i feel like there’s this huge unfulfilled niche in the Dark Academia thing (kill your darlings, the secret history, dead poets society etc) for stories about women???? like can we have rakish girls quoting sappho and anxious genius poet girls, bespectacled, frantically tapping away at typewriters? wild girls trying to start literary movements and being dragged down by their own hubris? innocent girls discovering love and sex and angela carter? cute girls in 60s looking school uniforms investigating ~mysterious happenings~? going to class the next day hungover and exchanging knowing glances? can we just have. the thing
“Which author would you want to bring into 2015″ is such a hard question to answer I mean you could watch Arthur Conan Doyle despair over everything Sherlock Holmes within the last century or you could present Douglas Adams with an iPad
I would quite like to unleash Dickens on the Tories.
imagine William Shakespeare in the age of social media. 24/7 supreme dick jokes and the world celebrates.
Victor Hugo vs Twitter’s 140 character limit
Okay but Oscar Wilde on Instagram
Give Asimov an actual real robot
Show Lovecraft a mixed-race president and watch him shit himself in fear and anger
Poor George Orwell. “I wasn’t writing a fucking instruction manual.”
because you can never have too many lgbtq+ rec lists right? here’s yet another one for your pleasure. i’ve tried for the most part to include books by lgbtq+ authors (there are some that aren’t, i realise, mostly because they were so good i had to include them), and i’ve also, to the best of my knowledge/memory, put trigger warnings alongside.
criteria for inclusion
happy ending
no bury your gays
lgbtq+ character is the/a main and gets a pov
not harmful representation
lgbtq-ness is not the only plotline – tho there may be argued to be some exceptions to this included. i mean more like, the plot does not revolve around them realising they’re gay and having a terrible time of everything before someone (usually straight) tells them they’re allowed to be happy or whatever. you know what kind of book i mean.
most importantly (lol) i liked it
p.s. there will be more parts to this, as i read more. if there’s one not on here that you think should be, feel free to ask about it. i’ll either have not read it or it’ll be excluded for one of the reasons above. equally, if there’s one on here with bad rep of any sort, let me know and i’ll take it off.
Despite Twilight’s flaws I think we can all appreciate what Rosalie Hale did to her gang of rapists after she became a vampire
One of Twilight’s biggest flaws was always that um, how do I put this? It has these kickass supporting characters with these fascinating back stories and instead we have to pay attention to this truly boring couple instead of hearing about Jasper fighting in a vampire war, or Alice as a psychic girl in a 1920’s mental institution, or Carlyle as a vampire doctor trying to atone for all the murdering he did.
Or Leah as the ONLY BIOLOGICALLY FEMALE WEREWOLF IN THE WORLD, or that other vampire baby from South America.
Or pretty much anything beyond Bella and Edward staring at one another and crying.
i’m reading a very manly 1950s account of a hunt for el dorado but i’m thirty pages in and the narrator has already described his traveling companion as “handsome” 4 times, “extremely handsome” twice, “exceedingly handsome” once, his voice as “quietly husky” and “a husky whisper,” his fingers as long and deft, his body as “tall and cat-like,” and his eyes as some variation of ice-blue at least three times.
just men being dudes. dudes being pals. it’s great. this is great.
“Ever since he had aimed that gun at my throat, I had liked him immensely. And now I liked him even better.”
oh my god
“I awoke when a beam of light fell across my eyes. Jorge had come into my room carrying a lighted candle.
I haven’t read it since seventh grade, but my favorite part of Twilight that I remember is the “radioactive spider” line bc it implies that
when presented with a dude who looks somehow eerily identical to his adopted siblings while sharing none of the same genetic features, a dude whose adopted siblings are apparently all dating each other, a dude whose family never socializes with other students, is never seen around town, NEVER EATS, a dude whose entire family is super dedicated to attendance and punctuality but just straight up LEAVES TOWN on sunny days,
Bella thought “could he be….Spiderman?”
My second favorite part is that she Googled it.
The biggest problem I had with twilight is why anyone would stay in high school longer than the allotted 4 years? I hate that? It literally made me so mad esp if you have been in the american school system like i bet theyre still as dumb as an other american also they have been going to school for so long and never once thought about sex ed? Also how are they going to school without ssns? Which leads me to my next point is that Carlile is Stealing dead peoples ssns for his demented family Thats right everyone Vampires Are committing tax fraud
First of all, I’m actually almost certain that Carlisle pays taxes. That’s just such a Carlisle thing to do. He probably does them all himself late at night sitting in his study wearing a pair of glasses he doesn’t need. “Our dad is weird,” Emmett says. Rosalie rolls her eyes, “he’s not our dad.”
