itsmal

i'm mal! 30s. they/them. when I'm not reading, I'm either walking my dogs or playing video games

409 points

0% overlap

My Taste

Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures (Zamonia, #3)

Heaven Official's Blessing: Tian Guan Ci Fu (Novel) Vol. 1

Reading...

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

Post from the Pagebound Club forum

10h

itsmal

reading & travel

when you guys take a book along for a trip or vacation, is it one you haven't read before or one that you have?

I'm going to be out of town for a few days and I don't anticipate having more down time than my short flights will grant. for that reason, I'm thinking of bringing a familiar title along. it'll be like traveling with a friend (:

itsmal wants to read...

15h

Black Friend: Essays

Ziwe Ziwe

From a rapidly rising comedy star, a bold, biting, and deeply hilarious takedown—and send-up—of our culture’s (mis)understanding of race Ziwe made a name for herself staring interviewees in the eye and asking: “How many Black friends do you have?” She’s an expert at making people squirm, coming right out and asking the tough questions about race and racism that our culture has made white people experts at dancing around. In The Book of Ziwe, she turns this incisive perspective on the culture at large, with the signature blend of devastating bluntness and incredible warmth that keeps her guests coming back. Throughout the book, Ziwe mixes bite-sized moments of insight with longer essays that take a range of forms, from serious distillations of cultural phenomena to a transcript of “A Conversation with a Cancelled White Person,” and even a Choose Your Own Adventure-style piece about navigating race in everyday life. Personal and funny, but also challenging and engaging, The Book of Ziwe tackles questions about race and racism head-on, approaching the issue in a manner that evokes the way it comes up in the real world—not through deliberate studies of history and theory, which are so important, but in an awkward conversation at a party or a yikes comment from a coworker in the break room. The book lives in the moment of discomfort that can be the most truly educational way of unlearning biases. Plus, like everything Ziwe does, it will startle you with how much it makes you laugh.

itsmal commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

kathytrithardt

Edited

Readers of the World, Unite!

I thought it would be kind of fun to see where in the world people are, and then folks can make friends with people from the same countries/ares (if they way, not pressure obviously).

I'll go first. I'm Canadian, and more specifically I am in British Columbia (Vancouver Island if you want to get fancy).

Try to find your country and join that thread!

Everyone else?

346

itsmal wants to read...

Bunny

Mona Awad

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and seem to move and speak as one. But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision. The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.

itsmal wants to read...

What Does Israel Fear From Palestine?

Raja Shehadeh

A poignant, incisive meditation on Israel’s longstanding rejection of peace, and what the war on Gaza means for Palestinian and Israeli futures.When apartheid in South Africa ended in 1994, dismantled by internal activism and global pressure, why did Israel continue to pursue its own apartheid policies against Palestinians? In keeping with a history of antagonism, the Israeli state accelerated the establishment of settlements in the Occupied Territories as extreme right-wing voices gained prominence in government, with comparatively little international backlash.Condensing this complex history into a lucid essay, Raja Shehadeh examines the many lost opportunities to promote a lasting peace and equality between Israelis and Palestinians. Since the creation of Israel in 1948, known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or catastrophe, each side’s perception of events has strongly diverged. What can this discrepancy tell us about Israel’s undermining of a two-state solution? And will the current genocide in Gaza finally mark a shift in the world’s response? With graceful, haunting prose, Shehadeh offers insights into a defining conflict that could yet be resolved.

itsmal commented on itsmal's update

itsmal completed their yearly reading goal of 20 books!

itsmal's 2025 Reading Challenge

18 of 20 read

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45

The Kamogawa Food Detectives (Kamogawa Food Detectives, #1)

Ghost In the Shell 2: Innocence: After the Long Goodbye

itsmal completed their yearly reading goal of 20 books!

itsmal's 2025 Reading Challenge

18 of 20 read

itsmal wants to read...

Angels Before Man

Rafael Nicolás

A queer retelling of Satan's fall that's part cozy coming of age and part fast-paced tragedy, with a little love story in between – In an eternal paradise, the most beautiful angel, Lucifer, struggles with shame, identity, and timidity, with little more than the desire to worship his creator. It isn't until the strongest angel, Michael, comes into his life that Lucifer learns to love himself. Along the way, their friendship begins to bloom into something else. Maybe the first romance in the history of everything. But this God is a jealous one, and maybe paradise is not paradise.

itsmal wants to read...

Water Moon

Samantha Sotto Yambao

A woman inherits a pawnshop where you can sell your regrets, and then embarks on a magical journey when a charming young physicist wanders into the shop, in this dreamlike and enchanting fantasy novel. On a backstreet in Tokyo lies a pawnshop, but not everyone can find it. Most will see a cozy ramen restaurant. And only the chosen ones—those who are lost—will find a place to pawn their life choices and deepest regrets. Hana Ishikawa wakes on her first morning as the pawnshop’s new owner to find it ransacked, the shop’s most precious acquisition stolen, and her father missing. And then into the shop stumbles a charming stranger, quite unlike its other customers, for he offers help instead of seeking it. Together, they must journey through a mystical world to find Hana’s father and the stolen choice—by way of rain puddles, rides on paper cranes, the bridge between midnight and morning, and a night market in the clouds. But as they get closer to the truth, Hana must reveal a secret of her own—and risk making a choice that she will never be able to take back.

itsmal wants to read...

