heloise9
825 points
0% overlap
My Taste
Reading...
49%
heloise9 is interested in reading...
8h
The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century
Ian Mortimer
The past is a foreign country: this is your guidebook. Take a step back into Ian Mortimer's guide and experience the middle ages like never before.
In this compelling volume, Medieval history expert Mortimer (The Fears of Henry IV) transports readers to jolly, squalid old England for a thorough survey of everyday 14th century life. Going beyond the "nasty, brutish and short" of it, Mortimer's immersive visitor's-guide approach to popular history gives readers a seamless sense of being there. The population is young-"Half of the population is aged twenty-one or less"-but incredibly diverse. The idea that social classes were distinct and few-fighters, prayers, and farmers-gets exploded in Mortimer's examination society and the Medieval character, including everything from humor and juggling to mariners to doctors. Mortimer even argues, convincingly, over relative standards of hygiene ("to regard a medieval kitchen as 'dirty' because it has not been wiped down with modern detergent is to apply our own standards inappropriately"). He also looks at the role of period's four greatest writers of the time , and reveals the horrors of contemporary medicine (with terrifying descriptions of the plague) and law (the outskirts of every town were decorated with the hanged corpses of minor criminals). Mortimer's toungue-in-cheek vistor's guide is an impressive accomplishment, turning 600 years of history transparent to give 21st century audiences a clear view on Medieval life.
0
0Reply
heloise9 commented on a post
9h
sashareads
Edited
Quest Recommendations
If you want to recommend a book for the quest, you’re in the right place - but please read this first. I’ll be using upvotes to gauge interest. Please avoid replying just to say you agree; it makes sorting much easier for me and for your fellow boundlings.
Upvoting/liking equals stating your agreement, in this case. Please do not downvote a book simply because you did not like it personally.💖
Important: a recommendation doesn’t guarantee the book will be added, even if it fits the criteria and has many upvotes.
Step One Make sure the book you want to recommend is fiction and fits under one or more of the following criteria:
Traveling back or forth in time: - a character intentionally travels to another time.
Person/people displaced in time: a character ends up in another time by accident and is stuck, trying (or having tried) to get back. The POV doesn’t have to be from the displaced character.
Time loop: same time period keeps repeating.
Time pocket: - a character spends meaningful time in a time pocket while real time is frozen or moves differently.
ALTERNATE REALITIES WILL NOT BE INCLUDED.
Step Two Check whether the book has already been recommended.
If it has, upvote the existing comment instead of adding a new one.
This helps keep everything tidy and makes it easier for everyone to navigate💖
Step Three If your book isn’t listed yet, leave a comment with: the title and author, and which criterion the book falls under.
Leave one comment per suggestion. Don’t be afraid of spamming the comment section - leave all the suggestions you’d like😍
Example: The Austen Affair by Madeline Bell – person/people displaced in time.
When will new books be added? I’ll try to add more books to the quest at least once every three months, but additions will mostly depend on relevant new releases.
Thank you so much!🥰
What types of books are currently being prioritized?
New releases
Books by BIPOC authors
Books by queer authors
Books with BIPOC representation
Books with queer representation
47
76Reply
heloise9 is interested in reading...
9h
The Austen Affair
Madeline Bell
Two feuding co-stars in a Jane Austen film adaptation accidentally travel back in time to the Regency Era in this delightfully clever and riotously funny debut
Tess Bright just scored her dream role starring in an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. It's not just the role of a lifetime, but it’s also her last chance to prove herself as a serious actress (no easy feat after being fired from her last TV gig) and more importantly, it’s her opportunity to honor her mom, who was the biggest fan of Jane Austen ever. But one thing is standing in Tess’s way—well, one very tall, annoyingly handsome person, actually: Hugh Balfour.
A serious British method actor, Hugh wants nothing to do with Tess (whose Teen Choice Awards somehow don’t quite compare to his BAFTA nominations). Hugh is a type-A, no-nonsense, Royal Academy prodigy, whereas Tess is big-hearted, a little reckless, and admittedly, kind of a mess. But the film needs chemistry—and Tess’s career depends on it.
Sparks fly, but not in the way Tess hoped, when an electrical accident sends the two feuding co-stars back in time to Jane Austen’s era. 200 years in the past with only each other to rely on, Tess and Hugh need to ad-lib their way through the Regency period in order to make it back home, and hopefully not screw up history along the way. But if a certain someone looks particularly dashing in those 19th century breeches…well, Tess won’t be complaining.
A wickedly funny, delightfully charming story, The Austen Affair is a tribute to Jane Austen, second chances, and love across the space-time continuum.
