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kitewithfishWork in Progress
My current sock project, Scylla in Malabrigo Candome, nears completion - I have picked a fancy slipped stitch form of ribbing to complement the slipped stitch pattern. I'm ignoring the charted instructions with some glee to add extra yarn overs in the rows before the slipped stitches so that the fabric doesn't tug itself out of alignment. While I love the yarn, it's knitting up quite dark and it's a challenge to get the level of contrast I want on the slipped stitches, but I'm very pleased with how soft it is and how well it's knitting up.
Reading Meme!
What I've Read
I've finished House of Leaves! (Mark Danielewski) This book was a TOME, but a fascinating read. I think it has some fame for being just a very weird book, which it is, and I felt like the ending was more of a fizzle than a bang, but that might be because I read a lot of the Appendices and the Whalestoe Letters as they became relevant to the book, rather than at the end. I really enjoyed it as a deeply impressive act of typesetting - which sounds like faint praise but it's really not. This book weaves the physical reality of the book into the narrative, in some straightforward ways and in some deeply strange ones. It's definitely horror - it left me with a somewhat abiding sense of unease and distrust towards reality around me - and it's a book that cries out for annotation. I really enjoyed watching the book talk to itself and then commenting on that in the extremely large margins.
I suppose I have a bit of personal myth built around this book. I have an emailed library notice from 2009 that confirms I ordered it from a public library for pick-up, which means I specifically requested it. I think that I found it first in my college library, but I just can't be sure - the only edition that I have ever seen was published in 2000, and I definitely did not encounter it before high school. I have tried to pick it up and read it so many times that I eventually bought the book because I knew I would never get thru it in the timeframe of a library check-out. But it's still been ten years and I have a vivid and enduring memory of getting to a very early part of the novel, where the main characters measure a home's interior wall over and over with greater tools and increasing precision, only to confirm again and again that they are encountering an impossible thing - the interior wall is larger than the exterior wall, the house is not interested in the limits of physical space, and they are encountering something that is uninterested in conforming to human perception. And every time! I would get to that part and bail! It was too much!
I suspect that the last calendar year's focus on horror films has really helped me get into the headspace where I could pick this book up and actually finish it.
I have also finished the much briefer but extremely creepy Through the Woods by Emily Carroll, a graphic novel that showed up at my house without me ordering it! I have no idea where this came from, though I recognize some of the comics, especially "His Face All Red" from its rounds on Tumblr. The book is excellent and deeply weird. I highly recommend it, but maybe not late at night.
What I'm Reading
I started and then put down Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames. The premise is quite charming - aging rockers in a fantasy world where a 'band' is not a group of musicians but a team of fighters, and the main character, Clay, is legitimately charming. But I keep bouncing off the random casually misogynists asides. They are not bad as, say, Jim Butcher and his weird fetish for sexy teens, but just... it's very clear that this is a man with no interest in women as characters trying to write his female side characters in a not sexist way, and landing flat. And he's included a fair number of women side characters! He definitely thinks that having his main characters robbed by a team of unsexy women is a plus!
I'm still delighted by the tone and the concept - it's got an 'inspired by Terry Pratchett' vibe in terms of really exploring the edges of what it means to do "battle of the bands but they have swords" reality, so I'm going to go back to it! But, oof, those little grace notes about ugly prostitutes or pretty women being sell outs are just... not my vibe, my dude.
I have picked up The Missing Page by Cat Sebastien, I am about 20 pages in and it's already delightful and making me want to read the previous novel again for the sheer joy of being in an excellently written mystery. Also, I love the fact that we immediately get to revisit the Cottage Lesbians from the previous book - it's a soft and gentle comfort to think that in every era of history, we have always found each other.
I'm also reading a Temeraire novel-length fanfic "Terror in War, Ornament in Peace" by WerewolvesAreReal, in which William Laurence makes some different decisions after the end of the canonical events of Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik, and we see a lot more of Napoleon Bonaparte.
What I'll Read Next
I'm going to finish Light from Uncommon Stars after this book club meeting (I hate to read ahead)
Finishing The Missing Page
Some By Virtue Fall will be out next week!
Need to do more SPN Queer Rewatch Reading - TV Horror chapters 3-4
I bought Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men because I adored reading Epistemology of the Closet
I'm vaguely interested to see what Mark Danielewski has done since House of Leaves - there are some interesting ebooks of his floating around.
Might hunt down more of Emily Carroll's digital works because her wikipedia pages suggests that some of them are interactive in a way that can't be booked.
