troisoiseaux (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
troisoiseaux) wrote2019-08-15 07:10 pm
troisoiseaux) wrote2019-08-15 07:10 pm
Entry tags:
Reading... uh, Thursday?
Recently read
I finally got my hands on Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered, the …memoir? …advice book? by My Favorite Murder co-hosts Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark! Surprisingly, given the title – and the selling point of ‘hey, your favorite true crime/comedy podcast hosts have written a book!’ – there’s not a lot of discussion of murder. (Probably a good thing— their storytelling style of enthusing with friends over a mutual interest meets book report started the night before it was due probably wouldn’t hold up well as a published book on true crime cases.) The premise is more: here’s how we fucked up, and here’s some other stuff that fucked us up, and here’s what we learned/how to deal with it. I’m glad I read it... but glad I waited for two months to read it on Libby instead of paying actual money for it.
Another long-awaited Libby hold I read this week was Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway, which is, to quote NPR, “a wonderfully unpredictable multi-generational saga which revolves around a Massachusetts bowling alley.” With this premise, I wasn’t expecting the amount of deeply bizarre misfortune that struck the Truitt-Sprague family, including the 1919 Molasses Flood, spontaneous combustion, being bludgeoned to death with a bowling ball, a possibly haunted doll, and ghosts.
Despite all that, McCracken keeps the tone light, with a breezy, whimsical narrative style. She also has a habit of dropping hints about her characters’ futures – who marries who, who dies how – that, at least in the latter case, are both purposefully misleading and exactly what it says on the tin, so when it finally happens, it’s satisfying as both the ‘ah-ha!’ moment of a prophesy fulfilled and a plot twist for the distinctly weirder than you originally assumed. The other books I thought of most while reading this one were Boy, Snow, Bird (interracial family in early 20th century Massachusetts; secret/misrepresented identities/pasts) and The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock (middle-aged romance; the thing that makes a family’s fortune bringing misfortune.)
Finished a couple of Agatha Christie novels— The Body in the Library and Five Little Pigs. I’d always assumed that Ariadne Oliver was a fictional stand-in for Christie herself, but apparently she does in fact exist in the same universe as Miss Marple! In The Body in the Library, a little boy shows off his detective-story credentials by mentioning he’d gotten autographs from a number of detective novelists, including Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. (Wait, does Miss Marple exist in the same universe as Hercule Poirot? What detective fiction is Agatha Christie writing in her Marple-and-Poirot ’verse if not, well, Marple and Poirot?)
Finally, I read Picnic at Hanging Rock, by Joan Lindsay. It was - to call water wet and the sky blue - incredibly dark. I really liked it, though; especially how the environment was not so much a background detail/local flavor as a thread of the story in itself. Instead of being framed as man vs. nature, it was like, nature vs. ‘ha, who are we kidding, there is no contest here, nature existed before the actions of man and it will continue on for long after.’
According to the unpublished eighteenth chapter by way of Wikipedia, Lindsay’s idea of what happened at Hanging Rock was that the two girls and the teacher got sucked into some sort of time warp (?), but between the scene where Mike hallucinates a swan as being Miranda, and like... the overall focus on the natural environment, and descriptions of what animals were doing, I like to think that they got turned into animals or trees or something.
I found the mistreatment of poor Sara way more disturbing than the ambiguously supernatural horror of the girls’ disappearance, possibly because that was an aspect of the story I wasn’t aware of, going in; possibly because the ambiguously supernatural disappearance of beautiful, rich, white girls has become such a cliche at this point, while cruelty and neglect towards a poor, vulnerable child is always going to be disturbing.
Actually, to the latter point: I don’t really know anything about horror story conventions of the 1960s, so I kept wondering how much of this story was commentary on an existing cliche vs. played straight? Especially like, the contrast between how beautiful and special the girls were who disappeared, compared to plain, silly Edith, to the point that everyone kept forgetting she had been with them and discounting her trauma.
Also, Mike and Albert were in love, right? And at the end of the book they’re living happily in North Queensland together? Right??
Currently reading
Vanity Fair update: I’m once again fully sympathetic to Becky; at this point, she’s basically trying to network her way into high society, and networking is the worst. Meanwhile, Amelia’s storyline has gone full Georges Pontmercy, as she’s been forced to give up custody of her son to his wealthy, horrible grandfather and strict spinster aunt, who hate her.
Next on list
I’m nearing the top of the waiting list for Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans on Libby! I’ve also heard good things about Trick Mirror, the new book of essays by New Yorker writer Jia Toletino, but my library doesn’t appear to have either a physical or digital copy available yet.
I finally got my hands on Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered, the …memoir? …advice book? by My Favorite Murder co-hosts Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark! Surprisingly, given the title – and the selling point of ‘hey, your favorite true crime/comedy podcast hosts have written a book!’ – there’s not a lot of discussion of murder. (Probably a good thing— their storytelling style of enthusing with friends over a mutual interest meets book report started the night before it was due probably wouldn’t hold up well as a published book on true crime cases.) The premise is more: here’s how we fucked up, and here’s some other stuff that fucked us up, and here’s what we learned/how to deal with it. I’m glad I read it... but glad I waited for two months to read it on Libby instead of paying actual money for it.
