I usually talk about serious stuff. This is also serious. What's your book cover ick? What kind of cover makes you not wanna pick up the book even though it might be the greatest story of all time.

For me, it's when there are real life people on the book covers, or a half naked male torso, or when the letters are too swirly (not cursive. Like when the edges of the letters are swirly). I don't care if this is a masterpiece of a novel, why are you trying to get me to bleach my eyes or give me dyslexia (I don't have dyslexia)

what is your favourite myth from your culture that you would love to see in a retelling?

Okay, so I just came across a video dissecting the Met Gala look of Doechii, and the person in the video, a South Asian creator, brought up the story of Kannagi. And it honestly opened this floodgate of nostalgia for me, because I used to read Kannagi’s story all the time as a kid. It’s a mythological story from Tamil Nadu. And it made me start thinking about all the mythological stories from your home country that you absolutely love. Because I realised that when I think about the mythological stories from my country that stayed with me — barring the really famous epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata — so many of them came from oral storytelling traditions or from these illustrated books like Amar Chitra Katha. And honestly, I think people in the South Asian diaspora, especially in the West, and people in South Asia too, have so much potential to work with these stories, to do modern retellings, to play with gender and sexuality, because these stories themselves often played with gender and sexuality.

So I’m gonna give a quick rundown of some of my favourite stories.

For context, Kannagi wasn’t exactly my favourite story, but basically, Kannagi is also known as the goddess of chastity and justice in Tamil Nadu. She was married to a man named Kovalan. Kovalan cheated on her, lost all his wealth, and one day decided to sell her anklet. The jeweller saw an opportunity because the anklet looked very similar to the queen’s missing anklet, so he accused Kovalan of stealing it. And the king — without even conducting a trial — ordered Kovalan to be executed. Kannagi was so enraged that she stormed into the court and broke open her anklet. Rubies fell out of it, while the queen’s anklet had pearls inside. And that’s how she proved Kovalan’s innocence. But she was still so furious that she cursed the entire Pandya kingdom to burn to the ground.

And it did. The whole city burned.

And honestly? We love a goddess. We love a woman who enacts revenge. There is no “being the bigger person” here.

Another set of stories I absolutely love are the stories of Mohini. Mohini is one of the avatars of Vishnu, and notably the only female avatar of Vishnu. One of the stories involves the demon Bhasmasura — whose name basically translates to “ash demon.” He worshipped Shiva, and Shiva is famously the kind of god who gets impressed if you worship him with enough sincerity and intensity. So Shiva grants him a boon: anyone Bhasmasura touches on the head will instantly turn to ash. Which, naturally, immediately backfires because Bhasmasura then tries to use the power on Shiva himself.

So Shiva asks Vishnu for help. Vishnu transforms into Mohini, who is impossibly beautiful, and Bhasmasura instantly falls in love with her. He asks her to marry him, and Mohini says she will — but only if he can perfectly imitate all her dance moves. So she starts dancing, and Bhasmasura mirrors every movement. And at one point, Mohini places her hand on top of her own head. Bhasmasura copies her. And immediately turns himself to ash. And what else could you expect from a man lowkey. The level of stupidity y'all.

Another Mohini story that I love comes from the Mahabharata. There’s this character named Aravan, who volunteers to become a human sacrifice to ensure victory in the war. But before he dies, he asks Krishna for three boons. I don’t remember the first two, but the third was that he wanted to be married before his death, because unmarried men were denied certain funeral rites and honours. But no woman wanted to marry someone doomed to die the next day. So Krishna transforms into Mohini, marries Aravan, and after Aravan is sacrificed, Mohini mourns him as a widow: crying, breaking her bangles, beating her chest; all that jazz before transforming back into Krishna. This form is sometimes referred to as Krishna-Mohini. And what’s fascinating is that this story became part of ritual tradition in Tamil Nadu. During a festival, transgender women and hijra communities reenact Mohini’s mourning for Aravan — mourning him as widows after a symbolic marriage ritual. And I just think stories like these are such rich material for reinterpretation. They’re already fluid. They already complicate gender, desire, devotion, embodiment, performance. So whenever people act like queerness or gender fluidity are somehow “Western concepts,” I’m always like… say what now???

