Punny

Mostly reads literary fiction & SFF, but likes all genres. Interested in humanities topics in non-fiction. Slow to reply via Ouija board. Pun always intended.

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Robinsonades

by Punny

8 books

Books where the characters have to survive in secluded places, away from civilization. The term was coined by Defoe's Robinson Crusoe but beside literary fiction this theme is often prevalent in post-apocalyptic fiction and sci-fi. This list interprets the theme more loosely and focuses on the practical side of survival, basically: less running from zombies and more building fences :)

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Punny started reading...

Your Absence is Darkness

Jón Kalman Stefánsson

A spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland's most beloved novelists. A man comes to awareness in a church in rural Iceland, not knowing why he’s there or how he arrived. When a local woman offers to reunite him with her sister, he realizes he’s lost not only his bearings, but his memory as he doesn’t recall either sister, nor their mother, the woman buried beneath the stone. As their stories unfold, he’s plunged into a history spanning centuries and a city girl drawn to the fjords by the memory of a blue-eyed gaze; a pastor who writes to dead poets and falls in love with a stranger from afar; a woman who must abandon her son to save her family; a musician plagued by cosmic loneliness; and an alcoholic transfixed by the night sky. Faced with the violence of destiny and the effects of choices, made and avoided, that cascade between lives, each discovers the cost of happiness and must answer the difficult question of how to love and be loved. An incandescent romance about the misfortune of mortality and the strange salve of time, Your Absence is Darkness is a spellbinding story of death, desire, and the perfect agony of star-crossed love.

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The Day of the Triffids

John Wyndham

This book is fantastic and frightening, but entirely plausible. It doesn't just seem scientifically possible, but its characters are living people shaken out of the civilization they know into the horror of a world dominated by triffids. The triffids are grotesque and dangerous plants, over seven feet tall, originally cultivated for their yield of high-grade oil. So long as conditions give the mastery to their human directors, they are a valuable asset to mankind. But when a sudden universal disaster turns those conditions upside down, then the triffids, seizing their opportunity, become an active and dreadful menace. The story of what happens is told here by one of the few people lucky enough to escape the disaster.

Punny commented on vumaisbooked's update

vumaisbooked TBR'd a book

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives

Lola Shoneyin

African-born poet Lola Shoneyin makes her fiction debut with The Secret Lives of Babi Segi’s Wives, a perceptive, entertaining, and eye-opening novel of polygamy in modern-day Nigeria. The struggles, rivalries, intricate family politics, and the interplay of personalities and relationships within the complex private world of a polygamous union come to life in The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives — Big Love and The 19 th Wife set against a contemporary African background.

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Starlight 3

Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Since its debut in 1996, Starlight has been recognized as the preeminent original anthology of science fiction and fantasy. Its stories have won the Nebula Award, the Sturgeon Award, and the Tiptree Award. Starlight 1 itself won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology. The series represents the best new short fiction in fantasy and SF. Now, with Starlight 3 , award-winning editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden offers a new serving of powerful, original stories. Some are playful, some rigorous, or exuberant, or melancholy; some are set in the world of today, and some amidst the farthest stars or in worlds that never were. Stephen Baxter Terry Bisson Ted Chiang Susanna Clarke Brenda W. Clough D. G. Compton Cory Doctorow Andy Duncan Colin Greenland Alex Irvine Geoffrey A. Landis Maureen F. McHugh Susan Palwick Madeleine E. Robins Greg van Eekhout Jane Yolen

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Detective Aunty (Kausar Khan Investigates, #1)

