Monthly library update: April 2025
Date published: 2025.05.10
This has been quite a busy month, which means I’ve been twice as productive compared to when I had been unemployed. Curious!
Anyways, many book recs in this update. Enjoy?
Articles and essays 📰
The Problem with Contemporary Transfeminine Literary Criticism
❝ Books by trans women disappear all the time. The preservation of transfeminine literature should be a major issue within the community, and yet almost nobody talks about it, mostly because they had no idea those books existed in the first place. Sometimes this is because of a lack of access. Sometimes it’s because people never bothered to look. Usually it’s both.
Is It Ethical To Be A Billionaire In Neopets?
❝ I wanted to buy a paintbrush to transform my pet Shoyru—a stubby sort of dragon—into a sea turtle in the rainbow fountain. I wanted to buy the fragments of a secret laboratory that would zap my pets into rare colors and species. I wanted to buy each of my pets pets of their own, aptly named petpets, and I wanted to paint the petpets too. Even as a child, I understood this world would not be delivered to me because of the goodness of my heart or the depths of my desire. To live out my dreams, I needed to amass wealth. By any means necessary.
❝ Imagine the author of a book telling people to "read my Amazon". A great director trying to promote their film by saying "click on my Max". That's how much they've pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as "my Substack", there is only your writing, and a forever fight against the world of pure enshittification.
Music 🎵
The Bog of Cosmic Delusions – Samtar
Prog rock 🤤🤤🤤
Favourite track: Vicarious Voodoo.
Skeletá – Ghost
Yay! Yayay !!
Favourite track: Peacefield.
Art 🎨
Sierra Nevada Morning – Albert Bierstadt
Poetry ✒️
Girls Only Want One Thing – Isabelle Correa
to take their skin off by the river and swim smiling with heads
bobbing like dogs chasing sticks. To wrinkle. To travel
back in time and tell their younger selves the real difference
between lust and love is that love is a seed and lust is a bird
ravenous for seeds. To harvest like bees and feast on soft avocados
and limes and everything green. To bend like water. To break
hearts and bread. To be girls and women and men and lovers
and inimitable fathers of unnameable creatures. To never smile
when they don’t feel like smiling. To bury the word sorry
and see what grows. Perhaps a tree will grow. Perhaps the bark
will know the future and the fruit will taste like the history
of all this wanting. Perhaps they will eat it and offer you nothing.
Books 📘
What Moves the Dead – T. Kingfisher
Oh, this one was lovely.
Okay, so first of all: I actually started reading this book right after I saw a negative review of it, saying that it was too predictable and obvious. But I will come clear with something right now: during the past year and half, my life has been a long string of uncertainty and unpredictability and stress, which made me avoid fiction, especially books; it’s simply difficult for me to handle the tension and the emotions accompanying it when I already have so much of that very tension in my personal life.
(Well, it’s been getting more stable lately, thank god. That’s why I’m trying to get back into fiction books.)
So as you might have guessed, the idea of a book that was completely predictable for me but still had a potential to be good was a very tempting one. And it turned out I was right – What Moves the Dead was a really entertaining read. I’ve read The Fall of the House of Usher a couple years ago so I generally knew what to expect from a retelling of it, but then again, I didn’t pick up this book for some crazy twists. No surprises, I just wanted an unsettling horror atmosphere and some good writing, and that’s exactly what I got. Also, I like fungi. Especially in horror.
So yeah, I thought it was lovely. Maybe a weird thing to say about a horror book, but that’s exactly how I feel about it. But also, hey: if you don’t like books that are predictable, you should probably just skip this one.
As a sidenote: after having finished reading this book I found out it already has a Polish translation. The protagonist is nonbinary, so the translators actually had to use Polish neopronouns (since we don’t have ‘they/them’ in our language, really). Fucking epic. Ordered the paperback the same day
Looking Inside: Life Lessons From a Multiple Personality in Pictures and Words – Judy Castelli
❝ You will survive this night. We have survived together all this time, and we did not know.
