Welcome back!
This time around, we have a couple recommendations by the community, non-fiction, and a time travel romance.
Are there any recommendations you’d like to pass along? Leave them in the comments!
The Death of Expertise
This is now in its second edition and incorporates more recent events. Sarah and I often talk about the immediacy of social media and what that means (both pros and cons) for interaction.
Building on his enormously successful first edition, Tom Nichols confirms his thesis that events, such as the COVID pandemic, prove that the assault on expertise has only intensified.
Fully updated chapters continue to address how technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Over the past several years, the rise of populism and conspiracy theories have taken this to new levels. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.
Tom Nichols’ The Death of Expertise, Second Edition, follows up on how this rejection of experts has the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine, and importantly, the election of Donald Trump. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both.
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This was a recommendation from a community member. Meaghan-Ray reached out to let us know how much they’ve been enjoying this series.
Magic is a rare gift that only exists in the bloodlines of the rich, the royal, and the reputable. Dominai of Airedale, a poor hunter and forest guide, is barely one of those things. But after a moonlit encounter with the wizard Allisande, Dominai’s life is changed forever. She reveals that Dominai has magic in his lineage and provides him with a letter of introduction to the Crux, the center of magical study in the Kingdom of Straetham.
Magical study is a far cry from the dusty tomes and rituals Dom was expecting. Instead, it is sex and desire, submission and surrender, loyalty and love, and, above all, trust. But when the trust of the Crux is betrayed, Dom must face his own insecurities and the unknown to protect his new home and his fellow wizards.
Alethea Faust’s debut novel delivers risk-aware consensual kink, hard BDSM, budding relationships between kind, emotionally mature adults, and a lot of butt stuff.
Initiation is a full-length fantasy, the first in the epic Sex Wizards series set in a sex-positive, magical world. This novel has a kink-based magic system which crosses a wide range of play with varying degrees of intensity. The wizards of the Crux include pansexual, polyamorous, fantasy race, nonbinary, gender non-conforming and intersex characters. Please see book preview for full CW.
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As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!Murder on Sex Island
Another community recommendation! This one is from Lucy, who mentioned the audio of this is hilarious. I’m really taken with the series titles and may give this one a shot; I have some audible credits collecting dust.
A sexy reality show. A missing contestant. A one-of-a-kind detective.
“Bless Jo Firestone’s quiet, mad genius. . . . Hilarious and completely brilliant, [a] bloodstained love-letter to reality-dating television.”—Vulture
When a cast member goes missing from the hit reality show Sex Island, producers hire detective Luella van Horn to go undercover as a contestant and solve the case. What the producers don’t know is that the enigmatic Luella van Horn is actually a woman named Marie Jones, a divorced ex–social worker from Staten Island attempting to lead a double life as a private eye. The local press couldn’t get enough of Luella . . . until she horribly bungled her last case and a murderer went free.
Unable to resist the opportunity to be a part of her favorite trashy TV show, travel to a remote island, and embark on a journey for redemption, Marie-as-Luella takes the case. But the more she learns about Sex Island’s dark underbelly, the harder it gets to make it out alive. She encounters shady producers, sleazy directors, contestants willing to do whatever it takes to win the $100,000 grand prize—and the dead body of the show’s missing fan-favorite in her bathtub.
Will she find the killer? Will she find herself? Will she find . . . love?
Find out now, in Sex Island’s most dramatic season yet.
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This book is available from:
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!Shoestring Theory
I feel like the description doesn’t quite do this one justice, as the marketing copy is a little confusing. But this is a second chance, time travel romance. The main character is in their 50s and gets send back to their early 20s self.
A queer, madcap, friends-to-lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers time travel romance with the future of the world at stake, this charming fantasy tale is sure to satisfy fans of Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree.
Cyril Laverre, former Grand-Mage of the High Court of Farsala, has spent the last decade hiding himself away in a ramshackle hut by the sea. He spends his days catching fish for his cat familiar, Shoestring, and suppressing his guilt over the kingdom’s ruin.
After finding Shoestring dead one morning, a desperate Cyril casts a powerful spell that catapults him back in time to a happier period of Farsalan history – a time when Tigris Margrave was destined to ascend to the throne and Cyril’s tentative romance with Tigris’ brother, Eufrates, had not yet bloomed.
Armed with the knowledge of Tigris’ sudden and tragic death and Eufrates’ subsequent descent into madness, Cyril is adamant to keep Eufrates from ascending to the throne and setting in motion the kingdom’s downfall.
Featuring a formidable Great Aunt, a friends-to-lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers romance, an awkward love quadrangle and a crow familiar called Ganache, this charming story is imminently easy to read and sure to satisfy fans of fanfiction who like their fantasy lite.
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This book is available from:
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!
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English (US) · 