Some northeastern US accents do something similar. Not sure the exact term for it but it is a linguistic thing. Words that end in A get turned into an R sound, like Emma sounding like Emmer.

I don't have one particular favorite, but up there is Akwaeke Emezi, who wrote Freshwater and The Death of Vivek Oji (among many, many others). Something about their writing style just sings to my soul.

I loved I'm Glad My Mom Died! It was my favorite memoir of 2022 for sure.

Yeah of course the comment on who likes/dislikes it isn't universal, it's just something I heard mentioned at some point.

I'm someone who can struggle with minutae like what I mentioned in the spoiler section, so that's probably a big part of why I disliked it. Like I said, I do understand why so many people like it - Gabrielle Zevin has great prose and the overall character development is interesting and compelling. I just struggled with some parts.

I'm glad you liked it!

I recently finished Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, and while I can see why other people enjoyed it, it was not for me.

I'll list two, nonfiction and fiction.

For nonfiction, I'd have to say How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair. It's a memoir of a woman who grew up in a strict Rastafari household in Jamaica. Safiya is a poet and she has a beautiful command of language that makes her descriptions lyrical, haunting, or painful as needs be. However, if you generally need content warnings I would highly recommend looking them up for this book because she does not pull any punches.

For fiction, my favorite would probably be Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett (Storygraph went down in the middle of me writing this lol, will edit the link in later). It's a lovely fantasy novel set in an alternate Earth where fae are real. You follow a Dryadologist as she works on documenting a rare type of fae while she works on her encyclopaedia of faeries (hence the title lol). I enjoyed being in Emily's head as she worked through the problems presented to her, and as she interacted with her colleague.

Just finished Aurora, gonna work on Vision and then Conflux. After that I will have all legendary runes, sigils, armor, and trinkets for my main. Still deciding if I'll do legendary weapons for my main after that or if I'll do other legendary armor weights.

That portion is anecdotal. These stories come from either before there were ethics guidelines in psychology so people were studying their own children, or reviews of child abuse cases where the parent was forcing a different identity on their children. This is not something that is possible to (ethically) run an empirical study on, unfortunately.

I was actually repeating what was said in a video I watched yesterday so I went to look at their sources - here is a relevant study that supports this conclusion - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1743609515339060

However while looking it up in google scholar I did find another study that concluded the opposite, that there's no significant difference between identical and fraternal twins. That study is here. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-17749-0

So it's possible that I was misinformed.

As a bonus, here's an interesting analysis about what even is gender and gender identity in an academic setting. https://academic.oup.com/analysis/advance-article/doi/10.1093/analys/anad027/7204699

Gender expression and gender stereotypes are societal constructs. A person's sense of their own gender is (probably) not. There have been many times where people have tried to raise their child as a different gender than the child was assigned at birth, and the child 99% of the time identifies with the gender assigned at birth, at the same rate as the general cisgender population. There have also been studies of identical twins where if one twin is trans, the other twin often is as well, at a much higher rate than fraternal twins.

There is a genetic component and a constructed component to gender.

Edit: wording.

Edit 2: See my comment below with sources on the twins study - it's possible I was misinformed on this. The results of studies are mixed.

I have been reading the Wheel of Time series for the first time (by Robert Jordan). Currently starting Crown of Swords, book 7.

Recently placed a request in my library for the following, hopefully they'll be coming in within the next week:

• How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler

• Yellowface by R.F. Kuang