maplemood | Entries tagged with reading

Roxane Weary's father, a cop and a hard-drinking piece of work, was killed on the job; Roxane, a PI and a hard-drinking piece of work herself, has mostly coped through sleeping with her dad's former partner. When her brother sends a new client her way--Danielle Stockton, whose brother, Bradford, is on death row for the murders of his high school girlfriend and her parents--Roxane uncovers links to an old missing persons case of her dad's, plus nasty undercurrents of police corruption in the quiet suburb of Belmont.

This is a well-plotted mystery--the murderer's true identity is foreshadowed subtly enough that I only realized it was foreshadowing in retrospect--with a snappy, charismatic first-person narrative voice. I mentioned yesterday that Roxane has a bit of Cass Neary/Jessica Jones flair to her; here's an example:

No one else recognized the sketch or did anything to encourage me except for the teenage punk girl who told me she liked my jacket. Then I got back into the car and squinted at the sketch. The more I stared at it the more it did look like Gwyneth Paltrow, if Gwyneth Paltrow lived in Ohio and had never been happy.

Bradford is black and his girlfriend and her family were white, and Belmont is exactly the kind of small, nosy suburb where prejudice and suspicion, especially against outsiders, get free rein.

Even shortly after ten in the morning, there were complaints about noise, about traffic jams at afternoon kindergarten drop-off at the Montessori school, about a suspicious individual entering a neighbor's house.

("I advised the caller that the individual was actually the neighbor, wearing a new coat.")

Roxane is bisexual; it's not a huge part of the plot, but it is part of her as a person, and it helps her strike up a connection with a teenage girl who becomes crucial to the case. She's self-destructive and self-aware about being self-destructive without tipping into self-pity, and by the end of the book she's taken steps towards cleaning up her act. Her character arc is less sprawling and messy than Cass Neary's, but again, there's a little bit of that shared-DNA sweet spot to it.

This book is also unusually balanced in its treatment of the police--there are multiple characters in law enforcement, and some are great and some are terrible and some are just trying to do their job in a system that's obviously rigged to favor insiders with wealth and connections.

I was lukewarm on this book when I first read it in high school and ended up loving it on reread, though it's still a headscratcher in certain ways. Everything else is going under a cut, thanks to a first-chapter spoiler that doesn't have much to do with the mystery itself but is still extremely spoiler-y for AMRoW's main relationship. If you know, you know.
( Read more... )

Another Random Old Children's Book picked up at a secondhand bookstore--I'd never finished anything by Vivien Alcock before but remembered coming across a couple of her books in the children's section of my old library back in the day. They all had interesting, weirdly haunting titles, like Singer to the Sea God.

The Stonewalkers is also interesting and weirdly haunting, and very, very creepy. The plot kicks off when Poppy, a girl with a difficult relationship with her mom and a habit of lying, witnesses the stone statue she's kinda-sorta befriended, Belladonna, get struck by lightening and then painfully come to life. At first, Poppy's excited that one of her unbelievable stories is actually true, but Belladonna is...off. Aside from obviously being a statue who shouldn't be traipsing around in the first place, she's both uncomfortable in Poppy's world and jealous of it, and before long she's making her own plans. Plans that don't bode well for Poppy.

Recently I've been stuck in a cycle of rewatching Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, a LONG documentary that's very expansive with its definition of folk horror (The Wicker Man? Obviously. Picnic at Hanging Rock? Why not? Candyman? Sure, you could make that argument!). The Stonewalkers slides right into that sure-why-not slot of folk horror with its rural setting (a moor somewhere in northern England, I think), outsider protagonist (Poppy's the new kid at school), and creepy statues reanimated by some form of ancient magic Poppy doesn't understand (she made Belladonna friendship bracelet out of some old chain she found in an ancient jar in her mom's employer's basement). It also has a great and believably tough mother-daughter relationship--Poppy and her mother aren't especially likable or easy to get along with, but the fact that they recognize that about themselves doesn't necessarily make them nicer to each other.

This was a good one--I'd love to read more Alcock in the future.

A historical murder mystery bringing together a serial killer, an amusement park, Chicago's silent film industry, a crossdressing teenage girl, and a fictionalized version of the outsider artist Henry Darger.

It's 1915; Pin's mother works as a fortune teller in the Riverview Amusement Park. Pin, who disguises herself as a boy for protection, earns spare change delivering drugs for Max, another sideshow performer. One hot summer day, she watches a man and a little girl with a yellow dress enter the Hell Gate ride. The man comes out, but the girl doesn't.

