marsberry

sofi, she/her, hopeful, bruja?

381 points

0% overlap

My Taste

Reading...

Nature's Way: Native Wisdom for Living in Balance with the Earth

The Fifth Sacred Thing (Maya Greenwood, #1)

marsberry commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

yashvi

Edited

buddy read/recs! just wanna make friends : )

hi y'all! it's my second week on pagebound, and i would love to make some new bookish friends : ) hopefully i'm in the right place for this!

about me: -woman of color -favorite tropes/themes: found family, friends to lovers, invisible string tying together many different characters and it comes together at the end, the author trusts us to deduce things, realistic/bittersweet endings, NEED HAPPY ENDINGS LOL, diverse cast, old people solving mysteries, healing, FOOODDDDD, well-developed characters apart from the mc's, a central place where the cast comes together (like in HP the common rooms)

here are my favorite genres and books: -queer media of any form, recently into graphic novels! -cozy mysteries, crimes, thrillers -magical realism, translated korean literature -love plot twists, strong women, diverse voices, books where they stay with you a long time

open to: -sci fi -dystopia -romance -fantasy (but not the ones with a lot of worldbuilding - i just got back into reading and my attention span is not strong enough to remember it all just yet enough to enjoy this genre)

not that into: -classics -non-poc works -nonfiction -romantasy -spicy books

i'm open to recs and reading together! all my love to y'all!

marsberry commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

yashvi

Edited

buddy read/recs! just wanna make friends : )

hi y'all! it's my second week on pagebound, and i would love to make some new bookish friends : ) hopefully i'm in the right place for this!

not that into: -classics -non-poc works -nonfiction -romantasy -spicy books

i'm open to recs and reading together! all my love to y'all!

marsberry commented on a post

arlorex

Thoughts from 100%🎧

ok also I absolutely love the cover!! I need a trophy for my shelf!!💕

marsberry commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

yashvi

Edited

buddy read/recs! just wanna make friends : )

hi y'all! it's my second week on pagebound, and i would love to make some new bookish friends : ) hopefully i'm in the right place for this!

not that into: -classics -non-poc works -nonfiction -romantasy -spicy books

i'm open to recs and reading together! all my love to y'all!

marsberry paused reading...

How to Age Disgracefully

Clare Pooley

A senior citizens’ center and a daycare collide with hilarious results in the new ensemble comedy from New York Times-bestselling author Clare Pooley When Lydia takes a job running the Senior Citizens’ Social Club three afternoons a week, she assumes she’ll be spending her time drinking tea and playing gentle games of cards. The members of the Social Club, however, are not at all what Lydia was expecting. From Art, a failed actor turned kleptomaniac to Daphne, who has been hiding from her dark past for decades to Ruby, a Banksy-style knitter who gets revenge in yarn, these seniors look deceptively benign—but when age makes you invisible, secrets are so much easier to hide. When the city council threatens to sell the doomed community center building, the members of the Social Club join forces with their tiny friends in the daycare next door—as well as the teenaged father of one of the toddlers and a geriatric dog—to save the building. Together, this group’s unorthodox methods may actually work, as long as the police don’t catch up with them first.

marsberry TBR'd a book

Assata: An Autobiography

Assata Shakur

On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed the life of a white state trooper. Long a target of J. Edgar Hoover's campaign to defame, infiltrate, and criminalize Black nationalist organizations and their leaders, Shakur was incarcerated for four years prior to her conviction on flimsy evidence in 1977 as an accomplice to murder. This intensely personal and political autobiography belies the fearsome image of JoAnne Chesimard long projected by the media and the state. With wit and candor, Assata Shakur recounts the experiences that led her to a life of activism and portrays the strengths, weaknesses, and eventual demise of Black and White revolutionary groups at the hand of government officials. The result is a signal contribution to the literature about growing up Black in America that has already taken its place alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the works of Maya Angelou. Two years after her conviction, Assata Shakur escaped from prison. She was given political asylum by Cuba, where she now resides.

marsberry TBR'd a book

Floating Hotel

Grace Curtis

This cozy debut science fiction novel tells a story of misfits, rebels, found family—and a mystery that spans the stars Welcome to the Grand Abeona home of the finest food, the sweetest service, and the very best views the galaxy has to offer. All year round it moves from planet to planet, system to system, pampering guests across the furthest reaches of the milky way. The last word in sub-orbital luxury—and an absolute magnet for intrigue. Intrigues such Why are there love poems in the lobby inbox? How many Imperial spies are currently on board? What is the true purpose of the Problem Solver’s conference? And perhaps most pertinently— who is driving the ship? Each guest has a secret, every member of staff a universe unto themselves. At the center of these interweaving lives and interlocking mysteries stands Carl, one time stowaway, longtime manager, devoted caretaker to the hotel. It’s the love of his life and the only place he’s ever called home. But as forces beyond Carl’s comprehension converge on the Abeona, he has to face one final when is it time to let go?

marsberry paused reading...

