![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Wednesday Reading Meme - May 10th 2023
May. 10th, 2023 03:06 pmI missed posting last week due to some Real Life stuff (see the end for more) so this covers April 26th to May 10th 2023
What I’ve Read
I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jenette McCurdy (Audiobook, narrated by author) –
McCurdy was a child actor with an abusive mother who gave her an eating disorder and other issues. Her mother had cancer early in McCurdy’s childhood and leaned into that as a component of her identity for the rest of her life in a way that is, in the telling, rather pathetic. McCurdy was on a Disney show called iCarly that was slightly too young for me, but I have heard of it. I listened to the audiobook, it was compellingly written, and at the end, I, too, was glad her mom was dead.
Game of Thrones: Alderaan by B_Radley, shadowmaat, SLWalker - https://archiveofourown.org/series/798396 –
A series of stories that posit that Maul was adopted into the Alderaanian royal family from an early age after being imprisoned at age 12, never became a Sith, and embarked on a romance with Bail and Breha Organa. Very much a story focused on an abused child recovering and finding a new home, with minimal smut. It’s adorable and plays a bit look with canon. Palpatine dies off screen sometime before Maul gets adopted – the story is blissfully unconcerned with Sidious as a character.
Montress Vol 1. Awakening by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda –
A graphic novel that I had dipped into last year when a later volume was nominated for a Hugo. I think it’s got some nice things going for it – vastly female cast, decent art, the worldbuilding is robust enough for the later stories to have some interesting scaffolding. I mostly found the main characters to be a less charismatic version of Venom, and I’m not super intrigued by the family history of the main character. I might read some of the others. It was a very pleasant discovery to find that my tablet is quite good for comic books.
Stalking Killing by Koogi – A Korean webcomic,
I read the first printed volume from the library and enjoyed it enough that I went out and found the rest of the comic online. It’s complete! The story is incredibly dark and riddled with gore, torture, sexual violence, obsession and suffering – it was very much published Dead Dove, Do Not Eat. The main plot is a rather pathetic young gay man with a pattern of stalking has found a way to break into the house of old classmate that he’s fixated on – he discovers that the object of his affections is a serial killer just in time to get a baseball bat to the back of the head. That’s the first 20 pages of 400+. The rest is like if Misery by Stephen King had romantic interludes. Definitely not for everyone, but I very much enjoyed it. I ended up logging each of the published volumes of the manwha on Storygraph rather than sorting out how to log it. I might be on a kick for m/m dark romance manga – found some recommendations thru Tumblr I can try.
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal – Xing Book Club - Part 1 of the Lady Astronaut series –
Ok, first of all, I had not heard this was a series and found that this book ended in a place that is uh, emotionally satisfying for some of the main arcs but did not leave me particularly happy. That said, I will confess that I found this book utterly deligthtful. I had heard about it too often and in not enough detail, so I decided I didn’t want to read it – I had some vague sense of it being a story about girlbossing your way out of 1950s sexism into space. It’s very much NOT that book. It’s both less trite and more interesting – the first third of the book is about the shock and grief of surviving a natural disaster that kills thousands of people, and how you take up the pragmatic tasks of figuring out how to the rest of your people survive. I found that the element of sexism in this book is not about how sexism impedes the main character’s personal fulfillment, but how sexism presents a very real risk to effectively addressing a global crisis. I also just really liked Elma, the main character, as a Jewish scientist with a crippling anxiety related to specific kind of systemic past abuse at the hands of people in authority over her. Honestly, a great read.
Read a bunch of other fanfic
What I’m Reading:
Babel – Xing Book Club – this is dark and bleak and dealing with racism in the 1830s and feels so much like it has something to do with A Memory Called Empire that it literally uses the same quote to describe the work of an empire “ to make a wasteland and call it peace”
Started to re-listen to Beauty by Robin McKinley, which is the best 39%
Dracula Daily is back! I’m enjoying my emails from Mina and Jonathan.
The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction - Nick Groom – 44% Got a little bit back on my bullshit today for this – finally got to the literature portion, tho the bit on architecture was indeed fabulous.
What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Monroe (of XKCD fame) – 8% - Static
Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn (1991) – 39% - Static
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection - Julia Kristeva - static
What I’ll Read Next
(edited to add: Dowry of Blood for the Necromancer's book club, Watchmaker's Daughter for the Discord Book club)
Owned and need to read: California Bones, Raven Song by IA Ashcroft, Kraken's Sacrifice by Katee Robert, Even Though I Know the End by CL Polk, At The Feet of the Sun by Victoria Goddard, Tamryn Eradani's Enchanting Encounters Books 2 and 3, Like Real People Do by EL Massey, Tom Stoppard, Invention of love, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty, "You Just Need to Lose Weight" and Other Myths about Fatness by Aubrey Gordon, Alisha Rai Partners in Crime, the Right Swipe
Real Life: I skipped last week because my spouse had appendicitis! Which appears to be related to the covid, tho the literature is not conclusive on causation here, and appendicitis is one of those things that you tend to focus on treatment rather than cause. But there’s some recent papers from doctors who saw a pattern of treating a patient for severe covid and then seeing the same patient back within a month for an appendectomy.
The Spouse is up and much better and puttering around the garden today, but they have some restrictions on lifting things and are, generally, acting like a person who has recently had abdominal surgery – pain management and some dietary restrictions for a while, and lifting restrictions for a bit longer.
I mostly powered thru that with pure adrenaline and coffee, and then crashed hard for some of this week. I do have some fairly real post-covid fatigue still going on, to my irritation.
