aghie

she/her | former biologist | now I try to understand what teenagers read for a living | I wanted my cat to go viral and make me rich.

2545 points

0% overlap

My Taste

Assassin's Apprentice (Farseer Trilogy, #1)

The House in the Cerulean Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #1)

Reading...

aghie is interested in reading...

Mechanize My Hands to War

Erin K. Wagner

The debut novel from Erin K Wagner is a chilling nonlinear sci-fi that examines androids as a labor force in conflict with both human farmers and homegrown militias in near-future Appalachia Deep in the hills of Appalachia, anti-android sentiment is building. Charismatic demagogue Eli Whitaker has used anger toward new labor policies that replace factory workers with androids to build a militia–and now he is recruiting child soldiers. Part of a governmental task force, Adrian and Trey are determined to put a stop to Whitaker’s efforts. Their mission is complicated by their own shared childhood experiences with Whitaker. After an automated soldier shoots a child during a raid to protect Trey, both grapple with the role of androids and their use in combat. Interrelated with the hunt for Whitaker, farmers Shay and Ernst struggle after they discover their GMO crop seeds have failed and caused a deadly illness in Shay. To help manage, they hire android employees: Sarah as hospice, and AG-15 to work the now-toxic fields. The couple’s relationship to the androids evolve as both humans get progressively more sick. Timely and chilling, Wagner's nonlinear debut shares intimate narratives of loss, trauma, and survival as the emergence of artificial life intersects with state violence and political extremism in rural Appalachia.

aghie is interested in reading...

The Employees

Olga Ravn

The near-distant future. Millions of kilometres from Earth. The crew of the Six-Thousand Ship consists of those who were born, and those who were made. Those who will die, and those who will not. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them, and human and humanoid employees alike start aching for the same things: warmth and intimacy. Loved ones who have passed. Shopping and child-rearing. Our shared, far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory. Gradually, the crew members come to see their work in a new light, and each employee is compelled to ask themselves whether they can carry on as before and what it means to be truly living. Structured as a series of witness statements compiled by a workplace commission, Ravn's crackling prose is as chilling as it is moving, as exhilarating as it is foreboding. Wracked by all kinds of longing, The Employees probes into what it means to be human, emotionally and ontologically, while simultaneously delivering an overdue critique of a life governed by work and the logic of productivity.

aghie commented on Devin's update

Devin TBR'd a book

The Book of Elsewhere

Keanu Reeves

The legendary Keanu Reeves and inimitable writer China Miéville team up on this genre-bending epic of ancient powers, modern war, and an outcast who cannot die. A mind-blowing epic from Keanu Reeves and China Miéville, unlike anything these two genre-bending pioneers have created before, inspired by the world of the BRZRKR comic books She said, We needed a tool. So I asked the gods. There have always been whispers. Legends. The warrior who cannot be killed. Who’s seen a thousand civilizations rise and fall. He has had many names: Unute, Child of Lightning, Death himself. These days, he’s known simply as “B.” And he wants to be able to die. In the present day, a U.S. black-ops group has promised him they can help with that. And all he needs to do is help them in return. But when an all-too-mortal soldier comes back to life, the impossible event ultimately points toward a force even more mysterious than B himself. One at least as strong. And one with a plan all its own. In a collaboration that combines Miéville’s singular style and creativity with Reeves’s haunting and soul-stirring narrative, these two inimitable artists have created something utterly unique, sure to delight existing fans and to create scores of new ones.

aghie commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

emmareadsbooks

book toxicity

does anyone else find the booktok/bookstagram community to be super toxic?

-3

aghie commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

Moodreader25

Edited

Unfinished Reading goal.

How do yall feel about not reaching your reading goal? Do yall feel disencouraged? Or disappointed? Or are yall okay with it and feel fine? And Do yall try hard to reach it or are yall chill about reaching it?

And If it was the last month of the year and you had set your goal at lest say..... 50. And now its the middle of December and you have only read 35 book and know u won't reach 50 before the end of the year. Would u lower it to 40 for example? Or do u leave it unfinished at 50? Like, would u lower it to 40 just so u would be able to finish it or are u okay with not finishing it?

Me personally I'm chill about it. I dont feel disencouraged or sad. Maybe a bit disappointed that i didn't reach it but like, i wouldn't be sad about it. I dont really care about it that much.

About the lowering the gaol thing tho....im not sure. This is my first reading goal and i finished it but i think i wouldn't lower it. Maybe I'd lower it the next year but i wouldn't lower it at December just to count it as finished (tho its okay if u do. And since this is my fearst reading goal Maybe i would we'll see in the future😂)

Give me your thoughts!!

aghie commented on Selkis's update

Selkis TBR'd a book

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Mary Roach

Beloved, best-selling science writer Mary Roach’s classic, now with a new epilogue. For two thousand years, cadavers—some willingly, some unwittingly—have been involved in science’s boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They’ve tested France’s first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender confirmation surgery, cadavers have helped make history in their quiet way. Stiff investigates the strange lives of our bodies postmortem and answers the question: What should we do after we die?

aghie is interested in reading...

Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves

Sophie Gilbert

From Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of how early-aughts pop culture turned women and girls against each other—and themselves—with disastrous consequencesWhat happened to feminism in the 21st century? This question feels increasingly urgent after a period of reactionary cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement’s power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress. Sophie Gilbert, a staff writer at The Atlantic and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, provides one answer, identifying an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the energy of third-wave and “riot girrrl” feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Gilbert mines the darker side of nostalgia, training her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. And what she recounts is harrowing, from the leering aesthetic of American Apparel ads and explicit music videos to a burgeoning internet culture vicious towards women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren’t. Gilbert tracks many of the period’s dominant themes back to the explosion of internet porn, tracing its widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness. Gilbert paints a devastating picture of an era when a distinctly American confluence of excess, materialism, and power-worship collided with the culture’s reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and how it continues to shape our world today.

aghie made progress on...

