The house is bloodthirsty. The housekeeper is noisy. All the girl wants is a garden.

It’s autumn, so the house has been gorging on mice. Normally she only finds one or two pellets a month - the compressed remains of fur, bone, and teeth, which the house can’t digest and wouldn’t want to anyway. Exactly like an owl’s leavings. The house gets hungry in autumn, positively bloodthirsty, and the harvest mice lured in from the fields become handfuls of pellets. Usually the house excretes them discreetly and logically from a drainpipe. But apparently this autumn has been so mouse-rich that the house hasn’t bothered with plumbing and has left pellets on the kitchen floor.

The morning is full of Karen ranting at the house. The bright spikes of her scolding bounce around the house. The dust motes dance in each fresh outburst. Karen doesn’t approve of the mouse remains. She greeted them with a shriek, and now she shrieks again, at intervals, in case anyone should think that she had calmed down about it.

“You’d think you weren’t housebroken,” Karen lays into the house again. “You’d think you weren’t housebroken. What is this? What am I, Am I a laugh to you?” She repeats herself a lot. Then she explains to the girl that she does it because she has mothered three children, none of whom ever listened to her, and none of whom do now. Karen, Karen will say, is used to repeating herself in an effort to get people to simply understand, and they never do. When Karen is repeating this to the girl, the girl feels a weird grimace spreading across her face, like a monkey trying to placate another monkey. The girl has so much secondhand sympathy for Karen’s children. Sometimes she wants to say, out of earshot of the house, Karen, do you think your kids would listen more if you were actually a little bit more selective about what you said? but that would feel horridly mean to Karen, a woman who has so much to put up with: the house, the girl, the mouse bones.

Karen has discovered that the house has eaten a snake. The scream bounces around the house, and the girl almost imagines it cringing sheepishly. “I draw the line!” Karen is saying, “I draw the line at snakes!”

Small Business Saturday is November 25 this year. This is when Macs Backs lets me cosplay a bookseller. I'll post my list of books that I'm eager to sell and if you drop by the store I'll try to persuade you to buy them. I'll be there 2:00--4:00 pm.

My list of books from last year can be found here

This year's list!

The Adventures of Amina Al Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm

Summer In Orcus by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon)

Simon Sort of Says by Erin Bow

The Luminaries by Susan Dennard

Hunter's Moon by Susan Dennard

Buy any of these books from Mac's Backs in the next week and I will draw really crummy picture of a tiny mole god holding a sign that says "I LIKE THIS BOOK" on the endpaper.

Of course, you can also by my books and I'll be happy to sign them, too.

Ask for the little mole god in the comment section of your online order. Otherwise I'll just assume you have some standards for your art appreciation.

Howls moving castle book fanart

About the Authors for books written under a pseudonym, ranked

4. [Pseudonym] is a pen name of [real name].

3. [no information]

2. [Pseudonym] also writes under their pen name, [real name].

Recently someone on Reddit found a book with this horrible legalese (illegally) prohibiting you from re-selling or even lending it to others

Here are some alternative suggestions for more constructive legalese.

"This book may be given away. In fact, if you enjoyed my book, you're obligated to share it with someone you care deeply about. The magic of reading cries out to be shared, and I am but that magic's humble facilitator. If you didn't enjoy my book, well, I have a thick skin for criticism, and I hope you have a thick skin for when you're mauled by a pack of tigers next week, you bastard-"

"Share this book with fifty people in the next seven days or I'll replace the middle of every Colleen Hoover book with The 120 Days of Sodom and your precious BookTok will never recover"

"This book is a work of fiction. The characters represented herein are the creation of the author. But if it doesn't sell well - perhaps my dread creations shall become less fictional! Perhaps I'll use the magic keys from this typewriter I bought at that antiques store that wasn't there the next day to make them real! To set them loose on this accursed Earth and rule over these unevolved apes forevermore!!!"

"Please buy extra copies. Please buy extra copies. Oh god I'm in deep with some bad, bad people and if YA dystopias don't come back into fashion I'm gonna be down two kneecaps, if you catch my drift."

My cartoon for yesterday’s @Guardian books.

P.S. you can order my books of cartoons here: https://tomgauld.com/comic-books-v2

so uh. apparently these are the only books i finished apart from Nozaki-kun vol. 14

go ahead, goblin emperor fans, sweep the hell out of this poll

My Love Story is doing better than I expected for a manga I’d never heard of before checking it out of the library a few days ago!

ok I’ve talked before about how, if you don’t want what you’re reading and kudosing on ao3 to be associated with you as an author or whatever that a lot of people have reading accounts that are seperate to the fics they post and I just came across a delightful example. I hope they don’t mind me pointing it out, but when I saw this on a fic today I let out the most delighted laugh

their account just has bookmarks on it, so I’m guessing that they just read on this account, leave reviews that are exactly what the times would say about books and bookmark shit. king shit.

not joking I would kind of like to brutally murder whoever thought it was a good idea to take away clicking on a person’s name to see their reblog and make it borderline impossible to get to the original version of a post without spending ten minutes scrolling with ctrl f

Helpful tip:

If you have the post date option turned on you can click the date and it will take it to the original post like before. It's annoying, unintuitive, and harder to click but it should work on mobile or desktop

this is the most ridiculous possible workaround thank you SO much tumblr user suffusionofyellow for sharing

Definitely works.

public libraries in the usa offering free digital library cards to people not in their areas (as of october 2023):

these cards (part of the books unbanned initiative) get you access to each library's complete libby/overdrive collection (unless otherwise mentioned), no hoopla/kanopy/physical copies included.

ebook collections are expensive to maintain (many american libraries have annual fees for non-residents because of this) but because of an uptick in book banning (particularly brutal in mississippi last summer) larger libraries have opened their doors more, which is very kind of them!

i've used my seattle card for the last several months and their libby collection has about three times the books that my local library does, which is wonderful for accessing more niche titles or skipping a waiting list. would love to hear of similar ebook initiatives internationally!

i use library extension (firefox/safari/chrome compatible) to check all my collections (+ the internet archive) at once, works for several different countries highly recommend it.

spotify seems to be offering 15hrs/month of audiobook listening to premium subscribers and while that does seem useful if you're already paying and are after a new release with a long library waitlist, libraries are better for everything else.

You know the Court of Thing and Stuff series aren’t even YA. You’ve all been lied to

haha yeah i agree completely. You look hauntingly beautiful in this lighting btw