literaryted
trying to read more than I have been lately! đ
168 points
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My Taste
literaryted commented on a post
1d
Pre-read thoughts | My first N.K. Jemisin novel.
I am jumping head first into N.K. Jemisin's writing. I do NOT know what to expect with this--other than this is a meaty book. I've barely glanced at the summary. I don't know if my heart will pound. Will I cry? Will I shake my fist in anger? Will I question my own existence?? Let's see!
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literaryted commented on a post from the Founder Announcements forum
1d
The App is live!!
I am over the moon to share that the app is officially live on both iOS and Android!!
We've quite literally poured our blood, sweat and (lots of) tears into the app development over the past 9 months and we could not be more thrilled for everyone to experience it!
We're still being indexed in app store search so you may have to scroll to find us, or type in Pagebound: Social Book Tracker. Here's links to iOS and Android: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pagebound-social-book-tracker/id6751526412 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.pagebound.app
There are quite a few improvements and new features in the app, including:
- Book Journeys (click the map icon on the book cards in your library and other user's library to see their posts, comments, and updates for a specific book)
- Quick access to "add to plan"
- Filtering your activity on profile
- Save posts
- upgraded Read Dates editing
This is the first release, so there will be many more additions and improvements to come. (PS for Android users: we're aware of two bugs related to library imports from Goodreads/Storygraph, and issues with editing read dates - these have already been resolved and are pending Google approval for release.)
We owe a huge thank you to our beta testers who worked diligently over the last month to report hundreds of bugs and help us get the app prepared for release. A huge round of applause to them.
We hope you love the app as much as we do; it definitely makes engaging on PB so much more convenient and fun. If you have a great experience with the app, we'd love if you'd consider supporting us through Pagebound Royalty; Lucy and I have worked for $0 over the past year to bring the app and website to fruition, and have been covering business costs with our savings accounts. Your contribution means we can continue to work full-time on Pagebound without influence from investors or advertisers, and keep Pagebound 100% for readers by readers. Thank you so much to all the Royalty who have already contributed; it truly means the world to us and keeps Pagebound online!
ok now go download the app and tell us what you think!
Happy Reading, Jennifer & Lucy
PS - leaving us a review in app stores also helps tremendously :)
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literaryted wants to read...
1d
Our Share of Night
Mariana EnrĂquez
A womanâs mysterious death puts her husband and son on a collision course with her demonic family.
A young father and son set out on a road trip, devastated by the death of the wife and mother they both loved. United in grief, the pair travel to her ancestral home, where they must confront the terrifying legacy she has bequeathed: a family called the Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of immortality.
For Gaspar, the son, this maniacal cult is his destiny. As the Order tries to pull him into their evil, he and his father take flight, attempting to outrun a powerful clan that will do anything to ensure its own survival. But how far will Gasparâs father go to protect his child? And can anyone escape their fate?
Moving back and forth in time, from London in the swinging 1960s to the brutal years of Argentinaâs military dictatorship and its turbulent aftermath, Our Share of Night is a novel like no other: a family story, a ghost story, a story of the occult and the supernatural, a book about the complexities of love and longing with queer subplots and themes. This is the masterwork of one of Latin Americaâs most original novelists, âa mesmerizing writer,â says Dave Eggers, âwho demands to be read.â
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literaryted wants to read...
1d
What Moves the Dead (Sworn Soldier, #1)
T. Kingfisher
From the award-winning author of The Twisted Ones comes a gripping and atmospheric retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's classic "The Fall of the House of Usher."
When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruravia.
What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.
Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.
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literaryted commented on a post
1d
Thoughts from 9% (page 41)
Iâm so intrigued by the choice to have the reader âbeâ Essun in the second person chapters. It seems like itâs going to draw me in in a very unique way. Thoughts on why she chose this perspective? And why not every chapter contains it? (Maybe this will become clear later on, but itâs my early musingsâŠ)
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literaryted finished a book
5d
What It Is
Lynda Barry
How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? For decades, these types of questions have permeated the pages of Lynda Barryâs compositions, with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving. What It Is demonstrates a tried-and-true creative method that is playful, powerful, and accessible to anyone with an inquisitive wish to write or to remember. Composed of completely new material, each page of Barryâs first Drawn & Quarterly book is a full-color collage that is not only a gentle guide to this process but an invigorating example of exactly what it is: âThe ordinary is extraordinary.â
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literaryted wants to read...