THAT SAID, yes, it’s totally ridiculous that Twilight takes place in high school. I think the concept itself would have been 100% more entertaining if Bella had been a a junior transfer student from a southwest community college to University of Washington in Seattle, commuting every day from Forks, where she finds out the weird dude from her college chem lab lives too (I’ve commuted 40+ minutes to school, it’s doable).
Not only is this more believable, but it would also be a lot more entertaining and potentially funny for Bella to just slowly realize she has at least one class a week with each of these weird-ass pale kids from her hometown.
Edward’s in chem with her. She accidentally sits down next to Rosalie in calc before she recognizes the resemblance. Emmet’s an overwhelmingly enthusiastic Fitness Management major who starts sitting next to her in Western Civ after he notices her talking to Edward. “Are you pre-med? You seem like you might be pre-med. My dad’s a doctor!”
Alice tries desperately to help her in a wheel-tossing class Bella had to take as an art elective after she put off choosing an art elective until it was the only one left. She asks herself daily why she didn’t take Art History. Jasper is there too. He doesn’t look like he’d be into pottery, but it seems like he’s into anything Alice is into (I still argue it’s literally impossible that he functions in public at all, but we’ll roll with it anyway).
Make Esme a professor at the school, too. Adorable. She’s that Mom Professor everyone loves and and respects (and also sort of fears). She always excuses absences as long as you send an email.
Instead of collecting graduation caps and gowns, they collect degrees.
Imagine Emmet bringing up the time he was almost a doctor, but having to actually be around the patients ended it. Carlisle says “I warned you the entire time you were in undergrad.”
After a few weeks of plot devices similar to the actual book (near-death parking lot experiences, etc.), Bella runs into Esme at the grocery store in Forks (I actually love that they buy groceries) and realizes my god, these people live here?
It would also make more sense that Bella were moving back in with her dad despite hating the Pacific Northwest so intensely. None of that sort of quirky “minor league baseball” stuff. She absolutely Would Not live in a dorm with some random roommate, so going to school where she could live with her dad was about all that made sense. The in-state tuition to a great university was just an added bonus.
It would also make the romance more enjoyable. NOW, a lot of people complain that a 100+ year old would have no reason to be interested in a high schooler in the original series, but I believe it’s very implied that all of the Vampires aren’t just physically frozen at their age, but they’re mentally and emotionally stuck forever as well.
Which is, you know, horrible. That’s why some of them are so damn angsty and emotionally volatile. That’s why Bella insists that Edward turn her sooner than later. Bruh, if you wait until she’s 25, she’s going to out-grow your maturity-level.
STILL, I think a romance between 21-23 year olds would have been better, by a little bit.
It would also make a lot more sense for them to be in college because of the way they function. They wouldn’t all be eating (or not eating) together in the only cafeteria as the entire student-body tried to pretend to not stare.
Less people would notice their eerie resemblance, their coordinated absences, and their overall weirdness, which would make more apparent Bella’s alleged super-strong powers of observation when she started putting things together.
Instead of there randomly being a sudden spike in criminals in that little town, Edward could dramatically rescue Bella’s naive ass from a party her human friends dragged her to.
I could go on, but this is eventually going to become and entire College Au rewrite of Twilight in excruciating detail. So I’ll stop.
this is all I ever wanted.
did i just enjoy twilight meta in the year of our lord 2017
I probably would give this a chance and I am not sure how I feel about this
So after running this tumblr and the Lesbrary for a couple years, I’ve gathered together a couple lists of specific lesbian (etc) books about specific topics, and I’ve stumbled on some similar lists other people have made. In order to keep them a little more organized, I’ve decided to put them all up on Goodreads. Here are the ones I have so far:
• 101 Times Lord Henry Should Have Shut His Cynical Whore Mouth
• I Kissed a Boy, and More Embarrassingly, My Own Portrait, and I Liked It
• I’m a Murderer, but Everything is Perspective
• Although I’m a Complete Wanker, I Am Infact a Victim of Suggestion Under the Influence of Another Complete Wanker
• Narcissism and Consequences
• If You’re Not Young and Pretty You May as Well Just Die
• Personalities Don’t Seem So Ugly When Surrounded With Beautiful Things
• Selling Your Soul for a Picture Probably Isn’t Worth It
• Being Philosophical and Being Intelligent are Not Always the Same Things
• It’s Okay to be Gay As Long As You Get Rid of the Body