Another long-awaited Libby hold I read this week was Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway, which is, to quote NPR, “a wonderfully unpredictable multi-generational saga which revolves around a Massachusetts bowling alley.” With this premise, I wasn’t expecting the amount of deeply bizarre misfortune that struck the Truitt-Sprague family, including the 1919 Molasses Flood, spontaneous combustion, being bludgeoned to death with a bowling ball, a possibly haunted doll, and ghosts.
Despite all that, McCracken keeps the tone light, with a breezy, whimsical narrative style. She also has a habit of dropping hints about her characters’ futures – who marries who, who dies how – that, at least in the latter case, are both purposefully misleading and exactly what it says on the tin, so when it finally happens, it’s satisfying as both the ‘ah-ha!’ moment of a prophesy fulfilled and a plot twist for the distinctly weirder than you originally assumed. The other books I thought of most while reading this one were Boy, Snow, Bird (interracial family in early 20th century Massachusetts; secret/misrepresented identities/pasts) and The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock (middle-aged romance; the thing that makes a family’s fortune bringing misfortune.)
Finished a couple of Agatha Christie novels— The Body in the Library and Five Little Pigs. I’d always assumed that Ariadne Oliver was a fictional stand-in for Christie herself, but apparently she does in fact exist in the same universe as Miss Marple! In The Body in the Library, a little boy shows off his detective-story credentials by mentioning he’d gotten autographs from a number of detective novelists, including Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. (Wait, does Miss Marple exist in the same universe as Hercule Poirot? What detective fiction is Agatha Christie writing in her Marple-and-Poirot ’verse if not, well, Marple and Poirot?)
Finally, I read Picnic at Hanging Rock, by Joan Lindsay. It was - to call water wet and the sky blue - incredibly dark. I really liked it, though; especially how the environment was not so much a background detail/local flavor as a thread of the story in itself. Instead of being framed as man vs. nature, it was like, nature vs. ‘ha, who are we kidding, there is no contest here, nature existed before the actions of man and it will continue on for long after.’
According to the unpublished eighteenth chapter by way of Wikipedia, Lindsay’s idea of what happened at Hanging Rock was that the two girls and the teacher got sucked into some sort of time warp (?), but between the scene where Mike hallucinates a swan as being Miranda, and like... the overall focus on the natural environment, and descriptions of what animals were doing, I like to think that they got turned into animals or trees or something.
I found the mistreatment of poor Sara way more disturbing than the ambiguously supernatural horror of the girls’ disappearance, possibly because that was an aspect of the story I wasn’t aware of, going in; possibly because the ambiguously supernatural disappearance of beautiful, rich, white girls has become such a cliche at this point, while cruelty and neglect towards a poor, vulnerable child is always going to be disturbing.
Actually, to the latter point: I don’t really know anything about horror story conventions of the 1960s, so I kept wondering how much of this story was commentary on an existing cliche vs. played straight? Especially like, the contrast between how beautiful and special the girls were who disappeared, compared to plain, silly Edith, to the point that everyone kept forgetting she had been with them and discounting her trauma.
Also, Mike and Albert were in love, right? And at the end of the book they’re living happily in North Queensland together? Right??
Currently reading
Vanity Fair update: I’m once again fully sympathetic to Becky; at this point, she’s basically trying to network her way into high society, and networking is the worst. Meanwhile, Amelia’s storyline has gone full Georges Pontmercy, as she’s been forced to give up custody of her son to his wealthy, horrible grandfather and strict spinster aunt, who hate her.
Next on list
I’m nearing the top of the waiting list for Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans on Libby! I’ve also heard good things about Trick Mirror, the new book of essays by New Yorker writer Jia Toletino, but my library doesn’t appear to have either a physical or digital copy available yet.
no subject
no subject
On a side note that possibly no one but me will find funny: when I scrolled back up and saw that I'd referred to them as K. and G., I suddenly got the idea for a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead AU where the reason no one can tell them apart is because they're podcast hosts whose voices sound too similar to distinguish. :D
(...for the record, I can tell Karen and Georgia's voices apart!! And once I could put names to faces to voices it was obvious!! It just took me a really long time!!!)
no subject
Okay, but that's a crackerjack idea for an AU, just saying. What kind of podcast would it be? History? Politics? Or hey, maybe true crime!
(I'm usually pretty good about telling Karen and Georgia's voices apart, but it got MUCH easier once I could put names to faces.)
no subject
If I wanted to be more or less accurate to R&GAD, I'd say, like, a philosophy podcast that was so unintentionally funny it went viral as the next big comedy podcast, but now I'm thinking about Hamlet as a true crime podcast narrated by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern...
no subject