Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)

@bookjockeyalex

librarian, archivist, author, Ignyte award-winning & Hugo-nominated writer and critic, rat obsessive, hella queer words in reactormag.com, locusmag.com, npr, reader's digest, and elsewhere bookjockeyalex.com

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Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· 20d

What I'm reading: 42) Find My Way Down to You by Julian Winters - YA fantasy, grief, the Underworld bookshop.org/a/4108/97805...

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· 20d

"All of which is to say that this is The Chris Nolan Film Experience. It is a spectacle and an adventure. It is maddening, frustrating, and confusing."

Nolan has a love for the stoic, serious man who, despite all his flaws, is loyal to a code of honor above all else, but this somewhat obscures or distorts the character of Odysseus, who repeatedly gives into his ugliest urges and desires throughout the poem. It may not be Nolan's job to be loyal to the original text, but he should at least consider what his deviations from it are trying to say.

Nolan also loves to depict power being used in ways that cause so much destruction and pain, while also holding out that abuse as the only way to solve the problem at hand. It's a tortured philosophy that makes it seem like he wants things both ways—to de-mythologize Odysseus and these ancient Greek myths while also turning Odysseus into a mythic action hero over its last 30 minutes.

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· 21d

What I'm reading: 41) It Looks Like You in the Dark by Mathilda Zeller - Alaskan Native horror, supernatural mystery bookshop.org/a/4108/97812...

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· 22d

Like, holy shit, this sounds so cool

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· 23d

Yesterday I played peekaboo with one of the feral kittens in my neighborhood.

A wood fence with horizontal planks. Between on of the lower gaps are a pair of golden eyes and a white stripe of a nose.

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· 23d

Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· 27d

Wow, I'd never heard about this! I need to do some research.

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· 28d

What I'm reading: 40) Funerals Are for the Living by Sami Ellis - YA horror, death magic, racist cults bookshop.org/a/4108/97814...

Funerals Are for the Living by Sami Ellis. The book propped up on a crowded bookshelf.

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jul 12

You cannot convince me these two are straight and not fucking each other. You simply cannot. This is every single Illya x Napoleon established relationship post movie fic.

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jul 11

What I'm reading: 39) Fishbone Cinderella by Elizabeth Lim - midcentury Korea and China, magical realism, generational trauma bookshop.org/a/4108/97982...

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jul 11

Blocklist strikes again!

Rachel Bitecofer @rachelbitecofer.bsky.social User Blocked by "A Very British Bigotry"

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jul 9

Gerhard Richter, Lesende

A woman with a short blonde ponytail pulled back with a green scrunchie. She's in a burgundy room and reading the newspaper intently.

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jul 7

The additional context is 🤌 (I just checked his feed and he seems to have deleted the 2nd post.)

Stephen King tweet: Tell you what--if you knew the whole truth about everyone in the Senate and House of Reps, those chambers would be dead empty. Jesus said, "Let him without sin cast the first stone."

Readers added context they thought people might want to know: This is referring to Graham Platner, who has been accused of rape. In John 8:7, the woman to be stoned to death was accused of adultery, not rape. It is understood to be a powerful statement against hypocrisy, not a free-pass for politicians to rape women.

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jul 7

Goobers, the lot of 'em. (Notes: it's not actually hot in the carrier, so they aren't trying to cool down. They can leave it at any time - it is on my bed and the door is propped open. They are choosing to sleep like this.) #PetRats #RatsOfBluesky

4 rats in a carrier. The tan and white one is splooting. The black one is pressed up against the back wall. The white and white and black ones are lying on their backs with their feet up.

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jul 6

Nope, not suspicious at all

Screenshot of an email. Subject: Dear Friends & Family join me for a joyful gathering on the 18th of July 2026 Please Open RSVP by using a Windows desktop for the link to work properly and make Sure you Install The Invitation after Downloading It, See you There !

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jul 6

Some good news on the Alex front! I picked up 4 boys from a rescue last week: Ilya (white with cream hood), Rahul (white with black hood), Rufus (black with white belly), and Nico (albino). So nice to have pets again. Been almost a year! #PetRats #RatsOfBluesky

4 young male rats in a carrier: all black (Rufus), white with cream hood and spots down back (Ilya), with with black hood and spots down back (Rahul), and albino (Nico).

