bexfiles

upstate NY | early childhood educator | free palestine 🇵🇸

6345 points

0% overlap

My Taste

Reading...

19%

The Mercy of Gods (The Captive's War, #1)

41%

30%

45%

22%

Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

43%

13%

20%

bexfiles commented on a post

bexfiles

Thoughts from 29% (page 90)

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The Compound

Aisling Rawle

Love Island meets The Hunger Games in this must-talk-about-it read, as bingeable as the best reality TV. Lily—a bored, beautiful twenty-something—wakes up on a remote desert compound, alongside nineteen other contestants competing on a massively popular reality show. To win, she must outlast her housemates to stay in the Compound the longest, while competing in challenges for luxury rewards like champagne and lipstick, plus communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door. Cameras are catching all her angles, good and bad, but Lily has no desire to leave: why would she, when the world outside is falling apart? As the competition intensifies, intimacy between the players deepens, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between desire and desperation. When the unseen producers raise the stakes, forcing contestants into upsetting, even dangerous situations, the line between playing the game and surviving it begins to blur. If Lily makes it to the end, she’ll receive prizes beyond her wildest dreams—but what will she have to do to win? Addictive and prescient, The Compound is an explosive debut from a major new voice in fiction and will linger in your mind long after the game ends

Post from the Wild Dark Shore forum

bexfiles

Thoughts from 29% (page 90)

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13h

Land

Maggie O'Farrell

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The award-winning, bestselling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait returns with a soaring historical novel set in Ireland in the years before and after the Great Hunger. “A breathtaking hymn to the sanctity of natural spaces, operating on timescales both intimate and geological. I finished Land moved not only by the vivid lives of its human characters, but the thrumming, gorgeous presence of its mosses, waters, winds, and skies.” —Daniel Mason, author of North Woods On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster. The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is unexpectedly sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and the lives of those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás, and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping and get them both home? Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away. As spellbinding and varied as the landscape that inspired it, Land is, above all, a story of survival, for our times and for all time.

bexfiles is interested in reading...

13h

Into the Blue: A Love Story

Emma Brodie

From the award-winning author of Songs in Ursa Major comes an epic, decade-spanning love story that blazes through the worlds of acting and comedy, and charts a connection so powerful it might just break space and time itself. In the summer of 2000, AJ Graves dreams of writing for SNL; instead, she’s stuck working in a video rental store, with slim odds of escaping her Massachusetts small town and large family. Then in walks Noah Drew, the enigmatic and intense scion of the Drew acting dynasty, and her life changes forever. Despite wildly different upbringings, the two forge a deep, cosmic bond first as friends, then as acting partners—until one day, Noah disappears without a word. Seven years later in New York City, AJ is shocked to find herself cast in the same intergalactic TV production as Noah, by then a well-known Hollywood heartthrob. As their on-screen characters grow closer every day, the lines between reality and acting begin to blur. Unable to stay away from each other, AJ and Noah are forced to confront the truth of what happened years ago—and the devastating secret that will send their lives careening apart, even as fate continues to draw them together. Blending unforgettable characters, explosive chemistry, and devastating emotion, Into the Blue is a journey unlike any other—one that asks: What does it mean to diverge from the script to forge your own story?

bexfiles commented on bexfiles's update

bexfiles made progress on...

20h

Wild Dark Shore

Charlotte McConaghy

45%

bexfiles made progress on...

20h

Wild Dark Shore

Charlotte McConaghy

45%

bexfiles commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

20h

CerriannReads

BookTok or Bookstagram

Which is your favourite? I have been on BookTok over a year now and really love it. Started my Bookstagram a few days ago and just not feeling the same. Which is your favourite and why?

bexfiles commented on a post

21h

mrshuisman

Thoughts from 20% (page 60)

I keep getting “White Blank Space” by Mumford and Sons in my head whenever I read a bit. Anyone else?

bexfiles commented on a post

21h

patheticnoodle

Thoughts and speculations from 17% (putting it under spoiler because I'm not sure if I'm onto something)

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Wild Dark Shore

Charlotte McConaghy

13%

bexfiles commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

LivMayRead

A bad reading year, fighting a reading slump and The Murderbot diaries related recs.

Every time I begin to get in a reading slump a write here and suddenly I am finishing one book after another. At this point, it is my superstition.