But my favourite story is about Kali. Now, remember: all of these stories were orally told to me by my family, so this might not be the most textually accurate version. But this is the version I grew up with. Basically, there’s this demon named Raktabija. And if I’m translating it correctly, Raktabija roughly means “drop of blood.” So Durga — who I personally like to think of as a goddess of war — and her people are trying to kill him. But there’s a problem: every single time Raktabija is wounded and a drop of his blood falls to the ground, another version of him emerges from it. A duplicate. A doppelgänger. So the more they fight him, the more of him there are. And Durga becomes so enraged that she becomes Kali (y'all Kali literally means Black or Dark Skinned One with feminine pronouns and yet the colourism in my country y'all I swear). And Kali is literally the goddess of your nightmares. She’s described with blazing red eyes and this enormous tongue, stretched out to drink every drop of blood Raktabija spills before it can touch the ground and create another demon. She’s depicted wearing a tiger-skin cloak — which is interesting, because Durga rides a tiger, so you could almost interpret it as Kali wearing the skin of Durga’s own mount. And she’s adorned with severed heads of Raktabija’s while literally carrying another one of his heads from her hand. And she kills every version of Raktabija, drinks all the blood, and dances on their corpses.

She's the epitome of female and feminine rage.

But in the version I grew up hearing, Kali becomes so consumed by rage that she loses awareness of everything around her. And that’s when Shiva, her husband, lies down at her feet. and she ends up stepping on him. And the shock of realising she has stepped on someone she loves suddenly pulls her back into herself. It snaps her back into awareness.

There’s just so much material there for modern retellings. Indian authors, South Asian writers, diaspora writers — there are literally centuries of mythology waiting to be reinterpreted. Please. Someone give me more weird, queer, angry, lush mythological retellings.

Thank you for reading this long ass info dump. But this is mainly to ask you: what is your favourite myth from your culture that you would love to see in a retelling?

what is your favourite myth from your culture that you would love to see in a retelling?

Okay, so I just came across a video dissecting the Met Gala look of Doechii, and the person in the video, a South Asian creator, brought up the story of Kannagi. And it honestly opened this floodgate of nostalgia for me, because I used to read Kannagi’s story all the time as a kid. It’s a mythological story from Tamil Nadu. And it made me start thinking about all the mythological stories from your home country that you absolutely love. Because I realised that when I think about the mythological stories from my country that stayed with me — barring the really famous epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata — so many of them came from oral storytelling traditions or from these illustrated books like Amar Chitra Katha. And honestly, I think people in the South Asian diaspora, especially in the West, and people in South Asia too, have so much potential to work with these stories, to do modern retellings, to play with gender and sexuality, because these stories themselves often played with gender and sexuality.

So I’m gonna give a quick rundown of some of my favourite stories.

For context, Kannagi wasn’t exactly my favourite story, but basically, Kannagi is also known as the goddess of chastity and justice in Tamil Nadu. She was married to a man named Kovalan. Kovalan cheated on her, lost all his wealth, and one day decided to sell her anklet. The jeweller saw an opportunity because the anklet looked very similar to the queen’s missing anklet, so he accused Kovalan of stealing it. And the king — without even conducting a trial — ordered Kovalan to be executed. Kannagi was so enraged that she stormed into the court and broke open her anklet. Rubies fell out of it, while the queen’s anklet had pearls inside. And that’s how she proved Kovalan’s innocence. But she was still so furious that she cursed the entire Pandya kingdom to burn to the ground.

And it did. The whole city burned.

And honestly? We love a goddess. We love a woman who enacts revenge. There is no “being the bigger person” here.

Another set of stories I absolutely love are the stories of Mohini. Mohini is one of the avatars of Vishnu, and notably the only female avatar of Vishnu. One of the stories involves the demon Bhasmasura — whose name basically translates to “ash demon.” He worshipped Shiva, and Shiva is famously the kind of god who gets impressed if you worship him with enough sincerity and intensity. So Shiva grants him a boon: anyone Bhasmasura touches on the head will instantly turn to ash. Which, naturally, immediately backfires because Bhasmasura then tries to use the power on Shiva himself.

