miauwend

i love cats and short stories 🇧🇦⚜️ 🇵🇸free palestine till it's backwards🇵🇸

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My Taste

The Apothecary Diaries (Light Novel): Volume 1

Reading...

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

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25%

A Short History of the World According to Sheep

10%

miauwend is interested in reading...

This Monster of Mine

Shalini Abeysekara

She knows the taste of death. He'll stoke her hunger for it. Eighteen-year-old Sarai doesn't know why someone tried to kill her four years ago, but she does know that her case was closed without justice. Hellbent on vengeance, she returns to the scene of the crime as a Petitor, a prosecutor who can magically detect lies, and is assigned to work with Tetrarch Kadra. Ice-cold and perennially sadistic, Kadra is the most vicious of the four judges who rule the land - and the prime suspect in a string of deaths identical to Sarai's attempted murder. Certain of his guilt, Sarai begins a double life: solving cases with Kadra by day and plotting his ruin by night. But Kadra is charming and there's something alluring about the wrath he wields against the city's corruption. So when the evidence she finds embroils her in a deadly political battle, Sarai must also fight against her attraction to Kadra - because despite his growing hold on her heart, his voice matches the only memory she has of her assailant... A dazzling Ancient Rome-inspired romantasy debut, This Monster of Mine is a bloodbath of manipulation, deception, and forbidden love.

miauwend is interested in reading...

The Girl With A Thousand Faces

Sunyi Dean

From the USA Today bestselling author of The Book Eaters comes The Girl with a Thousand Faces, a Gothic tale set in a historical Hong Kong that meshes ancient myths and local legends into a haunting story of ghosts, grief, and women who will not forgive. When Mercy Chan washed up on the shores of Hong Kong with no family, no money, and no memories, she was thrust into the horrors of World War II. She only survived by hiding in Kowloon Walled City, an infamous, ghost-infested slum full of lost and traumatized civilians. Since the end of the war, she has rebuilt her life and found work with the local triad as a ghost-talker, dealing with the angry and bitter spirits who haunt this place. These days, the filthy gutters and cramped alleyways of Kowloon feel like home. But the past she can’t remember won’t let her go. An unusually powerful ghost has infested Kowloon’s waterways, drowning innocents and threatening the district. Unnervingly, it claims to know Mercy―and her forgotten childhood. As Mercy is drawn into a deadly cat-and-mouse game with this malignant spirit, she begins to realize that the monster she fights within these walls may well be one of her own making. 33 years before, mere days ahead of the Japanese invasion, Sung Siu Yin and her mother flee Hong Kong, intending to hide out on her mother's ancestral island home. It’s beautiful, tranquil, and remote. . . but also inhabited by ghosts ever since the entire village drowned in a storm many years ago. Still, it’s better than living under occupation. But as the war drags on and isolation sets in, Siu Yin is increasingly drawn into the island's grim past―a past that may still have a hold on the present. There is a darkness lurking beneath that idyllic ocean, and it has been waiting many years for someone to return. "The Girl With a Thousand Faces confirms Sunyi Dean as one of the most interesting voices in genre fiction.”―Gareth Brown, USA Today bestselling author of The Book of Doors

miauwend is interested in reading...

Untamed

Glennon Doyle

Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both an intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is the story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure but on each member’s ability to bring her full self to the table. And it is the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honor our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts so that we become women who can finally look at ourselves and say: There She Is.

miauwend started reading...

What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

Stephanie Foo

A searing memoir of reckoning and healing by acclaimed journalist Stephanie Foo, investigating the little-understood science behind complex PTSD and how it has shaped her life"Every cell in my body is filled with the code of generations of trauma, of death, of birth, of migration, of history that I cannot understand. . . . I want to have words for what my bones know." By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD--a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years. Both of Foo's parents abandoned her when she was a teenager, after years of physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she'd moved on, but her new diagnosis illuminated the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. She found limited resources to help her, so Foo set out to heal herself, and to map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD. In this deeply personal and thoroughly researched account, Foo interviews scientists and psychologists and tries a variety of innovative therapies. She returns to her hometown of San Jose, California, to investigate the effects of immigrant trauma on the community, and she uncovers family secrets in the country of her birth, Malaysia, to learn how trauma can be inherited through generations. Ultimately, she discovers that you don't move on from trauma--but you can learn to move with it. Powerful, enlightening, and hopeful, What My Bones Know is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past over the present, the mind over the body--and examines one woman's ability to reclaim agency from her trauma.

miauwend is interested in reading...

