My grandma’s given me the same devotional book two years in a row.

I’m not religious.

Safe and Sound: the Renter’s Guide to Home Repair by Mercury Stardust.

My landlord doesn’t fix anything unless I badger them, and I want to get a better idea of what I can take care of by myself.

If they also had a spiritual experience reading Stone Butch Blues, this person and I are already renting a U-Haul and doubling our boot collection.

I have a handful of copies of The Hobbit.

One is beat to shit because I travel with it (it’s been on three continents so far!), one is annotated and illustrated, another is illustrated and was a gift. The fourth I picked up at a used book sale because it cost a quarter and I wanted to have a backup travel copy lol.

Tender is the Flesh.

You can TELL that the author had never seen a single scary movie or considered their own mortality. Just the other day I read a short story online about King Arthur’s son on a decomposing space station that had a more thoughtful interpretation of the “people are meat” idea that Tender is the Flesh spent 100+ pages on.

Tender is the Flesh.

You can TELL that the author had never seen a single scary movie or considered their own mortality. Just the other day I read a short story online about King Arthur’s son on a decomposing space station that had a more thoughtful interpretation of the “people are meat” idea that Tender is the Flesh spent 100+ pages on.

Depending on what I have access to, it’s Tolkien, Romeo and Juliet, or the first two episodes of Welcome to Night Vale (which isn’t technically a book, but the line between audiobook and scripted fiction podcast feels thin. Plus I have the script in book form, so I count it).

When I was at the emergency vet for six hours last year, I read Romeo and Juliet on my phone since it was free online, and I could focus on the words themselves instead of having to think.

Tolkien’s work is great to just take me away and let me forget about everything. I listen to the audiobooks every winter, when it’s dark at 4 PM and it feels like I’ll never see the sun again.

Night Vale is my go to when I want to acknowledge a problem but feel better about it (or when I need a distraction but absolutely cannot sit still enough to read). I really got back into it in 2020, which is around when I also read the scripts, but it’s my go to option for when I want someone to say “hey, this is bad, but it will pass, I promise”. And maybe he’s dealing with his boyfriend being trapped in another dimension or a glowing cloud dropping dead animals on him while I’m dealing with a busy workload, but the format of a radio show podcast really helps there be a sense of community.

I got into all of these around 10-14, which was also when my family moved to a new city, so it was the prime age and situation to have my brain chemistry altered forever.

I’m so sorry about your grandmother 💜

I’ve started collecting vintage textbooks and reference books, and they’re so cool. Personal favorites are a home medicine guide from the 1920s, a home ec textbook from the 1950s, and a book on horseshoeing from the 1890s

I listened to a lot of Welcome to Night Vale, then bought and read the scripts. “The Glow Cloud” especially has two quotes that really helped me:

• “The desert seems vast, even endless, and yet scientists tell us that somewhere, even now, there is snow.”
• “We may never fully understand, or, understand at all what it was […] But, and I’m going to get a little personal here, that’s the essence of life, isn’t it? Sometimes you go through things that seem huge at the time, like a mysterious glowing cloud devouring your entire community. While they’re happening they feel like the only thing that matters, and you can hardly imagine that there’s a world out there that might have anything else going on. And then the Glow Cloud moves on. And you move on. And the event is behind you. And you may find that, as time passes, you remember it less and less”

The second quote especially hit REALLY different in April of 2020.