Curious Toys is gritty and disturbingly nasty in parts--it's told in multiple POVs, so in addition to Pin, Henry, an amusement park police officer, a screenwriter for Essanay Studios, and Charlie Chaplin (!), we get chapters from the murderer's perspective. Jury's out on whether the murderer or the Chaplin chapters were harder to read. Still, Pin is very much the main character, and her relationship with Henry becomes the emotional center of the book.

If you don't know anything about Henry Darger (before opening this book, I didn't), I do think Curious Toys is a good place to start, since Elizabeth Hand clearly loves to research and is very good about weaving that research in organically. Darger worked most of his life as a janitor in a Catholic hospital, writing a multipage fantasy epic and creating weirdly beautiful but often disturbing artwork featuring young girls. He was obsessed with helping abused children and had ideas about forming a "Child Protective Service," which is how he and Pin cross paths in the book.

Like the Cass Neary series, one of the things that makes Curious Toys so enjoyable is that it's all about art and the people who make art--Henry, the silent film actors, actresses, and screenwriters Pin comes across, the sideshow performers at the park, and eventually Pin herself. There's plenty about the dark corners of the industry, but Curious Toys is also about innovation and wonder. For one person, art might be an excuse to destroy people, but for another, it might be a way to save them.

Emily Canfield always got whatever she wanted. When she wanted the moon, her father bought her a reflecting globe and installed it in the family's garden. When she wanted her parents, her father insisted that he and his wife cut their trip to New York short and come home to be with Emily. When Emily wanted to marry her childhood best friend, she wrote up a contract and forced the poor kid to sign it in blood. And when that best friend had had enough of her, Emily drenched herself in water, opened up her bedroom window, and sat until the freezing water and winter weather gave her pneumonia, and she died.

Years later, Emily's orphaned niece, Jane, and Jane's aunt, Louisa, come to spend the summer at the Canfield's house. Emily's mother Lydia is the only original Canfield still alive; her husband died soon after Emily and her son, Jane's father, was killed in a freak buggy accident. But another presence in the house fixes on Jane, and on moonless nights the old globe in the garden starts to glow...

A short, fun Gothic that seems to have always been marketed for kids, which is interesting since the narrator (Louisa) is eighteen, the book's true main character (Lydia) is "elderly" and "awe-inspiring" (So...fifties? Sixties?), and if I had to sum Jane-Emily up in one sentence it would be "Some kids just suck."

To be fair, "Some kids just suck" is a common theme in children's literature, but I've racked my brain and I cannot remember a single kid character quite as poisonous as Emily. She never appears, either in the flesh or flashbacks; Louisa picks up her story in bits and pieces from Lydia and Emily's childhood friend, Adam Frost, and from Jane's increasingly creepy "Emily-incidents." But Emily's presence is all over the house, from the dark, stuffy attic where her dolls are packed away (including one whose wax face she melted off) to the garden, where her reflecting ball becomes a nexus of all the creepiness.

Emily also had an especially sinister relationship with her father, who "adored' her more than his own wife. Jane-Emily's final confrontation comes down to Lydia finally standing up to her daughter, something she was never able to do during Emily's life.

I remember dipping in and out of a couple other Patricia Clapp books as a kid, including Witch's Children, which is historical fiction but, if I'm remembering right, shares some of the same Gothic spookiness as Jane-Emily. Based on how much I enjoyed this one--it didn't scare me the way it probably would have if I'd read it back then, but I ate up the whole thing in just one day--maybe it's time for a reread.

Stella Wallace met her family's god when she was nine years old. Later, she couldn't figure out why she didn't run when she saw it. It wasn't fear that pinned her to the spot, staring up at it, or even shock. It was something else. Awe, maybe. Wonder so deep it was almost adoration.

Isn't that just a perfect beginning? I decided to try the sample for this one on Kindle and ended up reading the whole thing in about three days. The rest of the book is just as good--evocative and atmospheric without being overwritten, creepy and dark without being depressing. The story is character-driven but very well-plotted, and it's one of only a couple books with alternating "before" and "after" chapters where I'm interested in both the "before" and the "after."

In 1930s Tennessee, Stella is dropped off at her grandmother's mountain cabin and stays there for the next five years, communing with the family god, the Ghostdaddy, and getting more and more tangled in the family cult, led by her Uncle Hendrick. Like her grandmother and mother before her, she acts as the cult's revelator, and Uncle Hendrick records her revelations in The Book of Stella, which she isn't allowed to read. Finally, one particular revelation drives Stella to escape, but after ten years, she gets news of her grandmother's death and her cousin, Sunny, who's set to become the next revelator.

