cassiopeia ☀️
@lagunabayfables
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🇵🇭 writer of the gothic, the glamorous, and the grotesque ⋆ future archaeologist ⋆ wuthering heights enthusiast ⋆ plant grower ⋆ ✍️ mekong review, pseudopod
Joined February 2018
ever since someone said that stretch marks kinda look like sunlight on water, i’ve liked mine
stretch marks. i actually kinda like mine.
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you know what the most difficult thing to write is? sex scenes and fight scenes between characters who use the same pronouns. what body part is where and whose body part is whose? who knows.
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update from Bisan’s ig 25 minutes ago. the fact that palestinians are having to risk their health for the barest amount of food while isra*lis are making tiktoks about baking gluten free cookies tells you all you need to know.
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I’m from the Philippines. My ancestors fought the Spanish, the Americans, and the Japanese. We’ve fought fascist dictators. Our historical liberation movement was called terrorism. Our current freedom fighters are called terrorists. We only have a fighting chance at freedom.
I’m Caribbean, I literally only exist today because my ancestors used violence to get their freedom.
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I’m so in love with every single one of the national costumes 😭 they never miss
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Creating a gown based off of the work of an Indigenous culture bearer is insane considering how the national costume (and the candidate herself) glorifies the very same military that harasses, b0mbs, and murders Indigenous people.
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For int’l friends, so far we’ve:. - had ballots for overseas voters pre-shaded.- had vote counting machines “break” .- been made to leave ballots uncounted as a result.- had the vote count rest at more than half despite the “broken” machines.- had explicit footage of vote-buying.
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we’re fucked. people don’t care about the consequences of global warming unless it affects them directly and unfortunately for us in the global south, we’re at the front lines of the climate crisis.
Brace yourself for "extreme danger" heat index. 🌡️. Temperatures are expected to rise further in the coming weeks, and temperatures may reach 52 degrees Celcius and beyond in several areas the country due to El Niño and the dry season, PAGASA said. READ:
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My favorite genre of art is “colonizer fucks around and finds out”
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Statues of Our Lady of Sorrows just scratch a particular itch in my raised-Filipino Catholic brain
catholic art and specially these depictions of the virgin amaze me every time i see them because the pain and sorrow is so intrinsically emotional and detailed
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i’m only 22, but the difference between typhoons when i was younger and typhoons now is honestly terrifying. back then, we’d get a typhoon of this magnitude maybe once every 2-3 years but now it feels like every other typhoon is a supertyphoon. we’re experiencing the consequences.
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ever since someone said stretch marks look like the patterns sunlight makes on water, ive gotten over my insecurity abt them
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reminder that the creators of ofmd, good omens, and pjo support isr**l and that disney+ is one of the places to boycott. pirate this media if you must, but don’t give them your money, don’t talk about them, don’t give them any kind of public attention. it’s the least we can do.
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colonizer x colonized romances must DIE AND NEVER COME BACK.
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Philippines 🇵🇭 BDS Boycott Alternatives:. Starbucks:. • CBTL.• Pick-up Coffee.• But First, Coffee. McDonald’s:. • Tropical Hut.• Zark’s Burgers.• Andok’s .• Chooks To Go. Pizza Hut & Domino’s. • Yellow Cab.• Greenwich .• Shakey’s .• Angel’s Pizza.• Pizza Pedrico’s.
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Motaz saying in his latest video that he didn’t even expect to turn 25 years old (it’s his birthday) broke my heart 💔 I hope he’s safe now and that he can return to a free Palestine 🇵🇸
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honestly i fully believe that the secret to good writing is self-indulgence. be the freak you want to see in the world.
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Today is International Comfort Women Memorial Day. There are no words that could ever encompass the violence done unto hundreds of thousands of East and Southeast Asian women by Imperial Japanese soldiers. To this day, many of the victims are still fighting for the right to be.
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This is such a colonizer take. Abandoning local languages feeds into the hegemony and *severs* cultural ties. It severs you from your own culture, and it also kills oral history (which is often the only surviving record we have of some events, esp in Indigenous and/or heavily
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The US didn’t liberate shit. Filipino victory against the Japanese was thanks to guerrilla fighters like my great-grandfather who fought tooth and nail to liberate us. Your ancestors didn’t do crap and I hope they’re in hell where they belong.
