lilymunster666

🇳🇬/🏳️‍🌈 I love a good fantasy, litfic, dystopia, or historical fiction. I love some good worldbuilding and I think I have elite taste.

3506 points

0% overlap

My Taste

A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1)

Reading...

What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

lilymunster666 TBR'd a book

Freshwater

Akwaeke Emezi

An extraordinary debut novel, Freshwater explores the surreal experience of having a fractured self. It centers around a young Nigerian woman, Ada, who develops separate selves within her as a result of being born “with one foot on the other side.” Unsettling, heartwrenching, dark, and powerful, Freshwater is a sharp evocation of a rare way of experiencing the world, one that illuminates how we all construct our identities. Ada begins her life in the south of Nigeria as a troubled baby and a source of deep concern to her family. Her parents, Saul and Saachi, successfully prayed her into existence, but as she grows into a volatile and splintered child, it becomes clear that something went terribly awry. When Ada comes of age and moves to America for college, the group of selves within her grows in power and agency. As Ada fades into the background of her own mind and these alters—now protective, now hedonistic—move into control, Ada’s life spirals in a dark and dangerous direction. Narrated by the selves within Ada, and based in the author’s realities, Freshwater explores the metaphysics of identity and mental health, plunging the reader into the mystery of being and self. Freshwater dazzles with ferocious energy and serpentine grace, heralding the arrival of a fierce new literary voice.

lilymunster666 TBR'd a book

House of Cotton

Monica Brashears

Nineteen years old, broke, and effectively an orphan, Magnolia doesn’t have much to look forward to. She feels stuck and haunted: by her overdrawn bank account, by her predatory landlord, by the ghost of her late grandmother Mama Brown. One night while working at her dead-end gas station job, a mysterious, slick stranger named Cotton walks in and offers to turn Magnolia’s luck around. He offers her a lucrative “modeling” job at his family’s funeral home. Magnolia accepts. But despite things looking up, Magnolia’s problems fatten along with her wallet. When Cotton’s requests become increasingly weird, Magnolia discovers there’s a lot more at stake than just her rent.Sharp as a belted knife, this sly social commentary cuts straight to the bone, revealing the aftermath of the American plantation and what it means to be poor, Black, and a woman in the God fearing south.

lilymunster666 TBR'd a book

Sorrowland

Rivers Solomon

Vern - seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised - flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world. But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes. To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future - outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.

lilymunster666 TBR'd a book

How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words

Sophia Smith Galer

lilymunster666 commented on a post

lilymunster666

Thoughts from 51%

Dude I like it, but I kinda wanna know what else is there. Like yeah, she's a dog. Yeah motherhood is hard. But what else, it's like 50% in. What else? I want to know. She's kinda telling me how hard it is, but I don't feel emotionally moved rn.

lilymunster666 TBR'd a book

Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

Beverly Daniel Tatum

Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about enabling communication across racial and ethnic divides. These topics have only become more urgent as the national conversation about race is increasingly acrimonious. This fully revised edition is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the dynamics of race in America.

lilymunster666 TBR'd a book

Franci's War

Franci Rabinek Epstein

What are you willing to do to survive? What are you willing to endure if it means you might live? In the summer of 1942, twenty-two-year-old Franci Rabinek - designated a Jew by the Nazi racial laws - arrived at Terezin, a concentration camp and ghetto forty miles north of her home in Prague. It would be the beginning of her three-year journey from Terezin to the Czech family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, to the slave labour camps in Hamburg, and finally Bergen Belsen. Franci, a spirited and glamorous young woman, was known among her fellow inmates as the Prague dress designer. Having endured the transportation of her parents, she never forgot her mother's parting words: 'Your only duty to us is to stay alive'. During an Auschwitz selection, Franci would spontaneously lie to Nazi officer Dr Josef Mengele, and claim to be an electrician. It was a split-second decision that would go on to endanger - and save - her life. Franci's story is an astonishing account of one woman's attempt to survive those dark years. Heartbreaking, candid, and sometimes unbearably funny, she gives voice to the women prisoners in her tight-knit circle of friends. Her testimony sheds new light on the alliances, love affairs, and sexual barter that took place during the Holocaust, offering a compelling insight into the resilience and courage of ordinary people in an extraordinary situation. Above all, Franci's War asks us to explore what it takes to survive, and what it means to truly live.

