subparsunlight

they/them • embodying sufjan stevens’ “futile devices”

797 points

0% overlap

My Taste

Reading...

26%

The Book of Queer Prophets: 21 Writers on Sexuality and Religion

41%

subparsunlight made progress on...

The Book of Queer Prophets: 21 Writers on Sexuality and Religion

Ruth Hunt

41%

subparsunlight is interested in reading...

The Once and Future Witches

Alix E. Harrow

In the late 1800s, three sisters use witchcraft to change the course of history in Alix E. Harrow's powerful novel of magic and the suffragette movement. In 1893, there's no such thing as witches. There used to be, in the wild, dark days before the burnings began, but now witching is nothing but tidy charms and nursery rhymes. If the modern woman wants any measure of power, she must find it at the ballot box. But when the Eastwood sisters -- James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth, and Beatrice Belladonna -- join the suffragists of New Salem, they begin to pursue the forgotten words and ways that might turn the women's movement into the witch's movement. Stalked by shadows and sickness, hunted by forces who will not suffer a witch to vote -- and perhaps not even to live -- the sisters will need to delve into the oldest magics, draw new alliances, and heal the bond between them if they want to survive. There's no such thing as witches. But there will be. An homage to the indomitable power and persistence of women, The Once and Future Witches reimagines stories of revolution, sapphic love, motherhood, and women's suffrage--the lost ways are calling.

subparsunlight commented on subparsunlight's review of Nymph

11h

subparsunlight

Mar 28, 2026

5.0

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

so incredibly grateful for the eARC from netgalley!!

wow… just wow. nymph has, without a doubt, exceeded my expectations. i wish i had gone into this book blind, since i initially thought that this book would be centered around sapphic yearning and longing (which, don’t get me wrong, is still present). the narrative however delivers a far more complex exploration of a young woman’s coming of age, and centers on themes of trauma/grief/loss. i will say that the pacing/tone of the book was pretty slow and languid, and far more character-driven than plot-driven, but this aligns well with the vibes of an aimless italian summertime— and my tastes lol :)

i deeply appreciated that the primary “conflict” of the story is all the aches and pains of growing up and coming into oneself, rather than the more trite and surface level coming-out stories that we see in most queer media. rather than fixating on the “taboo” of leo falling for another woman, the text’s focus is on her journey in understanding herself and her wants/needs/desires. it’s more about her unfolding and discovering herself in relation with those around her, which i found to be so profound and beautiful.

sofia montrone’s prose is so delicate and thoughtful, so incredibly descriptive and beautifully written, with each passage dripping with immense depth and meaning. she has definitely mastered the art of showing (rather than telling), which i unfortunately find many contemporary authors struggle with now. as a debut novel, this makes me so incredibly excited to see what other work she comes out with!

subparsunlight is interested in reading...

11h

Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention

Clara Mattei

For fans of Bernie Sanders and Thomas Piketty, an urgent intervention against capitalism revealing how economic models serve the extremely wealthy and powerful at the expense of ordinary people—and how we can reclaim our power to make choices about our economic lives.Capitalism isn’t inevitable, scientific, or natural—it's a relatively young system that can be replaced. In this radical rethinking of economics, Clara Mattei argues that enduring problems such as poverty, unemployment, and inflation are not bugs in the economy but core features. They are justified with pseudoscientific models, fabrications built to support a capitalist economy that unfairly rewards people with the most resources. The tools of economic experts—budget cuts, interest rate hikes, and regressive taxes—are sold as apolitical but disguise a bleak they maintain our capitalist system, reinforcing inequality. Central bankers raise interest rates knowing this will cause a recession and pain to working families. Governments slash tax collection jobs in the name of balanced budgets, which actually shields the wealthy from tax enforcement and creates budget shortfalls used to justify cuts in social services. Textbooks teach that unemployment must rise to fix inflation. But this model creates conditions that force people to accept crummy jobs and low pay. In the wake of World War I, when the world’s economy was in turmoil, economics was elevated to a scientific discipline, legitimized through mathematical formulas and new economic institutions considered too sophisticated for the average person to understand. Today’s economic institutions, from the Fed to the IMF, wield immense power over monetary policy yet are shielded from democratic scrutiny. Why should we accept a system that delegates crucial decisions that impact our lives to institutions in which we have no say? All the major problems today—from a healthcare system that prioritizes profits over well-being to the rise of ultranationalism—are rooted in an economic system that fails to serve the common good. In this revelatory manifesto, Mattei sets out a revolutionary vision that may one day allow us to achieve true economic freedom and finally escape from capitalism.

subparsunlight wrote a review...

