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Tell Me Something Tuesday is a meme-thingy where people answer a different question each Tuesday
- it's currently run/hosted by Roberta @ Offbeat YA, Berls at Because Reading Is Better Than Real Life, Jen at That's What I'm Talking About, Karen at For What It's Worth, and Linda at Book Girl of Mur-y-Castell.
NOTE: For some reason this post was hell to format - the Blogger coding gremlins were out in force - I think I've fixed all the issues, but apologies if the formatting is still a little off in places!!! 😅
I’ve read a weird combination of books so far this year (as per usual, lol,) some were re-reads, some were library finds, and some were from the epic collection that’s accumulated on my ereader over the years.
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I re-read a lot of The Umbrella Academy (TUA) at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, which is always awesome.
I adore the TUA comics, and in early 2026 I re-read The Umbrella Academy Vol. 3: Hotel Oblivion, as well as Tales From the Umbrella Academy Vol. 1: You Look Like Death.
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Certain Dark Things is a unique neon-noir vampire novel which I talked more about (and compared incessently to Romeo + Juliet,) in a Nerd Church post which you can see here.
I also read The Beautiful Ones, which was weird, but good weird. Think alternate-universe regency-style romance, and then add some telekinesis for the hell of it!
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Another library find was One Billion Years To The End of the World by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (translated by Antonina M Bouis) (also known as 'Definitely Maybe.')
— this is classic 1970s Soviet sci-fi/spec-fic about a scientist whose efforts to complete his work keep getting uprooted by the universe.
...I totally loved it. It's bizarre AF, and had a very modern vibe.
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Well… maybe not 'pleasant' as such, it’s a horror book after all, but a good surprise, regardless.
I didn’t really know what to expect going into it, but what I got was a Stephen King-esque tale that also kept entwining in my head with the movie Bad Times at the El Royale. I may or may not write a blogpost about that association — I haven’t decided yet.
Going even more obscure (because yes, I can do that,) I was super-impressed by an original work called The Scarlet Prince by Kaatyr that was posted on AO3 (yep, the fanfiction website; some people post non-fanfiction works there too,)
— this was an M/M Omegaverse romance that turned out to be less romance and more Queer Platonic Partnership (though it didn’t call it that specifically.)
It deals with a lot of heavy topics — recovering from a long-term and abusive kidnapping is central to the premise — so please heed the tags.
Omegaverse, for those unfamiliar, was born in the fandom space as a type of Queer werewolf erotica/romance where people typically have a ‘status’ or ‘secondary sex/gender’ as Alphas, Betas, or Omegas, with variations according to author’s choice.
(…Sometimes the author’s choice is to make me fear for humanity’s collective levels of emotional issues, but that’s a different problem.)
It has since broken it’s way out of fandom, and into mainstream romance, in a fairly substantial way.
I’ve been obssessed with it for a while, partly because it fascinates me how this extremely specific set of oddly flexible tropes and world-building rules has led to an entire sub-genre.
Omegaverse isn’t always Queer, there aren’t always werewolves (The Scarlet Prince has slightly-wolfy alien princes,) and it isn’t always either erotica or romance (though Omegaverse is inherently a specific paranormal/sci-fi sub-genre of romance, so romance is more likely to appear than not.)
I love that The Scarlet Prince was able to explore Queer Platonic Partnerships, and different types of intimacy, in an Omegaverse setting. It’s a testament to how the Omegaverse sub-genre itself provides a complex level of frameworked leeway that allows for this kind of exploration within it.
(Is she waxing lyrical about the philosophical and literary merits of something dismissed by many in the bookish world as pure trash? Yep. Of course she is! Bookish rebel for life, dearest nerdlets.)
On the webcomics platform Webtoon, I caught up on Nevermore
— an amazing series which I usually describe as ‘Pretty Little Liars meets Edgar Allan Poe with 19th Century Lesbians.’
And I’ve also been reading Nocturne
— an out-and-out horror comic which I almost gave up on more than once (body horror is not my favourite thing,) but somehow kept reading. It’s weirdly compelling.
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