lilymunster666 TBR'd a book

Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South

Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd

Southern Beauty explains a why a feminine ideal rooted in the nineteenth century continues to enjoy currency well into the twenty-first. Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd examines how the continuation of certain gender rituals in the American South has served to perpetuate racism, sexism, and classism. In a trio of popular gender rituals―sorority rush, beauty pageants, and the Confederate Pageant of the Natchez (Mississippi) Pilgrimage―young white southern women have readily ditched contemporary modes of dress and comportment for performances of purity, gentility, and deference. Clearly, the ability to “do” white southern womanhood, convincingly and on cue, has remained a valued performance. But why? Based on ethnographic research and more than sixty taped interviews, Southern Beauty goes behind the scenes of the three rituals to explore the motivations and rewards associated with participation. The picture that Boyd paints is not it is one of southern beauties securing status and sustaining segregation by making nostalgic gestures to the southern past. Boyd also maintains that the audiences for these rituals and pageants have been complicit, unwilling to acknowledge the beauties’ racial work or their investment in it. With its focus on performance, Southern Beauty moves beyond representations to show how femininity in motion―stylized and predictable but ephemeral―has succeeded as an enduring emblem, where other symbols faltered, by failing to draw scrutiny. Continuing to make the moves of region and race even as many Confederate symbols have been retired, the southern beauty has persisted, maintaining power and privilege through consistent performance.

lilymunster666 TBR'd a book

The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism

Matthew D. Lassiter

More than one-third of the population of the United States now lives in the South, a region where politics, race relations, and the economy have changed dramatically since World War II. Yet historians and journalists continue to disagree over whether the modern South is dominating, deviating from, or converging with the rest of the nation. Has the time come to declare the end of southern history? And how do the stories of American history change if the South is no longer seen as a region apart--as the conservative counterpoint to a liberal national ideal?The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism challenges the idea of southern distinctiveness in order to offer a new way of thinking about modern American history. For too long, the belief in an exceptional South has encouraged distortions and generalizations about the nation's otherwise liberal traditions, especially by compartmentalizing themes of racism, segregation, and political conservatism in one section of the country. This volume dismantles popular binaries--of de facto versus de jure segregation, red state conservatism versus blue state liberalism, the "South" versus the "North"--to rewrite the history of region and nation alike.Matthew Lassiter and Joseph Crespino present thirteen essays--framed by their provocative introduction--that reinterpret major topics such as the civil rights movement in the South and the North, the relationship between conservative backlash and liberal reform throughout the country, the rise of the Religious Right as a national phenomenon, the emergence of the metropolitan Sunbelt, and increasing suburban diversity in a multiracial New South. By writing American history across regional borders, this volume spends as much time outside as inside the traditional boundaries of the South, moving from Mississippi to New York City, from Southern California to South Carolina, from Mexico to Atlanta, from Hollywood to the Newport Folk Festival, and from the Pentagon to the Attica prison rebellion.

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Thoughts from 17%

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lilymunster666 wrote a review...

lilymunster666

Aug 01, 2026

Normal People

2.0

Enjoyment: 1.0Quality: 3.5Characters: 2.0Plot: 1.5

I could give a review, or I could make fun of it. I choose to make fun of it. Normal People summarized:

My name is Connell and this is Marianne. She stares at me with a uniquely pale expression while her incredibly sexy brain thinks about how she doesn't fit in. I think semi-colony about how sexy and skinny she is in her updo that makes her look even paler and small. We think about the political state of the world while I bang her. Palestine, abortion, and feminism are usually topics we talk about while we sigh moodily and sexily. She orders black coffee from a local cultured spot that plays authentic Himalayan sounds while we stare into each other's intelligent, sexy, and hot eyes. Her small, tiny, petite frame only enhances my huge large muscles that make me super hot to all women ever. But my brain is the best thing about me because I'm so smart and so talented and so is Marianne. We sigh and think about how intelligent, traumatized, and hot we are. We read Baldwin and smart essays and think about how unfair the world is while we stare sexily at one another. It's tough being so sexy and hot and smart. But someone has to do it.

