As many of you know, I am participating in the Pondathon, a year-long story-driven readathon hosted by The Quiet Pond. You can find the intro post that I wrote here.

It is now round three of the Pondathon, which means we have a new side quest! This quest is given to us by Cuddle, the resident otter of The Quiet Pond. The prompts are:

1. Read a book by a woman (including non-binary women and femme) author of color during Women’s History Month
2. Read a book by a Black author for Black History Month

There is also a secret achievement – to read a book by a Black woman/non-binary woman/femme author. For more information, check out the full side quest post on The Quiet Pond here!

So I’m here to help you “win” this quest! I’ve got a bunch of book recs for you that fit these two prompts. I’ve split them up into books by Black authors, and books by women (inc. non-binary women and femmes) of color. In the Black author section, I’ve made a note of the books that fulfill the secrete achievement! So let’s get to the books!!

I mentioned in my November 2021 wrap up that I had watched the Netflix show called Arcane – and immediately loved it. It’s based on lore from the game League of Legends. But don’t worry!! You don’t need to know anything about the game to love the show. The animation and artwork is beautiful, and the story is AMAZING. Just look at this!!! Isn’t it beautiful?

The show became SUPER popular, and lots of my (real life and bookstagram) friends ended up watching it too. It’s been so much fun to discuss it with them. I had wanted to do a collab post with my friend Gretal (Instagram // blog // Twitter) for a while, so I was like, Gretal listen. WHAT IF!! We did a book rec post based on Arcane?? And she said “omg yes okay” which is a direct quote. So here we are!! We picked out a handful of major themes from the show, and created recs based on each of those themes. And obviously these are great books in general, so they’re really just general book recs for everyone even if you haven’t watched the show!

But you should watch it.

Gretal: Take it from me, who is notoriously bad at watching anything. Arcane is a must watch!

Letting books take you where they might – that was one part of the Library magic.

The Archive of the Forgotten

Are you the kind of person who reads an entire series right after another, or do you prefer to take breaks in between? I’m honestly a bit of both. I don’t know what the deciding factor is haha. This is just to say, I’ve just finished reading this wonderful trilogy, and I read it in the span of a week. So of course I’m here to recommend the series to you! I mean, if I read it this fast you can assume I loved it haha. Probably I wouldn’t have finished it otherwise lol.

You know I love science fiction – particularly space operas, and you also know I love queer books. So what’s even better than each of those?? WHEN THEY’RE MASHED TOGETHER!! So I made a book recommendation list with a ton of queer space books. I originally posted it on my bookstagram here, so sorry if you’re seeing it twice. But here I’ve included the Goodreads links so you can check them all out easily!

One of the things I loved about SciFiMonth last month was discovering new blogs and bloggers to follow!! One of the new bloggers that I found is Louise at Monstrumology! A while ago she posted about her favorite subgenres of science fiction (find it here), which I really enjoyed reading. It made me think about mine, so I decided to make a post discussing the different subgenres of sci-fi. Thanks for the inspiration Louise!

Of course, there are infinite subgenres, and I know I’ll miss some of them. So please don’t come for me if I leave out your favorite subgenre lol. It absolutely wasn’t my intention, I just sadly am not omniscient. I’ll tell you which ones of these are my favorites, and I’ll give you some examples of where you can find each subgenre. Obviously I’ll talk about books, but I’ll include some tv shows, movies, and video games as well! I know we all like different types of media.

Also before I start, another disclaimer. Media is fluid, and can’t be pigeonholed into one neat little box. So a lot of the examples of media that I’ll mention probably fall into a few different subgenres of sci-fi! I tried to choose what I felt was the dominating one. Just as an example, take Star Wars. I’ve categorized it mainly as a space fantasy, due to the Force and the Jedi, but it’s obviously a space opera as well!

Okay, now let’s get into the different subgenres!!