crybabybea
i'm Leah (or bea) :) she/her; 26yo librarian from the US 🩷 aiming to never stop learning. chronic over-analyzer. big fan of crying 🎇🌻🌞🌊🐋
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Nerd Clusters? This is my jam heck yes this is a man of taste 🙂↕️🤌🏻🙂↕️
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Till Summer Do Us Part
Meghan Quinn
21crybabybea commented on a post
I can’t say I love the premise of this story: a woman needs to be married in the office in order to fit in? What century are we in? Because of this, the FMC lies and says she’s married when she’s actually divorced. Better to say nothing. She goes on to agree to a next day appointment with her boss’s partner, who is marriage counsellor, with her and her non-existent spouse. Again, what century are we in? A lot of readers find this set up funny, but I’m finding the humour rather cringey and forced. I hope this improves. I’ve often found romances can have cringey beginnings but manage to sort themselves out after that initial meet-cute.
Also have to say personally, I really don’t like Erin Mallon as a narrator. The other two narrators (MMC & marriage counsellor) aren’t that great either. I find EM tends to overact. This tends to backfire when the humour is forced. I usually don’t mind Teddy Hamilton, but I’m not vibing with him here. I’m trying to sort the narration out from the story. Unfortunately, Libby does not have an ebook copy of this so I can’t switch.
11crybabybea commented on crybabybea's update
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Universe Quest: Octavia Butler's Afro-Futuristic World
Champion: Finished 5 Side Quest books.
66crybabybea commented on bea.av's update
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Summer 2026 Readalong
Read at least 1 book in the Summer 2026 Readalong.
4crybabybea commented on crybabybea's update
crybabybea started reading...
Things in Nature Merely Grow
Yiyun Li
3crybabybea started reading...
Things in Nature Merely Grow
Yiyun Li
3crybabybea commented on crybabybea's update
crybabybea started reading...
Till Summer Do Us Part
Meghan Quinn
21crybabybea started reading...
Till Summer Do Us Part
Meghan Quinn
21crybabybea commented on beccajorobado's update
beccajorobado is interested in reading...
The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
Amia Srinivasan
2crybabybea commented on a post from the Founder Announcements forum
Last quarter, we trialed a new way to create Quests. Lists were nominated by Pagebound Royalty, the entire community voted, and 3 Quests inspired by 3 winning Lists were created.
It’s time to do it again 🎉 How this will work:
- Royalty members can nominate a List (their own or any community List) that would make a great starting point for a Quest. Royalty members will receive a notification today with a link to a form to fill out by EOD June 23rd to nominate. The form will include context about what makes for a great Quest. Folks who join Royalty through June 23rd will receive an email with a link to the form.
- The entire Pagebound community will then vote on which nominated Lists will inspire Quests. Everyone will receive a notification on June 24th with a link to vote.
- The creators of 3 winning Lists will be emailed and can accept/reject.
- If they accept, we will create a Quest inspired by their List, adapting the title & book list if necessary to fit Quest guidelines (for example, if a List has 20 books, we will reduce it to 15 for a Side Quest; if a List includes all 7 books of a series, we would put book 1).
We will be introducing another avenue to Quest creation in the fall: community-voted User of the Month (exact language TBD). The entire PB community can nominate a user they believe embodies PB values. The user with the most nominations will be awarded a badge and the ability to create 1 Quest.
The community-voted List winners and future Users of the Month will be listed as the Quest creator, and for Main Quests, this means they’ll be able to add new releases over time (capped at 100 books). The evergreen nature of Main Quests ensures their relevancy for many years to come, but of course, that’s a big commitment to ask of a Quest creator, so Jennifer & I are always available to take over curation if the original creator becomes inactive.
Looking forward to seeing the wonderful Lists that get nominated!
Jennifer & Lucy
95crybabybea commented on crybabybea's update
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Universe Quest: Octavia Butler's Afro-Futuristic World
Champion: Finished 5 Side Quest books.
66crybabybea commented on crybabybea's review of Survivor
Even Butler's "worst" book is thought-provoking and shrewd in such a specific Butler way.
I definitely see why she pulled this one from publication and why she wasn't as proud of it as her other works. The plot and characters are frankly derivative and feel overdone, especially during the era of classic sci-fi. However, I think she doesn't give herself enough credit for just how good she is at exploring deeper, darker topics even when the form feels basic.