The way the cult's beliefs seem to have grown out of the family's original Primitive Baptist theology rang true for me. (I'm not Baptist, but I was raised Reformed Protestant, which is Primitive Baptist-adjacent, at least when it comes to Calvinism and predestination.) Uncle Hendrick has a quality of religious passion but absolute arrogance/cluelessness, bordering on cruelty, that's pitch-perfect to some of the men I remember from back then. It's not so much that they hate women, but that they believe it's their God-given right to rule over women. In some ways that's almost worse.

Stella is also a wonderful character--in the "after" chapters she's grown up to become a bootlegger!--and her relationship with the Ghostdaddy became an unexpected highlight of the book. For me, the best monsters are scary not because they're evil but because they're alien; they're on a mission of their own, and human rules and morals don't apply. Being loved by that kind of monster is a special class of scary, and Stella and the rest of the women in her family are loved. Even more, they're adored.

Also, this one might have the world's best cover.

A couple weeks ago my roommates got to make a trip to The Book Thing, a warehouse full of donated books in Baltimore where once a month you can come in and pick out as many books us you want for free. (Technically, there's a limit of 150,000 books per person per day, but GEEZ.) There's also a one-hour time limit; my roommates still managed to grab a whole bunch of books. Some of those were for me, including two in one of my favorite categories, Random Old Children's Books.

Here they are:

A Chill in the Lane by Mabel Esther Allan
An atmospheric, not especially spooky ghost story set in Cornwall. On vacation with her family, Lyd begins experiencing visions of a cottage in the woods that isn't actually there, and starts to suspect it might tie back to her Cornish heritage--Lyd is adopted, and her parents, especially her father, would rather not talk about her biological family. That huge red flag aside, Lyd's parents are actually much more supportive than secretive adoptive families in ghost stories usually are. It's sweet but doesn't make for tense reading. But this is more of a family story with some light Gothic/ghost story elements.

(This book also has a list of "Other Good Books for Girls" on the back. One of them, Tina and David, gets this kicker of a blurb: "[...] beautiful and exquisitely tasteful. Mrs. Tate has proved that a good book for the young can be written without sex, crime, or drugs.")

Nightbirds on Nantucket by Joan Aiken
A reread and an old favorite. This is the third book in Aiken's Wolves of Willoughby Chase series. The first book is a pretty standard pastiche of 19th century children's lit with a little bit of alternative history thrown in--at least that's how I remember it; it's also my least favorite book in the series--and every book after gets weirder and weirder.

Nightbirds isn't quite peak Aiken weirdness, but it's getting there. Dido Twite, the closest this series has to a central heroine, wakes up after a months-long coma on a whaling ship headed, eventually, for Nantucket. Captain Casket only cares about chasing an elusive pink whale, but he promises Dido passage home if she can keep his daughter, Dutiful Penitence, company. This apparently includes staying with Dutiful Penitence and the girl's aunt, Tribulation, on Nantucket for a couple of months.

Dutiful Penitence ("Pen"), doesn't have good memories of her aunt, and once the girls arrive in Nantucket they figure out that Tribulation is still a piece of work, staying in bed the whole day and running them ragged with chores. Dido also discovers a black dress and pair of bottle-green boots hidden in the attic, and begins to suspect that Aunt Tribulation isn't who she says she is.

Part of the fun of this book is that, even though she's stuck in an objectively terrifying situation--holed up on an isolated farm with an imposter--Dido refuses to let Aunt Tribulation scare her. Here's a typical interaction between them:

Aunt Tribulation, when she did come down, was very angry. "How dare you disobey me, insolent girl!" she thundered, looking about for her stick. But Dido, accustomed to self-preservation in the hubbub of the London alleys, had prudently removed the stick, chopped it up, and burned it in the stove. Aunt Tribulation boxed her ears instead, and told her to go and sit on the whale's jawbone for two hours, reciting, "I must not be a naught, insubordinate girl."

This Dido did not at all mind doing.

My reading tracker has a space for recording each book's genre. For this one I went with "Aiken."

This is the fourth Cass Neary book and (so far) the last in the series, which I binged over a month or so. Withdrawal pangs are coming on, so if anyone has recs for other character-driven mysteries with not-exactly-likable but compelling narrators, please feel free to send them my way! Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt series seems to give off that kind of vibe--maybe I'll go there next.

