@molly0xfff Part 1 | April reading wrap up reviewing the 18 books I read this month. #aprilreadingwrapup #readingwrapup #booktok #bookish #bookreview #cozyfantasy #sciencefiction #fantasy #dungeoncrawlercarl ♬ original sound - Molly White
few things i enjoy more than unwinding with a cozy fantasy novel, but as someone who is highly suggestible to vivid descriptions of cinnamon buns i’m beginning to worry they’re bad for my health
More broadly, fiction can act as an antidote to authoritarianism. If authoritarianism thrives when people are isolated, fiction brings people together, she says. “In the most basic way, writing is about opening yourself to another person’s mind. The most intimate thing I do on a daily basis is pick up a book and open myself to another person.” And, while the Trump administration may be forcing one way of life on the world, fiction’s job is, as always, to remind people that there are “other ways of being”.
Every so often I read a book that's so good it makes me feel like I need to recalibrate my book ratings scale. How can it be a "five star" book when it's so much better than other "five star" books I've read?
But I've always found the ubiquitous star rating scales poorly suited to my mental model of cataloguing books, which vary so widely they could never be boiled down to a plain numeric scale. Do the stars represent how much I enjoyed a book? The depth of feelings it made me feel? The quality of the prose? The ease with which I find myself turning to the next page?
I've deeply enjoyed many a book with terrible writing and clichéd plots; is that a five star book? How do I rate a book with beautiful prose and intricate plotlines, that nonetheless causes me to dread picking it back up?
And what is a "one star" book? If a book is truly unenjoyable, I likely won't finish it at all — and thus won't rate it, as it feels unfair to cast judgment on a book I've only partially read. Is "one star" a book I liked enough to finish, but just barely?
Anyway, this is all to say you should read East of Eden, which topped the charts in just about every category, whether it was the prose, enjoyment, or deepness of feelings I felt afterwards.
March reading. Quite an eclectic mix this month, with some really enjoyable reads.
@molly0xfff March reading wrap-up 📚 #marchwrapup #readingwrapup #bookrecs #bookrecommendations #booktok #booktokfyp ♬ original sound - Molly White
quite relieved to discover that the library cloud lending error i was getting yesterday was due to an app outage and not my librarians deciding i needed to be cut off
kind of a bummer to DNF a book I’d really been looking forward to (Children of Time), but life’s too short to read books you don’t want to read
The DOE “book banning hoax” press release claimed that challenged books are “age-inappropriate, sexually explicit, or obscene”. Only 13% of banned books in 2023–24 included “on the page” sexual scenes—but 36% featured PoC characters and 25% featured LGBTQ characters.