So, it's been a bad year when it comes to reading for me. I am not reading as much as I wish I was, regardless of the fact I had a lot of time last month. Not even a really anticipated reread of my favorite book has been able to actually keep me hooked. I have been dealing with that feeling of wanting to read but failing, you know? This whole reading slump also made me a bit apprehensive of reading some books I know I might like because I have a feeling that my terrible mood won't allow me to actually enjoy them. Plus, I have been DNFing so many books in a row, that I might end up going into these reads with an unfair mindset. I might taint my experience with my terrible mood lol.

As someone does, I ran into the arms of that one series that always saves me, in my case, "The Murderbot Diaries" (I hope it works). And that brought me to the question: Are there any equivalents to The MBD in other genres? Like something with adventures and fun characters, short but not a stand-alone. I want something that will capture me in the first book but not make me feel like I am abandoning a story in the middle of the climax because I might not immediately pick up the next volume.I am already in the middle of a bunch of series that I can't bring myself to continue because there is a huge chance I might drop the book in the middle of it.

I am sure you guys know what I mean. If you know of anything like that, please feel free to drop them here. I have a vague memory of someone comparing "Someone You can build a nest in" to "The Murderbot diaries", saying it gives similar vibes. Let's see, probably, at some point. I FEEL IN THE PURGATORY waiting for something to click so I can go back to devouring books.

Also, tell me your slump saver book/series. I would love to know.

bexfiles commented on a post

hotgosss

Thoughts from 4% (page 13)

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The Idiot

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Returning to Russia from a sanitarium in Switzerland, the Christ-like epileptic Prince Myshkin finds himself enmeshed in a tangle of love, torn between two women—the notorious kept woman Nastasya and the pure Aglaia—both involved, in turn, with the corrupt, money-hungry Ganya. In the end, Myshkin’s honesty, goodness, and integrity are shown to be unequal to the moral emptiness of those around him. In her revision of the Garnett translation, Anna Brailovsky has corrected inaccuracies wrought by Garnett’s drastic anglicization of the novel, restoring as much as possible the syntactical structure of the original story.

bexfiles commented on bexfiles's update

bexfiles started reading...

Wild Dark Shore

Charlotte McConaghy

A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon. Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back toward the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place. Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, the characters must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.

bexfiles started reading...

Wild Dark Shore

Charlotte McConaghy

bexfiles commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

MayMay

My weird reading rules 📚

Soooo, every time I finish a book, I have this rule that I can’t start another book that same day. I need to let the book sink in for a little while first. I have no idea when I started doing this, but it got me wondering: what are some of the weird or oddly specific rules you have for yourself when it comes to reading? 👀

bexfiles commented on a post

JerniganGirl

Thoughts from 95%

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bexfiles made progress on...

Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

Robin Wall Kimmerer

43%

bexfiles wrote a review...

The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

bexfiles

Aug 09, 2026

The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

2.5

Enjoyment: 2.0Quality: 4.0Characters: Plot: Audiobook: 3.0

✝️

🪢

🇺🇸

i picked this book up knowing a few things:

i, a queer nonbinary leftist millennial, raised catholic and now nonreligious, was likely outside of the intended audience for this book
this was written and published before trump’s second election, and that much has changed since
while my family has very much wrestled with and been fractured by the overt intermingling of religion and politics in the united states, we have long benefitted from a white, lower-to-middle class upbringing and many in my family have only recently had to begin reckoning with the implications of it with the rise of trump’s regime

with that being said, i think that this book was insightful in a lot of ways that i wasn’t expecting. while often frustrating to read, i was glad to have the pieces of the long-forming american evangelical puzzle connected if only so i could see the bigger picture of how exactly we got to this point. did i particularly enjoy reading it? not really. it was clearly written for evangelicals struggling with their fractured religion and reminding them that there are people trying to change things from the inside, despite the strength and longevity of the institutions.

however, i am glad to read from different perspectives and form my own opinions, especially when it’s something that is impacting my country and family so deeply. i did pass this recommendation along to my family members and maybe it will help them more than it helped me. i can definitely see the potential in it, i just didn’t particularly connect with it as i am pretty far outside the intended audience.

i would definitely recommend it to anyone who is wanting a different perspective or to do a bit of a deeper dive into the formation and persistence of the religious right in the US.

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