mousewithgrayears

bring on the grief, the Greeks, the unlikable protagoni, the unreliable narrators, the queer-coded cyborgs and the drug-addled autofiction. I also like poems

282 points

0% overlap

My Taste

Reading...

75%

mousewithgrayears commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

Wynnrie

Non fiction faves

My nonfiction people!!

What's a nonfiction book you strongly believe that everyone should read?

Bonus points if it made you cry/changed your life

For me it's Educated by Tara Westover and Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H. (I have way more)

(Also I just wanna yoink some books because I love nonfiction)

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250 points

mousewithgrayears commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

eruzed

what are some books that changed how you think about reading?

Hi everyone! Happy Thursday or Friday, depending on your time zone 😎

I wanted to ask what books have changed how you think about reading/have changed what you look for in books. It could be anything—maybe a book that introduced you to a new writing style, a book that changed how you think about certain genre conventions, a book that changed your expectations for what gets published... Mostly, I just want to hear about which books changed things for you!

For me, Tamsyn Muir's The Locked Tomb series (but especially the second installment, Harrow the Ninth, because wow) changed how I think about modern lit entirely. The series gave me such a renewed love for reading, as well as a love for sci-fi, which is a genre I'm not typically partial to. Muir's writing is so evocative and strange and intentional; I found that her books made me want to improve my own creative writing abilities. I appreciate books with clever, well-polished prose ten times as much now, and I find that my standards are higher in general for novels I choose to read.

mousewithgrayears made progress on...

When My Brother Was an Aztec

Natalie Díaz

75%

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mousewithgrayears commented on a post

mousewithgrayears

Reread as an adult

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mousewithgrayears wrote a review...

mousewithgrayears

Jan 29, 2026

3.5

Enjoyment: 3.0Quality: 3.5Characters: 3.5Plot: 3.0

This longtime classic probably doesn't need a review from me, but I'll just remark that I've read it once in the 1980s and again in 2026, and the sociopolitical concepts and the sadness and terror all hold up for me. I still think Part One is beautiful, horrifying, wrought with tension, and so strong in world-building. Part Two feels "important" but is a kind of Council-of-Elrond boring. And Part Three is a brutal torture-fest, relieved only by a wistful but colorless ending. It's good and hard, but, like Descartes' Meditations, you could choose to stop after the initial third and still get what you came for.

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mousewithgrayears

Reread as an adult

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mousewithgrayears

Thoughts from 92% (page 246): Appendix

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mousewithgrayears

Edited

Thoughts from 81% (page 217)

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mousewithgrayears is interested in reading...

A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

Christopher Brown

A genre-bending blend of naturalism, memoir, and social manifesto for rewilding the city, the self, and society.A Natural History of Empty Lots is a genre-defying work of nature writing, literary nonfiction, and memoir that explores what happens when nature and the city intersect. To do this, we must challenge our assumptions of nature itself. During the real estate crash of the late 2000s, Christopher Brown purchased an empty lot in an industrial section of Austin, Texas. The property—a brownfield site bisected with an abandoned petroleum pipeline and littered with concrete debris and landfill trash—was an unlikely site for a home. Along with his son, Brown had explored similar empty lots around Austin, so-called “ruined” spaces once used for agriculture and industry awaiting their redevelopment as Austin became a 21st century boom town. He discovered them to be teeming with natural activity, and embarked on a twenty-year project to live in and document such spaces. There, in our most damaged landscapes, he witnessed the remarkable resilience of wild nature, learned how easy it is to bring back the wild in our own backyards, and discovered that, by working to heal the wounds we have made on the Earth, we can also heal ourselves. Beautifully written and philosophically hard-hitting, A Natural History of Empty Lots offers a new lens on human disruption and nature, offering a sense of hope among the edgelands.

mousewithgrayears is interested in reading...

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

Robin Wall Kimmerer

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.As indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.” As Elizabeth Gilbert writes, Robin Wall Kimmerer is “a great teacher, and her words are a hymn of love to the world.” The Serviceberry is an antidote to the broken relationships and misguided goals of our times, and a reminder that “hoarding won’t save us, all flourishing is mutual.”

mousewithgrayears is interested in reading...

