jenniferPagebound
co-founder of Pagebound 🖤
45043 points
jenniferPagebound started reading...
A Master of Djinn (Dead Djinn Universe, #1)
P. Djèlí Clark
0jenniferPagebound commented on a post
So I learned that the US version of Medea by Rosie Hewlett is titled The Witch of Colchis - these are separate books in PB which makes total sense, but could we add The Witch of Colchis to the quest too, please?
4jenniferPagebound commented on a feature request
5
“Owned” types
A way to distinguish if you own a book digitally, physically, or on audio (or more than one)?
jenniferPagebound commented on a feature request
26
Create activity cards for recommendations
I thought it might be fun if the app generated activity updates when we make a recommendation under a book. (As with my previous feature request for batch updates, these could also be rolled into one daily update so nobody's feeling spammed.)
Fun because: I feel like the recommendation area is an often-underutilized part of the app. Getting updates about recommendations from people we follow could not only improve discoverability for specific books that come across our feed but encourage more people to use this feature in general, both to make recommendations and to check for recommendations under books they enjoyed.
jenniferPagebound commented on a feature request
6
Add groups within tbr, interested and so on
This might not necessarily be a useful feature for the majority of Pagebounders, but I was wondering if there could be added a possibility to group the books within the “tbr”, “interested” and so on. I assume I could create my own shelves for this purpose (or even lists), but if more people are interested in adding this feature, I’d find it rather practical. This way I would be able to sort my reading schedule by topics as my tbr grows rather uncontrollably 😄
Thank you in advance for considering it!
jenniferPagebound commented on a feature request
2
Default format
I mostly read in digital and it's really annoying to go back to old reads and edit it to digital for stats sake. Also remembering to check digital every time I start a book is tedious.
(By mostly I mean 90% digital)
jenniferPagebound commented on a feature request
17Categorisation Under Community Recs
When I'm looking for a book rec (or giving one), there's usually something specific I want. I think it would be very helpful if the community recs section can reflect that through broad categories or tags for the books listed there.
Examples: genre/premise, writing/style, overall vibes, themes, character archetypes, etc.
I actually think it would be super cool if we could also have more freeform categories like "twist you won't see coming" or "everyone is just unhinged" but I understand that this kind of thing would be harder to push out on a broader scale.
Another reason I'm putting in this suggestion is because I've seen completely unrelated books being recommended, which is unhelpful. This system might encourage people to be a bit more mindful with their recs.
Thank you for all the good work you do, J+L. And for always giving us an avenue to give feedback and help build the community.
jenniferPagebound commented on a feature request
5
customise reading challenge preview on profile
sorry if this has already been suggested, i couldn't find it 😅 i was wondering if there could be a way to customise/select the books featured in this preview on a person's profile? this preview shows some of my lowest rated books (a 1*, 1.5* and a 2* rating) and none of my highest rated ones, i'd love a way to pick/choose my faves so it's slightly more representative of my taste!
jenniferPagebound TBR'd a book
Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson
Tourmaline Tourmaline
0jenniferPagebound commented on crybabybea's review of Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson
At times idyllic and supremely dramatized, often vibrant and jubilant, Marsha is a biography that refuses the usual tragedy-centered framing of historical queer and trans figures, but sometimes replaces tragedy with sainthood.
Marsha was often called Saint Marsha for her radical community care and protection, and as such, Marsha toes the line of hagiography. For some reason though, I can't bring myself to totally hate it.
Marsha is someone who is often defined by her suffering, often pushed into the role of martyrdom. Her legacy is about her activism, yes, but also the life that inevitably led her to activism: her poverty, her struggle, her death. In Marsha, Tourmaline is determined instead to center Marsha's joy.
There are plenty of books that focus on the systemic injustice dealt to trans people, that focus on oppression and violence and the more horrifying statistics and history of queer and trans people. So, much like Marsha's insistence on choosing radical joy and hope in the face of violence, Tourmaline carries that legacy through her own writing.
As much as Marsha is frequently defined by Stonewall and her struggle, it's important not to swing the pendulum too far into the corporatized smiling saint of pride-month inclusion, detached from the sex work, poverty, violence, and survival that made up so much of her life. It's a careful line to walk, to allow someone's life the freedom to be characterized as effervescent and liberated when they faced so much violence and pain.
Tourmaline's framing shines when it leans into more modern radical movements. Particularly, the passages that focused on Marsha's disabilities and placed her within the modern conversation of disability justice and crip care were incredibly expansive in how they painted Marsha's impact as so much larger than we usually see.