After the events of Hard Light, Cass is lying low in London with no plans beyond avoiding the police and tracking down Quinn, a convict and ex-boyfriend. She wanders into an occult bookshop and crosses paths with Gryffin Haselton, who first showed up in Generation Loss. Gryffin, a rare books dealer, is about to close the deal of a lifetime by selling a manuscript a friend of his--now dead--picked up in Baghdad.

This manuscript is the only existing copy of a legendary occult text, The Book of Lamps and Banners. Since Gryffin has bad judgement and a thing for Cass, he asks her to tag along, and the two end up having sex on the floor of another rare books dealer's pantry. When they remerge, the other dealer is shot through the eye, and the manuscript has disappeared.

Like all the other Cass books, this one is addictively readable and incredibly creepy in an understated, maybe it's cosmic horror, maybe it's paranoia and a whole bunch of drugs kind of way. In Hard Light, Cass encounters a movie that's possibly evil (it makes people sick, not with its imagery but with some kind of wrongness seeping out of it). The Book of Lamps and Banners has a possibly evil manuscript and a definitely evil app/code inspired by that manuscript.

The app can unlock people's worst memories and also drive them into a Viking-berserker-type frenzy; Cass is "lucky" enough to only get the unlocking your worst memory treatment. By the end of the book, she is finally ready to at least try to move past her trauma, but even if the app helped her decision along it's still dangerous at best and malevolent at worst.

The series is really good about taking mundane horrors (like apps knowing more than they should) and pushing them that one step further. I'm on the yes cosmic horror bandwagon for most of the creepy stuff Cass runs into (and most of the creepy stuff she believes about herself), but either way you go, she's not an especially reliable or sympathetic narrator. As in the other books, she makes a bunch of illegal and/or immoral choices that pull her even deeper into the mystery, but as always she's clear-eyed and very passionate about a very select number of things. I love being in her head--I just wouldn't love being with her.

As a bonus, this book is also set partly on the Finnish island of Kälkö, which, per all the settings in the Cass Neary books, is a touristy area rendered eerie and dreary--maybe because it actually is, maybe because we're seeing it through Cass's eyes. There are a couple neat callbacks to the Norse mythology elements in Available Dark: Cass as a Valkyrie, carrying the dead with her, Cass as Odin (there's a bunch of increasingly eerie eye imagery woven through the whole series).

Oh, and there's also a grossout that grossed me out like no grossout has ever before. Predictably, it barely slows Cass down at all.

I haven't been reading as much or finishing books as quickly for a couple different reasons (schoolwork, quarantine, working my way through Anna Karenina), and I'm trying not to let that be just another thing to stress about. On the bright side, I'm making good progress on Anna Karenina! Still nowhere near done, but I'm up to Part IV now. For the past week or so I've only had the energy to read the bare minimum I set for myself--one chapter a day--but I'm expecting that to change once the semester finishes.

Today I finished Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist; I feel like I read this one in a couple big chunks spaced out over my more high-energy days. Which could or could not actually be true, since I'm hardly keeping track of the days anymore except for assignment deadlines, BUT I went from liking this book to loving it in its last quarter or so, where (for me, anyway) the plot finally picked up in a major way. The story and writing style both feel very Stephen-King-inspired: you've got your lonely kid from a broken home, your psychopathic bullies, your scattered side characters whose separate plot threads all eventually intersect, your gross-out gore, and your focus on intimate, gross and/or humiliating physical details. More than one characters gets so scared that they wet their pants; another character can't stop cutting into her veins and drinking her own blood after she's transformed into a vampire. There's also a weirdly heartwarming ending, which I always love capping off a Stephen King book and loved here, too.

I reread two of my old-favorite, middle-grade/young adult historical fiction novels, The Beaded Moccasins: The Story of Mary Campbell and The Ransom of Mercy Carter. Both are about real-life colonial girls who were kidnapped and eventually assimilated into Native American tribes in the 1700s, and I was both glad and, to be honest, a little relieved that they both held up. The Ransom of Mercy Carter especially is just as good as I remembered.

I also read two other middle-grade historical fiction books that are slightly in the same vein. Blue Birds is about Roanoke Colony and split between the POVs of a colonist, Alis, and a Native American girl, Kimi. I picked up When Daylight Comes on a whim; it's set during the 1773 slave insurrection on St. John Island in the Danish West Indies. The book itself was written in 1985. Given that, it's definitely not perfect--the main character, Helena, is white and a magistrate's daughter captured by the rebels, so there's plenty that's intentionally problematic and then a couple of elements that are most likely unintentionally problematic, but its good points outweighed its flaws, at least for me.