A Half-Built Garden

Ruthanna Emrys

On a warm March night in 2083, Judy Wallach-Stevens wakes to a warning of unknown pollutants in the Chesapeake Bay. She heads out to check what she expects to be a false alarm--and stumbles upon the first alien visitors to Earth. These aliens have crossed the galaxy to save humanity, convinced that the people of Earth must leave their ecologically-ravaged planet behind and join them among the stars. And if humanity doesn't agree, they may need to be saved by force. The watershed networks aren't ready to give up on Earth. Decades ago, they rose up to exile the last corporations to a few artificial islands, escape the dominance of nation-states, and reorganize humanity around the hope of keeping their world liveable. By sharing the burden of decision-making, they've started to heal the wounded planet. But now corporations, nation-states, and networks all vie to represent humanity to these powerful new beings, and if any one accepts the aliens' offer, Earth may be lost. With everyone’s eyes turned skyward, everything hinges on the success of Judy's effort to create understanding, both within and beyond her own species.

marsberry TBR'd a book

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions

Greta Thunberg

We still have time to change the world. From Greta Thunberg, the world's leading climate activist, comes the essential handbook for making it happen. You might think it's an impossible task: secure a safe future for life on Earth, at a scale and speed never seen, against all the odds. There is hope - but only if we listen to the science before it's too late. In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts - geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders - to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster. Alongside them, she shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest challenges, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, how can we not act? And if a schoolchild's strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried? We are alive at the most decisive time in the history of humanity. Together, we can do the seemingly impossible. But it has to be us, and it has to be now.

marsberry started reading...

Nature's Way: Native Wisdom for Living in Balance with the Earth

Ed McGaa

Now in paperback! US bestselling author of Mother Earth Spirituality returns with a call for a spiritual awakening to create a new global culture. Beginning with the ways of the Lakota Sioux and branching outward, Sioux tribal leader Ed McGaa, known as Eagle Man, shows the error of using animals and the natural world as a whole for economic and political gain. He then offers everyday lessons and values gleaned from Nature that endure for all times and people. In this call for spiritual awakening, McGaa explains how we can create a new global culture based not on dominance over nature for economic and political gain, but on values that endure for all times and all people. Nature's Way explores Native American belief systems, oppression of Native Americans by the dominant society, the desacralisation of Nature, and the complicity of institutional religion. Taking on religion, politics, and culture, McGaa provides a template for readers – a path designed by Nature that anyone can follow. Using the lessons of eagle, bear, lion, wolf, orca, owl, tiger, buffalo, rat, deer – even the cottonwood tree, Nature's Way teaches all of us how we can overcome religious intolerance, treat women and men equally, preserve our environment, and live in peace.

marsberry started reading...

Como agua para chocolate

Laura Esquivel

Una novela sorprendente, inolvidable, cuyo tema gira en torno a un amor imposible para cuya consecución la protagonista recurrirá a las artes culinarias. Bajo la apariencia de un folletín por entregas y encabezando cada capítulo con una receta, esta historia mágica convierte la gastronomía en un código de sensualidad cargado de penetrantes aromas, de colores deslumbrantes. Tita es la pequeña, vive en un rancho con sus hermanas y sus sirvientas, y pese a saberse condenada a no poder gozar del amor por tener que hacerse cargo de su madre, no renunciará a Pedro. Él también la ama, pero se casará con su hermana Rosaura para poder seguir cerca de ella. Tita se refugia en la cocina y se entrega a la elaboración de platos mágicos capaces de transformar las emociones y el comportamiento de quienes los prueban, a la espera de que su trágico destino se cumpla.

marsberry paused reading...