Uzma Jalaluddin

When her grown daughter is suspected of murder, a charming and tenacious widow digs into the case to unmask the real killer in this twisty, page-turning whodunnit—the first book in a cozy new detective series from the acclaimed author of Ayesha at Last. After her husband’s unexpected death eighteen months ago, Kausar Khan never thought she’d receive another phone call as heartbreaking—until her thirty-something daughter, Sana, phones to say that she's been arrested for killing the unpopular landlord of her clothing boutique. Determined to help her child, Kausar heads to Toronto for the first time in nearly twenty years.Returning to the Golden Crescent suburb where she raised her children and where her daughter still lives, Kausar finds that the thriving neighborhood she remembered has changed. The murder of Sana’s landlord is only the latest in a wave of local crimes that have gone unsolved. And the facts of the case are Sana found the man dead in her shop at a suspiciously early hour, with a dagger from her windowfront display plunged in his chest. And Kausar—a woman with a keen sense of observation and deep wisdom honed by her years—senses there’s more to the story than her daughter is telling.With the help of some old friends and her plucky teenage granddaughter, Kausar digs into the investigation to uncover the truth. Because who better to pry answers from unwilling suspects than a meddlesome aunty? But even Kausar can’t predict the secrets, lies, and betrayals she finds along the way…

Post from the The Day of the Triffids forum

Punny

Thoughts from 28% (page 66)

spoilers

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Punny commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

lydia_b_b_lydia

Bookish pet peeves that don’t really make sense

I need to know if anyone else has any like basically irrational pet peeves when it comes to books. Yesterday I read the first couple pages of The Empress of Salt and Fortune (one of the readalong books) and I immediately put it down because there’s a talking horse on the first page. I absolutely cannot stand talking animals in books unless it makes sense in the universe, but I was just so unprepared for that I couldn’t go on lol 🥲. I’m sure it’s a good book I just can’t. I was wondering if anyone else has any pet peeves like that, or if I’m just insane lol.

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Post from the The Day of the Triffids forum

Punny

Thoughts from 22% (page 51)

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Punny started reading...

The Day of the Triffids

John Wyndham

Punny commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

remarkmd

Audiobook Performance Recommendations!!

Hello pagebound!! I want to hear your recommendations on the best audiobook performances. I don’t care the genre, I just want to experience some great audiobooks. I need to stop listening to the same music over and over again at work and instead expand my literary experience! For me, I will always recommend Andy Serkis narrating the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It is just chefs kiss

Punny TBR'd a book

Cloud Cuckoo Land

Anthony Doerr

When everything is lost, it’s our stories that survive. How do we weather the end of things? Cloud Cuckoo Land brings together an unforgettable cast of dreamers and outsiders from past, present and future to offer a vision of survival against all odds. Constantinople, 1453: An orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy with a love for animals risk everything on opposite sides of a city wall to protect the people they love. Idaho, 2020: An impoverished, idealistic kid seeks revenge on a world that’s crumbling around him. Can he go through with it when a gentle old man stands between him and his plans? Unknown, Sometime in the Future: With her tiny community in peril, Konstance is the last hope for the human race. To find a way forward, she must look to the oldest stories of all for guidance. Bound together by a single ancient text, these tales interweave to form a tapestry of solace and resilience and a celebration of storytelling itself. Like its predecessor All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s new novel is a tale of hope and of profound human connection.

Punny TBR'd a book

The Overstory

Richard Powers

An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers—each summoned in different ways by trees—are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest. In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe. The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity’s self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us? "Listen. There’s something you need to hear."

Punny TBR'd a book

The Will of the Many

James Islington

At the elite Catenan Academy, a young fugitive uncovers layered mysteries and world-changing secrets in this new fantasy series by internationally bestselling author of The Licanius Trilogy, James Islington. AUDI. VIDE. TACE. The Catenan Republic – the Hierarchy – may rule the world now, but they do not know everything. I tell them my name is Vis Telimus. I tell them I was orphaned after a tragic accident three years ago, and that good fortune alone has led to my acceptance into their most prestigious school. I tell them that once I graduate, I will gladly join the rest of civilised society in allowing my strength, my drive and my focus – what they call Will – to be leeched away and added to the power of those above me, as millions already do. As all must eventually do. I tell them that I belong, and they believe me. But the truth is that I have been sent to the Academy to find answers. To solve a murder. To search for an ancient weapon. To uncover secrets that may tear the Republic apart. And that I will never, ever cede my Will to the empire that executed my family. To survive, though, I will still have to rise through the Academy’s ranks. I will have to smile, and make friends, and pretend to be one of them and win. Because if I cannot, then those who want to control me, who know my real name, will no longer have any use for me. And if the Hierarchy finds out who I truly am, they will kill me.