Rapture of the Deep took me a good couple months to finish, just because I got sidetracked in the middle. It's Book 7, which puts me a little more than halfway through the Bloody Jack series. I sped through My Bonny Light Horseman, Book 6, which was surprisingly short--Rapture of the Deep is much longer, but it's also full of pirates and undersea deep diving and sunken Spanish wrecks, so I couldn't help but love it.

My biggest in-progress read is still Anna Karenina. I'm about 300 pages into my copy--up to Book III--and trying to read at least a chapter a day, usually in the mornings before I start on schoolwork. Making the reading a part of my morning routine has really helped me get back into the flow of it, which is great because I really do love this book. On the other hand, it leaves me craving shorter, snappier books because it...is very much neither of those things. But I've been enjoying leaving myself a pocket of time every day to sink into it for a bit.

Reading

I'm juggling a couple different books right now and not feeling especially motivated to finish any of them, probably because I have one last (quick and easy, but still) assignment dangling over my head. That'll be finished and submitted tomorrow, though, and as far as my plans for Christmas break go, I'd just like to catch up on reading.

Read

I had more thoughts on both The Turn of the Screw and The Girls at the Kingfisher Club after I finished them, but it's been a while and those thoughts are gone.

Mississippi Jack by L.A. Meyer--In my personal ranking of the Bloody Jack books this one goes below Bloody Jack, The Curse of the Blue Tattoo, and In the Belly of the Bloodhound but above Under the Jolly Roger (which in theory should have been my favorite, since it's all about privateers and not-so-accidental piracy, but man, did the middle drag for me). It's a lot of fun, and often very funny, and Jacky is--as always--an absolute delight; I also loved that Katy Deere, one of my favorite girls from the Bloodhound, gets to join in for another adventure and gets her own ride-off-into-the-sunset happy ending. There were a couple slow points towards the middle (again), but (again) things picked back up just in time for the ending.

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman--The worldbuilding of these books has always been one of their biggest draws for me, which is funny because aside from the witches (Serafina Pekkala was and still is one of my absolute favorite characters in any book, ever) and the daemons I'd forgotten some of the coolest bits, like the gyptians and all the politics going on...everywhere, but especially with the armored bears. I actually don't have plans to watch the new show, at least not until I've reread the main series, but it's been wonderful to drop back into this world.

Reading

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, a reread I meant to do over the Halloween season and never got around to. The first time I read this I was in high school, maybe even middle school, so even though before diving back in I remembered the basic plot and the creepiness, I didn't remember most of the actual encounters with the ghosts--which are eclipsed in creepiness only by some of the conversations the narrator, a governess, has with the two kids in her charge, Miles and Flora. There's such a shivery, I-know-you-know-I-know vein of horror running under most of their interactions, especially her conversations with Miles. It's fantastic.

The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine--another reread! This doesn't quite nab the #1 spot as my favorite 12 Dancing Princesses retelling of all time (that would be Entwined by Heather Dixon: it has a lot less bite than Kingfisher Club, but it's sweeter, with a big ol' dash of Gothic horror). It comes in a very close second, though. I love the setting (1920s New York! Flapper princesses! Dance halls and speakeasies!), the prickliness of all the sisters, and the fact that it's ultimately much more their story than the story of their romances--though there are romances, and those romances are handled in some unusual, interesting ways.

Read

I finished Trick Mirror.

The Mark of Cain by Lindsey Barraclough, the sequel to Long Lankin. It suffers a bit from not having the same sense of mystery, but it does have the same sense of oppressive atmosphere, and the ending wraps things up with a little more resolution for the characters, which is nice.

Watched

Он – дракон | I Am Dragon, aka the big dumb Russian dragon movie I loved with all my heart. The story--a princess is kidnapped on her wedding day by a dragon who oh-so-conveniently can transform into a hot and sweet, if angsty dude; at first she's solely focused on getting back to her equally hot but much less sweet fiance, until of course dragon dude wins her over with his angst and sweetness--is more or less Beauty and the Beast, but with dragons, so there's never any doubt that Miroslava (the princess) will end up with Arman (the hot dragon dude). Instead, you can sit back and enjoy scenes like Princess Teaches Hot Dragon Dude How to Spruce up His Man Cave (I love that most of Miroslava's advice for living as a human boils down to "Get better at interior decorating; also wipe your feet,") and Hot Dragon Dude Teaches Princess How to Fly a Kite.