However, there are moments where Tourmaline's focus on joy slides into liberalism in a way that sometimes felt disproportionate to Marsha's (and by extension, STAR's) radical legacy. The writing style dips into juvenility, and unfortunately, repeatedly felt like reading a storytime picture book about Marsha rather than a biography that reckons with her flawed and oftentimes painful life.
If anything is sanitized, it's usually due to the flowery writing and saintly elevation favored by Tourmaline that paints every modern reformist change as a radical victory and every moment in Marsha's life as profound and beatific. This framing risks domesticating Marsha's more radical politics, and risks turning her into a figure who can only signify grace, resilience, and radiance.
The real Marsha is more politically valuable than the beatified Marsha precisely because her life does not reduce cleanly into either martyrdom or bliss, revolutionary icon or saint, victim or liberated ancestor. To trust the contradictions is to honor the reality of STAR's politics: radical, survivalist, messy, and yes, joyful.
It is radical and revolutionary to choose care when systems of oppression are built upon isolation and competition, to choose self-expression when those systems insist upon conformity and assimilation. The choice to center joy is not foolish, it is definitively political. It is a response to a historical record that often preserves people through death, scandal, and spectacle. But joy and self-expression are not the full picture of revolution, and not the full picture of Marsha's life.
The problem is not that Tourmaline centers Marsha's joy, but rather that joy can become an interpretive frame that dissolves contradiction, ugliness, pain, anger, addiction, psychosis, survival sex, interpersonal harm, and anti-state radicalism into flower crowns and novena candles.
Truthfully, Marsha is a biography that I found lacking. And yet, I want to forgive it for all of its lack, because it was charged with the sincerely herculean task to be at once an introduction to trans history, a celebration of life, a devotional reclamation and a political biography.
It must serve to introduce, celebrate, correct, mourn, politicize, archive, and inspire all at once. It is a burden uniquely placed on trans historical memory under conditions of scarcity and erasure. Ultimately, Tourmaline handled it with care, and her love for Marsha is overwhelmingly apparent, even to a fault.
30jenniferPagebound commented on a post
This Immortal Heart by Jennifer Saint is coming out on June 9th! I just found out about this new release today and added it to the Quest, very excited to get ahold of this one. It's the love story of Aphrodite & Ares, which I haven't seen explored yet in the modern retellings. I have noticed quite a few Aphrodite retellings published in the past few months. I wonder what the sudden proliferation is? Has anyone read any, or have recs for which one to check out first?
6Post from the Greek Myth Retellings forum
This Immortal Heart by Jennifer Saint is coming out on June 9th! I just found out about this new release today and added it to the Quest, very excited to get ahold of this one. It's the love story of Aphrodite & Ares, which I haven't seen explored yet in the modern retellings. I have noticed quite a few Aphrodite retellings published in the past few months. I wonder what the sudden proliferation is? Has anyone read any, or have recs for which one to check out first?
6jenniferPagebound commented on a post
Could we add The Witch and The Huntress by Luna McNamara and The Lost Daughter of Sparta by Felicia Day to this quest? They both came out this month!
Thanks!
2jenniferPagebound commented on jenniferPagebound's update
jenniferPagebound commented on a post
I've just finished this book and I'd say it fits the quest's criteria perfectly. It's about a woman putting a hex on a man after being dumped and him then actually dying. It's been published in 2026.
4jenniferPagebound commented on a post
Hi everyone! I wanted to share how this quest was curated, and how suggestions and new additions will be evaluated. This quest first and foremost celebrates women behaving badly, whether that's through revenge, selfishness, unhinged desire, or simply a loose screw. There are (thankfully) many examples of such women in every genre, but this quest leans towards the "weird girl lit fic" realm. Weird girl litfic isn't an official sub genre of course; it's more of a vibe, you know it when you see it. Books in this sub genre tend to be literary or contemporary fiction with some thriller and horror mixed in, which is reflected in the quest list.
For new additions, I will be prioritizing new releases. There may be some exceptions if I missed an excellent backlist book, but in general I want the quest list to grow with books that will be published in the months and years to come :) Right now, I'm going through books published in 2025 that would be excellent fits. What Hunger by Catherine Dang was just added - let me know which other standout titles were published in 2025 and I'll do some research!
There are some popular backlist titles I intentionally did not include since they're well represented in other Quests (for example, Gone Girl and Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil). Others fit the theme but not the genre (examples: Poppy War and Iron Widow).