The Hunger We Pass Down

Jen Sookfong Lee

Jordan Peele’s Us meets The School For Good Mothers in this horror-tinged intergenerational saga, as a single mother’s doppelganger forces her to confront the legacy of violence that has shaped every woman in their family. Single mother Alice Chow is drowning. With a booming online cloth diaper shop, her resentful teenage daughter Luna, and her screen-obsessed son Luca, Alice can never get everything done in a day. It’s all she can do to just collapse on the couch with a bottle of wine every night. It’s a relief when Alice wakes up one morning and everything has been done. The counters are clear, the kids’ rooms are tidy, orders are neatly packed and labeled. But no one confesses they’ve helped, and Alice doesn’t remember staying up late. Someone–or something–has been doing her chores for her. Alice should be uneasy, but the extra time lets her connect with her children and with her hard-edged mother, who begins to share their haunted family history from Alice’s great-grandmother, a comfort woman during WWII, through to Alice herself. But the family demons, both real and subconscious, are about to become impossible to ignore. Sharp and incisive, The Hunger We Pass Down traces the ways intergenerational trauma transforms from mother to daughter, and asks what it might take to break that cycle.

itsmal commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

cajungirlreads

Last - Now - Next

I absolutely LOVE doing this - it lets me see all kinds of things people have read, are reading and plan on reading. I get off work in an hour and I finished the book I was reading on shift tonight.

So. What I want to know is everyone's Last - Now - Next! I started another one right after, but I am a mood reader and have no idea what I am going to read next.. so I need ideas from you all with your answers!

Last - Fixiation of the Mind by Kira Stanely Now - Black Ties & White Lies by Kat Singleton Next - IDK lol. Maybe the 2nd in the series for my NOW book.

155

itsmal commented on Tobi2x4's update

Tobi2x4 earned a badge

Made for the Movies

Bronze: Finished 5 Main Quest books.

itsmal commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

untrustworthy

Peer Pressure / Recommendation Difficulties

Am I the only one who finds that the more someone wants me to read something, the harder it is to get myself to read it? Or the more people that recommend a book, the less interested I am??

I really hate that I am this way but it is out of my control. Is anyone else similar? How do you combat that so you can check out the things your friends love?

itsmal wants to read...

The Bewitching

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Three women in three different eras encounter danger and witchcraft in this eerie multigenerational horror saga from the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic.“Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches”: That was how Nana Alba always began the stories she told her great-granddaughter Minerva—stories that have stayed with Minerva all her life. Perhaps that’s why Minerva has become a graduate student focused on the history of horror literature and is researching the life of Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure author of macabre tales.In the course of assembling her thesis, Minerva uncovers information that reveals that Tremblay’s most famous novel, The Vanishing, was inspired by a true Decades earlier, during the Great Depression, Tremblay attended the same university where Minerva is now studying and became obsessed with her beautiful and otherworldly roommate, who then disappeared under mysterious circumstances.As Minerva descends ever deeper into Tremblay’s manuscript, she begins to sense that the malign force that stalked Tremblay and the missing girl might still walk the halls of the campus. These disturbing events also echo the stories Nana Alba told about her girlhood in 1900s Mexico, where she had a terrifying encounter with a witch.Minerva suspects that the same shadow that darkened the lives of her great-grandmother and Beatrice Tremblay is now threatening her own in 1990s Massachusetts. An academic career can be a punishing pursuit, but it might turn outright deadly when witchcraft is involved.

itsmal wants to read...

Dog Songs

Mary Oliver

A collection of new and favorite poems, celebrating the dogs that have enriched the poet’s world Beloved by her readers, special to the poet’s own heart, Mary Oliver’s dog poems offer a special window into her world. Dog Songs collects some of the most cherished poems together with new works, offering a portrait of Oliver’s relationship to the companions that have accompanied her daily walks, warmed her home, and inspired her work. To be illustrated with images of the dogs themselves, the subjects will come to colorful life here. These are poems of love and laughter, heartbreak and grief. In these pages we visit with old friends, including Oliver’s well-loved Percy, and meet still others. Throughout, the many dogs of Oliver’s life emerge as fellow travelers, but also as guides, spirits capable of opening our eyes to the lessons of the moment and the joys of nature and connection.Dog Songs is a testament to the power and depth of the human-animal exchange, from an observer of extraordinary vision.

itsmal commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

PagesOfEmma

Do you keep every book you read?

Physical book readers - I was chatting with some bookish friends and we were talking about managing shelf space.

Are you the type of reader to keep all your books, or do you unhaul? If you unhaul, do you do it as you read or do you do it maybe once a season?

How else do you manage your space?

itsmal commented on mintlemonade's update

mintlemonade earned a badge

Level 2

100 points

itsmal commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

crybabybea

games to play while listening to books?

i usually tandem read my books but sometimes i'd like to just put the audio on and keep myself busy. i've tried to play games while listening and it never seems to work, but maybe i'm picking the wrong games!

i like to play things like WoW but it takes way too much focus to listen to a book i've also tried "cozier" games like Stardew Valley and Fields of Mistria but i still seem to lose too much brainpower to the game to focus on the book the only one i've had success with is Powerwash Simulator lmaoooo but that one gets boring pretty quickly

any ideas? preferably something i can play on PC!!

itsmal commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

Sarnav

Hi everyone, newbie here :)

Found out on IG decided to check out immediately. Looks stylish and fun. Imported my data from GR. Easy to use so far. Can be more functions but I believe they work hard for Pagebound. So I have high hopes. Happy reading you all :)

itsmal commented on a List

Why is there a cowboy?

by ClutteredBookshelf

5 books

Books that are not westerns yet inexplicably include a cowboy in the cast.

🤠

🐎

🤨

The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, #2)

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