Do you love books with maps and custom chapter headings? Do you love special edition, signed and numbered hardcovers? Do you, like my character Ludwig, love beautiful things?
THIS IS FOR YOU!
There's also a multi-narrator audiobook--three readers for the three POV characters, created by a full-service audiobook company, Artistic Whispers Productions. Ludwig appreciates luxury items and would approve!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/villyard/immortal-gifts-hardcover-paperback-and-audiobook
I've finished: The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher
Well, that's it I've finished T. Kingfisher's audiobook catalogue up to 11.2025.
I kept The Hollow Places in reserve because it was the most horror coded of her novels, and while it is full of horror and creepiness, it also has Kingfishers human touch. Softening the hard edges with humor and self reflection.
Trust Kingfisher to write horror that I can thoroughly enjoy.
P.S.
As someone living outside the US, one of the most alien aspects of the novel is the constant angst about the cost of medical treatment. That is truly horrifying.
https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/828dc8ee-3669-46c8-84b2-7f0077ad2d05
@bookstodon @audiobooks #ScienceFiction #horror #humor #TKingfisher #bookstodon #amReading #AudioBooks
The pressure is on. I can sense the barbarians* are at the gates. @bookstodon #bookstodon
*fellow users of Oxfordshire libraries.
@bookstodon I just discovered The Library Ladder https://m.youtube.com/c/thelibraryladder
A youtuber (also with a substack) talking about, mostly but not exclusively, SFF authors and books. Knowledgeable and calm, pretty nice to listen to. A little different from many other YouTubers.
Do you have any suggestions for interesting people talking or writing about Science fiction or Fantasy?
#bookstodon #SciFi #Fantasy
Five stars:
Ghost Business by Jen DeLuca and Jeannie Sheneman (Narrator) (2025) is the second book in the Boneyard Key series. The book begins with a foreword from the author apologizing for not setting up Sophie with the man we all expected. Instead, Sophie will be falling for her new competition in the ghost tour business, an out of towner named Tristan.
https://pussreboots.com/blog/2025/comments_11/ghost_business.html
Funded in 7 1/2 hours!
Stretch goals include hardcover upgrade (a ribbon, header and footer bands) and some short stories/novelettes/cut scenes in print!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/villyard/immortal-gifts-hardcover-paperback-and-audiobook
#bookstodon #vampirebooks @books @Books@mstdn.social @bookstodon
"You're arresting *Unmentionables*?"
"No uniform. No badge. Carrying weapons. Let's have a bit of law around here, shall we?" said Vimes. "Snouty, where's that cocoa?"
"We'll get into trouble!" Knock shouted.
Vimes let Knock wait until he'd lit a cigar. "We're in trouble anyway, Winsborough,' he said, shaking out the match. "It's just a case of deciding what kind we want."
#AmReading Night Watch. History always rhymes when I'm reading Terry Pratchett.
It's live! Christmas in Norway, 2025.
Buy an unrestricted ePub, or get it on Kindle.
Then wait a month or so before you begin to read a text a day for Advent.
https://norwegianfolktales.net/books/Christmas-in-Norway-2025
Table of contents, links to buy the book, and financial details (to ward off any idea that I am enriching myself at your expense).
#Bookstodon #NorwegianFolktales #NorwegianLegends #Folktales #Folklore #SelfPublishing #Christmas #Norway #AdventCalendar
Portland Book Festival is this Saturday, Nov. 8, at "ten stages at six partner venues in downtown Portland’s south Park Blocks" (quoting their website)
Main page:
Authors & Presenters:
https://pdxbookfest.org/lineup/
Map (PDF):
https://pdxbookfest.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/PBF25_ScheduleSignage_8.5x11_MAP.pdf
#AmReading The Grapes of Wrath and OMFG. It's all there in these classic books, everything we need to know, and yet we keep doing the same things decade after decade...
"We're sorry. It's not us. It's the monster. The bank isn't like a man.
Yes, but the bank is only made of men.
No, you're wrong there--quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It hapens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it."
Jason Koebler for 404 Media: "AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge"
“Fascism and AI, whether or not they have the same goals, they sure are working to accelerate one another” - Maggie Tokuda-Hall
#books #writing #writersofmastodon #WritingCommunity #bookstodon @bookstodon
https://www.404media.co/ai-is-supercharging-the-war-on-libraries-education-and-human-knowledge/
My CONjuration Panels! let me show you them! https://www.katherinevillyard.com/2025/11/05/my-conjuration-panels-let-me-show-you-them/ #fantasy #bookstodon @bookstodon
New on my #blog: "Books reviewed: October 2025."
https://itinerantlibrarian.wordpress.com/2025/11/05/books-reviewed-october-2025/
My monthly wrap up of #reviews.