The Daughters of Izdihar (The Alamaxa Duology, #1)

Hadeer Elsbai

<From debut author Hadeer Elsbai comes the first book in an incredibly powerful new duology, set wholly in a new world, but inspired by modern Egyptian history, about two young women--Nehal, a spoiled aristocrat used to getting what she wants and Giorgina, a poor bookshop worker used to having nothing--who find they have far more in common, particularly in their struggle for the rights of women and their ability to fight for it with forbidden elemental magic As a waterweaver, Nehal can move and shape any water to her will, but she's limited by her lack of formal education. She desires nothing more than to attend the newly opened Weaving Academy, take complete control of her powers, and pursue a glorious future on the battlefield with the first all-female military regiment. But her family cannot afford to let her go--crushed under her father's gambling debt, Nehal is forcibly married into a wealthy merchant family. Her new spouse, Nico, is indifferent and distant and in love with another woman, a bookseller named Giorgina. Giorgina has her own secret, however: she is an earthweaver with dangerously uncontrollable powers. She has no money and no prospects. Her only solace comes from her activities with the Daughters of Izdihar, a radical women's rights group at the forefront of a movement with a simple goal: to attain recognition for women to have a say in their own lives. They live very different lives and come from very different means, yet Nehal and Giorgina have more in common than they think. The cause--and Nico--brings them into each other's orbit, drawn in by the group's enigmatic leader, Malak Mamdouh, and the urge to do what is right. But their problems may seem small in the broader context of their world, as tensions are rising with a neighboring nation that desires an end to weaving and weavers. As Nehal and Giorgina fight for their rights, the threat of war looms in the background, and the two women find themselves struggling to earn--and keep--a lasting freedom.

miauwend is interested in reading...

Three Parts Dead (Craft Sequence, #1)

Max Gladstone

A god has died, and it’s up to Tara, first-year associate in the international necromantic firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, to bring Him back to life before His city falls apart. Her client is Kos, recently deceased fire god of the city of Alt Coulumb. Without Him, the metropolis’s steam generators will shut down, its trains will cease running, and its four million citizens will riot. Tara’s job: resurrect Kos before chaos sets in. Her only help: Abelard, a chain-smoking priest of the dead god, who’s having an understandable crisis of faith. When Tara and Abelard discover that Kos was murdered, they have to make a case in Alt Coulumb’s courts—and their quest for the truth endangers their partnership, their lives, and Alt Coulumb’s slim hope of survival. Set in a phenomenally built world in which justice is a collective force bestowed on a few, craftsmen fly on lightning bolts, and gargoyles can rule cities, Three Parts Dead introduces readers to an ethical landscape in which the line between right and wrong blurs.

miauwend commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

proud.bookworm

Hedgehogs 🦔

Dear people, I just saw a hedgehog on my walk and a switch in my brain was flipped. I am now obsessed with hedgehogs and want to learn all about them. I would love some recommendations on books that is about or has any content about hedgehogs. Thank you in advance😌🦔

miauwend commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

raindrop

Edited

queer and/or food manga recs!

HULLOH FRENS

i am going shopping for manga/graphic novels/comics today!

i would love some recs for any or all of the following: cosy/slice of life, queer/sapphic, bipoc, love food or cooking centered, found family is great too! also mystery (but more cosy or detective vibes, woman/queer centered) and animals.

for reference i loved i hear the sunspot for manga, and i really want to find our dining table! and also i looove tea dragon society! i love any kind of graphic novel but especially resonate with queer stories

a side note if it rings any bells: i like when graphic novels or comics or manga have less text on a page and more art bc my brain gets overwhelmed with too much info rip. and also calmer color palettes. but suuuuper open to anything i appreciate all art!!

so far my shopping list: jackass! our dining table she loves to cook and she loves to eat what did you eat yesterday the guy she was interested in wasn’t a guy at all wandering son

TYYYY

miauwend is interested in reading...