5d
Endling
Maria Reva
Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick biologist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the countryâs forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to give up, settle down, and start a family. What they donât know: Yeva already dates plenty of menânot for love, but to fund her workâentertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing theyâll find docile brides uninfluenced by feminism and modernity.
Nastia and her sister Solomiya are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing motherâa flamboyant protestor who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours. So begins a journey of a lifetime across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species. But their plans come to a screeching halt as Russia invades.
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literaryted wants to read...
5d
The Novices of Lerna
Ăngel Bonomini
An overlooked and enigmatic master of Argentine fantastic literature, Ăngel Bonomini garnered praise among peers and contemporaries like Borges, Bioy Casares, Ocampo, and Cortazar, before slipping mysteriously into obscurity. Born in Buenos Aires in 1929, Bonomini was forty-three years old in 1972 when he published The Novices of Lerna, the first of four books of short stories he released before his death at age sixty-four. The Novices of Lerna introduces Bonomini's fantastic tales to English readers for the first time. Shot through with wry humor and tender absurdity, these meditations on identity, surveillance, and isolation remain eerily prescient. The collection's central novella follows RamĂłn Beltra, an unambitious scholar mysteriously invited to attend a six-month fellowship at the University of Lerna in Switzerland. After complying with the unusual qualifying paperwork (several pages of detailed measurements and photographs of his entire body), Beltra soon finds himself in the deserted university town of Lerna, together with twenty-three other "novices," all subject to the same undisclosed project, and who look and sound exactly like Beltra himself. At first, Beltra is the only one to bristle at the school's dizzying array of rules and regulations, but this all changes with the onset of an uncontrollable epidemic, and the fellows begin dying off one by one...
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literaryted wants to read...
5d
Study for Obedience
Sarah Bernstein
A haunting, compressed masterwork from an extraordinary new voice in Canadian fiction.
A young woman moves from the place of her birth to the remote northern country of her forebears to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him.Â
Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs - collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly born lamb; a local dog's phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed with some intensity at her and she senses a mounting threat that lies 'just beyond the garden gate.' And as she feels the hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother's property, she fears that, should the rumblings in the town gather themselves into a more defined shape, who knows what might happen, what one might be capable of doing.
With a sharp, lyrical voice, Sarah Bernstein powerfully explores questions of complicity and power, displacement and inheritance. Study for Obedience is a finely tuned, unsettling novel that confirms Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation.
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literaryted wants to read...
5d
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going underâmaybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.
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literaryted wants to read...
3w
Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach
Kelly Robson
Discover a shifting history of adventure as humanity clashes over whether to repair their ruined planet or luxuriate in a less tainted past.
In 2267, Earth has just begun to recover from worldwide ecological disasters. Minh is part of the generation that first moved back up to the surface of the Earth from the underground hells, to reclaim humanity's ancestral habitat. She's spent her entire life restoring river ecosystems, but lately the kind of long-term restoration projects Minh works on have been stalled due to the invention of time travel. When she gets the opportunity take a team to 2000 BC to survey the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, she jumps at the chance to uncover the secrets of the shadowy think tank that controls time travel technology.
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literaryted wants to read...
3w
Evocation (The Summonerâs Circle, #1)
S.T. Gibson
The Devil knows your name, David Aristarkhov.
As a teen, David Aristarkhov was a psychic prodigy, operating under the shadow of his oppressive occultist father. Now, years after his fatherâs death and rapidly approaching his thirtieth birthday, he is content with the high-powered life heâs curated as a Boston attorney, moonlighting as a powerful medium for his secret society.
But with power comes a price, and the Devil has come to collect on an ancestral deal. Davidâs days are numbered, and death looms at his door.
Reluctantly, he reaches out to the only person heâs ever trusted, his ex-boyfriend and secret Society rival Rhys, for help. However, the only way to get to Rhys is through his wife, Moira. Thrust into each otherâs care, emotions once buried deep resurface, and the trio race to figure out their feelings for one another before the Devil steals David away for goodâŠ
The first book in a spellbinding and vibrant new series from The Sunday Times bestselling author of A Dowry of Blood.
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literaryted wants to read...
