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Frog Goblin

@thebookwitchscauldron

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'To take is to be joyless. Joyfulness is accepting the given, which cannot be earned by mindfulness nor deserved by carefulness.'

Book 12 is Always Coming Home by Ursula K Le Guin. I can genuinely say I've never read a novel formatted in the way this one is: collected poems, plays, maps, stories, first hand accounts of a people who could but have not yet existed in a potential California. Trying to explain it is slippery, but it's something I'd highly recommend reading. by @thebookwitchscauldron

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a year ago

Some nonfiction I've read recently:

Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky is a collection of transcribed talks he gave over around a decade or so in various locations across the US.

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake is a reread for me that never dims on reexamining. by @thebookwitchscauldron

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a year ago

Happy Pride Month!

Here's some Yaoi I read this year 😝 by @thebookwitchscauldron

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a year ago

Book 5 of 2025: Empusium by Olga Tocarczuk
Listen, just go read everything by this author you can get your little mitts on. It's been a while since I finished this (I have not been keeping up with posting my reading) but I still think about it all the time. It's a complicated story that explored themes I'm still dissecting, which I think in itself is a testament to the power of what she's written.

Book 6 of 2025: Innocent omnibus 1 by Shin'ichi Sakamoto. Absolutely stunning art, including full page spreads that took my breath away. This artist has a way of conveying movement on page that I found enrapturing. This is a gothic story about a family of royal executioners at the start of the revolution in France. I really enjoyed it and hope to continue on with it. by @thebookwitchscauldron

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a year ago

A 2025 Reading catch up:

Book 3: The Café at the Edge of the Woods by Mikey Please is a cute little picture book I got for free from work, and it is genuinely so adorable

Book 4: Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky absolutely emotionally devastated me. Even with being forwarned by a friend, I read the end on my train and was silently sobbing in public 😅 I don't know how it's possible, but this series just keeps being incredible and I genuinely hope he has more he'd like to write, I'll read every single one by @thebookwitchscauldron

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2 years ago

My creations via a throwing class I took with @rockgardenceramics, would highly recommend, Lydia is a wonderful teacher. So glad to be able to use my little gremlin ceramics. by @thebookwitchscauldron

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2 years ago

Book 2 of 2025 is Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk and translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Read it! It's 266 pages of some of the best writing craft I've experienced in a while. It is beautiful and haunting and darkly funny and please, both Pedro and I are telling you that you should read it as soon as possible. by @thebookwitchscauldron

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2 years ago

Children of Ruin is the second book in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of series. Is that the name of the series? Who knows. It's what I call it.

The Portiids and Humans set off to explore the universe, and I loved this book so very, very much. Another book with the octopus featured, another book that spoke to me about connection. I love words. Reading them, speaking them to people I love, listening to people sing them, I love words. I find the power of choosing just the right words to convey meaning fascinating and something I've spent years of my life trying to become very good at. And it helped in academia, for sure, but recently life has challenged my internal belief that I could do anything if I could just figure out how to find the perfect words, the exact right way to say something. Not to convince, necessarily, but to convey, and let the truth convince or not. We as a species have invented countless ways of trying to articulate both our inner and outer universes to each other, but if the other party is not willing to listen, not willing to try and understand, willing to engage, understanding is impossible, no matter how perfectly I manage to articulate myself. For we are all simultaneously an universe unto ourselves and entwined with each other as mere specs in our shared universe. I thought I could control the entirety of that dance of understanding if only I was perfect at it, but that is impossible, and even if I could be perfect, if the other party is closed to wanting to understand, any attempt is impossible before it begins. It's probably a simple truth for most people, but I found myself tackling it over and over as I read.

This book meditates on community, grief, exploration, ambition, breaking and preserving tradition, language, emotions, mono and multi-culturalism, life, sentience, friendship. Listen, it's an incredible book, my favourite in the series so far, which I didn't think was possible given how much I love the first one. But truly starting off 2025 with an incredible book. by @thebookwitchscauldron

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2 years ago

This book reflected a deep loneliness I find myself navigating during this part of my life, reminding me that I am not the only person to ever feel it or drag myself through the everyday of living whilst simultaneously feeling an emptiness that threatens to swallow everything, including myself. But it also called me to never give in to indifference, even in my loneliness, because true connection, although possibly the hardest thing we do as people, requires the rejection of indifference. I must care: about myself, about others, about the inherent connections of existence. This book has a lot to say about what makes someone a person, climate change, corporate and government corruption, the wanton destruction of greed. What you get out of it may be similar and also different to what it reflected to me, but I highly recommend it. Plus it's got my favourite little cephalopod: the octopus 🐙 by @thebookwitchscauldron

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2 years ago

Absolution is the surprise fourth installment in one of my favourite series of all-time. I reread the original trilogy, got to meet Jeff Vandermeer and get my books signed, and then read Absolution (a gift from my wonderful friend Elly). This series will always be, in my opinion, one of the greatest pieces of storytelling to exist in English. The first three were just as beautiful and powerful as the first time I read them, and Absolution was, for me, a timely story about persevering and accepting the changes deep pain etches into us, even as we attempt to build again by @thebookwitchscauldron

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2 years ago

I've been reading and forgetting to post them here, so have a little dump on the TL of my 2024 reads. I'm slowly getting back into my reading groove by @thebookwitchscauldron

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2 years ago

Book 4 of 2024: Dan dadan volume 2 by @thebookwitchscauldron

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2 years ago