21h

subparsunlight

Mar 28, 2026

5.0

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

so incredibly grateful for the eARC from netgalley!!

subparsunlight finished a book

21h

Nymph

Sofia Montrone

Call Me By Your Name meets Elena Ferrante in this debut coming-of-age novel about a young girl who spends summers working at her family’s timeworn Italian agriturismo, the tragedy that rends her life into “before” and “after,” and her romance with an American girl, which has unexpected consequencesTo ten-year-old Leo, life is a collection. She spends her mornings tidying the rooms of her Nonna Tina’s timeworn Italian agriturismo, carefully accumulating the curious bits of left-behind detritus from guests—a pearl earring, a lock of hair. Her nights are suffused with gathering the stories that flow from her father’s lips—liquor-spun tales of Odysseus and the Trojans in secret battle. But when an accident rips the gentle membrane of Leo’s childhood, she is left vulnerable to the pains and pleasures of growing up. Years later, in a sultry summer not unlike the many that came before, the agriturismo is the only thing that remains the same. Nonna Tina has grown older, Leo’s brother Max is intractable and mercurial, and the curiosity Leo so loved to feed as a child has turned into something more confusing. When she meets Dolores, an American girl made brilliant by Leo’s perception of her, she can’t help but gather all the experiences first love promises, while shedding parts of the past she no longer fits into. Embroidering the atmospheric yearning of Call Me By Your Name with the precise, elevated prose of Elena Ferrante, Sofia Montrone’s jaw-dropping debut revels in the exuberant highs and awkward lows of girlhood and captures the universal experiences of trying to hold on to what is elusive, to deny what cannot be faced, and to say what cannot be said.

Post from the Nymph forum

21h

subparsunlight

Edited

Thoughts from 93% (page 153/165)

ahhhh i understand the title now!! :)

subparsunlight is interested in reading...

21h

On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings of Ella Shohat

Ella Shohat

Defying the binary and Eurocentric view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ella Shohat’s work, as a whole, dares to engage the deeper historical and cultural questions swirling around colonialism, Orientalism, and nationalism. Spanning several decades, Shohat’s work has introduced conceptual frameworks that have fundamentally challenged the conventional understandings of Arabs and Jews, Palestine, Zionism, and the Middle East. Collected now in a single volume, this book gathers together some of her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies, and memoirs for the first time. As a renowned academic, orator, and activist, Shohat’s work unpacks complexly fraught anomalies of the national and colonial in Zionist discourse; narrating of Jewish pasts in Muslim spaces; links and distinctions between the expulsion of Palestinians during the 1948 war and the dislocation of Arab-Jews; traumatic memories triggered by partition and border-crossing; echoes within Islamophobia of the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew; and efforts to imagine a possible united and peaceful future. Shohat’s trans-disciplinary perspective illuminates the contemporary cultural politics in and around the Middle East. A transdisciplinary work engaging history, literature, sociology, film, media, and cultural studies, Selected Writings offers a vivid sense of Shohat’s unique intellectual journey and field-defining career.

subparsunlight commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

21h

kimikat

I want to sob like a baby 🥺

Happy Friday amazing PB readers! I’m in the mood for devastation and some healthy (or even unhealthy) crying.

I want a book that is going to absolutely destroy me. I’m talking ugly crying, can’t-see-the-words-through-my-tears, questioning-my-life-choices kind of heartbreak.

I want the one that left you staring at a wall after finishing. The ones you still think about. The ones that hurt so good you’d read them again anyway.