Mysteries of the Snake Goddess: Art, Desire, and the Forging of History

Kenneth Lapatin

One of the most famous pieces of ancient Greek art, a gold and ivory statuette of the Snake Goddess, has been described as the most refined and precious relic of Minoan civilization. Alas, as Kenneth Lapatin reveals, not only is the Goddess almost certainly modern, but Minoan civilization as it has been reconstructed is largely an invention of the early twentieth century. The Goddess’s ivory and gold are of the wrong vintage, and the stories of her origins are even more recent and problematic. What makes this tale fascinating, however, is not the forgery but the motivations behind it. Sir Arthur Evans, the legendary excavator of Knossos, romanticized a sophisticated prehistoric society, and restorers working for him obligingly supplied its artifacts. Their creations formed the basis for further theories, which led to further deceptions. Evans hailed Minoan culture as “at once the starting-point and the earliest stage in the highway of European civilization,” yet its icons were largely fashioned by modern rather than ancient Cretans to suit the desires of scholars, museums, and the art market. This astonishing book reads like a mystery, but it is also a major work of intellectual investigation, shedding light on the ways in which the past is reinvented to suit the needs of the present.

miauwend is interested in reading...

The Opposite House

Helen Oyeyemi

In a dazzling follow-up to The Icarus Girl, Helen Oyeyemi explores the thin wall between myth and reality through the alternating tales of two young women and their search for the truth about faith and identity. Maja was five years old when her black Cuban family emigrated from the Caribbean to London. Now, almost twenty years later, Maja is a singer, in love with Aaron, pregnant, and haunted by what she calls “her Cuba.” Growing up in London, she has struggled to negotiate her history and the sense that speaking Spanish or English made her less of a black girl. But she is unable to find herself in the Ewe, Igbo, or Akum of her roots. It seems all that’s left is silence. Meanwhile distance from Cuba has only deepened Maja’s mother faith in Santeria —the fusion of Catholicism and Western African Yoruba religion—but it also divides the family as her father rails against his wife’s superstitions and the lost dreams of the Castro revolution.On the other side of the reality wall, Yemaya Saramagua, a Santeria emissary, lives in a somewherehouse with two doors: one opening to London, the other to Lagos. Yemaya is troubled by the ease with which her fellow emissaries have disguised themselves behind the personas of saints and by her inability to recognize them. Lyrical and intensely moving, The Opposite House is about the disquiet that follows us across places and languages, a feeling passed down from mother and father to son and daughter.

miauwend is interested in reading...

Earth to Alis

Lex Carlow

Alistair Woodson is a loner by choice. Since the traumatic night that ended his only friendship, he’s isolated himself by letting his classmates believe he’s a criminal and an arsonist, best to be avoided at all costs. But on his graduation trip across Paris, Switzerland, and Italy, Alis discovers that isolation isn’t so easy to maintain in hostel rooms and cross-country trains. Soon he finds himself growing closer to classmates who were once strangers to him—namely the class clown, Craig Miltenberg, whose frustratingly good hair and cheerful disposition don’t irritate Alis nearly as much as they should. Yet, as his deepening connections stir up painful reminders of his last doomed friendship, Alis continues to cope the only way he knows how: drowning out the pain on the inside by hurting himself on the outside. When his self-destructive behaviours intensify and put him and his new relationships in jeopardy, Alis must find the courage to confront his spiralling mental health—even if it means letting someone in. Lex Carlow's gritty queer debut is perfect for fans of Alice Oseman, Kathleen Glasgow, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

miauwend is interested in reading...

The Sword of Kaigen

M.L. Wang

A mother struggling to repress her violent past, A son struggling to grasp his violent future, A father blind to the danger that threatens them all. When the winds of war reach their peninsula, will the Matsuda family have the strength to defend their empire? Or will they tear each other apart before the true enemies even reach their shores? High on a mountainside at the edge of the Kaigenese Empire live the most powerful warriors in the world, superhumans capable of raising the sea and wielding blades of ice. For hundreds of years, the fighters of the Kusanagi Peninsula have held the Empire’s enemies at bay, earning their frozen spit of land the name ‘The Sword of Kaigen.’ Born into Kusanagi’s legendary Matsuda family, fourteen-year-old Mamoru has always known his purpose: to master his family’s fighting techniques and defend his homeland. But when an outsider arrives and pulls back the curtain on Kaigen’s alleged age of peace, Mamoru realizes that he might not have much time to become the fighter he was bred to be. Worse, the empire he was bred to defend may stand on a foundation of lies. Misaki told herself that she left the passions of her youth behind when she married into the Matsuda house. Determined to be a good housewife and mother, she hid away her sword, along with everything from her days as a fighter in a faraway country. But with her growing son asking questions about the outside world, the threat of an impending invasion looming across the sea, and her frigid husband grating on her nerves, Misaki finds the fighter in her clawing its way back to the surface.

miauwend is interested in reading...

