KatieV
I don’t go anywhere without a book and I make a lot fo typos 30 She/Her 🎇🌻🌊🌞
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KatieV commented on Titania's update
Titania is interested in reading...
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Helen Phillips
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Helen Phillips
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KatieV earned a badge
The Kaleidoscope of Time: A Time Travel Quest
Bronze: Finished 5 Main Quest books.
4KatieV commented on a post
Hi everyone! I’m Sasha (@sashareads). Putting this quest together has felt a bit like tending to a tiny book‑baby, and I’m so excited to finally share it with you. I hope you’ll adore it as much as I do.🥰
About the quest The Kaleidoscope of Time dives into worlds where time doesn’t behave the way we expect - loops, pockets, displacement, and intentional travel across eras. Because it stretches across so many genres, some books will feel instantly like your thing and others might not - and that’s completely okay. You’ll find a mix of YA and adult titles across historical fiction, speculative fiction, literary fiction, romance, dystopian, fantasy, mystery, thrillers, and plenty of genre‑blending, all threaded with a touch of sci‑fi.
If you’d like to read some of the books that helped make the subgenre what it is today, then you should go for The Time Ship: A Chrononautical Journey by Enrique Gaspar, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, Kindred by Octavia E. Butler and Outlander by Diana Gabaldon.
Personally I’ve especially enjoyed Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (Historical Fiction), Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (Fantasy), Love Lethal, Death Divine by Jelena Dunato (Fantasy Romance), The Austen Affair by Madeline Bell (Historical Romance), The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow (Fantasy Romance), and On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle (Literary Fiction)
Quest recommendations I’ll be taking suggestions through this post: Quest Recommendations. Please give it a read before sharing your recs.
We’re all passionate about our favorite time travel stories, and I’d truly love to hear yours. However, recommending a book doesn’t guarantee it’ll be added, even if it’s popular and/or fits the criteria.
Let’s get questing! 🕰️
24KatieV joined a quest
The Kaleidoscope of Time: A Time Travel Quest ⏳🕰️🚪
🏆 // 482 joined
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From stolen centuries to days that echo themselves, these books breathe time travel into the weave, unraveling the seams of time and lingering in the threads that slip free.
0KatieV earned a badge
The Kaleidoscope of Time: A Time Travel Quest
Bronze: Finished 5 Main Quest books.
4KatieV commented on a post
Hi everyone, I’m Emma (PagesOfEmma), and I’m so thrilled to share my quest with you!
About the Quest As the name might suggest, the books in this quest all touch on the climate crisis in some way. I’m incredibly passionate about our planet, and I care deeply about what we as a species are doing to it and all that live here. Climate fiction is a way for me to broaden my knowledge of issues around the world that I may not be experiencing myself, and I feel strongly that it is a genre that should be more mainstream.
The books I have chosen to launch the quest with are ones that I feel offer a solid base for the subgenre, including some big names like Kim Stanley Robinson and Octavia Butler, to new voices that are doing brilliant things. Climate fiction can be a part of many different types of stories, and I have tried to choose a variety that gives something for everyone. Genre-wise I have mostly stuck with stories that lean either more literary or more science fiction, as the issues I want to highlight are the most prevalent in these, and it helps keep the quest a bit more focused.
A very important thing I want to note about this quest is that climate fiction on the whole, is not a happy subgenre. Please take care of your mental wellbeing when reading these books! I have been mindful about including a mixture of hopeful and bleak stories (and ones that are both) because I think it is good to take a balanced approach to reading climate fiction. It won’t do you any good to just read the difficult books, and it also won’t help to just read the super hopeful ones. At some point, I am planning to write up a separate post with this info and any related trigger warnings so you can all go in informed, but in the meantime please be aware there are often many trigger warnings for climate fiction.
A note on representation: As climate fiction has its roots in scifi, historically it has been dominated by white, mostly male, writers. I have tried my best to find books from a variety of voices (that fit my quest criteria), but some are sadly very underrepresented in the genre. This is changing nowadays, but slowly. I am hopeful that future additions to the quest will continue to become more diverse, and if you have any feedback for me on this front, I am open to hearing it.
Recommendations As this is a main quest, I will be taking recommendations for additions on this post >> 🔗Leave Your Recommendations Here!. Please don’t add recommendations as a new post - keeping the suggestions consolidated will help me stay organised!
Further Reading There are SO many books that come under the wider climate fiction umbrella. I can’t possibly include them all here, and a lot of them don’t fit my specific criteria but are still amazing. If you’re up-to-date on this quest, or nothing is currently speaking to you, you can check out my list that covers a lot of wider climate fiction across many different genres 🔗here.
Unofficial Readalongs If there is interest in doing some readalongs for this quest, then I would love to do that with you all! My thoughts are to do it quarterly, but I am open to feedback. If, on the other hand, you’d all prefer to sort out buddy reads as and when, that’s cool too! Just let me know if you want me to host anything.
