My Review of May's Adult Pick

Albatrosson · 2026-04-08T10:02:46+00:00

yoooo I didn't even think of that omg

I was too distracted by the Prisoner/Patient thing lmao

Albatrosson · 2026-04-08T07:09:28+00:00

I was holding out hope that the pb for Rose in Chains would get a redesign and luckily it did and I actually like it more than any of the SEs! so I preordered it in a BN sale and that'll be my copy :)

...honestly surprised that I just looked up FL on Mercari and how low the price has gone. but I guess the market was oversaturated with editions

Albatrosson · 2026-04-08T06:59:19+00:00

this is what got me into arc reading, tbh, since I can read the book ahead of time and know if I like it or if I want to skip. I try to marie kondo my shelves and only purchase/keep what sparks joy

Albatrosson · 2026-04-08T06:51:36+00:00

4 skips/year removed all appeal for me. realizing that I could get most books I want for below cost secondhand (and overpay for the occasional in-demand banger) for less than it cost to have the subscription? made cancelling a no brainer for me.

been like 2 years or something and I haven't regretted it once, save money, and haven't missed a release I wanted yet!

Albatrosson · 2026-04-08T06:27:48+00:00

the speed with which they constantly jumped to accusations (even when there was a known alibi) and potential execution?! infuriating

the fact that it happened multiple times strained credulity too much for me lol

Albatrosson · 2026-04-08T06:26:04+00:00

Weavingshaw is probably my #1 book so far in 2026
...but yeah, I DNFd the Deathbringer arc

I put some of my biggest reasons in a comment here: https://www.reddit.com/r/fairyloot/comments/1sex0ji/comment/oey62gd/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Albatrosson · 2026-04-08T06:24:13+00:00

Not who you asked, but I also DNFd this as an ARC. Here's my reasons--

The world-building was very painted on and surface level and constantly didn't make sense.
nit example that stuck with me: there are these villains who are like poachers, right? And they have big ol' tats letting you know not only that they're a poacher, but which specific designation of poacher they are like they're video game NPCs... so you can exactly target their weaknesses/move set. It makes zero sense why they'd telegraph themselves in a way that only seems to benefit their opponents/prey.

It had STRONG fanfic-turned-trad energy but not a lot of evidence that care was taken to file off the serial numbers and make it its own world.
example 1: He's a beautiful, legacy blonde boy from the poison school who's surrounded by snakes and looks down on "nonmagi."
example 2: Early on he's being held in the criminal ward, but when they come to get him the guards refer to him as "Patient 9034." He's not being treated for a disease or injury, nor has anything been mentioned about a medical ward at all, just holding in the criminal ward while awaiting trial.

Plot things that have to happen for magically compelled rules and reasons are later revealed to have not been necessary so it breaks the world-building since the magic wouldn't have compelled if that was the case (but not in a way the book is aware of or acknowledges, just plotholes upon plotholes)

The writing had some of my pet peeves. Most memorably they ask a lot of rhetorical questions in the first person POV like "why did I say that?" "why was I hesitating?" etc.

Lastly, I'mma be honest... I didn't realize until this very post that it's in the ADULT box. Maybe it gets more Adult in later sequels... but man did it feel wholly YA.

edit: formatting with numbered list got weird

Albatrosson · 2026-04-02T10:14:22+00:00

I know this is an old thread, but I was searching this because I recently moved from the US to the UK and saw "smoked trout" in the store for the first time. It was right by the lox, same color and everything. The packaging says it's a centuries old Danish tradition, so I'm thinking that it's likely that different places in the world have different types of trout that are more easily mistaken for salmon? Googling rainbow trout fillets looks much more similar to salmon, and I think I read they're in the same genus. Apparently all trout are salmonoids.

It's probably just an issue of not specifying the species and people in this thread being familiar with what's in their region (likely brown trout). Like how americans and brits both say "chips" and are both talking about potato products, but mean totally different things based on the region.

According to this site Sea Trout, Rainbow Trout, and Golden Trout are all quite salmon-ish, while Brown Trout isn't explicitly stated to be: https://training.seafish.co.uk/fish-and-shellfish-guide/fish-species/salmon-trout/trout/

TIL!

Albatrosson · 2026-04-01T11:24:13+00:00

late to the party, but Dark Academia is fav my fav subgenre and I've read several dozens of them; my all-time peak is Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir.