3w
The Great Work
Sheldon Costa
An alchemist and his young nephew hunt down a legend in this profound and unsettling speculative Western, for fans of Karen Russell and Victor LaValle.Alone in a frontier town in the nineteenth-century Northwest, Gentle Montgomery is grieving his best friend. Liam was an alchemist, killed when he tried to capture a creature that shouldnât a giant salamander that drives men mad. When Gentleâs teenage nephew Kitt arrives at his doorstep, the two set out together to track the monster down, so they can use its blood in an alchemical formula that will bring Liam back to life.It's a hard and haunted journey. The salamander produces surreal nightmares and waking dreams of a blighted, burning future. And Gentle and Kitt soon find themselves pursued by a bloodthirsty hunter, a sadistic judge, and a doomsday cult, all of whom have their own plans for the river monster. Armed with nothing but Liamâs alchemical notebooks, they must not only find the salamander but learn to understand itâand the terrifying visions it causesâbefore itâs too late. And as Gentle struggles to comprehend the creature, his lost friend, his nephew, and his fellow seekers, it becomes clear that the Great Work of the alchemists may pale in comparison to the small work of human connection.Sheldon Costaâs dark, vivid, and strangely hopeful debut novel is a supernatural adventure through the wilderness of friendship and the rotten heart of the early American empire.
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literaryted wants to read...
3w
Pan
Michael Clune
âI steal language and ideas from Michael Clune.â âBen Lerner, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Topeka School
A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in this wild, highly anticipated debut novel from one of our most distinctive literary minds.
Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He had plenty of reason to feel unstable already: Heâs been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. Then one day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says itâs just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas; his best friend, Ty; and his maybe-girlfriend, Sarah, hunt for answers whyâin Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire, in rock and roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where their classmate Todâs charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law.
Thrilling, cerebral, and startlingly funny, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Outânamed one of The New Yorkerâs best books of the yearâearned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, the great novel of our age of anxiety, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.
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literaryted wants to read...
3w
Herculine
Grace Byron
Manhunt meets Lord of the Flies in this blistering horror debut following a young trans woman after she arrives at the all-trans girl commune founded by her toxic ex-girlfriend, only to discover that demons, both literal and figurative, haunt her fellow comradesâand she's their next prey!
Herculineâs narrator has demons. Sure, her life includes several hallmarks of the typical trans girl sob storyâconversion therapy, a string of shitty low-paying jobs, and even shittier exesâbut she also regularly debates sleep paralysis demons that turn to mist soon after she wakes and carries vials of holy oil in her purse. Nothing, though, prepares her for the new malevolent force stalking her through the streets of New York City, more powerful than any sheâs ever encountered. Desperate to escape this ancient evil, she flees to rural Indiana, where her ex-girlfriend started an all-trans girl commune in the middle of the woods.
The secluded camp, named after 19th-century intersex memoirist Herculine Barbin, is a scrappy operation, but the shared sense of community among the girls is a welcome balm to the narratorâs growing isolation and paranoia. Still, something isnât quite right at Herculine. Girls stop talking as soon as she enters the room, everyone seems to share a common secret, and the books lining the walls of the library harbor strange cryptograms. Soon what once looked like an escape becomes a trap all its own.
While trying to untangle the communeâs many mysteries, the narrator contends with disemboweled pigs, cultlike psychosexual rituals, and the horrors of communal breakfast. And before long, she discovers that her demons have followed her. And this time, they wonât be letting her go.
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literaryted wants to read...
3w
Confessions of the Fox
Jordy Rosenberg
Set in the eighteenth century London underworld, this bawdy, genre-bending novel reimagines the life of thief and jailbreaker Jack Sheppard to tell a profound story about gender, love, and liberation.
Recently jilted and increasingly unhinged, Dr. Voth throws himself into his work, obsessively researching the life of Jack Sheppard, a legendary eighteenth century thief. No one knows Jackâs true storyâhis confessions have never been found. That is, until Dr. Voth discovers a mysterious stack of papers titled Confessions of the Fox.
Dated 1724, the manuscript tells the story of an orphan named P. Sold into servitude at twelve, P struggles for years with her desire to live as âJack.â When P falls dizzyingly in love with Bess, a sex worker looking for freedom of her own, P begins to imagine a different life. Bess brings P into the London underworld where scamps and rogues clash with Londonâs newly established police force, queer subcultures thrive, and ominous threats of an oncoming plague abound. At last, P becomes Jack Sheppard, one of the most notoriousâand most wantedâthieves in history.
Back in the present, Dr. Voth works feverishly day and night to authenticate the manuscript. But heâs not the only one who wants Jackâs storyâand some people will do whatever it takes to get it. As both Jack and Voth are drawn into corruption and conspiracy, it becomes clear that their fates are intertwinedâand only a miracle will save them both.