#BookReview #books #reading #AlchemicalThoughts #Bookstodon
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Five stars:
Furever After by Sofie Kelly and Cassandra Campbell (Narrator) (2024) is the 14th book in the Magical Cats mystery series. Kathleen discovers the body of the murderer from the first volume in the series, Curiosity Thrilled the Cat (2011). The discovery of his body leads to the realization that a painting stolen years before is somehow on display in the library!
https://pussreboots.com/blog/2025/comments_11/furever_after.html
I've finished: The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix
Narrated by the wonderful Bahni Turpin
I thought I was getting a new angle on the vampire trope, I got so much more.
The Southern Book Club's Guide isn't a fantasy where the protagonists are gifted the tools they need to beat the evil power.
It is about a group of housewives, with the their talents, background and idiosyncrasies facing a malevolent supernatural force while hampered by their marginalized position in society.
The Southern Book Club's Guide placed most other fantasy I've read in perspective. The fantasy isn't just about the worlds the stories take place in. It is that these worlds also contain the special powers necessary to win the day.
This isn't escapism, it's realism and it hit me hard. Most of the horror is about existing as a woman in a white man's world.
Oh, the gaSsliGhting, SO MUCH GASSLIGHTING!
https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/fd616997-43d2-4170-8eba-05c09578a5a1
@bookstodon @audiobooks #fantasy #vampires #feminism #amReading #bookstodon #AudioBooks
Book Review: A Mouthful of Dust by Nghi Vo
A deeply unsettling addition to the series, bringing the connecting thread of food up to the forefront of the story.
@chloroform_tea has our review at the NOAF blog
http://www.nerds-feather.com/2025/11/book-review-mouthful-of-dust-by-nghi-vo.html
@bookstodon #bookstodon #fantasy #books #review
Book Review: God's Junk Drawer by Peter Clines
A story of expectations, the hazy memories of youth, and… oh yes, a plot and setting inspired by a famous TV show
@Princejvstin has our review at the NOAF blog
http://www.nerds-feather.com/2025/11/book-review-gods-junk-drawer-by-peter.html
#books #bookstodon #sciencefiction #review @bookstodon
Four stars:
Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr (1938) is the short story that inspired The Thing. It also feels like an influence for T. Kingfisher's third Sworn Soldier novella, What Stalks the Deep (2025), although it isn't mentioned in her afterword (while At the Mountains of Madness is).
https://pussreboots.com/blog/2025/comments_11/who_goes_there.html
New on my #blog: "My 5 Warhammer 40,000 Starter Books"
https://itinerantlibrarian.blogspot.com/2025/11/my-5-warhammer-40000-starter-books.html
#books #reading #WH40K #ItinerantLibrarian #writing #bookstodon #Warhammer40K
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Do you love multi-narrator audiobooks? I have one of those! Artistic Whispers Productions did an AMAZING job with Immortal Gifts!
You can, of course, wait three months (or more) for this audiobook to show up on your favorite retailer... or you can back me here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/villyard/immortal-gifts-hardcover-paperback-and-audiobook
#bookstodon #vampirebooks #kickstarter #audiobooks @books @Books@mstdn.social @bookstodon
"Read all about it: What to know ahead of the 2025 Portland Book Festival"
"Hosted by nonprofit Literary Arts, the festival covers all things literary..."
Saturday, November 8, 10 am to 6 pm
If you’ve been holding off on backing to see if we get the ribbon bookmark…
We’re $31 away. So if you back for the hardcover, it’ll have the ribbon bookmark!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/villyard/immortal-gifts-hardcover-paperback-and-audiobook
#bookstodon #vampirebooks @books @Books@mstdn.social @bookstodon
"Avrana Kern has only limited and artificial emotional responses, being dead and a computer composed at least partially of ants."
#AdrianTchaikovsky 's Children of Time was one of my favourite reads this year. The sequel took a little bit longer to grow on me, but the alien life in this first contact story is memorably, wonderfully creepy, and overall this is another excellent book. Looking forward to getting started on the third! #Bookstodon @bookstodon
Four stars:
Moby Duck by Sara Goetter and Natalie Riess (2025) is the second book in the Cryptid Kids graphic novel series. It's another summer and this time everyone is hanging with K and her dad at her great-aunt's beach home. But even before they can get there things are going wrong.
https://pussreboots.com/blog/2025/comments_11/moby_duck.html
