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Wednesday Reading Meme August 28 2024
Aug. 28th, 2024 04:44 pmBack from my travel and it was not really a reading vacation, so I have some finished books and a near complete lack of focus!
What I’ve Read:
Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King - Horrifying story, very relatable and well told. It’s a single narrative, a confession in a police station by Dolores Claiborne as she effectively confesses to one murder to get herself off another. It’s chilling and touching and foul. As in the best of Stephen King, the most horrifying thing is what people will do to each other – we enter the narrative addressing the question, Did Dolores kill her rich elderly employer, Vera Donovan? But the main drive of the story is Dolores’s relationship with Vera and how they both share the burden of surviving abusive husbands and the knowledge of what they will do to survive. It’s also a love letter to a certain kind of small New England town, and a kind of Stephen King special of ‘a selfish man in a patriarchal society is the most dangerous thing a woman can encounter.’
Can I also just say, the timing for reading this book was serendipitous?
A major element of Dolores’s story is timing her final confrontation with her husband to coincide the solar eclipse, b/c everyone in their small community will be distracted, and there was literally just a solar eclipse in Maine this year, so I have a really clear image in my mind of what the preparations and celebrations would have been like.
Also, I basically read this in a single sitting on the plane, which I definitely recommend. I then went on to watch A Quiet Place, which is an apocalyptic survivalist horror-lite love letter to the patriarchal fantasy of ‘a man will protect his family from anything, including Laying Down His Life’ – it’s perfectly competent as a horror movie except for not being very scary, but it’s like, wow, this is definitely a world where Patriarchy is the Right and Only Choice to handle life’s challenges. Really interesting contrast to Dolores Claiborne, where patriarchy will kill you slowly with a useless man demanding you keep swimming as he drags you slowly down. Of the two, one of those feels like a fantasy.
The Blue Castle by LM Montgomery – This is complete wish fulfillment and a great read. It’s from 1926. An old maid with overbearing relations is given a medical diagnosis that tells her she will die in a year and she decides to stop living for other people. She mocks her deeply self important relatives who have a high horse and shitty morals, goes and gets a job working with people who also don’t care about their social standing, and falls in love with a man based on his joy in the world. She tells him about her fatal diagnosis and they marry knowing it will be for a short term of happiness together.
It’s got a happy ending and is also nearly a century old, so I’m going to spoil the ending – the letter with her diagnosis was perfectly serious but was sent to the wrong person, she was dealing with a benign heart palpitation instead of fatal angina – she finds out that the penniless man she married is actually the estranged scion of an absurdly wealthy man and also secretly the author of her most beloved books about nature, and he loves her even if she feels initially like she might have trapped him into the marriage.
The book is so deeply satisfying because fundamentally, the fantasy is about being a person forced to live for the good opinion of relatives who have stupid opinions and suddenly being able to throw it off in one fell swoop to go and build a life you enjoy. It absolutely rules.
Masquerade in Lodi (Penric and Desdemona novella) by Lois McMaster Bujold – This is a heist, a caper, perhaps even a romp! It’s cute and short and has a reasonably happy ending.
What I’m Reading
I appear to be reading about a dozen books that I haven’t technically given up on.
A Civil Campaign – I did just start listening to this today, I feel like I have read this far too often. I think this may have been the first Bujold I read, borrowing a paperback from my grandma’s stash.
Ash: A Secret History – weird and wonderful, but slower moving than I can handle
Paladin’s Grace
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Two Towers
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Lottery and Other Stoires
The Power Broken – Audiobook #2
Mo Dao Zu Shi vol 5
It Came from the Closet
What I’ll Read Next
I am totally without plans! Maybe one of the things I am actually technically currently reading??
What I’ve Read:
Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King - Horrifying story, very relatable and well told. It’s a single narrative, a confession in a police station by Dolores Claiborne as she effectively confesses to one murder to get herself off another. It’s chilling and touching and foul. As in the best of Stephen King, the most horrifying thing is what people will do to each other – we enter the narrative addressing the question, Did Dolores kill her rich elderly employer, Vera Donovan? But the main drive of the story is Dolores’s relationship with Vera and how they both share the burden of surviving abusive husbands and the knowledge of what they will do to survive. It’s also a love letter to a certain kind of small New England town, and a kind of Stephen King special of ‘a selfish man in a patriarchal society is the most dangerous thing a woman can encounter.’
Can I also just say, the timing for reading this book was serendipitous?
A major element of Dolores’s story is timing her final confrontation with her husband to coincide the solar eclipse, b/c everyone in their small community will be distracted, and there was literally just a solar eclipse in Maine this year, so I have a really clear image in my mind of what the preparations and celebrations would have been like.
Also, I basically read this in a single sitting on the plane, which I definitely recommend. I then went on to watch A Quiet Place, which is an apocalyptic survivalist horror-lite love letter to the patriarchal fantasy of ‘a man will protect his family from anything, including Laying Down His Life’ – it’s perfectly competent as a horror movie except for not being very scary, but it’s like, wow, this is definitely a world where Patriarchy is the Right and Only Choice to handle life’s challenges. Really interesting contrast to Dolores Claiborne, where patriarchy will kill you slowly with a useless man demanding you keep swimming as he drags you slowly down. Of the two, one of those feels like a fantasy.
The Blue Castle by LM Montgomery – This is complete wish fulfillment and a great read. It’s from 1926. An old maid with overbearing relations is given a medical diagnosis that tells her she will die in a year and she decides to stop living for other people. She mocks her deeply self important relatives who have a high horse and shitty morals, goes and gets a job working with people who also don’t care about their social standing, and falls in love with a man based on his joy in the world. She tells him about her fatal diagnosis and they marry knowing it will be for a short term of happiness together.
It’s got a happy ending and is also nearly a century old, so I’m going to spoil the ending – the letter with her diagnosis was perfectly serious but was sent to the wrong person, she was dealing with a benign heart palpitation instead of fatal angina – she finds out that the penniless man she married is actually the estranged scion of an absurdly wealthy man and also secretly the author of her most beloved books about nature, and he loves her even if she feels initially like she might have trapped him into the marriage.
The book is so deeply satisfying because fundamentally, the fantasy is about being a person forced to live for the good opinion of relatives who have stupid opinions and suddenly being able to throw it off in one fell swoop to go and build a life you enjoy. It absolutely rules.
Masquerade in Lodi (Penric and Desdemona novella) by Lois McMaster Bujold – This is a heist, a caper, perhaps even a romp! It’s cute and short and has a reasonably happy ending.
What I’m Reading
I appear to be reading about a dozen books that I haven’t technically given up on.
A Civil Campaign – I did just start listening to this today, I feel like I have read this far too often. I think this may have been the first Bujold I read, borrowing a paperback from my grandma’s stash.
Ash: A Secret History – weird and wonderful, but slower moving than I can handle
Paladin’s Grace
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Two Towers
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Lottery and Other Stoires
The Power Broken – Audiobook #2
Mo Dao Zu Shi vol 5
It Came from the Closet
What I’ll Read Next
I am totally without plans! Maybe one of the things I am actually technically currently reading??