Philippines were liberated by the US from Japan. My grandfather survived the Bataan Death March (massacre) there helping the Filipinos. These Palestinian Islamist marchers are death cultists like the Shinto Japanese.
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Hey while this may be good, the Jollibee Food Corporation’s had a long history with horrible labor practices and is the subject of some local boycotts because of that. Proceed with caution.
Hey so who was gonna tell me Jollibee’s is Pro-Palestine AND technically owns Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf?
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re: the convos on how haunted SEAsia is. someday, i’d like to do a paper on the colonial roots of our many, many ghost stories. because so many haunted place stories start with “it was a hospital/jail/graveyard during the japanese/american/dutch/etc colonial period”.
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Horror/romance is THE superior genre combination. Oftentimes there’s nothing we can do to escape the terrible enormity of desire. There’s no choice but to revel in it, let it consume you. No choice but to love the thing that brings you down on your knees.
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In Paete, Laguna in the Philippines, there’s a story about a golden crocodile owned by a diwata. This crocodile lived at the mouth of the river. The golden scales it shed were carried by the current, down to where people could gather them. This gold was eventually used to buy.
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Queer reads from Southeast Asia for Pride Month!. Featuring books from: 🇻🇳 🇹🇭 🇰🇭 🇲🇲 🇵🇭 🇲🇾
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Dark academia shouldn’t be primarily white because HAVE ANY OF Y’ALL HEARD ABOUT THE SHIT THAT GOES DOWN IN NONWESTERN SCHOOLS? . Every Filipino school has at least 1 headless ghost priest. It’s a quintessential trope. Don’t get me started on the rest of it.
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controversial opinion but i feel like a lot of people forget that horror isn’t just about aesthetics and atmosphere. it’s about meaningfully crossing lines and making your audience feel emotions so visceral that the feeling will stay with them even after they’ve closed the book.
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i think there’s much to be said about how ghibli isn’t just an aesthetic in the same way gothic isn’t just an aesthetic. reducing something as thematically complex as ghibli films with all their messages about war and environmentalism to just an aesthetic is how you get fascists.
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did you know that some folk/fairytales are so old that there are whole genetic sequences and family trees documenting their origins, tropes, and branching variations? it’s so cool how humans have been telling versions of the same stories for millennia.
Does anyone have any random fun facts about a very niche subject. I'm bored and love learning random things.
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debated keeping this in circles but i Need more toxic queer rep. give me more queers with terrible personalities who aren’t paragons 100% of the time. i don’t want them just flawed, i want them to be downright HORRIBLE. fuck respectability politics, give me all the toxic rep.
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the internet’s obsession with success at a young age creates unhealthy complexes for a lot of people (myself included) when we’re meant to actually be experiencing our youth—instead of spending it mired in self-loathing—and reaping the rewards of those experiences later.
one day I will be published. and I need to remember right now I’m only 22 and I have my whole life ahead of me and this is not a competition and I’m not racing myself or anyone else.
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I feel like Filipino dark academia would slap considering how much colonial history we have to tackle in regards to education AS WELL AS all the haunted school stories we have (that is also linked to that colonial history).
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Rereading isn’t enough, I wish I could delete a book from my brain and experience it for the first time again 😭.
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lesbians put the romance in necromancy.
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people should make more noise about this series tbh. it’s such a masterclass in emotions and politics. general ouyang INVENTED being doomed by the narrative.
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give me (more) southeast asian dark academia. we have the cutthroat academic competition. we have the haunted school lore. we have the colonial trauma. it’s so delicious.
Give me more dark academia in the Global South. Forget the Ivies and Oxford. I want the MCs discussing the Upanishads, reciting ghazals, debating Confucian philosophy and the merits of the Silk Road. this narrative of Western academic exceptionalism pmo.
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- had so many people unable to vote because the voting hours weren’t/haven’t been extended.- had (ILLEGAL) campaign endorsements right up until we were filling out ballots (happened to me).- had several disqualification cases against M@rc0s trashed even though they were valid.
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🧵 FILIPINO LENT TRADITIONS. 1. Visita Iglesia. In the Philippines, we have a tradition called Visita Iglesia, where we visit several churches. The number depends— sometimes it’s 7 for Jesus’ 7 last words, or 14 for the 14 Stations of the Cross, though this isn’t strict.
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I’m saying this so that people see that our struggles are all linked. Across the global south, no one is free until all of us are free. Fight like hell for Palestine, Tigray, the Congo, Myanmar, and wherever else people are suffering colonialism, apartheid, genocide, and war.