Thank you for joining me here, I’m super excited to read with you all! I’d love you to tell me why you’ve joined and what you hope to see and learn from these stories. ☀️ 🌍 ⛈️
32KatieV joined a quest
A Quest For The Future: Climate Fiction ☀️🌍⛈️
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The climate is intrinsic to life on Earth. What happens when it changes? These books examine our reality and imagined futures, both dystopian and utopian, to offer us words of warning, but also hope.
0KatieV commented on bronte.epub's review of What Moves the Dead
.... not a great day for the T. Kingfisher enjoyer in me.
One of my favourite things about T. Kingfisher's books is that i find her love for writing and storytelling to be so infectious it extends to the reader. What Moves the Dead is no different in that regard, but that is the only thing i enjoyed about it. It felt like a passion project, sure, but one that warranted more work on both its plot and its characters to make me care about it.
2KatieV commented on caait's update
caait started reading...
Gunk
Saba Sams
2KatieV commented on caait's update
caait TBR'd a book
Send Nudes
Saba Sams
5KatieV commented on nezuu's update
nezuu finished a book
The Empress of Salt and Fortune
Nghi Vo
5KatieV commented on a post
View spoiler
4KatieV commented on a feature request
4When sharing a link to a book page, don't require log in to view page
When I text a pagebound links to friends, it requires them to log in to see the book. Is it possible to have these pages load without logging in or requiring an account so recipients can view the page?
I like to send pagebound links to my reader friends and I feel like it would be easier to convince them to create an account if they could open the link and get a taste of what pagebound is like.
KatieV commented on farron's review of The Lion Women of Tehran
Once, when I was reading a poem in a very quiet little coffee shop, my mother interrupted my performance to explain the Indonesian and Dutch vocabulary in my poem. She did not mean any harm by it, she came to this country in the 1960s, and she is used to feeling like foreign words are a problem to explain away, regardless of their poetic effect. My mother is also a writer, English is her third language, and for the most part, our work could not be more different in its ethos. She dislikes stories with too much violence or swearing, and even when she discusses difficult or even traumatic matters, she does so with the relentless positivity that only a former middle school teacher could approach life. And how could I deny that this approached has worked for her and the life she’s built in the USA?
Most of what I could say about The Lion Women of Tehran feels quite similar to my feelings on my mother’s work: broad, sentimental, completely unsurprising, with the over-polished sheen of an uplifting, inspirational film that would net a white woman an Oscar if not for the subject matter. But damn, it knows which beats to hit and it knows it will make you cry. As long as you’re not a completely heartless person who gets irritated by the swelling strings or the narrative saying, “isn’t this so beautiful and brave, isn’t this so inspiring??” which, to be fair, I was in my young adulthood. Approaching this with an open mind, the sincerity and the strength of the bond between women did manage to wring a few tears out of this recovering cynic.
I could point out a lot of reasons why I think this book didn’t work for me specifically. It feels strange to mainly focus on an upper-to-middle class, largely politically uninvolved woman who spends a not-insignificant portion of the book not even in Iran. Even if it wasn’t Marjan Kamali’s intention for this book to be seen as a very accurate snapshot into very real political struggles, especially with this title, it is and will be seen as such, and that’s a little hard to swallow. Kamali does include a rather rote ‘mea culpa’ in her author’s note about how she is a novelist and not a historian, but it cannot be ignored that in attaching this novel of hers to a very politically loaded historical term, she has invited the criticism. Or her publishing house and editor have. Whatever. I don’t mean to speak out of turn, because I am basically as uneducated about the actual particulars of the events in the book as any Millennial American, but it seems to me a little bit like billing a book as being ‘The Birmingham Campaign,’ but mostly it’s from the point of view of someone whose friend went to the protests in the 1960s. I will be seeking out other voices more equipped to critique that aspect before landing on a solid opinion on this, but it just felt like a strange choice.
Again I return to my mother. I don’t think she softens her blows intentionally, or wants for my work, or hers, to be specifically catered to those outside of her experiences. Her internal life, the stories she tells about immigrating, about living as a brown woman in the sixties with a family that worked up from poverty into the middle class, her own trauma and the trauma passed down to her, she tells these stories from her heart, and as an educator, she always aims to be understood in the simplest manner. In a similar way, I think Marjan Kamali is a translator, so I think her writing philosophy probably has an intention design to, well, translate. I think she’s done an excellent job of writing a book for white feminists to discuss in their book clubs, and the overwelming popularity of this book in my local library system is definitely a testament toward that.
I appreciated this book for what it was, and I’m trying my best not to throw it under the bus for not being the kind of thing I personally like when I do sincerely feel like it is very good at the type of book it’s trying to be.
It’s going to make you want Persian food like crazy.
8KatieV commented on alethya's update
alethya started reading...
The Bear and the Nightingale
Katherine Arden
5KatieV commented on KatieV's update
KatieV is interested in reading...
Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal
Mohammed El-Kurd
6KatieV is interested in reading...
Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal
Mohammed El-Kurd
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