So Shiva asks Vishnu for help. Vishnu transforms into Mohini, who is impossibly beautiful, and Bhasmasura instantly falls in love with her. He asks her to marry him, and Mohini says she will — but only if he can perfectly imitate all her dance moves. So she starts dancing, and Bhasmasura mirrors every movement. And at one point, Mohini places her hand on top of her own head. Bhasmasura copies her. And immediately turns himself to ash. And what else could you expect from a man lowkey. The level of stupidity y'all.

Another Mohini story that I love comes from the Mahabharata. There’s this character named Aravan, who volunteers to become a human sacrifice to ensure victory in the war. But before he dies, he asks Krishna for three boons. I don’t remember the first two, but the third was that he wanted to be married before his death, because unmarried men were denied certain funeral rites and honours. But no woman wanted to marry someone doomed to die the next day. So Krishna transforms into Mohini, marries Aravan, and after Aravan is sacrificed, Mohini mourns him as a widow: crying, breaking her bangles, beating her chest; all that jazz before transforming back into Krishna. This form is sometimes referred to as Krishna-Mohini. And what’s fascinating is that this story became part of ritual tradition in Tamil Nadu. During a festival, transgender women and hijra communities reenact Mohini’s mourning for Aravan — mourning him as widows after a symbolic marriage ritual. And I just think stories like these are such rich material for reinterpretation. They’re already fluid. They already complicate gender, desire, devotion, embodiment, performance. So whenever people act like queerness or gender fluidity are somehow “Western concepts,” I’m always like… say what now???

But my favourite story is about Kali. Now, remember: all of these stories were orally told to me by my family, so this might not be the most textually accurate version. But this is the version I grew up with. Basically, there’s this demon named Raktabija. And if I’m translating it correctly, Raktabija roughly means “drop of blood.” So Durga — who I personally like to think of as a goddess of war — and her people are trying to kill him. But there’s a problem: every single time Raktabija is wounded and a drop of his blood falls to the ground, another version of him emerges from it. A duplicate. A doppelgänger. So the more they fight him, the more of him there are. And Durga becomes so enraged that she becomes Kali (y'all Kali literally means Black or Dark Skinned One with feminine pronouns and yet the colourism in my country y'all I swear). And Kali is literally the goddess of your nightmares. She’s described with blazing red eyes and this enormous tongue, stretched out to drink every drop of blood Raktabija spills before it can touch the ground and create another demon. She’s depicted wearing a tiger-skin cloak — which is interesting, because Durga rides a tiger, so you could almost interpret it as Kali wearing the skin of Durga’s own mount. And she’s adorned with severed heads of Raktabija’s while literally carrying another one of his heads from her hand. And she kills every version of Raktabija, drinks all the blood, and dances on their corpses.

She's the epitome of female and feminine rage.

But in the version I grew up hearing, Kali becomes so consumed by rage that she loses awareness of everything around her. And that’s when Shiva, her husband, lies down at her feet. and she ends up stepping on him. And the shock of realising she has stepped on someone she loves suddenly pulls her back into herself. It snaps her back into awareness.

There’s just so much material there for modern retellings. Indian authors, South Asian writers, diaspora writers — there are literally centuries of mythology waiting to be reinterpreted. Please. Someone give me more weird, queer, angry, lush mythological retellings.

Thank you for reading this long ass info dump. But this is mainly to ask you: what is your favourite myth from your culture that you would love to see in a retelling?

I’ve had a library audiobook hold come through, only to have found a second hand copy of the exact same book, so I’ve decided to try a tandem read.

I’ve never done one before so I’m asking those who have experience with them / enjoy tandem reads, what should I know for my first tandem read? Are there any tips or tricks which will make the experience better?

Thank you in advance!

Okay, so I made a post yesterday about my favourite love stories from my culture and asked you guys about yours. The response was so positive — I learned so much, and you can check that post out here. Our stories deserve to be celebrated.

But you will not believe this coincidence. I regularly check YouTube for book drama because, you know, girl's gotta get her tea. And guys. Guys. I am crying because this is ridiculous. A Brazilian author named Carolina Silva wrote a monster romance with Shiva as the MMC, as in, HE is the "monster". A smutty monster romance. Y'all, I genuinely do not know if I should be pissed or if I should find this funny, because she's an indie author, so there was clearly no oversight here. She is not even from India. And this is not a retelling. This is not even a romance story in any meaningful sense. It is a smutty monster romance.

