Playing Catch-up

[maplemood]

Stuff Read:

Still chugging along with War and Peace; I'm up to Book Seven now and not only is Andrei/Andrew much more tolerable, but his romance with Natasha is sweet and convincing in a way that--I won't say I didn't expect it, but I definitely was not expecting to fall for them as much as I did. Their first real meeting at the ball (where Natasha's given up hope of getting a partner until Andrei asks her to dance) has such a wonderful fairy-tale quality to it, and their year-long secret engagement reminds me a bit of a fairy-tale test; even knowing that it doesn't end well I can't help rooting for them.

For a while I tried switching off War and Peace with In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. It's another one of those books that I've been meaning to read for ages and have tried reading a couple of times before. This time around I got about a quarter of the way through before giving up, and I'm still not quite sure why I did give up: it's well-written and interesting and moves along pretty quickly. My best guess is that (and troisoiseaux  already mentioned this in her review) there's such a sad hopelessness to the whole story, even accounting for the fact that it's true crime. At the end of the day, the book's more about the murderers than the murder itself (at least according to my just-read-the-first-couple-chapters impression, so you can absolutely take that with a grain of salt) and reading about these two guys on the run, ahead of the cops for now, was demoralizing in a way I can't exactly pin down. I'll probably come back to the book at some point, but my state of mind has been so iffy lately anyway that I decided for now it wasn't worth it. 

Stuff Watched:

Not much! I am starting to gear up for season 3 of Stranger Things, though--July suddenly isn't so far away anymore. 

Stuff Listened To:

Since I loved Great Comet so much I've been listening to Ghost Quartet, which Dave Malloy also composed. It's deeply, deeply weird, with a much more obvious fairy-tale quality and (despite all the murder, baby-kidnapping, and Edgar Allan Poe shout-outs) a twisted sense of hope at the end. Also, the last song is called "The Wind & Rain," and there's almost nothing I like better than a good Twelfth Night shout-out. 

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

Yeah, In Cold Blood is...... suuuuper depressing. It does go into more detail about the murder itself later in the book, but it's awful and horrifying and just, yeah, the whole book is really sad.

Hah, I never thought about "The Wind & Rain" as a Twelfth Night shout-out! It's based off a traditional English folk song (The Two Sisters/The Cruel Sister/The Wind & Rain).

[skye_writer]

I'm glad you're enjoying War and Peace still! Best of luck with In Cold Blood, too; I totally understand needing to take a break from it for your mental health. (That's why I never managed to finish watching Hannibal; it's a great show, but when it was airing my mental health was in the toilet and watching something that bleak wouldn't have helped.)

[sholio]

New Stranger Things! It's so close! I'm pretty confident in these writers to pull off something fun, and also worried about what fresh hell is going to befall my poor babies.