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the category is “i wasn’t the same person i was before i read this book”
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and if i said this applies to gothic horror too 😔. it’s weird that i keep seeing people who are supposedly gothic horror lovers (and even gothic horror AUTHORS) turning their noses up at literal genre conventions and reducing the subgenre to pretty dresses and candlelight.
someone said a lot of fantasy today feels soulless because it prioritises aesthetic over having something meaningful to say and that has never been more true.
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some of my favorite translated books! they’re from madagascar, south korea, tunisia, brazil, morocco, and argentina ⭐️
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Some Filipinos really have the gall to say “i’m proud of our culture 🇵🇭” when it comes to Indigenous people being recognized (which, unless you’re part of that group, that culture doesn’t belong to you) but will turn around and call other Indigenous folk t€rrorists.
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These are the books that have rearranged my braincells, I highly recommend them (please).
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There is no single Filipino people. There is no one Filipino culture. We’re made up of hundreds of diverse cultures and ethnic groups, all with their own unique histories. Denying that in favor of a single narrative means destroying our soul and forcing us further into this neo-.
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Estimates say that anywhere from 200k to a million Filipinos were massacred during the Ph-Am War which this is a monument to. One could even go so far as to say it was a genocide because of the massacres & presence of concentration camps. I wholeheartedly support this defacement.
Hamas supporters defacing an American monument in San Francisco’s Union Square.
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Here are some books about Palestine by Palestinian authors that you can read to help to better understand historical and current contexts. Some are fiction, some are memoirs. While you’re here, do check out Amar’s book list as well.
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I really love the way these highlight the beauty of several Philippine cultures while showing us what it means to be Filipino through different lenses
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if you guys want some epic/political fantasy recs, check these out!
too many people complain about there not being enough epic/political fantasy, not enough people buy and support such books 😔.
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i really cannot deal with ig because every post needs to be a carefully thought out, paragraphs-long aesthetic work of art, meanwhile i can just say honk shoo honk shoo mimimimi eepy on twitter.
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and there’s so much more 🥲 if there’s any deity you believe in, please pray to them with the Philippines in mind.
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I need a short story about the Americans who faked aswang attacks in the 1950s to fight Filipino Communists being eaten by real actual aswangs.
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another thing i noticed about climate change in the philippines is just how bad the heat has gotten. when i was little, it was bearable. suspending classes because of the heat wasn’t a thing. now every summer gets worse and worse. it’s late october now but still feels like july.
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In Bahasa, harimau means “tiger” while in Filipino, halimaw means “monster”. Tigers have been extinct here for around 7,000 years, but among the Maranao, it is said that one of the seven moon-eaters who cause eclipses is called Arimaonga, and it takes the form of a tiger or lion.
Very cool that in Puyuma (an Indigenous Taiwanese language), buaya/buqaya means shark while in other Austronesian languages, it means crocodile. Apparently the theory is that after crocodiles went extinct in that area, the locals started to use it to refer to sharks because they.
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i just saw a “writer” justify their use of a👁️ with “my work would otherwise require me to spend hours in a university library basement” and as someone who spends hours in university libraries for research, the research IS THE WORK. you can’t take that away. you do it for the.
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i am not exaggerating when i say i am only 5% into this book but it’s already changing my brain chemistry. it’s so different from anything i’ve ever read.
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one of my goals this year is to read more classics, and here are some of the ones i want to get to! some of them are re-reads 💛
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my favorite short novels ✨
What's your favorite novel under 200 pages? No poetry, no short story collections. Novels & novellas only.
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🎃🕯️ spooky season reads by trans and/or BIPOC authors 🕸️🔮
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as everyone sets their reading goals for the year, may i recommend reading these books from southeast asia 👀 from poetry to short story collections, memoirs to fantasy, i’ve read and loved all of these and i hope you will too 🫶🏼
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The Philippine National Police are a US colonial legacy and it’s disgusting how they’re brutalizing Labor Day protesters while American cops are arresting students protesting on behalf of Palestine. ACAB everywhere.
PAYAPA ANG PROTESTA KUNG WALANG PULIS NA TERORISTA. 📷: josemonsieur.santos (ig)
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eternally looking for more so here are some books that shook up my brain chemistry
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i think the pressure on bipoc authors to make their cultural fantasy works educational is ridiculous because you wouldn’t expect that from a white author. we’re allowed to make shit up 🤷🏻♀️ that’s the nature of fantasy lol.