The last one that had me grasping for reality was The Last Letter by Rebecca Yarros

Make me cry, friends!

subparsunlight is interested in reading...

21h

A Gentleman's Gentleman

T.J. Alexander

From the acclaimed author of Chef's Kiss, a groundbreaking trans Regency romance that's both delightfully witty and refreshingly iconoclastic. The notoriously eccentric Lord Christopher Eden is a “man of unusual make” and even more unusual habits: he prefers to live as far from the prying eyes and ears of the ton as possible, and would rather have the comfortable company of his childhood cook and his aged butler, Plinkton, than the swarm of servants and hangers-on befitting a man of his station. But Christopher's pleasant, if occasionally lonely life is upended when he receives word from his lawyers that, according to his late father’s will, he must find a wife by the end of the Season if he intends to keep his family's fortune and the Eden's End estate. Christopher cannot imagine a worse fate: as he isn't attracted to women, his chances of making a wife happy are slim. Furthermore, if his quest to marry has any hope of succeeding, he must move to London posthaste and acquire some more suitable staff. Enter James Harding, Christopher's new, distractingly handsome—if rigidly traditional—valet. After a rocky start, the two strike up a fragile friendship amid the throes of the London Season . . . a friendship that threatens to shatter under the looming shadow of Christopher’s impending nuptials—and the secrets both men are keeping. With its heady combination of dry wit, slow-burn romance, and a nuanced, complex portrait of trans identity and relationships that’s as relevant now as it was during the Regency era, A Gentleman's Gentleman stands to transform the historical romance genre as we know it.

subparsunlight commented on subparsunlight's update

subparsunlight made progress on...

Nymph

Sofia Montrone

75%

subparsunlight is interested in reading...

Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die

Greer Stothers

In this hilarious, off-the-wall queer fantasy romance, a reclusive sorcerer is forced to protect a cowardly knight after a prophecy ties their fates together. Funny, touching and inventive, this book is perfect for fans of A Marvellous Light and Dreadful. All his life, Sir Cameron has tried to stay as far away from danger as possible. But when the Church hands down a prophecy to his fellow knights predicting that the only way to defeat their nemesis, the mad sorcerer Merulo, is to kill Sir Cameron, he finds himself in a situation too sticky for even his considerable wiles. Short of ideas, Cameron throws himself on the mercy of the one person who now actually wants him to the mad sorcerer. Merulo isn't thrilled to be babysitting a spoilt, attention-seeking knight, but fate has tied them together. And transmogrifying Cameron into a vulture is at least a great source of entertainment. Cameron, meanwhile, is on a voyage of self-discovery. It turns out he's really, really into surly sorcerers who lock him up and tell him what to do. Who knew? As a legion of knights surround their stronghold, led by an angry concussed elf—which definitely isn't in any way Cameron's fault—the sorcerer's poisonous ambitions draw ever closer to fruition. Cameron is quite invested in not dying, but he finds he's also invested in Merulo. And sometimes, supporting the sorcerer you care about means taking an interest in their hobbies. Even if their hobby is trying to kill God. Even if it might get you killed, too.

subparsunlight commented on peachyybabe's update

peachyybabe started reading...

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Ocean Vuong

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.

subparsunlight made progress on...

A Tale for the Time Being

Ruth Ozeki

26%

subparsunlight started reading...

A Tale for the Time Being

Ruth Ozeki

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying, but before she ends it all, Nao plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace—and will touch lives in a ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future. Full of Ozeki's signature humour and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.

subparsunlight made progress on...

Nymph

Sofia Montrone

75%

subparsunlight commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

roryrowan

Classic Novella Recommendations?

I recently read Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and really enjoyed it. I have since wanted to read more short stories/novellas, specifically more in the classics area (I love learning about things that shaped our Zeitgeist), but I am not quite sure where to start! I have a few on my tbr, and tried to find some lists with more novellas/short stories, but they were all quite specific to a genre, so I am turning to PB club!