I don't want to be the one to censor anyone, but where do you draw the line? Where do you draw the line? Because you are using one of our gods as an MMC in this. If you were writing a retelling, something like Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Menon where it's actually a retelling with love and beauty and sensitivity, I would fully support that regardless of where you're from. But this? Look, I am an atheist. But I have always loved the stories from my culture. They are full of philosophy, desire, devotion, and a really fascinating play on gender and sexuality. I talked about this in my last two posts, and I have learned so much from you guys about your cultures too. So this is not about gatekeeping mythology. This is about the fact that the author didn't even get the source material right. Shiva had two wives his entire life, Sati and then Parvati, who was the reincarnation of Sati. He was devoted to both of them. BRO WAS LOCKED IN OKAY. And this book makes his love interest someone other than Parvati and treats an active, living tradition as just set dressing for monster smut.

I genuinely do not know whether to be angry or just baffled. Maybe both. But I do want to know your thoughts: where do you think authors should draw the line?

Y'all I'm trying to be nice here I swear. But this is pissing me off. Like I get it. Smut is not a bad thing and I'm really not trying to play into purity culture. I'm from a country that literally produced Kamasutra but even that was way more about just JUST sex and dug deep into the philosophy surrounding the art of love making, being attractive for your partner, grooming yourself, kissing, foreplay, BDSM and sex.

But THIS is just violence against the philosophies my culture is set in where desire and devotion and sex are looked at in a very particular way which isn't different from meditating. Yes. Kama or desire and sex is a way to attain liberation or nirvana in some parts of my culture. So to write smut with a GOD from an ACTIVE tradition who's LOCKED IN?? HE ISN'T ZEUS OR HADES. GIVE ME A BREAK.

Edit: she threatened her critique with lawsuits. I'm crying.

Edit: ya'all she's a white brazilian. And of course she is 😭😭😭😭 and she wrote shiva as a "blue god". HE IS NOT BLUE Y'ALL. He is either a pale ass schmuck with a blue throat or incredibly dark with a blue throat. But he's not fully blue I can't- He's just REPRESENTED as blue to represent the vastness of the sky.

Edit: it gets worse. The fmc becomes involved with Shiva because she reads an inscription on Taj Mahal without knowing she's offering her soul to Shiva. Yes. Taj Mahal. A famously MUSLIM TOMB built by Shah Jahan for his favourite wife Mumtaz Mahal.

TL;DR - How do you guys feel about authors writing about social issues that do not affect them, but affect oppressed groups they do not belong to?

Personally, I don't think there's an issue with someone writing a character that doesn't reflect perfectly the author's own identity or personal experiences. That's what writing, and especially writing fiction, is. But my hackles will always rise when people write from a position of privilege on something that specifically does not/cannot affect them but affects a minority/oppressed group. When the author doesn't/can't have a personal understanding of this experience but they seek to profit from that experience and that story nonetheless.

The reason I'm thinking about this right now is I have a couple of Nat Cassidy books on my TBR, and I'm gonna be real, I thought this was a female writer. It's quite an ambiguous name and I was not previously familiar with his work. Now I know it's a cis man writing about some really thorny female-specific/woman-specific experiences* (and not just tangentially - from what I understand, these experiences form the heart, the engine of these narratives) from the perspective of female characters... yeah I'm side eyeing this a bit.

To be clear, I'm not saying this is outright wrong or somehow immoral or that stories should never be told unless they're told by someone who has directly experienced them or been impacted by the themes they deal with. I think that's a little silly.

But I do think if we are intending to write marginalised experiences we need to ask, why am I telling this story and why do I think my voice was the necessary one to do so? Why is my perspective the one that should be published? Am I benefitting from systemic harms done to others and leveraging my position of privilege to amplify my own voice rather than theirs?

Specific to my example, I have read good things about Cassidy's work, but I feel like maybe there are more appropriate voices to tell these stories that I should be supporting instead. I don't know. What are your thoughts?

[potential spoiler warning for Cassidy's novels below, but not really because I haven't read them]

*From what I have been told, Cassidy has written novels about menopause, medical gaslighting, motherhood and traumatic labour, and the horrific ways in which female people and female bodies suffer these experiences under patriarchal conditions.

