It’s the end of the year, so @thecontinent's Africans of the Year edition for 2025 is here! 🎉
So many great Africans.
That also means.... I got to pick my top 5 African reads of the year 👏🏾
bookstodon
finished reading The Scar 🌕🌕🌕🌗🌑
by China Mieville.
An exuberant, barely believeable steampunk world with cactus & mosquito people, underwater & floating cities, and mysterious powers. Very very long, and rather too serious.
If Mountain Man Romances are your jam, I have narrated three of them for Kelsie Calloway!
I grew up in the mountains around genuine mountain men. The voices for these hot male leads were inspired by real guys I know!
Scar, about a City Girl rescued in the Alaskan wilderness
https://geni.us/scarh
Saved by the Mountain Man, about a Runaway Bride
https://geni.us/SBMM2
Taken by the Mountain Man, about a single mom who gets a second chance at romance
https://geni.us/TBTMM
If you like Mountain Man Romances -- or Runaway Brides, Single Moms, or City Girls starting new lives -- these are a great stories!
They are all available at the links above as audiobooks on Amazon, Audible and Apple Books. They're also available as ebooks for Kindle Unlimited on Amazon.
#Bookstodon #Audiofiction #Audiodrama #Audiobook #Audiobooks #Romance #Romancelandia #MountainMan #BBW #BBWRomance #RunawayBride #SecondChanceRomance #MountainManRomance
Here’s my review of Frankie and Stankie by Barbara Trapido, her excellent 2003 Booker Prize longlisted novel based on her childhood in Apartheid era South Africa #bookstodon #reading #BookReview #audiobook
https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/00cfe17d-ddc2-4750-a8ed-37d51d6dd483
Is 07:15 too early to buy pie? Perhaps, but it's not too early to buy P.I.E. 😍
Four stars:
A Little Too Haunted by Justine Pucella Winans (2025) is a middle grade horror about a family of house flippers who end up with more house than they can handle. Luna Catalano is the middle school aged daughter of two women influencers who make their living recording videos of how they turn haunted houses into cozy houses. That is until their daughter's video outing them for faking all the paranormal activity.
https://pussreboots.com/blog/2025/comments_11/little_too_haunted.html
"How many times, he wonders, must a person relearn everything he knows, rediscovering it over and over again, and how many coverings must be torn away before he’s finally able to truly grasp things, to understand them to the bone?"
Jenny Erpenbeck, 'Go, Went, Gone,' p. 142
Five stars:
Spy x Family, Volume 12 by Tatsuya Endo and Casey Loe (Translator) (2023) involves the race to track down a mole in the organization that Loid is part of. Meanwhile Anya is basking in the afterglow of being the hero during the terrorist attack on their school bus.
https://pussreboots.com/blog/2025/comments_11/spy_x_family_12.html
This week's #NewBooks at the library: I bought second-hand copies of Fevered Planet: How #Diseases Emerge When We Harm Nature by the late John Vidal and #Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles by Jay Owens, and picked up a review copy of Uncommon Ground: Rethinking Our Relationship With the #Countryside by Patrick Galbraith.
#AtmosphericSciences #Pandemics #Epidemics #PublicHealth #Zoonoses #Books #Scicomm #Bookstodon @bookstodon
finished reading The World We Make 🌕🌕🌕🌗🌑
by NK Jemisin.
New York finishes the job against the Multiverse, despite the conservative reticence of the Old Cities. Clunkier and without the freshness of the original. But fun to see more city avatars. I think Mamdani could easily be a character in these books!
🌴 What would you do if you washed ashore on a tropical island full of giant women?
Daughters of Atlantis is an erotic tropical island fantasy story I narrated for Amber Collins. If you're a fan of sensual tiny man + giantess stories, this is the audiobook for you. 💋
Daughters of Atlantis is available as an audiobook on Amazon, Audible and Apple Books. It's also available as an ebook for Kindle Unlimited on Amazon.