The Everlasting

Alix E. Harrow

34%

aghie commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

jslynschapterverse

Edited

Ten Before The End 📚

I've been seeing this trend and thought it'd cool to see everyone's list here too. So what 10 books are you hoping to get to before 2026?

Mine:

We Have Always Lived in a Castle
The Second Death of Locke
The Red Parts
The Cemetery of Untold Stories
The Raven Scholar
The Writing Retreat
Secret History
Bunny
One of Us Knows
Jade City

Will I really get to these (as a semi-mood reader with a 9-5)? Fingers crossed, time will tell!

143

aghie is interested in reading...

Hazelthorn

C.G. Drews

CG Drews, acclaimed author of Don't Let the Forest In, returns with another deeply unsettling and yet hauntingly beautiful tale of murder and botanical body horror, perfect for fans of Andrew Joseph White and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Evander has lived like a ghost in the forgotten corners of the Hazelthorn estate ever since he was taken in by his reclusive billionaire guardian, Byron Lennox-Hall, when he was a child. For his safety, Evander has been given three ironclad rules to follow: He can never leave the estate. He can never go into the gardens. And most importantly, he can never again be left alone with Byron's charming, underachieving grandson, Laurie. That last rule has been in place ever since Laurie tried to kill Evander seven years ago, and yet somehow Evander is still obsessed with him. But when Byron suddenly dies, Evander inherits Hazelthorn’s immense gothic mansion and acres of sprawling grounds, along with the entirety of the Lennox-Hall family's vast wealth. There’s just one caveat: He must choose a new guardian from amongst Laurie's scheming, backstabbing relatives to help manage the estate until he turns eighteen. Except Evander's sure his guardian was murdered, and Laurie may be the only one who can help him find the killer before they come for Evander next. Perhaps even more concerning is how the overgrown garden is refusing to stay behind its walls, slipping its vines and spores deeper into the house with each passing day. As the family’s dark secrets unravel alongside the growing horror of their terribly alive, bloodthirsty garden, Evander needs to find out what he’s really inheriting before the garden demands to be fed once more.

aghie commented on a post

Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Emily Wilde, #1)

kaiaame

Edited

Thoughts from 15%

Is Emily Wilde autistic? I def jumped into this book not knowing what it is about TBH — all I know is I just like faeries!!

aghie TBR'd a book

A Rather Vengeful Accord

Danielle Knight

Enrol in this rivals-to-lovers dark academia fantasy of necromancers and gladiatorial combat against eldritch abominations, perfect for fans of Gideon the Ninth and A Deadly Education. St Penderghast's is an elite college for necromancers and gladiators, promising glory to those who can perfect the arcane arts of graving or spiring. Graving is the notorious act of raising the dead and shaping their decaying flesh into eldritch abominations. Spiring is divine-fuelled combat against undead horrors in grand arenas, thrilling crowds of thousands. Halen Kilchoir would kill (and resurrect) anything to study graving at St. Penderghast's under the guidance of her hero, master necromancer Mortritis. But Hal cannot enlist the only way she can secure admission is to enter a dangerous accord with her mortal rival, Alastair Faulton – accomplished spirer and the infuriating, formidable exiled scion of the great Faulton dynasty. If they team up as spirer gladiators, fighting gruesome creatures in a cut-throat competition, they could both earn their prestigious places at the college. As Hal and Alastair fight grisly monsters and ghastly peers side by side, mending their years-long feud in the resplendent halls of the college, Hal faces the horrors of graving, spiring, and the revolting prospect of a romance with her own nemesis.

aghie commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

Seaoffire

What is writing style you don't like?

Hello guys! Since I have started a new book few days ago, and I've found out that is written in the style that I dislike the most .. I am curious. What is the writing style that doesn't match with you guys? For me is first person pov with present tense. I don't really like first person pov in general, I don't know why 😭 If the writing style does not match with my taste it's super difficult for me to enjoy 100% the book even if the story is top tier. Am I the only one? 😢 What are your opinion?

(Disclaimer: I am not attacking any author, nor anyone who enjoys 1st person pov, just simply sharing my humble opinion)

Post from the The Everlasting forum

aghie

Thoughts from 30% (page 91)

My favorite thing so far has to be how much our narrator hates that fucking horse.

aghie commented on a post

kissandswoon

Thoughts from 5%

Alix E Harrow could describe a trip to the DMV and I would eat it up. I love her writing style.

aghie commented on a post

aghie

Thoughts from 23% (page 70)

We all debate about first person versus third person but can we aaaaaaaall agree that we hate the second person narration? I get the intention and I get the purpose but I'll just say it, I hate reading it 🙋

Post from the The Everlasting forum

aghie

Thoughts from 23% (page 70)

aghie commented on crybabybea's update

crybabybea TBR'd a book

The Everlasting

Alix E. Harrow

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Starling House, Alix E. Harrow, comes a moving and genre-defying adventure through time – as a reluctant lady knight and a not-so-heroic-historian will fight through time and space to rewrite their tragic fates . . . and finally reveal the truths hidden beneath the greatest legend ever told. It begins where it ends: beneath the yew tree – a girl not yet a knight, and a boy without a story. It is where she pulls a sword from the heartwood and becomes a legend. And it is where, more than a thousand years later, he will find her – and lose her – and find her – and lose her again. It is where a new story will be written – but whose will it be?

aghie commented on a post