Cemetery Boys (Cemetery Boys, #1)

Aiden Thomas

Yadriel has summoned a ghost, and now he can’t get rid of him. When his traditional Latinx family has problems accepting his gender, Yadriel becomes determined to prove himself a real brujo. With the help of his cousin and best friend Maritza, he performs the ritual himself, and then sets out to find the ghost of his murdered cousin and set it free. However, the ghost he summons is actually Julian Diaz, the school’s resident bad boy, and Julian is not about to go quietly into death. He’s determined to find out what happened and tie up some loose ends before he leaves. Left with no choice, Yadriel agrees to help Julian, so that they can both get what they want. But the longer Yadriel spends with Julian, the less he wants to let him leave.

marsberry TBR'd a book

How to Read Now

Elaine Castillo

How to Read Now explores the politics and ethics of reading, and insists that we are capable of something better: a more engaged relationship not just with our fiction and our art, but with our buried and entangled histories. Smart, funny, galvanizing, and sometimes profane, Castillo attacks the stale questions and less-than-critical proclamations that masquerade as vital discussion: reimagining the cartography of the classics, building a moral case against the settler colonialism of lauded writers like Joan Didion, taking aim at Nobel Prize winners and toppling indie filmmakers, and celebrating glorious moments in everything from popular TV like The Watchmen to the films of Wong Kar-wai and the work of contemporary poets like Tommy Pico. At once a deeply personal and searching history of one woman's reading life, and a wide-ranging and urgent intervention into our globalized conversations about why reading matters today, How to Read Now empowers us to embrace a more complicated, embodied form of reading, inviting us to acknowledge complicated truths, ignite surprising connections, imagine a more daring solidarity, and create space for a riskier intimacy--within ourselves, and with each other.

marsberry started reading...

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions

Greta Thunberg

marsberry TBR'd a book

When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda

Mahmood Mamdani

"When we captured Kigali, we thought we would face criminals in the state; instead, we faced a criminal population." So a political commissar in the Rwanda Patriotic Front reflected after the 1994 massacre of as many as one million Tutsis in Rwanda. Underlying his statement is the realization that, though ordered by a minority of state functionaries, the slaughter was performed by hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, including even judges, human rights activists, and doctors, nurses, priests, friends, and spouses of the victims. Indeed, it is its very popularity that makes the Rwandan genocide so unthinkable. This book makes it thinkable. Rejecting easy explanations of the genocide as a mysterious evil force that was bizarrely unleashed, one of Africa's best-known intellectuals situates the tragedy in its proper context. He coaxes to the surface the historical, geographical, and political forces that made it possible for so many Hutu to turn so brutally on their neighbors. He finds answers in the nature of political identities generated during colonialism, in the failures of the nationalist revolution to transcend these identities, and in regional demographic and political currents that reach well beyond Rwanda. In so doing, Mahmood Mamdani usefully broadens understandings of citizenship and political identity in postcolonial Africa. There have been few attempts to explain the Rwandan horror, and none has succeeded so well as this one. Mamdani's analysis provides a solid foundation for future studies of the massacre. Even more important, his answers point a way out of a direction for reforming political identity in central Africa and preventing future tragedies.

marsberry is interested in reading...

The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan, #1)

Robert Jackson Bennett

In Daretana’s most opulent mansion, a high Imperial officer lies dead—killed, to all appearances, when a tree spontaneously erupted from his body. Even in this canton at the borders of the Empire, where contagions abound and the blood of the Leviathans works strange magical changes, it’s a death at once terrifying and impossible. Called in to investigate this mystery is Ana Dolabra, an investigator whose reputation for brilliance is matched only by her eccentricities. At her side is her new assistant, Dinios Kol. Din is an engraver, magically altered to possess a perfect memory. His job is to observe and report, and act as his superior’s eyes and ears--quite literally, in this case, as among Ana’s quirks are her insistence on wearing a blindfold at all times, and her refusal to step outside the walls of her home. Din is most perplexed by Ana’s ravenous appetite for information and her mind’s frenzied leaps—not to mention her cheerful disregard for propriety and the apparent joy she takes in scandalizing her young counterpart. Yet as the case unfolds and Ana makes one startling deduction after the next, he finds it hard to deny that she is, indeed, the Empire’s greatest detective. As the two close in on a mastermind and uncover a scheme that threatens the safety of the Empire itself, Din realizes he’s barely begun to assemble the puzzle that is Ana Dolabra—and wonders how long he’ll be able to keep his own secrets safe from her piercing intellect. Featuring an unforgettable Holmes-and-Watson style pairing, a gloriously labyrinthine plot, and a haunting and wholly original fantasy world, The Tainted Cup brilliantly reinvents the classic mystery tale.

marsberry commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

abby_ace_of_books

Edited

Hopepunk as a Subgenre

I am currently in a worldbuilding class, and we're reading The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers because it's one of my professor's favorites and it also just has great worldbuilding. We've been talking a lot about genre/subgenre throughout the semester, and with the Chambers book, we've specifically been looking at hopepunk and the emerging "cozy" side of SFF.

