Neil Gaiman, as a person, sucks. I suggest looking up the allegations on your own. Having said that, there are some misconceptions I would like to clear up. (1) There is a difference between a book being corrupted because an author wrote it and influenced by the author who wrote it. Avoiding the book "because Neil Gaiman, the horrible person, wrote it" is invalid (edit: to me, please block me if you disagree). I believe that as long as you don't monetarily support an author, there is nothing moral or immoral about reading something by a particular author. However, dropping the book "because it reads exactly how you think it would with the information that Neil Gaiman is a horrible person" IS a valid reason to drop the book. When you get annoyed by tropes and cliches that you would associate with someone who has done the things Gaiman has done, that's when you stop. If you are already familiar with all of the warning signs, then who am I to tell you anything.
(2) For the same reasons you may read Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, you may read Neil Gaiman's books or Joanne Rowling's books. What were the warning signs? How can we avoid ever making someone like that popular? Are there any similar current authors? Do we have friends that sound similar? What can we do that we didn't do to prevent Neil Gaiman's situation from happening? How can we help victims? How can we support them? How can we empower them? Just digest that. I don't think not reading Gaiman's books will ever be enough morally. Gaiman should not be the center of these situations: The victims should be. I think we should be investing in solutions or preventative measures that stop these sorts of things from happening. How can we help the victims now? Why should Neil Gaiman's negative punishment be our focus and not the victim's negative and/or positive reward? By which I mean, how can we make their pain go away or enrich their lives? (3) If we sequester all the good books written by awful people into the darkness, we doom most good books to be written by bad people; bad people will be the only ones who are willing to read and learn from everything. Read the book. Learn from it. Make something better. EDIT: I have written this post as a kind way to fix my feed. Someone mentioned that they get scared that someone blocked them and they don't know why. I feel like blocking people over this is a bit mean but this way you know that fundamentally we disagree and that is why my comments don't show up! And I wrote this post so I know why as well. If you disagree with me, PLEASE block me because I am tired of seeing this idea that you should never ever read anything written by a bad person. Or you could enlighten me. Maybe I am not seeing things properly. I suspect I might have some irrationality somewhere in this post. I am very open to changing my mind on this.

I wanna start off by saying im aware PageBound is focusing on genre specific quests rather than universe/author ones and that the existing ones are quite old. This is just for fun and im curious to see what others think 🤭

Hypothetically if you were able to create a universe/author specific quest right now, which would you choose and why? The more niche and unique, the better! And ofcourse as a bonus, what badge should such quest have? :0

Im honestly unsure myself, as some authors have books that are unconnected and won’t fit nicely in a quest and some universes are so small they’ll barely fill up a side quest 😩 looking forward to seeing yall’s ideas ✨

How is everyone else deciding how to place your votes? I wanted to vote for everything, so I gave myself the rule that I could only vote for one thing in a category to help narrow it down. I also voted for two queer lists on principle. Even then it was so difficult :(

I'm so excited to see the new quests come out; it's going to feel like Christmas morning!

Europe is currently in a heatwave, and I am suffering. I‘m on medication that makes me a lot more sensitive to heat already, but we also don‘t have AC and my room has three outer walls, meaning I am being baked alive.

So far I got through it by just chilling, eating ice cream, and reading a lot (goals) but yesterday I had a lot to do running across town, got no rest, and got myself a giant headache because of heat exhaustion, and my eyes are incredidibly dry because I slept in front of a fan (?), so no more reading😤

So I have two questions:

1. Does anyone who is more used to heat have any advice for cooling down and keeping the body functioning? Neither me nor the infrastructure is prepared for heat, and it is awful☹️
2. Any recommendations for easy, not complicated but interesting audiobooks (or podcasts (this is how you know i‘m desperate)) for me to follow as I wallow?

There may be better words for these characters, but I'm thinking of side characters like:

• Caz in The Spellshop
• Calcifer in Howl's Moving Castle
• Jiji in Kiki's Delivery Service
• Moggett in Sabriel

Or even pets like Old Dan and Little Ann in Where the Red Fern Grows.

Characters that are pets or something like familiars that you grow to like or become attached to over the course of a book. Who are some of your favorites? I enjoyed all of the above and they're the ones that came to mind when I was thinking about this (I finished The Spellshop not long ago, so Caz was an easy one).