The scenery and costumes are both gorgeous, and the worldbuilding is a little thin, but satisfying; there are lots of cool details like a wedding ritual where the bride gets decked out in a gorgeous costume, lies down in a little gondola, and floats across the water to her groom. The whole thing reminds me of some of the Russian movies and soap operas I used to watch with my sisters and my mom, in that even when things get cheesy there's this genuine feeling and sweetness to them, which makes the cheesiness not just bearable but enjoyable.

September so far has been jam-packed (by my standards, anyway) and stressful; things should calm down by the end of the month but probably not before then, so in the meantime here are some nice things that happened in between stressing about travel and stressing about classes:

1.) I finished Under the Jolly Roger...which probably isn't quite my favorite Bloody Jack book, but still most definitely worth reading and a ton of fun. Almost too much fun, considering this is the book where Jacky gets press-ganged into the Navy and nearly raped by a sadistic captain, only to be saved at the very last second when the captain's heart fails and he literally dies on top of her. And okay, there's usually at least one rape threat per book (Do I love this series to pieces? Yes. Does it have its issues? Also, yes.), so I came to this one prepared, but...yeesh. Of course Jacky manages to turn the situation to her advantage and bounce back in record time; there's much more focus on the trauma of her battle experiences than, y'know, the trauma of being under constant threat of sexual assault.

2.) I started In the Belly of the Bloodhound, which I had to buy since it's one of the books in the series that none of the libraries in my area (NONE) have for some reason, and so far it's been seven bucks well spent; this just might end up being my favorite (next to the original Bloody Jack, obviously). This time around in breezily traumatizing plot points, Jacky and a bunch of other students from the Lawson Peabody School for Young Girls in Boston are kidnapped by slavers to be sold to harems on the Barbary Coast. I have a huge weakness for we-all-need-to-band-together-in-order-to-get-through-this storylines, and this one is shaping up to be a good one.

3.) I've been tossing around the idea of writing about War and Peace for my senior capstone--aka the final huge paper you have to write as an English major--so I checked out a book called Slavic Sins of the Flesh: Food, Sex, and Carnal Appetite in Nineteenth Century Russian Fiction from my college library. Sadly, I haven't got a chance to read the Leo Tolstoy section yet, but with a title like that it's got to be at least interesting, and hopefully helpful.

4.) I wrote a fic for

jump_scare_exchange ! And received an awesome fic in return! Both my fic and my gift are for Black Sails--I requested a couple different characters and pairings and got my favorite tiny rarepair plus ghosts. (And totally in-character dialogue! Seriously, what more could a girl ask for?)

My gift:

hope your road is a long one by

thedevilchicken : Abigail has had a good life. Charles Vane might be dead, but he's been there for most of it.

My fic:

A Kingdom of Sand: “This place ain’t right. Never has been.”

Among other great prompts, I got Anne/Jack and haunted/eldritch places, which I tried to do my best by. I did tinker with this fic quite a bit before it gelled in a way that I was even halfway happy with, and I'm still not sure I really nailed what I was going for, but then again I never am. (And while I was grabbing the link for this post I realized I'd completely overlooked a typo in the first few sentences...oops.) Anne was ridiculously fun to write, though, and I'd love to write more of her some day.

Did I love this book as a whole? Absolutely. Did I love the (first, plot-relevant) epilogue? ...Not so much.
( Longish, probably incoherent rant, plus 151-year-old spoilers )

Wi-fi was out through most of last week, so I got a lot of reading done, if not much else:

Read

Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat: A novel that reads more like interlocked novellas and covers the protagonist's life from when she's about twelve until up into her early twenties. When she's twelve, Sophie Caco leaves Haiti--very much against her will--to join her mother in New York City. By the point she eventually settles in and starts to become more "Americanized," secretly dating a non-Haitian (and much older) man and longing for some independence, her mother's own neuroses, which stem from an incredibly traumatic event in her past, are driving them apart. The mother-daughter relationship is the highlight of this book, and it's incredibly well-done; there's a lot of ugliness in her mother's past, and even though Sophie understands that the things she does( spoiler ) are motivated by a mix of tradition and trauma and genuine love, it doesn't make their reconciliation any easier. This book is hard-going, especially towards the end, but I enjoyed it quite a bit.