Hope this clarifies the criteria and helps steer suggestions! Stay bad 🔪💄🚬
50jenniferPagebound commented on a post from the Founder Announcements forum
Hi everyone, we have some community updates to share. Pagebound has grown significantly since the app launched in October, and to support this larger group we're revamping our Quest creation and community recognition programs.
We have decided to sunset the Top Contributor program. We started the program in the early days of Pagebound to recognize active community members and help build the culture. TC's created Quests, welcomed new users, answered questions, and helped us behind the scenes with beta testing, user interviews, and feedback. We are so grateful to the 80+ TC's who were crucial in helping shape the platform & culture as we built the v1 of so many features.
To make Quest creation and community recognition more democratic and community-oriented, we will have two paths for Quest creation:
- We will continue the community-voted List initiative, where each quarter Royalty members nominate Lists to be turned into Quests, and the entire PB community votes on the nominated lists. We will have 3 winners per quarter for a total of 12 list-to-quests a year.
- We will start a new program, community-voted Member of the Month (exact language TBD). Each month starting in the Fall, 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 a Quest.
We will have more details on this new program when voting nears :)
Editing to add: Former members of the Top Contributor program who had Quests in-progress will be able to release those Quests. We have not put a time limit on this since curating a Quest takes a ton of work, and many hours have already been invested in these Quests. You'll continue to see some final Quests created by former TCs be released over the next months.
App + Product Updates The Discover People section got an upgrade: at the top, you'll see a Featured My Taste book that rotates daily, similar to the Featured Emoji. We highlight active users with that book in their My Taste section
We also fixed some small edge-case bugs related to progress updates + tracking. Reminder: you need to track your progress to see daily pages/minutes updated in your stats! So if you start & finish a book in the same day, you'll need to track progress still to see that graph updated (this is because there are some folks who don't track daily, and if we auto-tracked, stats would look very incorrect).
Thank you everyone for keeping this community thriving, PB wouldn't be what it is today without everyone's support & engagement. We can't wait to recognize new community members with these new initiatives, and are so excited to see what Quests y'all cook up. And of course, a special thank you to our Top Contributors who invested so much of their free time, love, and energy into this community. A round of applause for the (retired) TCs 👏👏👏
Happy Reading, Jennifer + Lucy 💜💙
460Post from the Founder Announcements forum
Hi everyone, we have some community updates to share. Pagebound has grown significantly since the app launched in October, and to support this larger group we're revamping our Quest creation and community recognition programs.
We have decided to sunset the Top Contributor program. We started the program in the early days of Pagebound to recognize active community members and help build the culture. TC's created Quests, welcomed new users, answered questions, and helped us behind the scenes with beta testing, user interviews, and feedback. We are so grateful to the 80+ TC's who were crucial in helping shape the platform & culture as we built the v1 of so many features.
To make Quest creation and community recognition more democratic and community-oriented, we will have two paths for Quest creation:
- We will continue the community-voted List initiative, where each quarter Royalty members nominate Lists to be turned into Quests, and the entire PB community votes on the nominated lists. We will have 3 winners per quarter for a total of 12 list-to-quests a year.
- We will start a new program, community-voted Member of the Month (exact language TBD). Each month starting in the Fall, 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 a Quest.
We will have more details on this new program when voting nears :)
Editing to add: Former members of the Top Contributor program who had Quests in-progress will be able to release those Quests. We have not put a time limit on this since curating a Quest takes a ton of work, and many hours have already been invested in these Quests. You'll continue to see some final Quests created by former TCs be released over the next months.
App + Product Updates The Discover People section got an upgrade: at the top, you'll see a Featured My Taste book that rotates daily, similar to the Featured Emoji. We highlight active users with that book in their My Taste section
We also fixed some small edge-case bugs related to progress updates + tracking. Reminder: you need to track your progress to see daily pages/minutes updated in your stats! So if you start & finish a book in the same day, you'll need to track progress still to see that graph updated (this is because there are some folks who don't track daily, and if we auto-tracked, stats would look very incorrect).
Thank you everyone for keeping this community thriving, PB wouldn't be what it is today without everyone's support & engagement. We can't wait to recognize new community members with these new initiatives, and are so excited to see what Quests y'all cook up. And of course, a special thank you to our Top Contributors who invested so much of their free time, love, and energy into this community. A round of applause for the (retired) TCs 👏👏👏
Happy Reading, Jennifer + Lucy 💜💙
460jenniferPagebound commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
I fumbled my phone when I was going to update my page count, and accidentally selected "I'm finished" (that placement is really unfortunate for lefties!). I'm not done reading that book, and was wondering if there is any way to undo the mistake...?
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