The Summer Without Men

Siri Hustvedt

"And who among us would deny Jane Austen her happy endings or insist that Cary Grant and Irene Dunne should not get back together at the end of The Awful Truth? There are tragedies and there are comedies, aren't there? And they are often more the same than different, rather like men and women, if you ask me. A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment." Mia Fredrickson, the wry, vituperative, tragicomic poet narrator of The Summer Without Men, has been forced to reexamine her own life. One day, out of the blue, after thirty years of marriage, Mia’s husband, a renowned neuroscientist, asks her for a “pause.” This abrupt request sends her reeling and lands her in a psychiatric ward. The June following Mia’s release from the hospital, she returns to the prairie town of her childhood, where her mother lives in an old people’s home. Alone in a rented house, she rages and fumes and bemoans her sorry fate. Slowly, however, she is drawn into the lives of those around her—her mother and her close friends,“the Five Swans,” and her young neighbor with two small children and a loud angry husband—and the adolescent girls in her poetry workshop whose scheming and petty cruelty carry a threat all their own. From the internationally bestselling author of What I Loved comes a provocative, witty, and revelatory novel about women and girls, love and marriage, and the age-old question of sameness and difference between the sexes.

mousewithgrayears is interested in reading...

Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian

A thrilling book about the abounding queerness of the natural world that challenges our expectations of what is normal, beautiful, and possible.Growing up, Patricia Kaishian felt most at home in the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley. A child who frequently felt out of place, too much of one thing or not enough of another, she found acceptance in these settings, among other amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her—and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science.In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness, literal and otherwise, of all the life around us. Fungi, we learn, commonly have more than two biological sexes—and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship. Glass eels are sexually undetermined until their last year of life, which stumped scientists once dubbed “the eel question.” Nature, Kaishian shows us, is filled with the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized—and they have lessons for us all.Wide-ranging, richly observant, and full of surprise, Forest Euphoria will open your eyes and change how you look at the world around you.

mousewithgrayears is interested in reading...

The Hounding

Xenobe Purvis

The Crucible meets The Virgin Suicides in this haunting debut about five sisters in a small village in eighteenth century England whose neighbors are convinced they’re turning into dogs. Even before the rumors about the Mansfield girls begin, Little Nettlebed is a village steeped in the uncanny, from strange creatures that wash up on the riverbed to portentous ravens gathering on the roofs of people about to die. But when the villagers start to hear barking, and one claims to see the Mansfield sisters transform before his very eyes, the allegations spark fascination and fear like nothing has before. The truth is that though the inhabitants of Little Nettlebed have never much liked the Mansfield girls—a little odd, think some; a little high on themselves, perhaps—they’ve always had plenty to say about them. As the rotating perspectives of five villagers quickly make clear, now is no exception. Even if local belief in witchcraft is waning, an aversion to difference is as widespread as ever, and these conflicting narratives all point to the same ultimate conclusion: something isn’t right in Little Nettlebed, and the sisters will be the ones to pay for it. As relevant today as any time before, The Hounding celebrates the wild breaks from convention we’re all sometimes pulled toward, and wonders if, in a world like this one, it isn’t safer to be a dog than an unusual young girl.

mousewithgrayears commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

What.A.Novelty

Palate Cleanser Authors

Do you have any palate cleanser authors for between books or for after a not-so-great read?

I always read an Atwood or an Ishiguro after a kind of sucky read but I am now almost done with both of these authors’ works so am looking for new “safe” authors!

mousewithgrayears commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

Plankton

Books I’m reading - equilibrium

Do you guys feel like you have an equilibrium when it comes to the number of books you’re reading? I just thought about this, since I’ve been trying really hard to cut down (a bit) on the number of books I’m reading at the same time, but whatever I do I always end up reading 5 books at once. I feel this might be my personal state of equilibrium which provides my brain with enough different topics to choose from and maybe trying to cut down on that number is wasted effort…? How does it work for you? I’m curious to hear your thoughts™️

mousewithgrayears made progress on...

When My Brother Was an Aztec

Natalie Díaz

50%

mousewithgrayears commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

Storyteller

Your job in books

Okay so I just saw Bunny's post abou what everyone here does for work and it is so lovely to see how diverse this community is in terms of jobs. And a new question occurred to me: do you see your job represented in books often? Have you ever seen it? What did you think, was it done well, or did it annoy you? How could it be done better? I'm curious!

(This question brought to you by my grandparents who were doctors, and watched medical dramas with loud and angry commentary :D )

mousewithgrayears made progress on...

1984

George Orwell

75%

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