It is a nice hot day here in my part of the UK and this lines up perfectly with my recent hyper-fixation - Italy and, more niche, the Mafia! I am itching to finish a current read so I can read The Godfather by Mario Puzo but it got me thinking - does anyone have any Mafia-related (or adjacent) books which are not a smutty romance? I have looked at the lists and can only find romances which aren’t the vibe I’m going for…

I have nothing against Mafia romance but I’m looking for a gritty thriller or a non-fiction, does anyone have any recommendations?

I'm here with more info dump and more questions about your culture. Because I believe PageBound is where we can also pass down stories and I think that's beautiful. So I would like to know your most favourite, most insane love stories from your culture, please. Eg: Romeo and Juliet. Like, people always bring up stories like Eros and Psyche, Orpheus and Eurydice (my favourite) when talking about mythology and romance, but I genuinely think there are so many more of such stories in different cultures.

Because in my culture we have the story of Sati and Shiva, and I think it’s genuinely tragic that the practice of self-immolation got named after a goddess who didn’t kill herself to give her husband a “good life” or whatever patriarchal reinterpretation people later made of it. She killed herself out of rage. Out of fury at her father for disrespecting both her and the man she loved. Which is such a different emotional framework. It’s less “devoted wife sacrifices herself for husband after his death” and more: fuck you, my death is in your hands kind of thing. And honestly, that same energy exists in the Ramayana too.

Quick rundown: Rama is exiled, his wife Sita is kidnapped by Ravana, and Rama wages this enormous war to bring her back. But after they return to the kingdom, people start gossiping about Sita because she spent time in another man’s palace. So Rama exiles her while she’s pregnant because he has to “do his duty as king." (BUT NOT BEFORE LITERALLY PUTTING HER THROUGH A TRIAL BY FIRE TO PROVE HER INNOCENCE THE AUDACITY OF THIS MAN Y'ALL) And later, after she raises their sons away from him and he finds her and begs her to bring his sons back to him along with herself, he asks her to prove her purity again. A trial by fire. Again. And this time she refuses. Tells her sons to be good boys and she basically says, if I have been truthful and faithful, let the earth itself take me back.

And the earth literally opens up and consumes her. Y'all she's so badass. She's like hahaha we're never ever getting back together.

And Rama is just left there with their sons And I think there’s something so powerful about that ending. It’s Sita essentially saying: you don’t get me anymore.

But the story that always destroys me is Sati and Shiva. Sati falls in love with Shiva despite everyone thinking he’s strange — this ash-covered hermit sitting in cremation grounds, wearing snakes, smoking weed, completely detached from society. In one version of the story, during her swayamvar (think the bachelorette), where she chooses her own husband by putting a garland around a candidate's neck, she throws her garland up in the air and it lands around Shiva’s neck. In another, she meditates and worships him for so long that he finally agrees to marry her. But her father, Daksha, despises Shiva. He thinks he’s beneath her. So one day Daksha hosts this huge ritual and intentionally refuses to invite Shiva and Sati. Shiva tells her not to go because he knows Sati will be humiliated, but Sati insists because, well, it’s her father.

And when she gets there, Daksha humiliates both her and Shiva publicly. So Sati calls upon fire and immolates herself right there. As a final fuck you. And Shiva loses his mind. He becomes so consumed by grief and rage that that he picks up Sati’s burned body and starts dancing the Tandava — the dance of death and destruction and creates these forms of chaos, including Bhadrakali (translates to the dark one who is gentle), who KILLS EVERYONE AND BEHEADS DAKSHA, the irony y'all. And his grief is so immense that it literally threatens cosmic balance. The gods have to intervene because Shiva is basically going to destroy existence itself. So Vishnu uses his chakra (a weapon) to cut Sati’s body into pieces, and the places where those pieces fall become sacred temples across India. Like. I’m sorry. If your love story does not involve cosmic devastation, grief so intense it destabilises the universe, rage powerful enough to birth gods, and dancing with your lover’s charred body until reality itself starts collapsing… is it even love?

Anyway. What’s the most unhinged, devastating, or beautiful love story from your culture’s mythology (doesn't have to be myth can be a literature type of legend too)?