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The way Z*on*st Filipinos continue to kiss Isr*el’s ass after they treat us as slave labor and subject us to this degree of racism will never not strike me as pathetic.
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people should stop harassing authors tackling “taboo” topics like dv and csa in the name of “protecting victims” because 1. usually we’re writing from experience and 2. you’re not doing it to protect victims, you’re doing it to preserve your own comfort.
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SEA “sayang” anthology where it’s a toss-up between sayang as in my love and sayang as in missed chance and the reader won’t know which is which until the end of each short story. serving angst mwahaha.
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this is one of THE books of all time, i���m so serious when i say that you should read it if you haven’t yet, it’s only 106 pages, 2 hours on audio, get on it NOW
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ship so good the only happy ending they’ll get is when they’re buried next to each other.
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Me, writing my MC: damn, girl has issues. Me:. Me: damn, these are my issues.
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specifically, i’d like to link SEAsian ghost stories with colonial trauma because i like to think that there’s a wealth of things to explore there. it’s always interesting when my creative writing and academic research interests intersect.
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Did it hurt? When you realized that your amazing novel idea required you to write far above your skill level and that your characters are too smart for you?.
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currently watching hilda furacão aka the brazilian show with the pathetic priest that’s been breaking a specific corner of twitter and i’m ecstatic to report that it’s rearranging my brain chemistry.
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have you ever wanted to read a retelling of wüthering heights but filipino where heathcliff is an unhinged biracial girl who m*rders her abusers? . now you do. (art by alamangoes)
I wish books about angry BIPOC girls got the same hype/love as books about angry white girls.
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I love sunshine/grumpy ships where l sunshine is a sweet pretty boy himbo and grumpy is a girl who can and will murder you.
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Currently reading 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸. I highly recommend the audiobook!
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weird (affectionate) books that have influenced me, you will always be loved
i love books that are so unhinged that they encourage me to color outside the lines so to speak in my own writing. weird books, you will always be so loved by me.
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all of these are 500+ pages!
so does anyone have good recommendations for LONG NOVELS.
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Edit: do NOT buy from Pickup Coffee as they have a history of workers’ rights violations. It’s the same reason I didn’t list Jollibee as a McDonald’s alternative. Also remember to #supportlocal and if you can, drop some local alternatives around your locations in the qrts/replies.
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What really sucks about publishing is they take one type of book from a POC author like, say, a magic school book, and then they tell subsequent POC authors that “sorry, that’s already been done, you can’t do that anymore” despite the amount of white authors doing the same thing.
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*violently taps the sign*
"toxic yuri!!!“ WE want nightmare-inducing yuri. where is the questionable mutual manipulation that drives them both completely mad? where's the obsessive fixation that consumes them? where is the cannibalism no longer a metaphor but is very raw and nasty between their teeth?.
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wow anyway if you guys like houses, you might like my paper on haunted houses and colonial trauma, coming ✨soon✨ *title not final
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aw i’m really glad this is blowing up in a good way because i’ve seen so many quote tweets about people learning to like their bodies a little more because of this 🥹.
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Why do dark academia novels always focus on murder when the viscerally terrifying feeling of watching your own slow spiral into insanity is right there.
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in honor of spooky season rapidly approaching, here are some horror books i really enjoyed! . i wanna add more to my tbr for october too so send some recommendations my way <3
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ALIX E. HARROW IS RELEASING A NOVEL-LENGTH VERSION OF SIX DEATHS OF THE SAINT??????????? SIGN ME UPPPPPPP
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i’m 6 books away from completing my goodreads challenge and this is my tbr 🥰
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as a fat person who has struggled with eating disorders, i think that accusing people with EDs of fatphobia based on the way *they see themselves* is beyond ridiculous. society collectively needs to unlearn fatphobia so blaming ppl with eating disorders is wild.
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I’m currently reading Yellowface by RF Kuang and it’s so funny if you’re chronically online
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✨READ AROUND THE WORLD✨ . A(n in progress) list of books from 194 countries and territories . 🇦🇫 Afghanistan - Earth and Ashes - Atiq Rahimi.🇦🇷 Argentina - Our Share of Night - Mariana Enriquez.🇦🇺 Australia - This Time it’s Real - Ann Liang
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