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What I’ve Read:
A Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter J Miller Jr – Oh, this is a good book. Bleak in some spots, but beautiful. It’s from 1959 and it feels like it but good god, it’s gorgeous on some fronts. Structurally, there are three novellas centered on the same abbey, each in a different time period after a nuclear war. The first focuses on a novice discovering historical artifacts a few generations after the war, the second is court intrigue in a second renaissance, and third is just a world that has regained nuclear weapons and is poised to make the same mistakes all over again.
The recurring theme of the fragility of each human life, and how easily it all can be lost, how contingent on past efforts all human knowledge is, hit pretty hard this week. I can see why this book stayed in print. It does functionally have a single woman character and presumes that the 1950s racial dynamics of America would be preserved into the future, so I had to extend it some historic grace, but over all, a very good read and a nice start to my attempt to read more older books.
Halo Effect by Alex51324 https://archiveofourown.org/works/19892077 – Downton Abbey fic – What if nice things happened to Thomas Barrow? It’s a re-read and it’s lovely. The next entry, Soldier’s Heart, is longer than Les Miserables and covers Thomas’s time in the army in WWI, so. Less cheerful!
Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle – I really enjoyed this! I don’t generally find horror fiction that upsetting because, well, it’s a book, I can look away when I feel uncomfortable. This did have some The book was largely marketed without any information about the experience of reading it, which is actually shockingly pleasant because of how much I liked the main character. Rose is 20, autistic, gay, and closeted to even herself at the start of the novel. As a POV character, I found her view of the world and her methods for coping with the anxiety of trying to live up to an impossible Christian ideal very believable and compelling. She’s curious, deliberate, and unrelenting about holding herself accountable to her own mistakes – not quite a Mark Watney type but not dissimilarly careful about thinking thru problems carefully. The horror’s focused on pointing out how the conservative anti-gay Christianity that Rose grew up in is not that far out of range for many Christian traditions, and the impact that it has on people over their lives, even if they leave.
EDIT: I realized that I forgot to mention that Tingle makes a lot of references to Peter Pan in this book - The main character is Rose Darling, and she mentions at the outset that she's never read Peter Pan because it's secular literature with magic in it, so she stayed clear of it. But from the fact that she lives in Neverton and the leader of the church is named Pete and a few other little elements, I feel like Tingle wanted to frame this character's journey as escape from the world of the lost boys to the outside world.
What I’m Reading:
City of Blades – Robert Jackson Bennett - Xing Book Club – Steady progress – I am finding that Bennett does really good work setting up mysteries and laying out the crumbs for you to find. He includes little snippets of ‘documents’ from the cultures that he has created, and it really helps with a book that focuses on one character’s POV to get these little windows to their world that aren’t filtered thru their own interpretation.
It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections in Horror - Joe Vallese (Editor) – SPN Seminar –
-Short essays where queer authors talk about horror cinema’s impact on them, with a focus on particular movies.
- I have now read the first three essays (A Demon-Girl’s Guide to Life by S. Trimble, Both Ways by Carmen Maria Muchado, and My Hand on the Glass by Bruce Owens Grimm) I think that anyone who has read Carol Clover’s Men Women and Chain Saws would like this book. Clover’s whole approach to horror was interesting because she was really interested in audience reception – How do people watch horror movies? What is compelling and interesting? What do they bring to the film and what do they get out of it? This collection of essays is like a deep dive into how horror impacted each author. It’s also a great reading companion, bc each author picks a movie (or two) and focuses on how that one story impacted them. So I’m reading the essays and pairing them with the appropriate movies. I will say that Grimm’s essay stood out – it’s simultaneous the most interesting essay of the three I read on its own merits, but it’s also using a different frame work to approach the horror film in question. They picked Hereditary, which certainly has some great thematic similarity to the personal essay they wrote about marrying a woman while in denial about their sexuality, and they write very compellingly! There are themes! The story of their own coming out is tender and scared and beautiful. But the other essays focused on movies that were formative to the author while young, and Hereditary seems more like a lens that Grimm returns to occasionally to look at their own life. It’s a great essay, just not a reflection on how watching the film impact them – so not quite what I was looking for.
What I’ll Read Next:
Dark Rise – CS Pacat – re-read before the next book comes out.
Dark Heir – New book!
House of Leaves – Robobook Club – Haven’t touched it since I started it.
Ninefox Gambit – Xing Book Club
When Women Were Dragons - Xing Book Club
Owned and need to read: California Bones, Raven Song by IA Ashcroft, At The Feet of the Sun by Victoria Goddard, Tamryn Eradani's Enchanting Encounters Books 2 and 3, Tom Stoppard, Invention of love, "You Just Need to Lose Weight" and Other Myths about Fatness by Aubrey Gordon, Alisha Rai Partners in Crime, the Right Swipe
Re: Streams: I have set up some infrastructure for myself to try the Reading Streams mode of organizing that my friend suggested (see last week’s reading post) – basically setting up multiple lists of books in categories, and then you read randomized categories.
A Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter J Miller Jr – Oh, this is a good book. Bleak in some spots, but beautiful. It’s from 1959 and it feels like it but good god, it’s gorgeous on some fronts. Structurally, there are three novellas centered on the same abbey, each in a different time period after a nuclear war. The first focuses on a novice discovering historical artifacts a few generations after the war, the second is court intrigue in a second renaissance, and third is just a world that has regained nuclear weapons and is poised to make the same mistakes all over again.
The recurring theme of the fragility of each human life, and how easily it all can be lost, how contingent on past efforts all human knowledge is, hit pretty hard this week. I can see why this book stayed in print. It does functionally have a single woman character and presumes that the 1950s racial dynamics of America would be preserved into the future, so I had to extend it some historic grace, but over all, a very good read and a nice start to my attempt to read more older books.
Halo Effect by Alex51324 https://archiveofourown.org/works/19892077 – Downton Abbey fic – What if nice things happened to Thomas Barrow? It’s a re-read and it’s lovely. The next entry, Soldier’s Heart, is longer than Les Miserables and covers Thomas’s time in the army in WWI, so. Less cheerful!
Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle – I really enjoyed this! I don’t generally find horror fiction that upsetting because, well, it’s a book, I can look away when I feel uncomfortable. This did have some The book was largely marketed without any information about the experience of reading it, which is actually shockingly pleasant because of how much I liked the main character. Rose is 20, autistic, gay, and closeted to even herself at the start of the novel. As a POV character, I found her view of the world and her methods for coping with the anxiety of trying to live up to an impossible Christian ideal very believable and compelling. She’s curious, deliberate, and unrelenting about holding herself accountable to her own mistakes – not quite a Mark Watney type but not dissimilarly careful about thinking thru problems carefully. The horror’s focused on pointing out how the conservative anti-gay Christianity that Rose grew up in is not that far out of range for many Christian traditions, and the impact that it has on people over their lives, even if they leave.
EDIT: I realized that I forgot to mention that Tingle makes a lot of references to Peter Pan in this book - The main character is Rose Darling, and she mentions at the outset that she's never read Peter Pan because it's secular literature with magic in it, so she stayed clear of it. But from the fact that she lives in Neverton and the leader of the church is named Pete and a few other little elements, I feel like Tingle wanted to frame this character's journey as escape from the world of the lost boys to the outside world.
What I’m Reading:
City of Blades – Robert Jackson Bennett - Xing Book Club – Steady progress – I am finding that Bennett does really good work setting up mysteries and laying out the crumbs for you to find. He includes little snippets of ‘documents’ from the cultures that he has created, and it really helps with a book that focuses on one character’s POV to get these little windows to their world that aren’t filtered thru their own interpretation.
It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections in Horror - Joe Vallese (Editor) – SPN Seminar –
-Short essays where queer authors talk about horror cinema’s impact on them, with a focus on particular movies.
- I have now read the first three essays (A Demon-Girl’s Guide to Life by S. Trimble, Both Ways by Carmen Maria Muchado, and My Hand on the Glass by Bruce Owens Grimm) I think that anyone who has read Carol Clover’s Men Women and Chain Saws would like this book. Clover’s whole approach to horror was interesting because she was really interested in audience reception – How do people watch horror movies? What is compelling and interesting? What do they bring to the film and what do they get out of it? This collection of essays is like a deep dive into how horror impacted each author. It’s also a great reading companion, bc each author picks a movie (or two) and focuses on how that one story impacted them. So I’m reading the essays and pairing them with the appropriate movies. I will say that Grimm’s essay stood out – it’s simultaneous the most interesting essay of the three I read on its own merits, but it’s also using a different frame work to approach the horror film in question. They picked Hereditary, which certainly has some great thematic similarity to the personal essay they wrote about marrying a woman while in denial about their sexuality, and they write very compellingly! There are themes! The story of their own coming out is tender and scared and beautiful. But the other essays focused on movies that were formative to the author while young, and Hereditary seems more like a lens that Grimm returns to occasionally to look at their own life. It’s a great essay, just not a reflection on how watching the film impact them – so not quite what I was looking for.
What I’ll Read Next:
Dark Rise – CS Pacat – re-read before the next book comes out.
Dark Heir – New book!
House of Leaves – Robobook Club – Haven’t touched it since I started it.
Ninefox Gambit – Xing Book Club
When Women Were Dragons - Xing Book Club
Owned and need to read: California Bones, Raven Song by IA Ashcroft, At The Feet of the Sun by Victoria Goddard, Tamryn Eradani's Enchanting Encounters Books 2 and 3, Tom Stoppard, Invention of love, "You Just Need to Lose Weight" and Other Myths about Fatness by Aubrey Gordon, Alisha Rai Partners in Crime, the Right Swipe
Re: Streams: I have set up some infrastructure for myself to try the Reading Streams mode of organizing that my friend suggested (see last week’s reading post) – basically setting up multiple lists of books in categories, and then you read randomized categories.