0
0Reply
heloise9 is interested in reading...
9h
Before the Coffee Gets Cold
Toshikazu Kawaguchi
What would you change if you could go back in time?
In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.
In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.
But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .
Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?
0
0Reply
heloise9 is interested in reading...
9h
The Vanishing Cherry Blossom Bookshop
Takuya Asakura
For fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold, What You Are Looking for Is In the Library, and Days at the Morisaki Bookshop comes an enchanting novel that will linger in your heart long after the last page is turned.
As the last petal falls, the final page is turned…
Welcome to The Cherry Blossom Bookshop, a haven for book lovers that only appears during the fleeting cherry blossom season. Nestled amidst the bloom of delicate petals, you’ll find a sanctuary for those burdened by regrets and past sorrows. Here, Sakura, the mysterious young owner, and her wise calico cat, Kobako, patiently await the arrival of souls in need of solace and healing.
Told over four seasons, each visitor to the bookshop holds a book that bridges their past and present, guiding them towards understanding and acceptance. Within the antique charm of the shop and the soothing aroma of freshly brewed coffee, Sakura and Kobako help their guests confront their lingering sadness through the power of stories, enabling them to move forward with renewed hope.
0
0Reply
heloise9 joined a quest
9h
The Kaleidoscope of Time: A Time Travel Quest ⏳🕰️🚪
🏆 // 678 joined
Not Joined
From stolen centuries to days that echo themselves, these books breathe time travel into the weave, unraveling the seams of time and lingering in the threads that slip free.
1
0Reply
heloise9 is interested in reading...
9h
New York 2140
Kim Stanley Robinson
It is 2140.
The waters rose, submerging New York City.
But the residents adapted and it remained the bustling, vibrant metropolis it had always been. Though changed forever.
Every street became a canal. Every skyscraper an island.
Through the eyes of the varied inhabitants of one building, Kim Stanley Robinson shows us how one of our great cities will change with the rising tides.
And how we too will change.
0
0Reply
heloise9 joined a quest
9h
A Quest For The Future: Climate Fiction ☀️🌍⛈️
🏆 // 481 joined
Not Joined
The climate is intrinsic to life on Earth. What happens when it changes? These books examine our reality and imagined futures, both dystopian and utopian, to offer us words of warning, but also hope.
1
0Reply
heloise9 is interested in reading...
1d
American Hagwon
Min Jin Lee
At last, the National Book Award finalist and NYT bestselling author of Pachinko returns with a breathtaking contemporary epic: Min Jin Lee has written a masterpiece by turns sweeping and intimate, one that reckons with ambition and moderation, lust and loyalty, personal dreams and familial duty. In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children—Bo, DH, and Mido—find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California—where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security. In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice—for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers—is a kind of prayer.
0
0Reply
heloise9 started reading...
2d
The Tapestry of Fate
Shannon Chakraborty
New York Times bestselling author Shannon Chakraborty sets sail into the second adventure of pirate Amina al-Sirafi as her quest to track down magical artifacts brings her to the island lair of a sorceress whose woven enchantments are impossible to flee.
Amina al-Sirafi thinks she’s struck gold. Tasked with hunting down arcane artifacts for the council of immortal peris, she can savor the occasional rollicking adventure on the high seas with her cherished criminal companions while still returning home to raise her beloved daughter, Marjana. But when Raksh, the spirit of discord with whom she is reluctantly wed, provokes the council’s wrath, Amina is charged with a seemingly impossible quest: steal a spindle capable of rewriting fate from a mysterious sorceress on an island no one can escape.
Forced to leave Marjana—who is increasingly frustrated at being peddled what are clearly lies about her mother’s life and her own past—Amina finds her mission almost immediately thrown into peril. But deadly storms, an erratic poison mistress, and old enemies are the least of her worries. For the peris’ story is unraveling, hinting at a far deadlier game whose rules Amina must swiftly puzzle out. A game that sets her against an adversary more cunning and powerful than she has ever faced.
A game that not everyone on her crew wants her to win.
0
0Reply
heloise9 finished a book
2d
A Conjuring of Light
Victoria Schwab
Witness the fate of beloved heroes - and enemies.
THE BALANCE OF POWER HAS FINALLY TIPPED...
The precarious equilibrium among four Londons has reached its breaking point. Once brimming with the red vivacity of magic, darkness casts a shadow over the Maresh Empire, leaving a space for another London to rise.
WHO WILL CRUMBLE?
Kell - once assumed to be the last surviving Antari - begins to waver under the pressure of competing loyalties. And in the wake of tragedy, can Arnes survive?
