Esther started reading Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
Her city is under siege.
The zombies are coming back.
And all Nona wants is a birthday party.
In many …
Queer goth lady in Berlin, buying more books than I find time to read
Some leanings: political philosophy, psychology, queer lit, sci-fi, fantasy, horror
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Her city is under siege.
The zombies are coming back.
And all Nona wants is a birthday party.
In many …
How to Blow Up a Pipeline is probably the most thought-provoking and crucial piece of political philosophy that I’ve read since Social Death by Lisa Marie Cacho.
In three long essays Malm fist dismantles the myths and extremely selective histories told by strategically pacifist climate movements like XR (Extinction Rebellion), then describes specific material actions and practical examples on how to disrupt fossil fuel combustion effectively and towards the end takes climate fatalism to task in a radically hopeful finale.
This book is as important as it is approachable, not at all a dense academic work but a pragmatic guide for the real world.
Why resisting climate change means combatting the fossil fuel industry
The science on climate change has been clear for a …
I never expected a book to successfully gaslight me and I would have expected even less that I would enjoy that.
This book manages not only to describe someones descent into madness from intense grief but it makes you feel it yourself. It fractured so many things you thought you knew from the previous book that you constantly doubt your own memory of those past event, but brings everything together towards the end only to leave you with questions again.
It is also repeatedly hilarious and features one of the best dad jokes of all time.
"She answered the Emperor's call.
She arrived with her arts, her wits, and her only friend.
In victory, her world …
Just like The New Topping Book by the same authors, which came out after this but I read first, this book very much shows its age. It is from a time when online resources like Fetlife were far more scarce than today and someone coming newly into kink would have had real difficulty finding any useful material. That is no longer the case and these books today read like someone did maybe a week’s worth of internet research to compile them.
They cover a lot of the basics quite well, but if you already have some experience, even just a little, and especially if you had even just a halfway decent mentor who introduced you to kink, they don’t offer much new insight.
I’m sure they were useful 20 years ago but I wouldn’t recommend them today.
They also have a few issues that you’d expect to see in books …
Just like The New Topping Book by the same authors, which came out after this but I read first, this book very much shows its age. It is from a time when online resources like Fetlife were far more scarce than today and someone coming newly into kink would have had real difficulty finding any useful material. That is no longer the case and these books today read like someone did maybe a week’s worth of internet research to compile them.
They cover a lot of the basics quite well, but if you already have some experience, even just a little, and especially if you had even just a halfway decent mentor who introduced you to kink, they don’t offer much new insight.
I’m sure they were useful 20 years ago but I wouldn’t recommend them today.
They also have a few issues that you’d expect to see in books written by cis people in San Francisco around the year 2000: a very limited view on gender, some very obvious cultural appropriation, and a sense of assumed authority on their subject matter. They sometimes like to define things is very stiff terms, which feels very dated today.
Eine Ausstellung von Menschen in und um eine Ausstellung in der sie sich alle, ebenso wie ich als Lesende, ständig bewegen, nie lange genug stehen bleiben um ihre Fassaden ind Abgründe vollständig zu erfassen, was so vielleicht auch besser ist.
What an incredible book. A poignant look at how and why bureaucracies are created and maintained, how they are a form of game that’s opposed to actual play, how each of us has a responsibility to actively imagine a better world and create the conditions under which it can come into existence, and a surprise analysis of Christopher Nolan’s film “The Dark Knight Rises” which (trust me) makes sense in this context.
A clear recommendation for anyone who wants to look critically at how we as a society run the world. It’s also not too dense (as opposed to some other political philosophy works) and written in a very approachable way.
Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth unveils a solar system of swordplay, cut-throat politics, and lesbian necromancers. Her characters leap off …