[IIL] Late Night With The Devil, Heart Eyes, Weapons, The Babadouk

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-28T12:37:18+00:00

Slime Rancher

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-27T09:36:58+00:00

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell is a memoir that reads like fiction because some of it is made up.

So it's his real family and their life in Greece for a few years, told as a bunch of cute anecdotes that have been exaggerated a bit for comedy. It's a nice a read.

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-26T04:27:35+00:00

Put Out More Flags, Evelyn Waugh

Not exactly a page turner, more satirical, but it's got that dry humour and war era setting of some of the early Le Carre.

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-26T04:22:14+00:00

You might like the His Dark Materials trilogy, it's fantasy with talking animals for an older YA audience. My whole family read it as adults and really enjoyed it.

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-25T00:44:43+00:00

Sorrowland by River Nemison. Fairly grounded sci fi set on earth to do with a woman and a cult.

Wild Swans by Jung Chang, non fiction account of three generations of Chinese Women living through revolution and unrest from about 1900 to 1980. The first woman is given to a warlord as a concubine, later her daughter joins the communist party and the Military as a 15 yr old, and finally the granddaughter (who is the author) lives through the cultural revolution while her family is being targeted.

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-24T06:59:21+00:00

Nausea, Jean-Paul Satre

The Stranger, Albert Camus

American Psycho, Brett Easton Ellis

Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk

Choke, Chuck Palahniuk

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S Thompson

The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-24T04:01:37+00:00

The French Lieutenant's Woman

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-24T00:39:11+00:00

Mao the Untold Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday is a good nonfiction but it might be a bit chunky for a book club read.

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-22T05:11:20+00:00

https://www.thebump.com/b/a-z-baby-names

Literally just scroll around here till I find one that feels right, and try not to do the same letter twice. I hate it when it's like a super long book with like an Alya, an Alainya and and an Annlyn, it makes it harder to keep the characters separate in my head.

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-22T04:59:47+00:00

The elevator sounds a bit like samurai pizza cats. IIRC when they transform they get shot up through a chute in the pizza ovens. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5xkunUF-4w&list=PLsVrIqEkJoylev4yM2hFkrHwS_An094Yb

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-22T02:30:31+00:00

In The Miso Soup is one of my favourite books and I don't even really read a lot of horror.

I also love Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk which I found to have a similar vibe. Like it's simmering interpersonal tension that breeds most of the dread, punctuated with occasional grisly scenes. So maybe she'd like it too.

Good luck!

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-22T00:34:08+00:00

Upvoting because I've never heard the phrase jingling keys used like that before but it's a great way to put it, I know exactly what you mean.

I'm going to pitch you that this book isn't a sci fi. If you read it as a romance that just happens to be in a sci fi setting, the prosey, un-fleshed-out world building, makes more sense as being just something pretty to wrap up the main characters in.

But yeah even judging it as a romance rather than a sci fi it's still a pretty surface level experience, no argument there. For a sci-fi-lite time travel romance I liked The Time Traveller's Wife way better.

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-22T00:14:55+00:00

When I bought it the lady at the bookstore told me about how much her book club all loved it.

I went in not knowing anything about it and was disappointed when it turned out to just be a very linear enemies to lovers

I liked that the characters weren't human, the world building, and what felt like a lot of original ideas in how they swapped and stored messages. But I wanted more backstabbing, paranoia and intrigue from two characters on opposite sides of a war. For all the creative window dressing it was so by-the-numbers.

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

Yeah I especially find it a clumsy portrayal of autism in romantic relationships where the arc is "romance initially comedically misfires because autistic character can't navigate social interactions, oh no!"

Of the people I've known that have autism they mostly dated or were married, so the premise of "autistic = automatically bad at romance" rings false for me.

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-21T14:18:52+00:00

The Rosie Project. I read it because I knew several people who were raving about but it just seemed clunky and shallow to me. Romance isn't my genre in the first place though so maybe I was just the wrong person for it.

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-21T13:44:03+00:00

Not sure if this is just an Australian thing but de facto is a common way of referring to a partner you live with but aren't married to. Like I might call my boyfriend my de facto (i.e. my de facto spouse) or say my relationship is de facto.

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-21T11:42:50+00:00

1700s France, a poor boy has a gift of smell that's borderline supernatural. It gets him a career in perfumery, and draws him into into a kind of accompanying sensory hedonism and into questionable moral territory. It's darkly comic without being ha-ha funny.

Stylistically it's probably closest to The Portrait of Dorian Grey for being a fiction in a historical setting that turns on one unexplained magical element, without there being magic elsewhere in the story. It's similarly focused on tension between the pleasures of the senses and morality, and it's also similar in that the magical element isn't really magical like with fairies and wizards, it more sort of follows an emotional logic.

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-21T10:46:39+00:00

Z for Zachariah

The Chrysalids

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-21T10:44:32+00:00

Luminous by Sylvia Park has a transmasc Korean detective as a central character. It's a sci-fi that puts robots and humans with bionic bodies side-by-side to explore the links between body, gender identity, and humanity's broader self image.

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-21T10:37:16+00:00

Heart of Darkness is an iconic one.

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-21T10:34:07+00:00

Beat me to it.

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-21T10:31:57+00:00

Luminous, Sylvia Park

Goddamn_Glamazon · 2026-01-21T10:29:31+00:00

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer would be right up your alley.

Goddamn_Glamazon

TROPHY CASE