CW: homophobia

So there’s a gay character in this book and I thought it was interesting the way King introduced him — reasonably subtly, saying things like “it was a house that looked like a woman didn’t live there” or something. His homosexuality is mentioned a few times throughout the first half of the book with a kind of “isn’t that quaint” tone. Things like “Tom can’t drive a manual transmission” or “his mustache is neatly trimmed”. But then about halfway through, there’s a line that made me double take.

“She’s like Ahab on the prod for Moby,” the Head remarked. “Eminem may have been a jerk, but he was right about that guy,” Tom said morosely.

Ok, so I vaguely knew Eminem and Moby had beef, but what did Eminem actually say? Turns out he called Moby a f** in a song! So what the hell is Tom, the story’s gay character, supposed to be agreeing with? My charitable interpretation is that King didn’t know about that specific lyric, I guess, and just put in his pop culture reference where he could fit it. But it’s a weird decision, isn’t it?

I'm currently packing for a short 3 day stay at my friend's house to dog sit while she is away and have gotten to the inevitable part of the packing experience where I need to decide how many and which books to bring. As a mood reader that is a bit of a struggle and I know that I'm pretty likely to bring twice as many books as I'll probably even start.

But this led me to think of the question, How many books do you usually bring on a tripp, is there a planned tbr or do you just go off of vibes? Maybe you bring a little bit of everything for variety? I'm curious how do you pack your reading for a trip?

i'm fairly new to pagebound! is there a feature where we can browse/discover books via publish era, genre, etc? i like the discovering books tab a LOT better than goodreads or any other book tracker but i'm still missing that browsing in a bookstore feeling bc i can't search or browse via genre 😭

Does anyone else feel like a kid waiting for Christmas waiting for the next round of Seasonal Readalongs to come out or do I have a problem? 🙂