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Wednesday Reading Meme - November 29 2023
Nov. 29th, 2023 11:50 amWhat I’ve Read:
(Technically I finished Camp Damascus on the 24th, so I log it here, but last week was where I really went into it.)
What I’m Reading:
House of Leaves – Robobook Club – Haven’t touched it since I started it.
City of Blades – Robert Jackson Bennett - Xing Book Club – Steady progress! We will get into the second half of the book next week, but I really do enjoy the mystery element of these books.
Fourth Wing – Rebecca Yarros – Fun with Necromancy book club - <
On the reading of the book: This reads like fanfic. I love fanfic, but it commonly relies on the source material to establish the world building and rules, and then plays with characterization and relationships inside those rules. This book, as original work, has not actually built the world before filling it with characters. It also has not actually built the characters as real people. It is 500+ pages of “Man, this could be good with some major edits and about ten years of therapy.”
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.
This week’s essay, “The Girl, The Well, the Ring” by Zefyr Lisowski, talked about The Ring and Pet Sematary. This essay is, unfortunately, the low point of this book so far. I had some longer thoughts but I’ll trim it down here: Lisowski is just kind of careless – at first I thought she was just finding things in the movies that I had missed, but in closer reading with a friend, it became clear that she just made a bunch of kind of careless mistakes to support her argument better.
Sidebar: I am reminded of an English teacher in high school, who had the class reading short stories and churning out papers about them every three days. It was an exercise in learning to read analytically and write about it quickly – he was quite clear that he was choosing to teach New Criticism because it was a good toolset for that situation. One of the things he stressed was using quotations and evidence from the readings in good faith. If the story has an elegant lady “perfuming herself at her toilet,” it’s disingenuous to take that quote and write that the author “said her perfume smells like a ‘toilet’” – you’d be twisting the quotation out of its context to make your point rather than actually engaging the text in good faith. I should look that teacher up.
The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson - I was lured in by the absolute prettiness of the Picador Modern Classic pocket version of this book. I have not read Jackson before, and had intended to – the smallness of this book has allowed me to pick up and read a few stories here and there and they are BANGERS so far. “The Intoxicated” and “After You, My Dear Alphonse” are both short stories about adults interacting with children and finding it deeply unsettling to realize they live in vastly different worlds than the adults.
What I’ll Read Next:
Dark Rise – CS Pacat – re-read before the next book comes out.
Dark Heir – New book!
Ninefox Gambit – Xing Book Club
When Women Were Dragons - Xing Book Club
Owned and need to read: Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, 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
(Technically I finished Camp Damascus on the 24th, so I log it here, but last week was where I really went into it.)
What I’m Reading:
House of Leaves – Robobook Club – Haven’t touched it since I started it.
City of Blades – Robert Jackson Bennett - Xing Book Club – Steady progress! We will get into the second half of the book next week, but I really do enjoy the mystery element of these books.
Fourth Wing – Rebecca Yarros – Fun with Necromancy book club - <
On the reading of the book: This reads like fanfic. I love fanfic, but it commonly relies on the source material to establish the world building and rules, and then plays with characterization and relationships inside those rules. This book, as original work, has not actually built the world before filling it with characters. It also has not actually built the characters as real people. It is 500+ pages of “Man, this could be good with some major edits and about ten years of therapy.”
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.
This week’s essay, “The Girl, The Well, the Ring” by Zefyr Lisowski, talked about The Ring and Pet Sematary. This essay is, unfortunately, the low point of this book so far. I had some longer thoughts but I’ll trim it down here: Lisowski is just kind of careless – at first I thought she was just finding things in the movies that I had missed, but in closer reading with a friend, it became clear that she just made a bunch of kind of careless mistakes to support her argument better.
Sidebar: I am reminded of an English teacher in high school, who had the class reading short stories and churning out papers about them every three days. It was an exercise in learning to read analytically and write about it quickly – he was quite clear that he was choosing to teach New Criticism because it was a good toolset for that situation. One of the things he stressed was using quotations and evidence from the readings in good faith. If the story has an elegant lady “perfuming herself at her toilet,” it’s disingenuous to take that quote and write that the author “said her perfume smells like a ‘toilet’” – you’d be twisting the quotation out of its context to make your point rather than actually engaging the text in good faith. I should look that teacher up.
The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson - I was lured in by the absolute prettiness of the Picador Modern Classic pocket version of this book. I have not read Jackson before, and had intended to – the smallness of this book has allowed me to pick up and read a few stories here and there and they are BANGERS so far. “The Intoxicated” and “After You, My Dear Alphonse” are both short stories about adults interacting with children and finding it deeply unsettling to realize they live in vastly different worlds than the adults.
What I’ll Read Next:
Dark Rise – CS Pacat – re-read before the next book comes out.
Dark Heir – New book!
Ninefox Gambit – Xing Book Club
When Women Were Dragons - Xing Book Club
Owned and need to read: Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, 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