WHO WILL RISE?
Lila Bard, once a commonplace - but never common - thief, has survived and flourished through a series of magical trials. But now she must learn to control the magic, before it bleeds her dry. Meanwhile, the disgraced Captain Alucard Emery of the Night Spire collects his crew, attempting a race against time to acquire the impossible.
WHO WILL TAKE CONTROL?
And an ancient enemy returns to claim a crown while a fallen hero tries to save a world in decay.
0
0Reply
heloise9 finished a book
3d
The Gate of the Feral Gods
Matt Dinniman
New Achievement! Total, Utter Failure.
You failed a quest less than five minutes after you received it. Now that’s talent.
A floating fortress occupied by warrior gnomes. A castle made of sand. A derelict submarine guarded by malfunctioning machines. A haunted crypt surrounded by lethal traps.
It was supposed to be easy. One bubble. Four castles. Fifteen days. Capture each one, and the stairwell is unlocked.
Here's the thing. It's never easy. Carl and his team can't go it alone. Not this time. They must rely on the help of the low-level, I-can't-believe-these-idiots-are-still-alive crawlers trapped in the bubble with them. But can they be trusted?
Welcome, Crawler. Welcome to the fifth floor of the dungeon.
0
0Reply
heloise9 finished a book
3d
Among the Wildflowers: A Greyfin Bay Novel
Anita Kelly
Owning a farm is Emerson King’s lifelong dream come true—even if achieving it has cost him his marriage.
Now, a year after his divorce, Short King Farms is in dire financial straits. One bright spot on the horizon? Money from his friends Ben and Alexei, who are renting out the farm for their wedding. But even that might be in jeopardy: the farm is a mess, not at all ready for a hundred person wedding. Emerson needs help, desperately—if only he could afford it.
Luca Yaeger has spent his life as a fisherman, with only one he’s never actually wanted to be one. What he truly wants to do is write, but all that's brought him is pain. When he receives his hundredth rejection for his novel, he decides it's time to give up the ghost for good. But first, he heads to the local brewery for a small pity party.
There he finds a sad farmer—and an opportunity for a new life.
In exchange for room and board, Luca offers to work at Short King Farms for free so Emerson can better prepare for the wedding. The farm is beautiful, the fresh start Luca has been looking for—even if his growing feelings for his new boss are useless, being that Emerson is definitely still in love with his ex.But when it comes to all the stress Emerson is still under—maybe Luca could help with that in other ways, too…
As the wedding approaches, Luca and Emerson grow more and more attached. But when the past comes calling, they must decide what the future holds—for the farm and for themselves—after the final wedding bells toll.
Among the Wildflowers is a gentle gay small-town romance that explores the costs and rewards of following our dreams, and the messiness in expanding our expectations of love.
0
0Reply
heloise9 started reading...
4d
The Gate of the Feral Gods
Matt Dinniman
New Achievement! Total, Utter Failure.
You failed a quest less than five minutes after you received it. Now that’s talent.
A floating fortress occupied by warrior gnomes. A castle made of sand. A derelict submarine guarded by malfunctioning machines. A haunted crypt surrounded by lethal traps.
It was supposed to be easy. One bubble. Four castles. Fifteen days. Capture each one, and the stairwell is unlocked.
Here's the thing. It's never easy. Carl and his team can't go it alone. Not this time. They must rely on the help of the low-level, I-can't-believe-these-idiots-are-still-alive crawlers trapped in the bubble with them. But can they be trusted?
Welcome, Crawler. Welcome to the fifth floor of the dungeon.
0
0Reply
heloise9 started reading...
4d
Among the Wildflowers: A Greyfin Bay Novel
Anita Kelly
Owning a farm is Emerson King’s lifelong dream come true—even if achieving it has cost him his marriage.
Now, a year after his divorce, Short King Farms is in dire financial straits. One bright spot on the horizon? Money from his friends Ben and Alexei, who are renting out the farm for their wedding. But even that might be in jeopardy: the farm is a mess, not at all ready for a hundred person wedding. Emerson needs help, desperately—if only he could afford it.
Luca Yaeger has spent his life as a fisherman, with only one he’s never actually wanted to be one. What he truly wants to do is write, but all that's brought him is pain. When he receives his hundredth rejection for his novel, he decides it's time to give up the ghost for good. But first, he heads to the local brewery for a small pity party.
There he finds a sad farmer—and an opportunity for a new life.