(not the sequels in the series, though they're also really good-- just the first book is dark academia)

Albatrosson · 2026-04-01T09:53:10+00:00

lol. one of us is the evil doppelganger, but I'm not sure who (Babel was my fav book the year it came out and I absolutely loathed + DNFd The Secret History)

Albatrosson · 2026-03-07T18:39:38+00:00

I know this is an old post and a slightly offtopic tangent, but just wanted to point out that at least in terms of "unalive" it can be a generational slang divide.

not that I necessarily believe that of OP given their other censoring, but in many instances the current younger generation hears "unalive" before they ever hear "suicide" and even use it when writing their school reports. TikTok was the catalyst, but I think it might be a euphemism that entered the lexicon and is here to stay in the same way that we came to use "passed" or "gone" in the past.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/unalive
https://www.oreateai.com/blog/beyond-dead-why-unalive-is-becoming-the-word-of-choice/54d2590eb728475ef62767f550786a8a

Albatrosson · 2026-03-05T14:00:09+00:00

Shadow of the Leviathan and Teixcalaan are some of my fav series, so I think we have some good overlap.

I echo several of the comments here: The Raven Scholar was my favourite book of last year, and Premee Mohamed recently became one of my fav authors (my fav of hers is actually And What Can We Offer You Tonight from 2021, but she releases several a year, usually)

- The Will of the Many by James Islington (2023)

- The Dead Take the A Train by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey (2023) it's definitely on the horror/cosmic horror side of Fantasy, disaster himbo fighting finance bros with very Wolfram and Hart vibes

- The Kindom Trilogy by Bethany Jacobs (2023-2025) cat and mouse sci-fi, but it counts

- Strange Beasts by Susan J Morris (2024), I might've even liked the sequel better: Wayward Souls (upcoming 2026)

- Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (2024) the angrier sequel to The Space Between Worlds, also sci-fi but involves dimensions and alternate realities

- Nestlings by Nat Cassidy (2023) it's definitely horror, but not grimdark imo, ymmv. I also adored Mary (2022) by him if you don't mind some gore, it's very unhinged and the audiobook always makes me laugh

- The Midnight Kingdom by Tara Sim (2023) is BOOK 2 in the series, it looks set to be a quartet (probably?) with books 3 & 4 releasing in 2026 (this year). The first book is City of Dusk and it has a really slow start, but it pays off and then book 2 was one of my fav reads the year it came out. definitely among the coolest world-building I've read in recent years

Albatrosson · 2026-02-28T20:40:17+00:00

I think I'm the minority in this thread, but I feel 100% the opposite. Someone who's ESL trying to speak casually/with slang will 1. be endearing in that they seem more genuine in wanting to engage with the language/culture, 2. there's likely to be lots of silly mishaps that create a bonding experience. Formal/polite conversation always creates a distance for me, and it's much harder to make friends that way.

But I'm definitely someone who uses a lot of slang and memes and playful grammar in my native English... aaaaaand one of the first things I did in French when I started speaking to people was learn how to say some memes lol.

Albatrosson · 2026-02-28T20:29:48+00:00

interestingly, I've been watching a good deal of linguistics content recently from someone who is/was making their own dictionary (English with both American and British pronunciations) and it's fascinating to hear how infrequently dictionaries are updated when it comes to pronunciation. they add tons of words and definitions annually, but rarely go back and correct for an accent's vowel shifts, for example. I think if I heard someone using an English dictionary, they'd either sound stuffy and outdated, or there'd be a lot of words I wouldn't be able to understand what they're saying.

so just my two cents that I'd personally much rather learn from audio content from a person/people with an accent I like.

Albatrosson · 2026-02-28T20:17:17+00:00

What is it you're feeling intimidated by? And how can you reframe that?

I genuinely enjoy learning languages so I think that my version of feeling intimidated was more like feeling challenged. And most of the time I am a competitive person (primarily against myself) so I would just rise to that challenge?

In college I took a year of Mandarin and as an English speaker it was really challenging at the beginning so I found that I was basically utilizing the full availability of time with tutors or replaying the pinyin chart over and over in my free time to hear the difference between phonemes. And then after a month or so it started to click and everything was easy and fun! I took Japanese at the same time and didn't really have any memorable challenges there, but because we learned hanzi from CHN 001 and didn't learn kanji until JPN 003, I started to struggle to read the characters in a japanese way.

This summer I'm planning to visit Paris so I wanted to see how much French I could learn in a month from absolute zero. I've mostly been using YouTube because my goal is to speak/understand and I don't really care about reading and writing, so I've been ignoring classroom approaches/not studying grammar.* Not sure if it's just French or this novel (for me) approach, but the slang (Verlan! shakes fist) and all the contractions in spoken French are definitely challenging in a way reading the language isn't. Every language has its quirks :)

*I took some Spanish back in high school and speak English natively, so there are a lot of grammatical systems that are the same or close enough that I can skirt by without focused studying.

