Thanks you Sasha for this amazing quest! Time travel is possibly my favorite trope of all time 😅 In particular, I'm most fascinated by time loops :)

So, to people who finished some of the quest books already - which ones would you recommend for time loop enjoyers specifically?

I think this maybe started when the performative male thing was going around, since the "performative male" in question always having some feminist book or work on him; and then possibly spurred itself into this "reading in public is performative" narrative (which I've now seen several posts of).

Reading in public is only seen as performative if you don't read, I think.

We've somehow reached a point where being seen doing something as basic as reading is a pretentious action.

To me it's just as basic as wearing headphones and listening to music in public, so why does reading have such a differing reaction?

I think it's a more subtle form of anti-intellectualism, trying to make it socially embarrassing to be seen doing things like reading.

Edit: added context.

Hi guys! I’m feeling nostalgic today and am curious what everyone’s first experience with queer books was! What was the first queer book you read? How did it make you feel? Scared? Seen?

I personally don’t remember the first queer book I read but i would love to hear everyone’s answers!

On that note, does anyone have queer middle grade recommendations? Books that make you wish you had them when you were younger ☺️

I was thinking about The Golden Compass earlier because I'm going to be buddy reading that series later this year (rereading in my case because we actually read it in English class in 7th grade) and about the concept of daemons in that series, which is, to summarize briefly, an animal representation of your soul that lives in the physical world with you who you can talk to and interact with. Honestly, the dream. In the book, your daemon essentially settles into one animal form based on who you are for the rest of your life when you hit puberty.

And because I love animals and always love reasons for more animal talk - what would your daemon/animal form/however you want to conceptualize it be based on your personality and why? Post a picture if you want!

(To post a picture, use  without the spaces.)

I was recently reading The Priory of the Orange Tree and i was talking to one of my friends about. I was saying i thought it was really interesting and I thought that by all the elements included, he would enjoy it. He then said he might check it out since i said that, but when he was looking for the book he first saw it described as 'feminist Lord of the Rings'. We then got sidetracked and had a whole discussion about Tolkien and the society he lived in at the time of writing the books, but that is beside the point.

I got stuck in mind the idea or trend that is in describing some books by using others. I think it might have been a BookTok amplified phenomenon, which I did find interesting and fun at first, but also started to feel a bit irritated by it as time went on, because i found most, if not all, popular books being described as 'the cross between this book and this book with the emotional impact of this third book'.

I felt that having an actual description of the plot or characters might convince me more. Also, sometimes, when i see the books described through some titles, I am actually less likely to pick that book up, because I did not enjoy the one they are referencing, even if perhaps this book has a different writing style or story progression or characters I would enjoy much more.

So i was wondering what others think. Do you enjoy having that, so you can discover books more like your favourites, or do you also find that you are not the biggest fans of it?