antagonists. hes not cartoonishly evil or anything like a lot of the others. #you can see his motivations and you can see how his morals somehow justify this (while being hypocritical) #and yet you are able to look at it and decide how you feel about his actions & decide what it means when someone is 'innocent' #it forces you to ask yourself how much a person can do before they're irreparably guilty. and whether theres a balance to it. #100 good deeds might outweigh 100 bad deeds. or they don't. and every moment decides whether you're 'innocent' or not on its own. #and at the end you have to ask yourself whether spaulding deserved that. DID the punishment fit the crime? why him and not vic? #it brings up moral issues you maybe didn't think about before. #very very good issue... one i often think about. #WHY WONT TUMBLR LET ME MOVE THESE PICTURES AROUND IM GOING TO EXPLODE #no one is guilty except whoever at tumblr made this impossible

[communistkenobi]

I really need to get more into marxist god-building. As soon as I started reading a review of Lunacharsky’s writings on how Marxism evokes religious emotion and is basically scientific theology it was like discovering what i had believed but didn’t realise it

#also have been pretty compelled by his discussion of the role of religion in socialism #like in terms of capturing the ritual and social emotion that religion evokes for the purposes of uniting the working class #it resonated a lot with the history I’d read of the Haitian revolution and the role religion played in slave organising #like obviously religion plays a massive role in most conflicts but using it as a mobilising force for proletarian movements resolves a lot #of my confusion/uncertainty about religion in a socialist society #anyway I need to read a lot more I’m not very far into it #hoping maybe I can do a bit more reading in the summer but I have comp preparation then. augh #book club

[wen-kexing-apologist]

Love in the Big City: Part Two

Once again I find myself without an original essay already floating in my head, so shout out to @bengiyo for the discussion questions. They are a life saver! 

I find the question about I maintain effective distance from a narrator when the story gets heavy, but I am not sure that that is something I know how to do. In my day to day life I often feel cut off from emotions. I process my emotions through media, where putting myself in the experiences and feelings of the characters can be used like armor as I turn to face my own. I fail time and time again to maintain effective distance from my characters, because my characters are how I maintain effective distance from myself. I suspect Mr. Young and I have that in common. 

I’m glad for these essays because last week’s made me really have to think about Young, what he was like, why he was like that, how his friendship with Jaehee broke down when Young wasn’t able to be serious. Because I feel like Part Two is proof for me that my initial read was correct. But just like in Part One, where Young mentions his own problems almost off-handedly, his suicidality being a single sentence sandwiched somewhere in a paragraph. Here too, Young is rather distanced himself when he recounts his traumas. 

He does not linger on the fact he spent his summer in a psychiatrist facility because his mother saw him kiss a boy. He merely bluntly gives the details, but doesn’t really mention how he felt about it. At least not until closer to the end of Part Two. His boyfriend is the same, in some regards. Beyond the dickmatization of our narrator, I think the initial draw for Young was that there was another gay with mommy issues who was willing to talk about them. I think sadness speaks to sadness and that can call people to one another. The failing here is in the difference in their courage. 

Young has suppressed his sexuality as much as he could in places where he knew it might get him hurt (the military as an example). But even after suffering what he did in that psych facility, he left it with the knowledge that his mother was the one who was sick, not him. Young’s boyfriend, however, grew up in a different generation. Ben’s right, in BL we usually root for reciprocal couples to get together, and here we are watching a relationship fail. But I am not rooting for these two to be together, because that relationship was not balanced in what it gave and what it took. Young and his boyfriend stood on different ground from the beginning, both in what they wanted out of it and in how they navigate the world. 

I am not someone who thinks everyone needs to be out of the closet, I think it is quite rare that we get a closeted and out couple where their need to hide their relationship does not impact their relationship (shout out to Cooking Crush yet again for defeating that trope!) Young does not seem like the kind of person used to be looked at and he’s in a younger generation. He isn’t closeted, and does not at least outwardly appear to fall victim to internalized homophobia, he wants to hold his boyfriend’s hand in public, he does not give a shit what elders think. But he is with someone that is deeply ashamed of his queerness, to the point where he tortures himself with the news. Young is right to be upset after he finds the articles on his boyfriend’s laptop, it would be horrifying to find out that’s what your boyfriend thinks of you. 

But I don’t think Young mentioned, and he definitely did not reflect on the fact this has less to do with how he feels about Young and more to do with how he feels about himself. I love that this book got in to the complexities of activism. Now, I know someone did some very incredible work on the Korean history timeline, I just did not have an opportunity to finish it. So I’m not sure about the politics at play for what those students were activists for, but if I know one thing, it is that activists are never perfect. In the US, for example, racism existed within the women’s sufferage moment, homophobia existed in black liberation movements, and transphobia exists in the feminist movement and in queer communities as well. 

If Young’s boyfriend and his classmates were activists together, got arrested, fought against whatever it is they fought against and the boyfriend had respect for them, it would be a massive thing to internalize to find out they are homophobic. Hell, when we met that couple at the park, the husband said he believed that queer people existed as if there was a time when he didn’t think homosexuality was real. Young’s boyfriend ranted a lot about the American Empire and the influence of Western culture on Korean society and Young made a point to emphasize religion as a part of that. 

Korea has a pretty decent Christian population, and as we saw from Young’s umma that evangelical nature resulted in massive punishment for Young out of his mother’s fear of his sins. And she’d been a Christian for 25 years. I think every character we meet is really supposed to be some sort of reflection for Young, a way to show us alternate futures for Young. Jaehee is what his life could never look like because he was gay in a country that does not have gay marriage rights. But at the very least, Jaehee got serious when Young could not, and she got a serious boyfriend, and entered a serious relationship. Young and Jaehee were so similar for so long, that I do think Young would have been able to maintain a longterm relationship if he could actually emotionally commit to one. 