Alanna is a fascinating character, though certainly not the most interesting in the Patternist series. She feels very similar to Anyanwu, but what was most compelling to me was her special position in the middle of warring factions and colonist Missionaries. Because of her upbringing, her adaptability makes her powerful, but ethically unstable.
Alanna is someone who can read and adapt to power instantly, which brings up interesting questions about the line between resistance and assimilation. Her positionality makes her an intriguing, complicated character, and her stubborn insistence on survival by any means necessary truly represents the novel's title while also feeling like a continuation of the headstrong leads of the previous books.
Butler challenges the "us vs them" of traditional sci-fi narratives via Alanna's adaptability and the deconstruction of normative boundaries. While conventional space colonist metaphors can feel heavy-handed and politically moderate, Butler focuses the narrative on the intimacy of relational politics. There's such an interesting irony following the Missonaries and their misguided idea of supremacy, watching them cling to their "mission," dehumanizing the Kohn as brainless savages even as they are being used as pawns in a war larger than themselves.
As in every Butler book, everything is packed with meaning, and every symbol can be expanded in a million different ways. Most compelling were the topics of addiction as population control, the pitfalls of anti-hierarchical resistance, and how alternatives to systems of oppression can still become oppressive if they do not actually solve the practical problems of violence and care. As always, Butler is endlessly skeptical of systems that claim to be liberatory without first doing the work of imagining what liberation actually looks like.
Survivor also provides an important stepping stone after Mind of My Mind, which gives a voice back to the oppressed people of the Patternist world. There are some gripping parallels between the escape of the Missionaries from the Patternist-ruled Earth and the legacy of slavery in the United States by asking questions about the inheritance of oppression and examining whether people can ever truly be free of domination. I only wish Butler was able to revisit the book and treat it with the care she clearly believed it deserved.
4crybabybea commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
i've been using this platform for many many months now and have participated in many a readalong, and so i want to ask everyone else. what is your favourite book that you've read thanks to the readalong choices of the past and present?
i've participated in winter 2026, spring 2026 and summer 2026. out of all of the books i've read for it, my favourite of them all so far is when we lost our heads by heather o'neil. i can't wait to see your choices!
43crybabybea wrote a review...
Even Butler's "worst" book is thought-provoking and shrewd in such a specific Butler way.
I definitely see why she pulled this one from publication and why she wasn't as proud of it as her other works. The plot and characters are frankly derivative and feel overdone, especially during the era of classic sci-fi. However, I think she doesn't give herself enough credit for just how good she is at exploring deeper, darker topics even when the form feels basic.
Alanna is a fascinating character, though certainly not the most interesting in the Patternist series. She feels very similar to Anyanwu, but what was most compelling to me was her special position in the middle of warring factions and colonist Missionaries. Because of her upbringing, her adaptability makes her powerful, but ethically unstable.
Alanna is someone who can read and adapt to power instantly, which brings up interesting questions about the line between resistance and assimilation. Her positionality makes her an intriguing, complicated character, and her stubborn insistence on survival by any means necessary truly represents the novel's title while also feeling like a continuation of the headstrong leads of the previous books.
Butler challenges the "us vs them" of traditional sci-fi narratives via Alanna's adaptability and the deconstruction of normative boundaries. While conventional space colonist metaphors can feel heavy-handed and politically moderate, Butler focuses the narrative on the intimacy of relational politics. There's such an interesting irony following the Missonaries and their misguided idea of supremacy, watching them cling to their "mission," dehumanizing the Kohn as brainless savages even as they are being used as pawns in a war larger than themselves.
As in every Butler book, everything is packed with meaning, and every symbol can be expanded in a million different ways. Most compelling were the topics of addiction as population control, the pitfalls of anti-hierarchical resistance, and how alternatives to systems of oppression can still become oppressive if they do not actually solve the practical problems of violence and care. As always, Butler is endlessly skeptical of systems that claim to be liberatory without first doing the work of imagining what liberation actually looks like.
Survivor also provides an important stepping stone after Mind of My Mind, which gives a voice back to the oppressed people of the Patternist world. There are some gripping parallels between the escape of the Missionaries from the Patternist-ruled Earth and the legacy of slavery in the United States by asking questions about the inheritance of oppression and examining whether people can ever truly be free of domination. I only wish Butler was able to revisit the book and treat it with the care she clearly believed it deserved.
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