Embracing-the-shortness - Embracing The Shortness Since '96

A Language of Dragons || S.F. Williamson ★★★★☆ Started: 23.04.2025 Finished: 05.05.2025 London, 1923. Dragons soar through the skies and protests erupt on the streets, but Vivian Featherswallow isn’t worried. She’s going to follow the rules, get an internship studying dragon languages, and make sure her little sister never has to risk growing up Third Class. By midnight, Viv has started a civil war. With her parents arrested and her sister missing, all the safety Viv has worked for is collapsing around her. So when a lifeline is offered in the form of a mysterious ‘job’, she grabs it. Arriving at Bletchley Park, Viv discovers that she has been recruited as a codebreaker helping the war effort – if she succeeds, she and her family can all go home again. If she doesn’t, they’ll all die. I'll come clean - I only got this book because of the stunning international edition with the blue cover and sprayed edges. Luckily, the content did not let me down either - the main plotline of cracking the secret dragon code / language was fascinating. The advertised enemies to lovers romance was, truthfully, barely enemies to lovers at all, but since that was never the main draw for me, I didn't mind this one bit. And though at times A Language of Dragons feels a little too ostensibly "Babel meets Fourth Wing", with heavy emphasis on the Babel influence, it was overall still a very enjoyable read.

“Love the erasure of everything else, a blinding worse even than the sun.”

— David Vann, Bright Air Black

The River Has Roots || Amal El-Mohtar ★★★★★ Started: 22.05.2025 Finished: 01.06.2025 In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family. There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the family’s latest daughters, Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees. But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters’ bond but also their lives will be at risk…

Pandora's Box || Osamu Dazai ★★★★☆ Started: 24.02.2025 Finished: 13.03.2025 The war is over. Japan is defeated. Together with his country, a young man must rebuild his life. He will begin at a sanatorium, where everyone gets a nickname, surrounded by an interesting ensemble of patients and caregivers.

I must admit I am charmed by these little GR reading challenge bookmarks, I just wish the categories included lesser known books, and not just the current TikTok darlings (looking at the Valentines Day challenge with eligible books such as Fourth Wing and the Dark Romance of The Hour)

We || Yevgeny Zamyatin ★★★★★ Started: 22.02.2025 Finished: 23.02.2025 Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, We is the classic dystopian novel. In the totalitarian society of the OneState of the great Benefactor, in a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, is a world where people are numbers, there are no individuals, only numbers. Life has been reduced to a mathematical perfectly balanced equation, an ongoing process of mathematical precision. Free will is a disease. Primitive passions, instincts, and creativity have been subdued. Even nature has been defeated, banished behind the Green Wall. But one frontier remains: outer space. Now, with the creation of the spaceship Integral, that frontier, and whatever alien species are to be found there, will be subjugated to the beneficent yoke of reason. One number, D-503, chief architect of the Integral, decides to record his thoughts in the final days before the launch for the benefit of less advanced societies. But a chance meeting with the beautiful 1-330 results in an unexpected discovery that threatens everything D-503 believes about himself and the One State… the discovery, or rediscovery, of inner space, and that disease the ancients called the soul, and Love. If you are interested in dystopian literature in the vein of Orwell's 1984 and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, We is a must read!

Men often described the girl as having hair the colour of wheat. Others called it the colour of caramel or honey. The girl wondered why men so often used food to describe women's features. There was a hunger to such men that was best avoided.

- Brandon Sanderson: Tress of the Emerald Sea