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Tiffany Chu giveaway

The Constellation of Forgotten Things

Tiffany Chu

When love transcends the boundaries of time, memory, and even death itself. In the world of Reveria, broken dreams rise as trails of light across the night sky. A blacksmith's boy vanishes into rebellion. Two cosmic beings—one of Memory, one of Void—discover their forbidden love might reshape reality. The Constellation of Forgotten Things weaves together interconnected tales of love that defies impossible distances: between life and death, earth and sky, remembering and forgetting. Each story illuminates a different facet of love's power to endure—and its cost. This collection is both an act of remembrance and a celebration of the stories we tell to keep our beloveds alive, proving that some bonds transcend even the veil between worlds. Perfect for readers who love the lyricism of Madeline Miller and Alix E. Harrow, the emotional storytelling of Studio Ghibli films, and the mythic beauty of Ursula K. Le Guin's work. If you read for gorgeous language and deep feeling rather than fast plots—these stories will captivate you. Love that would change the constellations and the reality of existence.

ebook • 100 copies • everywhere

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Hum

Helen Phillips

From the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Need comes an extraordinary novel about a wife and mother who—after losing her job to AI—undergoes a procedure that renders her undetectable to surveillance…but at what cost? In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called “hums,” May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance. Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights’ respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be. When her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives as she works to restore the life of her family. Written in taut, urgent prose, Hum is a work of speculative fiction that unflinchingly explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities. As New York Times bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer says, “Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future.”

Punny commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

adarkershadeofrosie

Edited

Middle grade books to entice an 8-year-old boy to read?

Calling all moms and/or elementary teachers!!! 📣

My eight-year-old informed me he HATES reading. (Cue the big fat alligator tears.) So my mission is to find some books to get him interested!

Some things about him: he was diagnosed with autism, and he is extremely smart. His favorite subjects include space and numbers/math. His favorite tv shows are Numberblocks, Bluey, & True and the Rainbow Kingdom. He’s recently been into video games, so any type of game-to-book adaptation might be good.

Can you give me your recs???

Signed, A desperate mom

Punny commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

silvertongues

Edited

what are you dream quests?

if you could pick any quest theme, what would it be? bonus points if you have a list you want to promote in anticipation of the next community quest vote! i would really love the following: • an anti ai/big tech quest! i feel like it makes sense for pagebound to have one, given its anti ai values. i've seen a couple lists about this nominated for the community vote and i'm always sad when they don't win! • a "books about books" nonfiction quest! the history of the book, books on libraries, books on writing and language and storytelling, etc etc. also very appropriate for the pagebound community! • a drama quest. like actual dramas, plays, theatrical scripts, the like. it's the only main literary form (prose, poetry, drama) we don't have a quest for yet!

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Punny commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

displacedcactus

First Tuesday Trivia and Tidbits of August!

Hello PB Trivia Fans! It is Tuesday, which means it's time for our weekly sharing of fun facts (or horrifying facts). What's something interesting you learned from your reading this week? Whether it's something about the world around us or your own inner self, all realizations are fair game.

I'm still reading Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant (it's a 15.5 hour audiobook and I listen at 1x speed) and I learned that Lord Byron was actually pretty sympathetic to the poor and spoke out in favor of the Luddites. This doesn't change my opinion that he was a fuckboi, but he was a fuckboi who was right about at least some things.

Your turn!

(Hat tip as always to acidicchaos for starting this wonderful tradition)

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Fever Dreams & Strange Realities

Bronze: Finished 5 Main Quest books.

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