My current sock project, Scylla in Malabrigo Candome, nears completion - I have picked a fancy slipped stitch form of ribbing to complement the slipped stitch pattern. I'm ignoring the charted instructions with some glee to add extra yarn overs in the rows before the slipped stitches so that the fabric doesn't tug itself out of alignment. While I love the yarn, it's knitting up quite dark and it's a challenge to get the level of contrast I want on the slipped stitches, but I'm very pleased with how soft it is and how well it's knitting up.
Reading Meme!
What I've Read
I've finished House of Leaves! (Mark Danielewski) This book was a TOME, but a fascinating read. I think it has some fame for being just a very weird book, which it is, and I felt like the ending was more of a fizzle than a bang, but that might be because I read a lot of the Appendices and the Whalestoe Letters as they became relevant to the book, rather than at the end. I really enjoyed it as a deeply impressive act of typesetting - which sounds like faint praise but it's really not. This book weaves the physical reality of the book into the narrative, in some straightforward ways and in some deeply strange ones. It's definitely horror - it left me with a somewhat abiding sense of unease and distrust towards reality around me - and it's a book that cries out for annotation. I really enjoyed watching the book talk to itself and then commenting on that in the extremely large margins.
I suppose I have a bit of personal myth built around this book. I have an emailed library notice from 2009 that confirms I ordered it from a public library for pick-up, which means I specifically requested it. I think that I found it first in my college library, but I just can't be sure - the only edition that I have ever seen was published in 2000, and I definitely did not encounter it before high school. I have tried to pick it up and read it so many times that I eventually bought the book because I knew I would never get thru it in the timeframe of a library check-out. But it's still been ten years and I have a vivid and enduring memory of getting to a very early part of the novel, where the main characters measure a home's interior wall over and over with greater tools and increasing precision, only to confirm again and again that they are encountering an impossible thing - the interior wall is larger than the exterior wall, the house is not interested in the limits of physical space, and they are encountering something that is uninterested in conforming to human perception. And every time! I would get to that part and bail! It was too much!
I suspect that the last calendar year's focus on horror films has really helped me get into the headspace where I could pick this book up and actually finish it.
I have also finished the much briefer but extremely creepy Through the Woods by Emily Carroll, a graphic novel that showed up at my house without me ordering it! I have no idea where this came from, though I recognize some of the comics, especially "His Face All Red" from its rounds on Tumblr. The book is excellent and deeply weird. I highly recommend it, but maybe not late at night.
What I'm Reading
I started and then put down Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames. The premise is quite charming - aging rockers in a fantasy world where a 'band' is not a group of musicians but a team of fighters, and the main character, Clay, is legitimately charming. But I keep bouncing off the random casually misogynists asides. They are not bad as, say, Jim Butcher and his weird fetish for sexy teens, but just... it's very clear that this is a man with no interest in women as characters trying to write his female side characters in a not sexist way, and landing flat. And he's included a fair number of women side characters! He definitely thinks that having his main characters robbed by a team of unsexy women is a plus!
I'm still delighted by the tone and the concept - it's got an 'inspired by Terry Pratchett' vibe in terms of really exploring the edges of what it means to do "battle of the bands but they have swords" reality, so I'm going to go back to it! But, oof, those little grace notes about ugly prostitutes or pretty women being sell outs are just... not my vibe, my dude.
I have picked up The Missing Page by Cat Sebastien, I am about 20 pages in and it's already delightful and making me want to read the previous novel again for the sheer joy of being in an excellently written mystery. Also, I love the fact that we immediately get to revisit the Cottage Lesbians from the previous book - it's a soft and gentle comfort to think that in every era of history, we have always found each other.
I'm also reading a Temeraire novel-length fanfic "Terror in War, Ornament in Peace" by WerewolvesAreReal, in which William Laurence makes some different decisions after the end of the canonical events of Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik, and we see a lot more of Napoleon Bonaparte.
What I'll Read Next
I'm going to finish Light from Uncommon Stars after this book club meeting (I hate to read ahead)
Finishing The Missing Page
Some By Virtue Fall will be out next week!
Need to do more SPN Queer Rewatch Reading - TV Horror chapters 3-4
I bought Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men because I adored reading Epistemology of the Closet
I'm vaguely interested to see what Mark Danielewski has done since House of Leaves - there are some interesting ebooks of his floating around.
Might hunt down more of Emily Carroll's digital works because her wikipedia pages suggests that some of them are interactive in a way that can't be booked.
