forever we try

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. 

First off, I read Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix, which is an absolutely hilarious/delightful, and very pretty (for a definition of "pretty" that includes all the bizarre 80s pulp horror covers you could ever ask for) overview of the insanity that was 80s horror paperbacks. Just thanks to my own interests, I was especially into the "Creepy Kids," "Real Estate Nightmares," and "Gothic and Romantic" chapters, but the entire book was a treat. Being an overview, it's more interested in getting you interested in the genre (which, mission accomplished) than going super in-depth, though it also paints a great broad-strokes picture of both the publishing history of horror paperbacks and the cultural context that would make writing a book about Nazi leprechauns seem like a good idea. Oh, and there are also lots of great one-liners, though my favorite has to be this one describing Robert Marasco, who wrote the incredibly creepy-sounding haunted house novel, Burnt Offerings: "Marasco was a high school English teacher, which meant any illusions he’d ever had about human nature had long since been stomped to death." 

I also decided to reread Long Lankin, which scared the crap out of me in high school: it's a YA ghost story based on the Child ballad (which is scary enough on its own) and set in 1950s England. For some reason, YA horror is pretty hit-or-miss for me--either I really click with it or I absolutely don't. Long Lankin was one of the ones I remember really clicking with; I loved it to pieces even though I literally had trouble sleeping after I first read it, and rereading it I wasn't quite as scared (either because I already knew what was coming or because I've read and watched a lot more horror since high school), but I still loved it to pieces. The atmosphere is so creepingly oppressive, even from the get-go, and as things unspool it only gets worse and worse, until by the end you're praying that the characters will all make it out okay while being so, so scared that they won't. It's also got an unsentimental but very sweet depiction of a big family, three fantastic narrators, and creepy ballads being sung by an invisible someone just behind you. 

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.