In exchange for room and board, Luca offers to work at Short King Farms for free so Emerson can better prepare for the wedding. The farm is beautiful, the fresh start Luca has been looking for—even if his growing feelings for his new boss are useless, being that Emerson is definitely still in love with his ex.But when it comes to all the stress Emerson is still under—maybe Luca could help with that in other ways, too…
As the wedding approaches, Luca and Emerson grow more and more attached. But when the past comes calling, they must decide what the future holds—for the farm and for themselves—after the final wedding bells toll.
Among the Wildflowers is a gentle gay small-town romance that explores the costs and rewards of following our dreams, and the messiness in expanding our expectations of love.
0
0Reply
heloise9 finished a book
5d
The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook
Matt Dinniman
Welcome to the Gun Show!
The top ten list is populated. The sponsorship program is open. The difficulty is ramping up. The first three floors were nothing compared to what Carl and Donut now face.
The Iron Tangle. An impossibly-complicated subway system built out of the world's subterranean railway systems, all combined and then tied together into a knot. Up is down. Down is up. Close is far. The cars are filled with monsters, the railway stations are less than safe, and the exit is always just a few stops away.
But there is hope. For the first time, the crawlers are all working together. The loot is better than ever. And the secret to unraveling it all may be hidden in the pages of a seemingly-useless book. Welcome, crawlers. Welcome to the fourth floor of the dungeon.
0
0Reply
heloise9 started reading...
6d
The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook
Matt Dinniman
Welcome to the Gun Show!
The top ten list is populated. The sponsorship program is open. The difficulty is ramping up. The first three floors were nothing compared to what Carl and Donut now face.
The Iron Tangle. An impossibly-complicated subway system built out of the world's subterranean railway systems, all combined and then tied together into a knot. Up is down. Down is up. Close is far. The cars are filled with monsters, the railway stations are less than safe, and the exit is always just a few stops away.
But there is hope. For the first time, the crawlers are all working together. The loot is better than ever. And the secret to unraveling it all may be hidden in the pages of a seemingly-useless book. Welcome, crawlers. Welcome to the fourth floor of the dungeon.
0
0Reply
heloise9 finished a book
6d
World's Okayest Oracle (Reluctantly) Seeks Demon
Olivia Dade
An oracle who can see the future teams up with the far-too-hot demon from her past to avert catastrophe, in this steamy paranormal romance from the USA Today bestselling author of Zomromcom.
Gwen Wexloff might be able to see the future, but not when it matters. Her visions invariably involve piddling issues, which means—unlike most oracles—she’s spent her life predicting for everyday humans instead of international power brokers. After a clutch of brain-slurping zombies escapes from their walled-off compound, though, Gwen experiences the first genuinely world-altering vision of her life . . . and now she needs help.
Unfortunately, that help comes from Hugh Blacke, the same starchy (but annoyingly cute) demon who watched her bomb her oracle verification test years ago. To Gwen's dismay, the two of them will need to work together to unravel the deadly conspiracy behind the zombie breach, despite their complicated past and the secrets they’re keeping.
Even with her newfound power, she couldn't have foreseen how quickly they'd both want more than a simple partnership. But the clock is ticking—and with the fate of humanity at stake, Gwen and Hugh will have to decide how much they’re willing to risk for an unexpected, passionate love...and a future together that might prove very short indeed.
0
0Reply
heloise9 made progress on...
1w
World's Okayest Oracle (Reluctantly) Seeks Demon
Olivia Dade
94%
0
0Reply
heloise9 started reading...
1w
World's Okayest Oracle (Reluctantly) Seeks Demon
Olivia Dade
An oracle who can see the future teams up with the far-too-hot demon from her past to avert catastrophe, in this steamy paranormal romance from the USA Today bestselling author of Zomromcom.
Gwen Wexloff might be able to see the future, but not when it matters. Her visions invariably involve piddling issues, which means—unlike most oracles—she’s spent her life predicting for everyday humans instead of international power brokers. After a clutch of brain-slurping zombies escapes from their walled-off compound, though, Gwen experiences the first genuinely world-altering vision of her life . . . and now she needs help.
Unfortunately, that help comes from Hugh Blacke, the same starchy (but annoyingly cute) demon who watched her bomb her oracle verification test years ago. To Gwen's dismay, the two of them will need to work together to unravel the deadly conspiracy behind the zombie breach, despite their complicated past and the secrets they’re keeping.
Even with her newfound power, she couldn't have foreseen how quickly they'd both want more than a simple partnership. But the clock is ticking—and with the fate of humanity at stake, Gwen and Hugh will have to decide how much they’re willing to risk for an unexpected, passionate love...and a future together that might prove very short indeed.
0
0Reply