Does anyone have any classic novella recommendations or favourites? I particularly enjoy horror, fantasy, and narrative focussed books, however I am open to any genre!

(My novella tbr: -The Metamorphosis -Lobster -The Stranger -Harlequin Butterfly -The Birds -How Much Land Does a Man Need?)

Looking forward to hearing some suggestions!✨

subparsunlight commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

acidicchaos

Calculate Pages Per Day - Google Sheets Template

I was talking with @prongsreads about how it's tough for people who read multiple books at once to calculate how many pages they need to read per day to stay on track with different due dates, so I added it into my Notion reading tracker. My notion reading tracker isn't ready to share yet, but I whipped up a (basic) Google Sheets version, so I figured I'd share it with y'all too! Link To Google Sheets Pages per Day Calculator Here

Here's the Idea If you're trying to track total pages per day across multiple books with different deadlines (book clubs, PB Events/Seasonal Readalongs, library books, ARCs, etc.), it gets messy fast. Most reading apps tell you to "read 10 pages of each book" per day, but that's not how a lot of us actually read. I don't want to read 10 pages from 6 different books each day. I want to focus on one or two, binge em, and move on to the next! But then, how do I know if I'm still on track overall?

What It Does It calculates the pages per day for each book (based on due date and reading progress) and calculates your TOTAL pages per day across all books with due dates. It will automatically update each day (you just need to update your reading progress).

Example You have 5 books due at different times. You randomly read 75% of one book in a day and ignore the other books for 3 days -> it recalculates everything and tells you what you need to do now to stay on track (or catch up).

Notes

It's functional, not pretty. I figured y'all could customize it to your own aesthetics. Make it cute, change the colors, reorganize it (just make sure you cut and paste columns to keep the formatting).
You'll need access to google drive -> it will automatically have you make a copy of the calculator so the original template doesn't get messed with.
Full instructions & examples are inside the spreadsheet but if you have questions, just holler! Spreadsheets are a love language for me. I'm not a pro by any means, but I love making them haha

Happy reading Boundlings!!

subparsunlight is interested in reading...

Structure and Qur'anic Interpretation: A Study of Symmetry and Coherence in Islam's Holy Text (Islamic Encounter Series)

Raymond Farrin

The Qur'an, Islam's holy book, is widely misunderstood because it is a difficult book to engage. The Qur'an is not written as a straightforward narrative like the Christian Gospels but is composed of discontinuous revelations that are often unclear in placing in an overall context. Structure and Qur’anic Interpretation , aimed both at readers familiar with the Qur’an and at those opening it for the first time, differs from other books on the Qur’an in that it reveals the text’s fundamental symmetrical organization. Moreover, through readings of key Qur'an chapters, Farrin shows how structure serves as a guide to interpretation. Indeed, one finds that the Qur’an’s structure again and again points to universal messages of an ethical nature, rather than to messages whose application may be limited to a specific context. In addition, the book makes a contribution to Qur’anic studies by highlighting literary evidence indicating that the Qur’an was compiled by one author (in all probability, the Prophet Muhammad) and not by an official committee.

subparsunlight is interested in reading...

Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique

Sa'ed Atshan

From Ramallah to New York, Tel Aviv to Porto Alegre, people around the world celebrate a formidable, transnational Palestinian LGBTQ social movement. Solidarity with Palestinians has become a salient domain of global queer politics. Yet LGBTQ Palestinians, even as they fight patriarchy and imperialism, are themselves subjected to an "empire of critique" from Israeli and Palestinian institutions, Western academics, journalists and filmmakers, and even fellow activists. Such global criticism has limited growth and led to an emphasis within the movement on anti-imperialism over the struggle against homophobia. With this book, Sa'ed Atshan asks how transnational progressive social movements can balance struggles for liberation along more than one axis. He explores critical junctures in the history of Palestinian LGBTQ activism, revealing the queer Palestinian spirit of agency, defiance, and creativity, in the face of daunting pressures and forces working to constrict it. Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique explores the necessity of connecting the struggles for Palestinian freedom with the struggle against homophobia.

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