Wednesday Reading Meme December 20 2023
Dec. 20th, 2023 02:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitewithfishWhat I’ve Read:
Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson – This book was incredible. Not to overhype, but there is a really cutting way of looking at the world in Jackson’s works. Given the cast of four people who are all drawn, for their own reasons, to stay and visit Hill House, Jackson has lots of people to investigate and display all their inner foibles. It’s so tender and personal, but it’s not sentimental or sugar coating anything – She writes all of Eleanor’s skittish giddy hopes and her petty resentments with a clear view to what makes Eleanor the person that she is. I also think this is one of those books where I went in with an idea of what the book was about – a haunting at a big house – and the book is so much more about the particulars of the people in this space at this exact moment, bouncing off each other. It shares something with Agatha Christie for a keen observation of human foibles and with Jane Austen for characters with a rich interior life.
Dark Heir – CS Pacat – Oh, god, this is doing what I love best in a middle trilogy book: The Empire Strikes Back. She’s showing you the absolute worst thing that could happen for the characters as you have set them up in Book One, and then absolutely fulfilling that by the end of the book. Dark Rise, the first book, ends with our main character finding that he’s not the one destined to stop a dark and awful prophecy from coming true – but, trying to be that hero has led him to good and noble people who want to help him stop the forces of the dark, and if they find out, they will assume that he tricked them. So, as he comes into his own real power and has to face the reality of how destructive and terrible the fate they are all facing will be, he has to keep pretending and hoping that no one will ever find out. And… well. I am very much looking forward to the third book.
What I’m Reading:
Ninefox Gambit – Xing Book Club
All the Hidden Paths – Foz Meadows – sequel to Strange and Stubborn Endurance, which I read and enjoyed and re-read in October.
The Dark is Rising – it was pointed out in a discord group that there reading this a chapter a day for 12 days takes you thru the whole action of the book chronologically! I have never read it but it’s time.
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.
The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson – no movement. I’m just carrying it around in my backpack for bored moments.
What I’ll Read Next:
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
Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson – This book was incredible. Not to overhype, but there is a really cutting way of looking at the world in Jackson’s works. Given the cast of four people who are all drawn, for their own reasons, to stay and visit Hill House, Jackson has lots of people to investigate and display all their inner foibles. It’s so tender and personal, but it’s not sentimental or sugar coating anything – She writes all of Eleanor’s skittish giddy hopes and her petty resentments with a clear view to what makes Eleanor the person that she is. I also think this is one of those books where I went in with an idea of what the book was about – a haunting at a big house – and the book is so much more about the particulars of the people in this space at this exact moment, bouncing off each other. It shares something with Agatha Christie for a keen observation of human foibles and with Jane Austen for characters with a rich interior life.
Dark Heir – CS Pacat – Oh, god, this is doing what I love best in a middle trilogy book: The Empire Strikes Back. She’s showing you the absolute worst thing that could happen for the characters as you have set them up in Book One, and then absolutely fulfilling that by the end of the book. Dark Rise, the first book, ends with our main character finding that he’s not the one destined to stop a dark and awful prophecy from coming true – but, trying to be that hero has led him to good and noble people who want to help him stop the forces of the dark, and if they find out, they will assume that he tricked them. So, as he comes into his own real power and has to face the reality of how destructive and terrible the fate they are all facing will be, he has to keep pretending and hoping that no one will ever find out. And… well. I am very much looking forward to the third book.
What I’m Reading:
Ninefox Gambit – Xing Book Club
All the Hidden Paths – Foz Meadows – sequel to Strange and Stubborn Endurance, which I read and enjoyed and re-read in October.
The Dark is Rising – it was pointed out in a discord group that there reading this a chapter a day for 12 days takes you thru the whole action of the book chronologically! I have never read it but it’s time.
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.
The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson – no movement. I’m just carrying it around in my backpack for bored moments.
What I’ll Read Next:
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
