My Webbed Site

some of my favorite books

• go tell it on the mountain by james baldwin
• gut symmetries by jeanette winterson
• it lasts forever and then its over by anne de marcken
• wuthering heights by emily bronte
• the broken earth series by n. k. jemisin
• elantris by brandon sanderson
• our lady of the flowers by jean genet
• twelve angry men by reginald rose
• kiss of the spider woman by manuel puig
• howard's end by e. m. forster
• crossing by pajtim statovci
• bleak house by charles dickens

some recent reads

• bliss by peter carey. fin 3/3/25. about a man who dies and gets resuscitated and believes that he is now in hell. and many ridiculous things begin to happen and many peoples lives are turned upside down. i really loved this book. his life was bad before he died and he never realized it and as soon as he actually started caring about the world his family thought he was going crazy. what commentary.
• the ten thousand doors of january by alix harrow. fin 3/1/25. I was skeptical about this one because the blurb sounded lame but it was actually quite good. about a girl named january who's being raised by her father's employer and starts to learn about her family history and that there are doorways all around the globe that are portals to other worlds. a fun though somewhat heavy ya fantasy.
• the bettencourt affair by tom sancton. fin 2/15/25. a nonfiction about liliane bettencourt, heiress to the l'oreal fortune, and a legal case surrounding her fortune. this was alright. there were certainly a lot of rich people nonsense. i think it's fine to try and steal from billionaires so this book was not as thought-provoking for me as it was maybe intended to be.
• the lais of marie de france - fin 2/13/25. marie de france was the earliest known french woman poet. the penguin edition translated the poems into prose form, so it was more like reading short stories than poems. more interesting for the history than for the stories.

welcome to my library!

reading is one of the things that i really enjoy. i would call it one of my main hobbies. i love to read classics, literary fiction, the occasional sci-fi/fantasy, and queer books. but i also read a little of everything. here you will find some of my favorite books, updates about what i'm reading, and various related things. i'd love to hear what other people are reading as well, so once this site is more developed i will try to add some sort of comment function. thanks for reading xoxo

various things and links

• my book reviews page
• follow me on storygraph
• Bookfinder, a trawler that finds the cheapest available version of the book you want to buy
• TheQueer Liberation Library is an online library with a bunch of free gay stuff on Libby
• Trans Reads is a free collection of trans-focused literature
• Greg Egan's website, an author I really enjoy who writes interesting sci-fi & speculative fiction. There's a bunch of free writing on here as well as lots of science & math-related tidbits

current reads

• nightmare abbey & crotchet castle by thomas love peacock - started 2/13/25. some sort of satire. i dunno i'm like two pages in.
• nineteenth-century american poetry (penguin classics edition) -started 2/3/25. what it says on the tin. i haven't read much of this yet, just sort of skipped around. I used to memorize poetry a lot as a child and i kind of want to start doing that again, which is why i picked this up
• the old drift by namwali serpell - started 2/18/25. fiction about multiple families who live in or move to zambia. so far it's a few very separate storylines with a few chapters from some outside perspective called "swarm". I've seen reviews that say this book gets crazy at the end so excited to see where it goes.
• it lasts forever and then its over by anne de marcken - starting soon probably. i just got this from the library and i won't be able to renew it since there's a pretty long holds list so i need to get going on it.