Hi, hello everyone! We’re super excited to bring you our discussion questions for The Tea Dragon Society! We adored reading these books this month, and we cannot wait to get discussing. Without anything further, let’s get into it!
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Read moreShay Johnson has all the makings of a successful witch. Now that she’s a junior at T.K. Anderson Magical Magnet School, she’s one step closer to winning the full-ride Brockton Scholarship–her ticket into the university of her dreams. Her main competition? Ana freaking Alvarez. The key to victory? Impressing Mr. B, drama teacher and head of the scholarship committee.
When Mr. B persuades Shay to star in this year’s aggressively inclusive, racially diverse musical—at their not-quite-diverse school–she agrees, wearily, even though she’ll have to put up with Ana playing the other lead. But with rehearsals underway, Shay realizes Ana is…not the despicable witch she’d thought. Perhaps she could even be a friend–or more. And Shay could use someone in her corner once she finds herself on the receiving end of Mr. B’s unpleasant and unwanted attention. When Shay learns she’s not the first witch to experience his inappropriate behavior, she must decide if she’ll come forward. But how can she speak out when the scholarship–and her future–are on the line?
Happy Wednesday, everyone! I hope that you’re doing well and staying safe! This week, I’m bringing you another Annotate with Me post, and this time I’m highlighting my favorite book — If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio!
I did annotate a copy of If We Were Villains earlier this year, but I did so before I really started to develop my process for annotating, so, I wanted to try again with my more specific and detailed system. I also thought this was the perfect time to do so because I’ve (unintentionally) reread If We Were Villains on September 14th for the last two years — so it made sense to do a reread and re-annotation this month!
This post is basically all spoilers — I can’t really get into the nitty gritty parallels, influences, and foreshadowing without doing so — so if you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend reading it and then checking this post! Okay, it’s gonna be a long one, friends, so get comfy, grab some tea, and let’s get started!
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Hello friends! Given that it’s been almost two years of blogging and bookstagramming, I thought it’d be a good day to sit down and reflect on what I’ve learned in that time. So grab a cup of tea, and get cozy!
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Happy September! We hope that you’re all doing well and that the month is treating you well so far. We’re really excited to announce that our October TeaTimeReads pick will be R.F. Kuang’s Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution — we know that this is a highly anticipated read for many, so we’re really looking forward to reading it with everyone!
Here is the full summary for Babel:
Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.
1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation — also known as Babel.
Babel is the world’s center of translation and, more importantly, of silver-working: the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation through enchanted silver bars, to magical effect. Silver-working has made the British Empire unparalleled in power, and Babel’s research in foreign languages serves the Empire’s quest to colonize everything it encounters.
Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, is a fairytale for Robin; a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge serves power, and for Robin, a Chinese boy raised in Britain, serving Babel inevitably means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to sabotaging the silver-working that supports imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide: Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence? What is he willing to sacrifice to bring Babel down?
Babel — a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal response to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell — grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of translation as a tool of empire.
Links for Babel: Goodreads | TheStoryGraph | Bookshop | IndieBound
We’ll be doing a loose reading schedule this month, but of course, feel free to read at your own pace.
Content Warnings for Babel: “period typical” racism, c slur, anti-asian rhetoric, antiblackness, war, gun violence, blood, murder, child abuse/neglect, slavery, colonization, gore, death of a parent, classism, sexism, suicide ideation, xenophobia, grief, hate crime, murder
As always, we hope that you’ll join us and we’re looking forward to discussion our September pick, The Tea Dragon Society with you all later this month
Hello, everyone! You all may not know this, but Cossette and I both love Gossip Girl (we are Blair Waldorf stans first, and humans second. Also, Dair should’ve been end game), and since the fifteen year anniversary of the show’s premiere is on the 19th — I’m sorry what? — we thought it would be fun to share some Gossip Girl recs with you!
When we were coming up with this post, we originally thought of recommending books based on your favorite character, but then thought “what if we recommended books we think the characters would like?” and so, this list was created! So grab a cup of tea, and some macarons (approved by Blair) and get cozy!
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Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.
1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation — also known as Babel.
Babel is the world’s center of translation and, more importantly, of silver-working: the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation through enchanted silver bars, to magical effect. Silver-working has made the British Empire unparalleled in power, and Babel’s research in foreign languages serves the Empire’s quest to colonize everything it encounters.
Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, is a fairytale for Robin; a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge serves power, and for Robin, a Chinese boy raised in Britain, serving Babel inevitably means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to sabotaging the silver-working that supports imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide: Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence? What is he willing to sacrifice to bring Babel down?
Links for Babel: Goodreads | TheStoryGraph | Bookshop | IndieBound
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As usual, Andie Rose has a plan: Transfer from community college to the hyper competitive Blue Ridge State, major in psychology, and maintain her lifelong goal of becoming an iconic self-help figure despite the nerves that have recently thrown her for a loop. All it will take is ruthless organization, hard work, and her trademark unrelenting enthusiasm to pull it all together.
But the moment Andie arrives, the rest of her plans go off the rails. Her rocky relationship with her boyfriend Connor only gets more complicated when she discovers he transferred out of Blue Ridge to her community college. Her roommate Shay needs a major, and despite Andie’s impressive track record of being The Fixer, she’s stumped on how to help. And Milo, her coffee-guzzling grump of an R.A. with seafoam green eyes, is somehow disrupting all her ideas about love and relationships one sleep-deprived wisecrack at a time.
But sometimes, when all your plans are in rubble at your feet, you find out what you’re made of. And when Andie starts to find the power of her voice as the anonymous Squire on the school’s legendary pirate radio station–the same one her mom founded, years before she passed away–Andie learns that not all the best laid plans are necessarily the right ones.
Filled with a friend group that feels like family, an empowering journey of finding your own way, and a Just Kiss Already! romance, Begin Again is an unforgettable novel of love and starting again.
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Read moreIt started with their ancestor Oanh who dared to leave her marriage for true love—so a fearsome Vietnamese witch cursed Oanh and her descendants so that they would never find love or happiness, and the Duong women would give birth to daughters, never sons.
Oanh’s current descendant Mai Nguyen knows this curse well. She’s divorced, and after an explosive disagreement a decade ago, she’s estranged from her younger sisters, Minh Pham (the middle and the mediator) and Khuyen Lam (the youngest who swears she just runs humble coffee shops and nail salons, not Little Saigon’s underground). Though Mai’s three adult daughters, Priscilla, Thuy, and Thao, are successful in their careers (one of them is John Cho’s dermatologist!), the same can’t be said for their love life. Mai is convinced they might drive her to an early grave.
Desperate for guidance, she consults Auntie Hua, her trusted psychic in Hawaii, who delivers an unexpected prediction: this year, her family will witness a marriage, a funeral, and the birth of a son. This prophecy will reunite estranged mothers, daughters, aunts, and cousins—for better or for worse.
A multi-narrative novel brimming with levity and candor, The Fortunes of Jaded Women is about mourning, meddling, celebrating, and healing together as a family. It shows how Vietnamese women emerge victorious, even if the world is against them.
Hi, besties! As I am fully in my annotations era, I thought it would be fun to start a new post series called Annotate with Me. In this series, I’ll be highlighting one of the books that I’ve recently annotated, show you what supplies I used, share photos of my annotations and discuss some of the things I chose to highlight and comment on throughout the book. Since we just wrapped up our read of Grace D. Li’s Portrait of a Thief for TeaTimeReads, I figured this would be the perfect book to start with!
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