lilymunster666 finished a book

Normal People

Sally Rooney

At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school soccer team while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her housekeeping job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers - one they are determined to conceal. A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years in college, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Then, as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other. Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.

lilymunster666 TBR'd a book

Sweetbitter Song

Rosie Hewlett

One fateful night in Sparta, a young slave girl encounters a mysterious, grey-eyed princess. Melantho and Penelope, though from different worlds, are instantly connected. But betrayal soon tears them apart.Years later, on Ithaca's rocky shores, Melantho is sent to serve Princess Penelope and her new husband, Prince Odysseus. Hardened by slavery, Melantho vows to stay distant from Penelope. Yet, the undeniable pull between them proves stronger than ever.As war ignites Greece, Odysseus and Ithaca's men are called away and, in their absence, Melantho finds a new world opening up before her – one where women rule, where family can be found, and where love is finally given the space to bloom.But all wars eventually end and as Troy falls, Penelope and Melantho must face the King’s return and decide how far they will go to protect what matters most to them.

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Thoughts from 65%

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Post from the What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany forum

lilymunster666

Thoughts from 6%

I see so many parallels between the way people are acting in MAGA movements now, the way people treated segregation and Jim Crow back then, and the way people excuse racism nowadays. I love that they mention that people are taught to hate and also choose it. Because at some point, it becomes a choice to be that hateful. It definitely shows that the Germans who committed such terrible acts were just normal people who actively chose to look away and not do anything.

lilymunster666 started reading...

What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

Eric A. Johnson

The horrors of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust still present some of the most disturbing questions in modern history: Why did Hitler's party appeal to millions of Germans, and how entrenched was anti-Semitism among the population? How could anyone claim, after the war, that the genocide of Europe's Jews was a secret? Did ordinary non-Jewish Germans live in fear of the Nazi state? In this unprecedented firsthand analysis of daily life as experienced in the Third Reich, What We Knew offers answers to these most important questions. Combining the expertise of Eric A. Johnson, an American historian, and Karl-Heinz Reuband, a German sociologist, What We Knew is the most startling oral history yet of everyday life in theThird Reich.

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Thoughts from 65%

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Post from the Normal People forum

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Edited

Thoughts from 36%

This book tries so hard to be smart, it is genuinely killing me. Their post sx talk is about the political and economic state of the world. Really? Like wow. Look at these two hot, smart, almost flawless people who have sex every few pages. What a book! This can't be real. This can't be how Sally Rooney writes. It's so pretentious and performative the book feels like it wears a fedora. The characters are flat, boring, and deeply uninteresting. But at least Marianne is skinny and white!! This book is booktok slop that wears secondhand clothes and eats vegan due to ethical concerns. (Due to annoying people, the PR team has decided to revise and release a statement): Marianne and Connell have a complex relationship which is whatever yall what me to say here. It is a very good book that does not suck. They are insert opinion from Tiktok together but if the Hive Mind thinks they are blank, we will revise again! I think whatever the majority thinks and I am a bot. Please leave me be to recharge!

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Edited

Thoughts from 50%

(Disclaimer because people in book spaces dont have literacy: I dont think Marianne should die because I dont like the way she's written. This is a character. It's not real.) Trauma as a plot can work when it's done really well. Instead of having such annoying self pitying lines. That could work if that was made to make Marianne an annoying person purposefully. But it wasn't. Because she is never framed as an annoying person by anyone despite being deeply annoying. Connell never thinks that, her friends don't, Lorraine doesn't, the book doesn't. That's definitely to the book's detriment because it could work better if she was annoying about it. If she did constantly annoy people with her perceived superiority in school, and that's why they didn't like her. If she did somewhat get on Connell's nerves when she put herself down instead of making him feel bad for her. She should have gone full Jughead Jones with the characters and made them purposely annoying about how prententious they are. It would have been a banger if she did that. (Side tangent: it would be nice if Connell had negative feelings towards her once in a while. Or maybe a differing opinion than her. Or maybe didn't like her at times. We get close to maybe being a bit mean or terrible but we back away out of cowardice.) Because victims can still be annoying people. I'm an annoying person, and my dad used to punch me too. It would have been better like that, honestly. But I don't think people would have the intelligence for it. They would probably call Sally an asshole for making her unlikable.

-3

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