We are well set up with soup and care from our local friends, and I caved and ordered groceries so I didn’t have to face the supermarket (Spouse does most of the grocery buying and nearly all the cooking under normal circumstances.)
What I’ve Read
I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jenette McCurdy (Audiobook, narrated by author) –
McCurdy was a child actor with an abusive mother who gave her an eating disorder and other issues. Her mother had cancer early in McCurdy’s childhood and leaned into that as a component of her identity for the rest of her life in a way that is, in the telling, rather pathetic. McCurdy was on a Disney show called iCarly that was slightly too young for me, but I have heard of it. I listened to the audiobook, it was compellingly written, and at the end, I, too, was glad her mom was dead.
Game of Thrones: Alderaan by B_Radley, shadowmaat, SLWalker - https://archiveofourown.org/series/798396 –
A series of stories that posit that Maul was adopted into the Alderaanian royal family from an early age after being imprisoned at age 12, never became a Sith, and embarked on a romance with Bail and Breha Organa. Very much a story focused on an abused child recovering and finding a new home, with minimal smut. It’s adorable and plays a bit look with canon. Palpatine dies off screen sometime before Maul gets adopted – the story is blissfully unconcerned with Sidious as a character.
Montress Vol 1. Awakening by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda –
A graphic novel that I had dipped into last year when a later volume was nominated for a Hugo. I think it’s got some nice things going for it – vastly female cast, decent art, the worldbuilding is robust enough for the later stories to have some interesting scaffolding. I mostly found the main characters to be a less charismatic version of Venom, and I’m not super intrigued by the family history of the main character. I might read some of the others. It was a very pleasant discovery to find that my tablet is quite good for comic books.
Stalking Killing by Koogi – A Korean webcomic,
I read the first printed volume from the library and enjoyed it enough that I went out and found the rest of the comic online. It’s complete! The story is incredibly dark and riddled with gore, torture, sexual violence, obsession and suffering – it was very much published Dead Dove, Do Not Eat. The main plot is a rather pathetic young gay man with a pattern of stalking has found a way to break into the house of old classmate that he’s fixated on – he discovers that the object of his affections is a serial killer just in time to get a baseball bat to the back of the head. That’s the first 20 pages of 400+. The rest is like if Misery by Stephen King had romantic interludes. Definitely not for everyone, but I very much enjoyed it. I ended up logging each of the published volumes of the manwha on Storygraph rather than sorting out how to log it. I might be on a kick for m/m dark romance manga – found some recommendations thru Tumblr I can try.
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal – Xing Book Club - Part 1 of the Lady Astronaut series –
Ok, first of all, I had not heard this was a series and found that this book ended in a place that is uh, emotionally satisfying for some of the main arcs but did not leave me particularly happy. That said, I will confess that I found this book utterly deligthtful. I had heard about it too often and in not enough detail, so I decided I didn’t want to read it – I had some vague sense of it being a story about girlbossing your way out of 1950s sexism into space. It’s very much NOT that book. It’s both less trite and more interesting – the first third of the book is about the shock and grief of surviving a natural disaster that kills thousands of people, and how you take up the pragmatic tasks of figuring out how to the rest of your people survive. I found that the element of sexism in this book is not about how sexism impedes the main character’s personal fulfillment, but how sexism presents a very real risk to effectively addressing a global crisis. I also just really liked Elma, the main character, as a Jewish scientist with a crippling anxiety related to specific kind of systemic past abuse at the hands of people in authority over her. Honestly, a great read.
Read a bunch of other fanfic
What I’m Reading:
Babel – Xing Book Club – this is dark and bleak and dealing with racism in the 1830s and feels so much like it has something to do with A Memory Called Empire that it literally uses the same quote to describe the work of an empire “ to make a wasteland and call it peace”
Started to re-listen to Beauty by Robin McKinley, which is the best 39%
Dracula Daily is back! I’m enjoying my emails from Mina and Jonathan.
The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction - Nick Groom – 44% Got a little bit back on my bullshit today for this – finally got to the literature portion, tho the bit on architecture was indeed fabulous.
What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Monroe (of XKCD fame) – 8% - Static
Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn (1991) – 39% - Static
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection - Julia Kristeva - static
What I’ll Read Next
(edited to add: Dowry of Blood for the Necromancer's book club, Watchmaker's Daughter for the Discord Book club)
Owned and need to read: California Bones, Raven Song by IA Ashcroft, Kraken's Sacrifice by Katee Robert, Even Though I Know the End by CL Polk, At The Feet of the Sun by Victoria Goddard, Tamryn Eradani's Enchanting Encounters Books 2 and 3, Like Real People Do by EL Massey, Tom Stoppard, Invention of love, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty, "You Just Need to Lose Weight" and Other Myths about Fatness by Aubrey Gordon, Alisha Rai Partners in Crime, the Right Swipe
Real Life: I skipped last week because my spouse had appendicitis! Which appears to be related to the covid, tho the literature is not conclusive on causation here, and appendicitis is one of those things that you tend to focus on treatment rather than cause. But there’s some recent papers from doctors who saw a pattern of treating a patient for severe covid and then seeing the same patient back within a month for an appendectomy.
The Spouse is up and much better and puttering around the garden today, but they have some restrictions on lifting things and are, generally, acting like a person who has recently had abdominal surgery – pain management and some dietary restrictions for a while, and lifting restrictions for a bit longer.
I mostly powered thru that with pure adrenaline and coffee, and then crashed hard for some of this week. I do have some fairly real post-covid fatigue still going on, to my irritation.
We are well set up with soup and care from our local friends, and I caved and ordered groceries so I didn’t have to face the supermarket (Spouse does most of the grocery buying and nearly all the cooking under normal circumstances.)