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jul 3

Yes to all of this!

Christina Chatel, a school library media specialist from Michigan and co-founder of Young Teen Lit, championed the need for stories featuring characters in their early teens (14-16) as an alternative to Young Adult novels that have steadily aged up over the years, often featuring 19- and 20-year-old main characters and increasingly written for adults. Her advice: shorter lengths (180-300 pages), no cartoon covers, and a clarification that it’s a very different market from Hi/Lo readers.

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jun 27

There is nothing in TOC because there are no chapters. It is uploaded as one big file.

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jun 26

yeah, I did that, but I don't see all books. I can only see these limited lists

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jun 26

Okay this? Sucks. You have e got to upload your audiobook with chapters!

Screenshot of an audiobook in Libby with no chapters. It shows the entire audio of 316 minutes.

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jun 23

What I'm (re)reading: 38) The Roommate Risk by Talia Hibbert, narrated by Rooke Kingston & Keval Shah - friends to lovers, abandonment issues, two knuckleheads refusing to admit they're in love bookshop.org/a/4108/97819...

Screenshot of the audiobook in the libby app.

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jun 12

Malls won't let teens in without an adult and cops are banning young adults from going to the beach. We got rid of public transit and third spaces. There are no sidewalks, and kids riding bikes get hassle by NextDoor NIMBYs. Where the fuck are teenagers supposed to go?

In books like Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents, Twenge has documented the profound behavioral changes that accompanied smartphones, especially among young people.

"The smartphone fundamentally changed the way adolescents spent their time outside of school," Twenge told NPR. "They started spending a lot more time online and on their phones and a lot less time hanging out with their friends in person and driving around in a car or going to the mall or just hanging out."

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jun 12

Or, and hear me out, it's actually a good thing that tons of teenagers aren't getting pregnant anymore.

The drop in birth rates has affected women of all ages, but it's most pronounced among teenagers. That sounds plausible to Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University.

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jun 12

Summer/Fall 2020 was terrifying. I was in the North Bay and we had so many fires back to back then that we didn't see blue sky for 6 weeks. It was so smoky at my job that we were wearing blue medical masks over our N95s and we still could barely breathe.

If the region sees rare, but possible, soaking rainfall in Aug-Oct, it’s possible we’ll see a relatively modest peak and early end to fire season. But if those unusual summer/autumn rains don’t materialize, and/or if the warm nearby ocean or “tropical remnant” events instead facilitate dry thunderstorm outbreaks (versus rain-bearing ones, as occurred in August 2020 when over 650 fires lightning fires ignited in a single day), the potential is there for a very different, and more concerning, outcome.

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jun 10

I dunno, could there possibly be economic instability with tens of thousands of people being fired or forced out of their jobs and prices of every day items hitting sky high rates? Could that be why people aren't buying $35 hardcovers at the same rate as a decade ago?

According to survey results, the data suggests that is indeed happening: active library members were found to buy 42% fewer new books than non-members, and the substitution effect is strongest for the most popular, widely stocked authors.

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jun 9

The current one:

A partially completed puzzle of a vase of bright orange poppies on a table stacked with books.

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jun 8

What I'm reading: 37) Foundling Fathers by Meg Elison - science fiction, clones, history mindfuck bookshop.org/a/4108/97816...

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jun 6

I supposedly jusy got connected to a live agent and yeah, I don't think so.

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jun 6

Setting aside the inanity of this elavted horror comment, Widow's Bay is not "horror-coded." It is explicitly a horror comedy. The latest episode was literally a Halloween parody. Did this piece get any editing at all? The author seems to have no understanding of horror at all.

So much of the creative and commercial energy around modern film-making seems to be directed towards the horror genre. Ever since the emergence of what is either termed “elevated” or “post” horror around a decade ago, the coolest, buzziest films have tended to swim in those waters: Sinners; Weapons; Longlegs; the works of Jordan Peele; the works of Robert Eggers; the works of Ari Aster; the work of the Philippou brothers (another pair of YouTube graduates). You could extend this to TV, where the show of the moment, Widow’s Bay, is extremely horror-coded.

Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them)@bookjockeyalex· Jun 5

HOW AM I ONLY SEEING THIS NOW?!?!