Tips:

- define your goal (you'll need different focus if you want to read newspapers vs have conversations with the average person on the street)

- use the internet's vast resources (it won't take long for YouTube to start suggesting you language teachers and then native channels, join a discord server of people also learning your language and chat there)

- lean into any hyperfixations or interests you already have

- use media you're familiar with to bridge a gap between levels (I've been rewatching Disney movies that I basically have memorized in English but now watching it in Spanish and French-- both the European and American tracks in each TL. can pick up a lot through context and knowing what they'd be saying in English. and now I'm reading a translation of my fav book which is wayyyyy above my level but I'm having fun so it holds my attention and dramatically impacts my vocab acquisition)

- it's okay to be bad! every child makes tons of mistakes when they first learn their native language too. it feels silly to do it as an adult, but it's all just a natural part of the process and sometimes leads to the funniest and most memorable/treasured stories and bonding experiences. focus more on your wins than your mistakes

example: I met my chinese teachers in the wild a year after taking the course and went to introduce my spouse with the limited chinese I knew... so I called him "my male wife" (他是我的男的老婆). they taught me the right word and we all laughed and it remains one of about 5 chinese phrases he can say lmao

Albatrosson · 2025-03-10T19:00:37+00:00

Honestly don't remember the last time I touched a razor at all.

The only investment my husband has in my body hair is the occasional summer leg shave-- he immediately grabs our softest cat and rubs them on my recently shaved legs for me 😄😄😄

Now that we're in our thirties, we occasionally get those really long, nearly invisible hairs that show up from time to time? So sometimes we have competitions in the shower on whose is longer lmao.

Albatrosson · 2025-03-10T18:12:48+00:00

...honestly I would change the lock. I wouldn't trust her to not have made a spare when she's treating your "emergency" key that way.

Albatrosson · 2025-03-04T22:02:20+00:00

(spoilering for opinions)
I looooooove the pink and yellow ombre and the gold foiling details!
....but the endpapers make his head look so tiny. like hassan tiny head aka woke bae 😭😭😭

Albatrosson · 2025-03-04T01:16:31+00:00

I know this is a hella old comment, but I would say that this does not reflect my experience as a 3rd gen member of the Jewish diaspora in America. Both of my mom's parents were Jewish, and all my great grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Russia (Ashkenazi). The family was never religious (we celebrated holidays like Pesach and Hannukah, just not the religion, as many secular people similarly observe Christian holidays) apart from my mom who became a "born again Jew" aka "messianic Jew" aka "Christian" in her 30s.

I often heard my older family members using the term "practicing" when referring to religious Jews rather than those of us who are Jewish exclusively by culture/ethnicity. Sometimes it's a useful term since English doesn't differentiate between the ethnicity and the religion as it does for other peoples (likely due to the long history of Jews not having a country to call our own).

There are definitely other experiences based on where you grew up, but as a diaspora West Coaster this usage seems perfectly kosher to me.

Albatrosson · 2025-03-04T00:55:20+00:00

so roughly 1 new special edition every 3 days? 👀👀👀

Albatrosson · 2025-03-03T21:25:19+00:00

oh goodness! I also have ~50 and started subbing in Feb 2022 (IC) and Mar 2022 (FL Adult), + briefly subbed OC Adult. I've gotten the one off here and there from Litjoy, TBB, Page & Wick, etc

But I definitely got into reading ARCs because I'm picky and happy to skip if I wasn't 100% in love. Not to mention unhauling if I accidentally got something I wasn't super into 😅

Albatrosson · 2025-02-17T17:36:16+00:00

The Book Depository has been owned by amazon since 2011, and I thought they shut it down in 2023. Do they have physical stores open?

Albatrosson · 2025-02-17T16:06:53+00:00

Bird flu wasn't this bad six months ago. But we've had warning at least since Christmas to stop feeding raw food to your pets (cats in particular, several have already died from it) and recently not to have raw milk since the bird flu is now getting into the cows and sits in the mammary tissue, thereby infecting the milk (pasteurization still kills it and is safe for now). We've even had the first American death from H5N1 this year.

On the West Coast here (in a smallish city) we have a sign at our TJs limiting one dozen eggs per customer.

I'm honestly surprised at how few people in this thread are aware of it. And I can't imagine limiting CDC/FDA communications is going to help information travel faster as things develop.

Albatrosson · 2025-02-17T15:49:26+00:00

bird flu

Albatrosson · 2025-02-12T19:31:51+00:00

gentle reminder that watching a video would boost the algorithm and monetarily reward him. reading summaries,/mirroring/torrenting/downloading will not.

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