An imaginative retelling of Brechtâs Threepenny Opera, Confessions of the Fox blends high-spirited adventure, subversive history, and provocative wit to animate forgotten histories and the extraordinary characters hidden within.
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literaryted wants to read...
3w
The Church of the Mountain of Flesh
Kyle Wakefield
THE CHURCH OF THE MOUNTAIN OF FLESH is a cosmic horror novel about mad artists, bodies spiralling out of control, and a trans man's merciless desperation.
Sole De Gasinis drowns his grief in wine and buries his hatred of his body in twisted sculptures. When, one drunken night on the beach, God orders him to rebuild his village's church, he knows he wasn't chosen for his piety.
Instead, he and God make a deal. If Sole rebuilds the church, God will give him the body of a man.
As Sole works in a frenzy for salvation, lifelong friendships decay, a village united to tear down its church fractures into pariahs and zealots, and power and grief reshape the prophet into a tyrant. Grief for a boy he fell in love with ten years ago, who claimed to be a virgin birth, who died in agony in the church crypt when the God inside him wanted out -- and whose monstrous remnant Sole must commune with for every piece of his prize.
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literaryted wants to read...
3w
The Thirty Names of Night
Zeyn Joukhadar
Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. He has been unable to paint since his motherâs ghost has begun to visit him each evening. As his grandmotherâs sole caretaker, he spends his days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his estranged sister, and even his best friend (who also happens to be his longtime crush). The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria. One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting the birds of North America. She famously and mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that both his mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. In fact, Laila Zâs past is intimately tied to his motherâsâand his grandmotherâsâin ways he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Zâs story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his own community that he never knew. Realizing that he isnât and has never been alone, he has the courage to officially claim a new name: Nadir, an Arabic name meaning rare. As unprecedented numbers of birds are mysteriously drawn to the New York City skies, Nadir enlists the help of his family and friends to unravel what happened to Laila Z and the rare bird his mother died trying to save. Following his motherâs ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along. Featuring Zeyn Joukhadarâs signature storytelling, The Thirty Names of Night is a timely exploration of how we all search for and ultimately embrace who we are.
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literaryted wants to read...
7w
Necessary Fiction
Eloghosa Osunde
From the acclaimed author of Vagabonds!: an audacious and eye-opening exploration of cross-generational queer life in Nigeria. What makes a family? How is it defined and by whom? Is freedom for everyone? In Necessary Fiction, Eloghosa Osunde poses these provocative questions and many more while exploring the paths and dreams, hopes and fears of more than two dozen characters who are staking out lives for themselves in contemporary Nigeria. Across Lagos, one of Africa's largest urban areas and one of the world's most dynamic cities, Osundeâs characters seek out love for self and their chosen partners, even as they risk ruining relationships with parents, spouses, family, and friends. As the novel unfolds, a rolling cast vibrantly active, stubbornly alive, brazenly flawed. These characters grapple with desire, fear, time, death, and God, forming and breaking unexpected connections; in the process unveiling how they know each other, have loved each other, and had their hearts broken in that pursuit. As they work to establish themselves in the city's lively worlds of art, music, entertainment, and creative commerce, we meet their collective and individual attempts to reckon with the necessary fiction they carry for survival.
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literaryted wants to read...
7w
Everything Will Swallow You
Tom Cox
Have you ever been curious about how people live when nobodyâs watching? Have you wondered whether thereâs more going on than meets the eye?
Eric and Carl live in Dorset in a small white cottage under the shadow of a big cliff. Eric sells old records and antiques. Carl cooks, cleans and crochets. Eric likes maps, Second World War memorabilia and the smell of old cars and, at 67, seems to be still waiting for full self-awareness to land. Carl, who everyone assumes is much younger, has a sophisticated emotional intelligence and likes wildflowers, mid-twentieth-century female novelists and swimming. If you passed them on a walk, you may not pay them much attention. You may even be distracted by Carlâs long floppy ears, tail and fur and mistake him for a dog.
Carlâs true nature is a closely guarded secret, and something the neighbours may struggle to fathom. But as the pair meander around South-West England, hunting for rare records and unusual collectibles, they encounter an eclectic range of people, a handful of whom are let in on the truth.
Tom Coxâs third novel is a rare gem, from the importance of friendship, to the joy that can be found in accepting the unusual, Everything Will Swallow You will make you appreciate your surroundings a with fresh perspective.
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