The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat: "Dew breaker" was a synonym for "torturer" during the Duvalier regimes in Haiti; this novel/short story collection focuses on one who put that past behind him and fled to New York City. The short stories that make up the book are all for the most part interconnected--some of them focus on the dew breaker and his family, others on his tenants, and others on his victims or possible victims. Though in his past the dew breaker was by far and away a worse person than Sophie's mother in Breath, Eyes, Memory, both books are kind of similar in that they deal with the forgiveness of seemingly unforgivable things and how complicated that forgiveness is. Sure, the dew breaker is a different man now--but he's still in hiding. His wife constantly worries that one day they'll be found out and he'll be returned to Haiti to answer for his crimes (the story of how they met and she more or less redeemed him is my favorite in the whole book) and as a reader you aren't given much guidance on how to feel about that. Should he go back? Is living with all the memories of his past, plus the constant fear of being found out, punishment enough? For all the questions it raises the book doesn't give any straight answers, and I loved that. YMMV, though, considering what the guy's done.

AND

War and Peace: I'm officially (...minus the second epilogue, okay, but we don't need to talk about that) finished! It really deserves a post of its own, which I'll try to write up soon, but the Cliff's Notes version is I still love it very, very, much. The first epilogue did throw me for a bit of a loop--Tolstoy was by no means a feminist and had some...let's call them interesting views on women and marriage which come through pretty strongly in the last few chapters--but it's still a gorgeous book, large-scale and small-scale all at once, sweeping and romantic and philosophical and just...gah. A real joy to read.

Currently Reading

Tolstoy: A Russian Life by Rosamund Bartlett: Started this on my mom's recommendation. So far it's been great, easy to read and (from what I can tell) pretty thorough.

Circe by Madeline Miller: Well-researched and well-written--aside from a couple deviations it follows the myths pretty closely, so the plot isn't all too unexpected and the middle chapters dragged a bit for me. I'm also not a huge fan of the way Miller chose to explain Circe's decision to turn the sailors who arrive on Aeaea into pigs( spoiler and a bit of a tw ) But the last few chapters, and especially the ending, made up for everything else. There's a bit of an unexpected twist that I really dug, and the very last scene is lovely.

Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat: A memoir focused on the author's relationship with her father, who immigrated to the US when she was a toddler, and her uncle, whom she lived with in Haiti until she was twelve years old. I don't have much else to say about this one except that I really, really enjoyed it. It's very honest and some parts are brutal (in a nutshell: immigration policy in the US is massively screwed up and always has been; the same goes for US foreign policy), but overall the writing is matter-of-fact and warm. Love and deep family connections really shine through.

My Heart is Laughing by Rose Lagercrantz: A really cute chapter book translated from Swedish. It's also the second in a series, so now I want to read the rest.

On to Book Fourteen of War and Peace. If I'm being honest with myself I'll probably skim (or outright skip) the last here's-my-master's-thesis-on-history epilogue...or maybe not. We'll see. Either way, the end is in sight and I'm still not ready (though very much ready for Natasha and Pierre to admit their feelings to each other--again--and get together already).

Squeaking this post in just under the line--I want to start being more systematic about recording/reviewing the books I've read, which may or may not actually happen but hey, you have to start somewhere. War and Peace is still taking up the bulk of my reading time (which absolutely isn't a complaint, I'm up to Book Twelve so, barring any huge distractions, on track to finish it this summer, and that was my main reading goal anyway), but I've had the time to sneak in a few other things now that my summer class is over.
( Read more... )
On the TV front, I just finished the first season of Black Sails and started the second. Hardcore obsession hasn't kicked in yet but I've got a pretty good feeling that it might--of the characters so far Flint, Eleanor, Anne, and Max are my favorites, and aside from being chock full of all the brutal, backstabbing, wooden-ships-and-iron-men, Golden Age of Piracy tropes you could ask for so much of it is just gorgeous to look at. Since I've got a soft spot for anything Treasure Island-inspired I've been wanting to watch this show for a couple of years, and so far it's been worth the wait.

Every time I fall out of journaling and then try to write a catch-up post I remember that my life is pretty boring for the most part...which I don't mind except for when I'm trying to write catch-up posts. But anyway. I've been pretty busy. Some things have happened. More things have not happened.

1.) My summer class is officially over with! It ended up being a lot more relaxed and less stressful (though not stress-free) than I was worried it would be. It still did obviously take up most of my time, and I haven't wanted to read or write much of anything for the past three weeks or so. I don't want to not want to read or write anything, so hopefully I can get back into the groove of that soon. Hopefully.

