It's a lot of set up at the beginning, but I personally feel like it "picks up" at the chapter entitled "Number 34 and Number 27", lol.

I bought The Overstory in a small bookshop in Guerneville. First time seeing the Redwoods. Seemed appropriate.

I read The Terror during a cold snap where I was bundled up sitting in front of an electric heater

I wouldn't say so. Just seems like the authors are racist

I've never read Andy Weir. I really liked the movie the Martian. Sounds like it's worth checking out.

This is a book aimed written for and aimed at late teens and is supplementary sex education for gay kids because, funnily enough, the practice of safe gay sex is not taught in schools the way straight sex is. When I was at school (many moons ago) we learnt about straight, penis-in-vagina sex, the anatomy around this and what safe sex precautions to take. There was nothing covering this for gay sex. Now you may say "well, gay sex is a minority, so there's no point covering this." Well, if it's not covered in normal educational classes at school, it should be addressed elsewhere. Gay kids shouldn't be the ones just left to "figure it out" and possibly be taken advantage of or not be properly prepared the way sex education tries to prepare and warn straight kids.

This book was written to address that. So yes, it shows a diagram of the male body and erogenous zones and mentions that the prostate is an erogenous zone....cause it is? Are you equally shocked and appalled that in normal sex education, they note that a penis is also an erogenous zone too? In a book educating about gay sex...they're going to talk about the functions of gay sex. I'm not seeing how it can be anything else but homophobia that you're clutching pearls over the idea that a book might acknowledge that the prostate is a well-known erogenous zone. Would you equally freak out about a sex education book mentioning the clitoris?

A walk in the woods by Bill Bryson! Also a really great audiobook

https://spotify.link/KPjRg3Zgsyb

Could always enjoy the song instead!

This is terrorism.

Thank you !

This is fascinating. I firmly believe that dreams are something more than just "weird stuff our brain does while we're sleeping." I think dreams could well be connected with some form of reality. I also believe that just because we experience time linearly, does not mean that time is linear. Just because human consciousness seems to orient itself at a fixed point in time, does not mean that the moment we are living right now is the only moment that exists.

Thank you for sharing.

I read Less Than Zero as a kid in the 80’s. Still one of my favs.

This is a YA book and, whilst the subject matter is quite sensitive, the author has handled it thoughtfully and appropriately for that age range. As a parent I do not censor books; as a teacher I obviously have to be a little more circumspect - this text is one that I have in my personal tutor library for a Y9 group. I'd say it is ok for a 13 year old - it is certainly handled a lot more sensitively than I've seen the topic handled online, where it is easily accessed.

Didn't know something like that existed. Thank you.

I only have 3 out of 299! I am not afraid to dnf so that makes sense. Also I just realized those 3 were book club picks which is probably the only reason I fished them.

The Maidens

Gone Girl

The Perfect Marriage

Edited for formatting

I tried to read it, but thought it was above my head. Did you ever notice that every quote you ever hear from that book, such as , iirc, "nattering nabobs of nepotism" or negativity or whatever it was, comes from the first three pages. Nobody (except op) gets past those first few pages.

As i said, if there’s a reasonable explanation I have absolutely no issue

Wheel of Time feels personally attacked.

Look it up on Common Sense Media rather than asking the troglodytes on Reddit.

I liked Cell, I feel like it was direct inspiration for some of the story beats in The Last of Us (which was a good show).

Hang in there. Worth the ending

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If a 13 year old is old enough to know about slavery and genocide, they are old enough to handle psychological problems.

I mean, the Allied Control Council that effectively ran Germany immediately after World War II banned and pulled out of circulation massive amounts of literature that was either explicitly or was more indirectly associated with Nazi ideology. I'm only semi-flippant when I characterise that less as traditional censorship and more as the rest of the human race telling Germany to touch grass and read another book.

I think this is more complicated than most people seem to recognize here. In the first place, race is not a biological category. This means that referring to race, even in a fictional story, will be based on social conventions of thinking (falsely or mistakenly) that people belong to distinct racial groups on the basis of, presumably, skin color. And it's hard to see how such views could arise, at least not without a very complicated back story. There could, of course, be geographically-isolated populations of humans or human-like creatures, and in these populations certain characteristics might be more common than in other geographically-isolated populations. But if that's the case, then these populations will not, except very rarely, interact, so it's not likely that there will be diverse populations; it won't be usual or normal. Second, most fantasies are imagined in some geographically-limited, temperate zone climate that is a close-clone of medieval Europe, and in that environment, with that technological level involving limited trade and travel, again, diverse populations (at least of the skin-color type) aren't at all likely. It's not that you can't have such things without stretching credulity (which is a weird concept to appeal to in a fantasy context), it's just that there aren't any clear reasons why 'different races' make sense. The "Summer Isles" in George Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series do provide a rationale, but even in that case, there aren't people of different races all over Westeros and Essos. In fantasies that have a clear line of descent from Tolkien's stories, diverse races don't make sense at all (even supposing isolated developments in the 'east' of Middle Earth) because the time frames involved are only thousands of years, not millions. Again, it's not that such things cannot be introduced, but the matter is, as i said, complicated.