#NSFW #Erotica #Macrophilia #SizeFantasy #Audiobook #Audiobooks #Book #Ebook #Bookstodon #Audiofiction #Audiodrama #GiantWoman #Giantess #TinyMan #MSub #MaleSub
Five stars:
"A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear" by John Cheever (1960) first appeared in the November 12, 1960 edition of the New Yorker as "Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear In My Novel." The original title was then used for a collection of Cheever short stories and the story's title was changed to "A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear."
https://pussreboots.com/blog/2025/comments_12/miscellany_of_characters_that_will_not_appear.html
My year in review for reading as calculated by LibraryThing:
It’s the last 47 hours. Need I say more?
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/villyard/immortal-gifts-hardcover-paperback-and-audiobook
#bookstodon #vampirebooks #kickstarterbooks @books @Books@mstdn.social @bookstodon
New on my YouTube channel: "White Poverty: an Under 5 Review."
https://youtu.be/Q5GaCMtT10I?si=4286PX-AxfI5efAF
#Under5Reviews: where I tell you about a book and help you decide if you want to read it or not in under 5 minutes.
#BookReview #reviews #ItinerantLibrarian #blog #vlog #poverty #ThisIsAmerica #books #reading #BadEconomy #bookstodon
💙📚
I'm currently reading Transcription, by Ben Lerner, and so far, I'm impressed. I briefly confused the author with Ben Marcus. Ha! I get authors confused all the time. Anyway, *this* Ben wrote The Topeka School, which I thought was very good, and showed an excellent understanding of human behavior, especially regarding young people.
This novel won't appeal to everyone, but if you liked his earlier work, you're the right reader for it. Also, if you've been avoiding longer books, this one is only 130 pages.
And here it is, my third #Autocade Year of Cars annual for all you #car aficionados out there! Octane called last year’s ‘brilliant’ and ‘totally absorbing’ and I hope this 2026 edition hits the same high notes! Boosts appreciated!
https://lucire.biz/product/autocade-year-of-cars-2026-hardcover/ #book #car #yearbook #bookstodon #coche #waka #Auto #voiture #macchina #design #trends #tendances #WeirdCarMastodon
Edited 355d ago
I'm keeping reading Shklovsky. This paragraph is not that funny for a non-Russian ear, but it reminded me of two great anecdotes I want to share. (01/03)
Is Victor Pelevin's 'Babylon' (also known as Homo Zapiens and Generation P) the ideal novel for Mastodonians ?
It's an alcohol-and-drug-fuelled fantastical satire on both capitalism and tech, in which (we gradually discover) politicians are computer-generated, and representations more important than reality. In one key scene, we find ourselves in an art exhibition, but the walls are hung not with paintings, but with notarised certificates confirming that the original was bought by its current owner for so-many-million-dollars. Not even a copy of the original - because only the price is important now,
But it precedes and predicts our ai-and-billionaires world. It was written in Russia in the 1990s, and clearly reflects the shock of the cowboy-capitalism that was imposed there after the soviet collapse. It is horrific - yet it is the model for the world the likes of Trump would propagate. They saw the emergence of Russian oligarchy, and wanted it. I first read it when I was working in Russia 20 years ago, so can vouch for its accuracy. I came to this re-reading after also re-reading Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, and was struck by the contrast between that story of 1930s capitalism-as-worker-exploitation, and Pelevin's portrayal of capitalism as insane consumerism.
Today is the author's birthday.
#AmReading "Sick and Dirty: Hollywood's Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness" by Michael Koresky. Not very far in, but I think it's going to be fascinating. It's about finding value in older film depictions of queerness. Seems to be a bit in response to "The Celluloid Closet."
Did you miss my Kickstarter? You can still grab the audiobook here! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/villyard/immortal-gifts-hardcover-paperback-and-audiobook/backing/redeem?ref=creator_share\
Since I really have to practise tooting my own horn a bit more, behold the wisdom of the MMRomance Redditers!
(Book available at your favourite online retailer/library, or direct from me: https://wendypalmer.au/bookshop/)
#bookstodon #QueerRomance #mmromance #bookstodon @bookstodon
Bookstore run:
- The Pocket Pema Chödrön (when instructed to hear a kind voice in one's head, I hear Pema)
- The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (everyone tells me this is fantabulous)
- How Far the Light Reaches (picked it up in bookstore and couldn't put it down)
- Unwinding Anxiety (Jud Brewer has done great peer-reviewed research into both anxiety and addiction)
