moski

maggie/moski • 25 • she/her bookseller 📔 movie theater employee 🎞️ pale blue dot enthusiast 🌎 friend to cats everywhere 🐈‍⬛ lover of exclamation points❕very happy to be here! 🌞

27959 points

0% overlap

My Taste

Reading...

22%

It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

15%

72%

Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals

10%

moski made progress on...

Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals

Agha Shahid Ali

10%

moski wrote a review...

moski

Apr 06, 2026

3.0

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

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these prose poems are super absurd and surreal, their logic very dream-like. some of them worked for me, but for the most part, simic’s style just… wasn’t my jam.

moski started reading...

Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals

Agha Shahid Ali

"Ali's ghazals are contemporary and colloquial, deceptively simple, yet still grounded in tradition....Highly recommended."― Library Journal The beloved Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali presents his own American ghazals. Calling on a line or phrase from fellow poets, Ali salutes those known and loved―W. S. Merwin, Mark Strand, James Tate, and more―while in other searingly honest verse he courageously faces his own mortality.

moski finished a book

The World Doesn't End

Charles Simic

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry “One of the truly imaginative writers of our time.” — Los Angles Times Book Review You never know what Charles Simic is up to until you reach the end of the line or the bottom of the paragraph. Waiting for you might be a kiss. Or a bludgeon. A smile at the absurdities of society, or a wistful, grim memory of World War II. He puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak himself in antiquity. Charles Simic has new eyes, and in these wonderful poems and poems-in-prose he lets us see through them.

moski made progress on...

The World Doesn't End

Charles Simic

100%

moski wrote a review...

moski

Apr 06, 2026

4.0

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

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oh louise glück the way you write about nature will never not amaze me and break me

moski commented on raindrop's update

raindrop made progress on...

16h

Life on Mars: Poems

Tracy K. Smith

moski commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

amalgama

What's the list you're most proud of?

I have seen a few posts about lists lately: asking about everyone's favourite lists, the lists we have saved, etc. User created lists are one of my favourite featuresof PB, so today I wanted to put a bit of a spin on the "favourite lists" question and ask list curators directly: what's the list you are most proud of, out of the ones you've created? I know this can feel a bit like picking a favourite child 😂 But I'm very curious to hear what lists curators hold dearest. I'll drop my own answer in the comments as well, let's find some new favourites! 👀

moski commented on leylines's update

leylines started reading...

The Housemaid (The Housemaid, #1)

Freida McFadden

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781538742570. Every day I clean the Winchesters’ beautiful house top to bottom. I collect their daughter from school. And I cook a delicious meal for the whole family before heading up to eat alone in my tiny room on the top floor. I try to ignore how Nina makes a mess just to watch me clean it up. How she tells strange lies about her own daughter. And how her husband Andrew seems more broken every day. But as I look into Andrew’s handsome brown eyes, so full of pain, it’s hard not to imagine what it would be like to live Nina’s life. The walk-in closet, the fancy car, the perfect husband. I only try on one of Nina’s pristine white dresses once. Just to see what it’s like. But she soon finds out… and by the time I realize my attic bedroom door only locks from the outside, it’s far too late. But I reassure myself: the Winchesters don’t know who I really am. They don’t know what I’m capable of…

moski started reading...

The World Doesn't End

Charles Simic

moski commented on Loyaute's update

Loyaute earned a badge

Intro to Poetry

Platinum: Finished 20 Main Quest books.

118

moski TBR'd a book

18h

Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change

Anjali Enjeti

A move at age ten from a Detroit suburb to Chattanooga in 1984 thrusts Anjali Enjeti into what feels like a new world replete with Confederate flags, Bible verses, and whiteness. It is here that she learns how to get her bearings as a mixed-race brown girl in the Deep South and begins to understand how identity can inspire, inform, and shape a commitment to activism. Her own evolution is a bumpy one, and along the way Enjeti, racially targeted as a child, must wrestle with her own complicity in white supremacy and bigotry as an adult. The twenty essays of her debut collection, Southbound, tackle white feminism at a national feminist organization, the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the South, voter suppression, gun violence and the gun sense movement, the whitewashing of southern literature, the 1982 racialized killing of Vincent Chin, social media’s role in political accountability, evangelical Christianity’s marriage to extremism, and the rise of nationalism worldwide. In our current era of great political strife, this timely collection by Enjeti, a journalist and organizer, paves the way for a path forward, one where identity drives coalition-building and social change.

moski TBR'd a book

18h

Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South

Margaret Renkl

Winner of the 2022 Southern Book Prize Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay An Indie Next Selection for September 2021 A Book Marks Best Reviewed Essay Collection of 2021 A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021 A Country Living Best Book of Fall 2022 A Garden & Gun Recommended Read for Fall 2021 A Book Marks Best Reviewed Book of September 2021 From the author of the bestselling #ReadWithJenna/ TODAY Show book club pick Late A Natural History of Love and Loss For the past four years, Margaret Renkl’s columns have offered readers of The New York Times a weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling new collection. “People have often asked me how it feels to be the ‘voice of the South,’” writes Renkl in her introduction. “But I’m not the voice of the South, and no one else is, either.” There are many Souths—red and blue, rural and urban, mountain and coast, Black and white and brown—and no one writer could possibly represent all of them. In Graceland, At Last , Renkl writes instead from her own experience about the complexities of her homeland, demonstrating along the way how much more there is to this tangled region than many people understand. In a patchwork quilt of personal and reported essays, Renkl also highlights some other voices of the South, people who are fighting for a better future for the region. A group of teenagers who organized a youth march for Black Lives Matter. An urban shepherd whose sheep remove invasive vegetation. Church parishioners sheltering the homeless. Throughout, readers will find the generosity of spirit and deep attention to the world, human and nonhuman, that keep readers returning to her columns each Monday morning. From a writer who “makes one of all the world’s beings” (NPR), Graceland, At Last is a book full of gifts for Southerners and non-Southerners alike.

moski commented on a List

19h

understanding the american south

by moski

22 books

a multigenre syllabus on the history, identity, and culture(s) of the american southeast - a region often known otherwise as simply “the south” or “the deep south,” consisting in part of “the bible belt” and parts of appalachia.

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South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

moski made progress on...

19h

The Wild Iris

Louise Glück

100%

moski made progress on...

19h

One Last Stop

Casey McQuiston

72%

moski commented on a post

19h

moski

Edited

welcome welcome welcome!!! (recommendations for further reading can go here!)

ahhhh hello hello hello everyone! i’m so so excited to share this quest with you all. it was hard narrowing these down to just 15, but i can only hope i’ve done this cool little niche justice!

a few notes:

on the title — strictly speaking, these books feature more than just “plagues” as they’re scientifically defined. i’ve used the word plague here as a general / colloquial term for a variety of maladies that meet my criteria of being a) significant in scope b) in some way spreadable and c) distinctly “strange” in that they are dramatically unlike any real disease the human race has so far encountered.
i’ve tried to make sure there’s a little something for everyone! we’ve got graphic novels, novellas, long epics and short and sweet ya. i’ve also tried to cover quite a few genres here, since strange plagues can be found in all corners of genre fiction! i’ve posted a separate starter guide for those wondering where to begin :)
i’ve also made a separate post containing a list of trigger warnings for each of these reads, as due to the nature of strange plague stories these books can get a little intense / cover some sensitive topics!

finally - since this is a side quest, i cannot add or change anything. however, if you have recommendations for books that also fit into this niche, you can use this post as a place to share them! i plan to keep my list up as a sort of “further reading” guide and will keep that updated with more recommendations! thank you all for being here <33

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moski commented on moski's update

moski finished a book

19h