Landlocked in Foreign Skin

Drew Huff

The Fisherman can't fathom why anyone would want to be human. Small wonder. They've been ripped from their underwater home under Europa's ice, and stripped of their skin--the nebulous outer layer that enables them to shapeshift for survival. Imprisoned on a ship that's hunting for a mad undersea god, they must help the crew find it if they want to retrieve their skin and return home. Dame Isobel, an insane young heiress, owns the ship, desperate to find the god in the hopes that it will heal her lobotomized girlfriend. The Fisherman is stuck in a female human form. They're pulled into a toxic, codependent sexual relationship with Dame Isobel-- in a world where homosexuality is punishable by death. In the midst of this insanity, it's quite clear to the Fisherman: Humanity is confusing, inefficient, and messy. When Isobel reveals that she will never let the Fisherman go, even if they find the mad god, the Fisherman knows: It's time to get violent.

miauwend commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

Batfield

Edited

finding bookish friends through mutual hate 🤝

It's great when you meet people who love your favorite books. You know what's even better? Finding people who hate the same books as you do!

I often go find one-star reviews of books I despise and give the reviewer a follow. It's funny to me that mutual hatred is more often a better predictor of shared taste than mutual endorsement :))

Here are some popular books I cannot stand or found underwhelming (apologies if this offends anyone here):

First and foremost, the star of the show: A Little Life ✨: this is easily one of my MOST HATED books of all time. I could make a five-hour video explaining why that is, but others have already done that. I hate it so much I'm using it as a coaster just to be disrespectful.

Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson: I know, I know, this is a favorite among many. This one I don't "hate" tbh, I just didn't care for the writing, the corny dialogue, the characters, and some plot points I found ridiculous. The world-building and the magic system was cool though. (I had this feeling it would be a much better experience as a video game!)

The Jade City: yes, another very popular fantasy, but I disliked it so much I DNF'd it after 100 pages. I really hated the objectification and over-sexualization of female characters, and I didn't care for the male characters or the plot either.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tart: I'm a sucker for big, slow-paced books with good writing so I had high hopes for this one but good grief this one KILLED ME. It was SUCH A DRAG. loved the prose but this did not have nearly enough substance to justify this much yapping. I might read her other book though.

The name of the wind by Patrick Rothfuss: I read this many years ago in farsi and I don't remember much except the main character was very clearly the writers' self insert and utterly insufferable. Some say this has good prose, but I read a translated version so this had no redeeming qualities for me.

What are your most hated books? Name them in the comments and see if you can find friends:))

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miauwend commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

nakedmollrat

Edited

men writing women

safe to say I’m particularly sick of how men write women now that I’m re-reading The Great Gatsby, so I thought, why not get everyone to comment the best and worst male writers for writing female characters.?? I’ll start with Ian McKewan as he writes women very well

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miauwend commented on a post

miauwend

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Paprika Hendl and Mămăligă/Impletata

here's pictures of the dishes Jonathan mentions (extreeemely tasty btw!). i love the food anecdotes in his travel diary!

alt text

edit: recipes here

1 (paprikás csirke is the hungarian name of the dish) 2

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miauwend commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

floppybooks07

Microfixations

I listened to a podcast about why having special interest is so important to generate your own personality and to be human and i want to talk about microfixations specially art related ones (music, books, movies, art pieces, video games even..)

I think out there there's the perfect piece (or pieces) of art for everyone and not all people have the fortune to find it. by perfect piece i talk about any piece of media that resonates with you in a deeper level than any other art piece has resonated with you. For me that would be Twin Peaks, i haven't even finished it (im on the third season) but i never felt the interest i'm feeling with this show with anything else, i could talk about it for hours. It has also happened to me with the Hunger games, i think is a contemporary classic, i even made my final highschool project about the representation of dystopia in fiction and the real world with the hunger games as my main piece of reference.

what are your microfixations?

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