This book is a collection of poetic prose taken from the journals of a woman with DID, and each poem is illustrated with a drawing. Additionally, at the end of the book the author shares a bit of advice for other multiples suffering from dissociation and trauma and struggling to get to know each other and love themselves.
This book is warm, vulnerable, and filled with love. The poems focus on supporting one another despite the hurt and on building community within the system, making reading it a very touching and healing experience.
A lot of the poems stuck with me, reminding me of our own struggles when we discovered we were plural a couple years ago, and had to handle building internal communication, getting to know each other, coping with the previously dissociated trauma that proceeded to start spilling out, all at once. And it reminded me of how we knew that we had to cooperate and learn to love each other, how we had to support the ones who were scared and the ones who were scared of the ones who were scared, how we had to show compassion to those who were hurting us without meaning to and how we had to do our very best to stop hurting the others. This book felt personal. It was personal.
I’m very glad to say this is a book written for other plurals: one that means to give them hope and show they aren’t alone in the world.
Witch King – Martha Wells
Good book. Not all fantasy does it for me, but this one was great. I liked the rich, detailed worldbuilding and loved Kai as a protagonist, although I imagine this book might be harder to enjoy if one of those things doesn’t vibe with you. It’s a pretty character-focused novel, at the very least, which is something I appreciate a lot but you might not.
Just don’t pick it up while expecting it to be Murderbot but in a fantasy setting. It’s not. I liked it more than the Murderbot books, but many people seem to have had the opposite reaction.
(Obligatory reminder that we’re plural and editing the library update Obsidian file as we go, and I should not be expected to have as much to say about a book I’ve just finished reading as the headmate above. I assure you I enjoyed this book as much as [REDACTED] enjoyed the two books above. Give Witch King a try it’s awesome uwu)
Mexican Gothic – Silvia Moreno-Garcia
I picked this one up after seeing people compare What Moves the Dead to it. The general consensus seems to be that Mexican Gothic is the better contender… and I don’t necessarily agree, but I don’t disagree either.
While What Moves the Dead is lovely and atmospheric and fun to read, Mexican Gothic is unnerving and disturbing. I see them as two different types of horror, so to speak – both equally great at what they do. Either way, if you like your horror to be scary (which I don’t care about that much, personally), then Mexican Gothic is definitely up your alley. So yes, I get why people prefer this book. I completely understand.
I’m giving this novel bonus points for a well-written romance subplot – I could really feel the chemistry between Noemí and Francis, and I enjoyed reading about it. Good straight romances exist!
CW for rape. Keep that in mind.
Polish stuff
Titan - Głęboka Analiza (cz.1)
Titan - Głęboka Analiza (cz.2)
Książki 📘
Piekło kobiet – Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński
❝ Byłoby nie do pomyślenia, aby rzecz, na którą ma jasny pogląd każdy prawnik, była obca jedynie tym, których, z pośród najświatlejszych, powołano do tworzenia praw. Nie, tego nie można przypuszczać. Każdy z nich, jako człowiek prywatny, wie co o tem myśleć; wie, że paragraf, który wprowadza, jest zarazem i bezsilny i morderczy; ale jako kodyfikator zamyka oczy na to, co wie jako człowiek; staje się przedstawicielem obłudy i małoduszności społeczeństwa. Jeden z wybitnych adwokatów mówił mi wręcz: „Jako człowiek, jako prawnik i jako obywatel, jestem przeciw karalności; ale gdybym był prawodawcą, głosowałbym za utrzymaniem kary. Opinja nie dojrzała do tego liberalizmu. Toleruje i praktykuje czyn, ale nie chce sankcjonować go ustawą”.
Prześliczny komiks dokumentalny o polskich wilkach. Obawiałom się z początku, że informacje mogą być w nim przekazane w sposób dość infantylny (przy zakupie mnóstwo recenzji wspominało, że to prezent dla dziecka – wiadomo, bo komiks), ale nie, wszystko jest ujęte merytorycznie i konkretnie, odpowiednio dla dorosłego czytelnika.
Cieszę się, że mam to cudo na półce.