2.) I'm about three episodes into season 3/the last season of Jessica Jones and realizing more and more that the show peaked for me in the first season. It's not that I hated season 2 and I don't hate what I've seen so far of season 3 either but...I'm just not grabbed by it? Either emotionally or plot-wise; I keep switching it off mid-episode and going to do something else because it's...not all that interesting. At least not to me and at least not right now. I wonder if some of that has to do with pacing; NONE of the Marvel Netflix shows had this as a strong point but back in season 1 of JJ Kilgrave was a presence right from the beginning. Season 2 took its sweet time setting up the villain, and season 3 seems like it's going down the same route, and for some reason they way they went/go about that sucks so much urgency out of the plot for me. Not having a good sense of who the villain is for the first couple episodes doesn't leave me all that interested in finding out. Also--I really, really didn't want to be this person but GOOD LORD is Trish getting on my nerves. I love her. I really do love her, and boy do I get the obsession with wanting to be someone special and heroic and to do something that matters (who doesn't?), but her desire to be someone is really starting to overtake her desire to, y'know, actually help people. Which I'm pretty sure is what this season is going for, and I'm pretty sure they'll resolve it in an interesting way (if I can make it that far), but. TRISH.

3.) On the bright side I got a new phone and have been catching up on My Favorite Murder and also getting into The Teacher's Pet; I need to finish The Long Dance, too.

4.) War and Peace keeps chugging on. I'm up to Volume Three, Andrei is very obviously Not Long for This World and I'm much, much sadder about that than I expected I would be based on my reaction to him when I first started. Pierre continues to be adorable and awkward and ineffectual in the most relatable way, Natasha and Princess Mary and Sonya are all lovely and wonderful, Hélène is awful and wonderful, Anatole is pitiful, Dolokhov is...Dolokhov. I know I'm missing more than half the characters, but I really do love every single one and I'm both excited to say that I finished War and Peace and not ready at all to finish War and Peace.

Things have been busy and I'm coming home most days feeling like all the energy to read/write/comment/do anything but sleep or mess around on my phone has been sucked right out of me, but Monday I went swimming for the first time this summer and that honestly made up for a lot. I don't remember swimming AT ALL last summer, when I was pretty much just as busy, which is insane and awful because if there's one thing all this heat is good for, it's swimming.

Otherwise, I've been trying to get writing and reading done in random spurts; I did just finish one non-War and Peace book (Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) and started on another (An Untamed State by Roxane Gay). I can usually read during the breaks we get in my summer class and while I'm waiting in the hall for the class to start, but once I get home I've either got something else to do or I'm down for the count. I haven't been watching anything lately--I still need to finish Westworld.

Anyway! Reveals happened for

hurtcomfortex and I got the most amazing fic ever, written by one of the most amazing friends ever:

A Road that Bends by

acequeenking (Hadestown): This fic was, essentially, me and my id getting repeatedly gut-punched and enjoying every minute of it. There's Hades and Persephone falling in love and out of love and back in love again, there's references to Greek mythology and Americana, there's angry sex and bittersweet-but-mostly-sweet reconciliation sex, there's Hermes being awesome and Demeter being wry and equally awesome, there's bitter old marrieds who do love each other but also deeply dislike each other and know exactly where to twist the knife, there's a genuine effort to make their relationship work, there's hope and an absolutely perfect ending...and there's over 20k words of it all. 20k. I feel ridiculously happy and blessed to have gotten this; it really is the gift fic of my dreams.

Unfortunately, I ended up having to default on my assignments, because business and poor planning and...okay, actually, business and poor planning were pretty much the extent of it. No more exchanges for me, at least for a while--for whatever reason I haven't been able to hack them lately, and if I can't I'd rather not sign up and maybe treat if I'm feeling up to it than leave someone hanging so close to the deadline.

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.

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Alex

June 2022

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forever we try

Entries tagged with reading

Roxane Weary #1 - The Last Place You Look (Kristen Lepionka)

Mary Russel #2 - A Monstrous Regiment of Women (Laurie R. King)

The Stonewalkers (Vivien Alcock)

Curious Toys (Elizabeth Hand)

Jane-Emily (Patricia Clapp)

Revelator (Daryl Gregory)

Two Free Books

Cass Neary #4 - The Book of Lamps and Banners (Elizabeth Hand)

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Weekly-ish Reading: Last Couple Bits of War and Peace

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June 2022

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