For our most recent class, we read two articles ( Becky Chambers Interview and Hopepunk Critique if anyone is interested in checking them out) that focused on some critiques of the hopepunk/cozy genre.

I'm not a huge cozy enjoyer; I need plot-driven stories with action and angst to keep me interested. I like the idea of hopepunk as a genre that strives to fill literary spaces with warmth and comfort amongst all the grimdark and cynical pieces, but I don't enjoy reading them as much, which is besides the point. (For the record, I think I struggle to enjoy cozy stuff because of a mix of the lack of action, and also, I need a strong emotional contrast to truly feel the impact of both wholesome and angsty moments, and I find that cozy books tend to lean more into the happy with little negative to compare to, so it becomes bland after a while.)

The critique article basically calls out Chambers and other "cozy" authors for being "too optimistic" and for trying to drive all negativity out of literature altogether, which is a complete misinterpretation of the Chambers article to begin with. The author of the critique article argues that hopepunk is too positive and unrealistic (kind of crazy considering we're specifically talking about SFF here), and she also ties it to politics and tries to assert that reading isn't political (because she's full of questionable takes, apparently). At the same time, the Becky Chambers interview is titled in a way that suggests that hopepunk is our last hope for speculative fiction, which almost implies that there's something that needs to be fixed, which I also don't 100% agree with (but I do think the title is more for clickbait than to actually make a claim).

All of that is to say, what do you think about hopepunk? Do you find it to be too positive and unrealistic? Do we need more positivity in literary spaces? I'm curious what other people think.

marsberry commented on a post from the Founder Announcements forum

jenniferPagebound

Edited

Points & Product Updates + App Release [11/02/25]

The new app version is live on Android and iOS, please update your apps to see the Mute + Owned book options that went live on web this week! Reminder: you can mute books or mark them as "owned" in the book status modal, and you can manage your muted books under Account & Settings.

This update also includes some new features (all platforms):

We have a new book status: Interested ! So many readers lament their huge TBRs and hesitate to add to that growing list. The Interested status is your answer; you can log a book you'd like to remember, or that piques your interest, without committing it to your TBR. When you mark a book as "Interested", it will create an activity item in your feed, but you will not see posts about it in your Main or My Books feeds. Anecdotally, I've been using a custom "interested" shelf for a while, and am excited to convert these to the Interested status (and also add books guilt-free to my library, like a Pagebound digital book haul 😏)
on the top of the Discuss page, you'll see a scrollable list of books the people you follow are reading, along with their progress. You can click these books to go right to their progress update, see if they wrote a note, or write them a note! Think of this like a status update where you can chat more personally and keep tabs on a daily basis. This list is ordered by who most recently updated their progress.
We linked the Merch Store in the footer on web, and in the More tab in the app
Android users in the US can sign up for Pagebound Royalty right in the app! We would be so grateful if you considered supporting us through Royalty.

We also made some changes to points, outlined below with an explanation:

You will no longer receive points for posts or comments in the Pagebound Club (this applies ONLY to Pagebound Club, NOT to book forums. You will continue to receive points for book forum posts and comments). While we love seeing the friendships and community built in the club, we've also seen some not so genuine behavior. This change is intended to encourage more respectful, authentic engagement and to stop rewarding less authentic posting/commenting.
You will now receive 3 points for every day that you log reading progress, and you will receive 5 points instead of 1 point for finishing a book. We want folks to be rewarded for reading, and give lurkers a way to level up :) We hope this also encourages ppl to comment their personal updates on their reading progress activity items, rather than in the book forums, since you receive points for logging progress! (note: you receive 3 points for logging progress per day, not per book per day)

We'll be back soon with more updates!

Happy Reading, Jennifer & Lucy 💙💜

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marsberry is interested in reading...