In Part Two, Young’s boyfriend is his mirror. The anti-American imperialist that pays attention to flags versus the kid who does not even pay attention to the symbology he is wearing. The former activist versus the passive kid. The internalized homophobe and the one who rebelled against that. I said it already but Young was tortured for being queer, and the first thing his mother did when the therapy failed was to hand him fucking scripture. Young could have ended up just as disgusted and ashamed as his boyfriend, but he didn’t. 

I think the author intercut Young’s relationship with his mother and his boyfriend in this part because they act as catalysts, they change Young, they show him what his weaknesses are, and the pain he will suffer when he bites his tongue…and when he doesn’t. His relationship with his boyfriend implodes when he starts saying more of the thoughts in his head, he waits for his mother to die after he cannot bring himself to ever tell her he wants an apology. 

I think so much of this part is about being let down by the people around you, which I think is how Young felt when he realized Jaehee had left him at the end of Part One. We get the homophobic activists as an example, but we also spent a significant amount of time with Young talking about his boyfriend who was the first to make a move, and the first to sit and listen, and how that turned out to be an act, his boyfriend was deeply stuck in his homophobia and stopped really listening to Young early in to their relationship; Young talked quite a bit about how stubborn and strong his mother used to be. The force of her. And he spends this entire part just watching her wither away to skin and bones. He describes how long she kept up the act, that he’d help her use the restroom and then ten minutes later you couldn’t even tell she needed help. 

And then he lays his head in his mother’s lap at the end, and he wants an apology. He wants an apology so badly. But he knows he will never get it, not in the way he wants.  But honestly, I think his mother does apologize to him, in her own way, when she admits that she was scared. And I think the hardest truth he could ever tell his mother is that he was sorry he felt like the whole world in her hands. 

#love in the big city #litbc #litbc book club #love in the big city bookclub #litbc analysis #litbc discussion

[therealamylee2]

i do think book elphaba is aroace though.

yes i’m 99% sure gregory maguire was going for the “she doesn’t think she’s pretty/she doesn’t value herself enough and that’s why she doesn’t allow herself romance/sex/etc.”

but i don’t know. i think her thing with fiyero was because she needed to be brought back up for air. she was so not herself but also SO herself, this new self, and it terrified her. she was lonely and being driven down a bad path and he was there to “save her” and she knew it. “yero my hero.” she enjoyed his company and the sex (because ace people can) but i don’t think she loved him romantically. i don’t think she’s romantically attracted to anyone at all, actually.

the difference is is with glinda she formed such a close bond with her that surprised them both. she doesn’t see glinda as a soulmate but rather as a SOULMATE, if you get what i mean. it goes beyond holding hands, cuddling, going on dates. glinda’s her person. she kisses her when she says goodbye not because of romance but because that’s her love, a different kind of love that’s unexplainable.

#wicked #wicked the musical #wicked the book #wicked the life and times of the wicked witch of the west #gregory maguire #elphie #elphaba #glinda #galinda #gelphie #headcanon #book discussion #book club #aroace #lgbt

[elains]

This was something I was talking with da friends™️ on discord, but it's something I kinda want to post here to.

I have always had issues with most Sarah J. Maas protagonists. Aelin post HoF and especially after EoS was insufferable for me; I grew disappointed in Feyre post ACOMAF, in part because how centered Rhysand is in her narrative. Which... Has only grown worse with ACOSF and HOFAS. Feyre deserves better.

Mind, my problem in part comes from the framing of the narrative and the ridiculous amount of protagonist centered morality present.

Bryce is one of the most egregious cases. All through the book, I'm supposed to think she's smart, brilliant, a force who can do everything — a party girl, but more. The thing is... it doesn't land. She comes off a spoiled, petty, arrogant brat who is entitled and rude to everyone, yet still somehow would be a great Queen. Are you for real?

It's so cringe. She doesn't read like a mature adult, but rather a rebellious teen with a bone to pick with the entire world. Her character development is a MESS. Oh, so now that the Asteri are revealed to be parasites and leeching off everyone... you care? They must be taken down now that it concerns her?

I have no problem with nominal heroes, morally grey characters and villain protagonists when they're portrayed by such. Bryce is, however, touted as a hero and savior of all, including the Humans who... are there, I suppose. You forget Bryce is demifae because it matters SHIT to her character.

And the thing is that Sarah's handling of her protagonist has only gotten worse through time. The books are less tightly edited now than they were before, so it's bound to get more noticeable with thr MCs. The side characters are given more room to breath and are, therefore, more complex and hell, consistent. As a certain book hoarder astrological friend said, the plot armor is less impervious.

Take Tharion, for instance. Yes, I know plenty dislike him, but his character is surprisingly consistent and his progression makes sense. His flaws keep returning to bite him in the ass and that's nice. Nesta too: the fact that she didn't start off as a protagonist has made her so much more interesting to me, and I fear what's to come.

#hofas spoilers #sjms critical #BOOK CLUB FRIENDS I DISCUSSED THIS WITH THANK YOU FOR HEARING ME RANT

[ftm-megamind]

i think jack is more of a ya fantasy type guy whereas david is more of a ya dystopian type guy. these two probably intertwine sometimes

#modern au javid but they meet at a book club when they're 12 and they had both just read [insert your fave book from when you were a kid] #and they had a long and heated discussion about it (adhd + autism) #whether they were friendly or hostile due to their different takes... it's up to you dear reader #but nonetheless they bonded. and they kept seeing one another at the book club #fast forward a few years they're making out on david's bed #newsies #newsies 1992 #92sies #jack kelly #david jacobs #javid