Book cover for the russian edition of «Night of the Raven, Dawn of the Dove» by Rati Mehrotra✨
This year some of my favourite books I read were written by indigenous American authors and I just wanted to shout out a couple that I fell in love with
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
Horror being my second most read genre, I did not think books could still get under my skin the way this one did lol. It follows four Blackfoot men who are seemingly being hunted by a vengeful... something... years after a fateful hunting trip that happened just before they went their separate ways. The horror, the dread, the something... pure nightmare fuel 10/10
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
An apocalyptic novel following an isolated Anishinaabe community in the far north who lose contact with the outside world. When two of their young men return from their college with dire news, they set about planning on how to survive the winter, but when outsiders follow, lines are drawn in the community that might doom them all. This book is all dread all the time, the use of dreams and the inevitability of conflict weighs heavy til the very end. An excellent apocalypse story if you're into that kind of thing.
My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
This book follows Jade, a deeply troubled mixed race teenager with a shitty homelife who's *obsessed* with slasher movies. When she finds evidence that there's a killer running about her soon-to-be gentrified small town, she weaponises that knowledge to predict what's going to happen next. I don't think this book will work for most people, it's a little stream of consciousness, Jade's head is frequently a very difficult place to be in, but by the last page I had so much love for her as a character and the emotional rollercoaster she's on that I had to mention it here.
Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger
Taking a bit of a left turn but this charming YA murder mystery really stuck with me this year. Elatsoe is a teenage girl living in an America where myths, monsters, and magic are all real every day occurrences. When her cousin dies mysteriously with no witnesses, she decides to do whatever she can, including using her ability to raise the spirits of dead animals, to solve the case. The worldbuilding was just really fun in this one, but the Native American myths and influence were the shining star for me, and the asexual rep was refreshing to see in a YA book too tbh
Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq
The audiobook, the audiobook, the audiobook!!!! Also the physical book because formatting and illustrations, but the audiobook!!! Tanya Tagaq is an Inuit throat singer, and this novel is a genre blending of 20 years worth of the authors journal entries, poetry, and short stories, that culminates in a truly unique story about a young girl surviving her teenage years in a small tundra town in the 70s. It is sad and beautiful and hard but an experience like nothing else I read this year.
I'm not an expert, I know nothing about ornithology or biology or zoology or wildlife science or animal behaviours or animal intelligence, but sometimes I think about the fact that birdwatchers in Toronto observed a raven learn how to mimic crow calls, make a nest with a crow and raise a pair of crow-raven hybrids the birdwatchers referred to as cravens and I just think. That's gotta be love, baby.
Tumblr: No NSFW! You know how it is we banned it because of the bots in 2018!
Also tumblr:
lmao
You know how it is then, folks!
me: “yeah I dated a guy in high school who came out as gay. it was before i knew i was a boy so needless to say it didn’t work out”
coworker: “damn dude was preordering”
other things this coworker (who is a cis guy) has done/said:
—got confused about why I’d never been a boy scout because he forgot i was trans
—told me he was gonna get top surgery scar tattoos to match me after i get mine
—laughs at all my trans jokes, even if they’re supremely unfunny
—calls me big dog (and him little dog) even though he is about as tall as two of me
— “I can’t believe she would say that transphobic thing to you. In June? Pride month?”
reject booktok culture. go to the library and get a weird little novel you’ve never heard of in your life and read it all in 2 days like god intended.
this too tbh
OP: "So it turns out the plucking of the hairpin and the hairstyle falling apart the way it does in novels really is real."
i wanna do another DTIYS because they're FUN and also to celebrate Ride or Die chapter 4's launch on August 13 and help spread the word!
to enter:
- redraw the above pic of Lucky and Vick in your own style and tag it with #marsoiddtiys so I can find it!
- change as much as you want! the outfits, the expressions, colors, whatever!!
- ends September 1!
i'll share everyone's entries and i'll also pick THREE participants who will receive a custom drawing of whatever they want (within reason lol)!
THANKS YALL!! B)
my edit of @gladiolusly 's group meme (original here) which is exactly what I was looking for, thank you....
“Leons the biggest slut in Resident Evil” Wrong, it’s Chris
Putting Jill and Leon in the same room repeatedly was so funny of capcom. These two are the rulers of dumb-yet-endearing-one-liners and they actually found each other funny because of it. No one else thinks they're funny except each other. It's brilliant.
theglowpt2-deactivated20200101
every word out of guillermo del toro’s mouth is the most hardcore thing i’ve ever heard and he says it all so casually like he doesn’t even realize how much of a gothic visionary he is
tonyahardingapologist
“Since childhood, I’ve been faithful to monsters. I have been saved and absolved by them, because monsters, I believe, are patron saints of our blissful imperfection, and they allow and embody the possibility of failing”
I STILL THINK ABOUT THIS EVERY DAY OF MY LIFE
Yo okie Guillermo has some of the best quotes and lines I’ve ever heard, here are just a few of his quotes that have me questioning life:
“What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? A moment of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber.”
“I knew that monsters were far more gentle and more desirable than the monsters living inside ‘nice people.’ Accepting that you are a monster gives you the leeway to not behave like one. When you deny being a monster, you behave like one.”
“When you see something or experience something extraordinary, you can’t go back to normal… I think that that’s the way I see the supernatural-as happening in mundane circumstances or to people who are unprepared”
“To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. Horror defines our boundaries and illuminates our souls”
“Any legend, any creature, any symbol we ever stumble on, already exists in a vast cosmic reservoir where archetypes wait. Shapes looming outside our Platonic cave. We naturally believe ourselves clever and wise, so advanced, and those who came before us so naïve and simple…when all we truly do is echo the order of the universe, as it guides us…”
And the last but certainly not the least:
“In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.”