Reading Wednesday
Feb. 5th, 2020 05:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxRecently read
I finished Little Women! Not to rehash the entire debate I had about this point with my best friend last week, but on the whole question of Jo/Bhaer vs. Jo/Laurie vs. Laurie/Amy, I'm even more solidly on Team The Way It Worked Out In Canon for having re-read the actual storyline.
Something I noticed in the second half of the book was that both Amy and Laurie had scenes where they declared themselves finished with art and music, respectively, for a lack of natural genius.* Then, in the last chapter, it's shown that they've both returned to art/music on a casual (hobby?) basis— Laurie composes a song for Marmee's birthday, and Amy discusses a sculpture she's making of her baby daughter. I feel like there's a capital-O Opinion on Art in there somewhere, but I'm not entirely sure what it is...?
* Interestingly, Jo was the only one who didn't have a moment like this— the couple of times she steps back from writing (i.e. to preserve the Integrity of her Art because the only stories she was able to sell were ~sensational~ ones, and then at the end of the book, there's a line about how she still wants to write a great novel but for the moment, her priority is telling stories for the entertainment of her boys) are unrelated to the debate of talent vs. genius. I suppose you could read in this that Jo does have a natural genius for writing, which is amusing in the context of Jo as Alcott's self-insert character.
Based off reviews byskygiants and rachelmanija, I checked out Elizabeth Hand's Wyldling Hall: in 1972, the frontman of a British folk-rock band mysteriously disappears from the ancient manor in the English countryside where they've decamped to record their second album. The story is told in the form of transcripts of interviews with the rest of the band and various involved parties - the band's manager, a music journalist and a girlfriend who had visited the band at Wylding Hall, a local who took photographs of the band's infamous last recording session - for a documentary investigating what happened that fateful summer, forty years before. Was it drugs? Ghosts? Ghosts on drugs?
For me, the spookiest parts were when the one guy stumbles into a room full of dead birds, and when Lesley goes into Julian's room after no one has heard from him in three days, to find an impossibly small spatter of blood and a bird thrashing itself to death against the locked window. I found the scene with the photographs, and the girl with too many teeth, less scary than I would have had I read it, say, at night before trying to fall asleep, as opposed to in the morning, over breakfast. It's hard to be properly creeped out when it's 7 am and you're shoving a bagel in your mouth, you know?
I also discovered that Libby has comic books/graphic novels, so I read Noelle Stevenson's Nimona and an adaption of The Adventure Zone podcast's "Here There Be Gerblins" arc. Both were very cute! I'd read Nimona back when it was a webcomic, so that made me super nostalgic for all the webcomics I followed in high school, and then I ended up listening to the entirety of TAZ's "Murder on the Rockport Express" arc while home sick on Monday.
Currently reading
The Trials of the King of Hampshire: Madness, Secrecy, and Betrayal in Georgian England by Elizabeth Foyster, non-fiction about John Charles Wollop, the 3rd Earl of Portsmouth, who in 1823 became the subject of "the longest, costliest, and most controversial insanity trial in British history."
To read next
In keeping with the theme of Weird Shit Goes Down In Rural England, my next-available hold on Libby is Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss.
I finished Little Women! Not to rehash the entire debate I had about this point with my best friend last week, but on the whole question of Jo/Bhaer vs. Jo/Laurie vs. Laurie/Amy, I'm even more solidly on Team The Way It Worked Out In Canon for having re-read the actual storyline.
Something I noticed in the second half of the book was that both Amy and Laurie had scenes where they declared themselves finished with art and music, respectively, for a lack of natural genius.* Then, in the last chapter, it's shown that they've both returned to art/music on a casual (hobby?) basis— Laurie composes a song for Marmee's birthday, and Amy discusses a sculpture she's making of her baby daughter. I feel like there's a capital-O Opinion on Art in there somewhere, but I'm not entirely sure what it is...?
* Interestingly, Jo was the only one who didn't have a moment like this— the couple of times she steps back from writing (i.e. to preserve the Integrity of her Art because the only stories she was able to sell were ~sensational~ ones, and then at the end of the book, there's a line about how she still wants to write a great novel but for the moment, her priority is telling stories for the entertainment of her boys) are unrelated to the debate of talent vs. genius. I suppose you could read in this that Jo does have a natural genius for writing, which is amusing in the context of Jo as Alcott's self-insert character.
Based off reviews by
skygiants and rachelmanija, I checked out Elizabeth Hand's Wyldling Hall: in 1972, the frontman of a British folk-rock band mysteriously disappears from the ancient manor in the English countryside where they've decamped to record their second album. The story is told in the form of transcripts of interviews with the rest of the band and various involved parties - the band's manager, a music journalist and a girlfriend who had visited the band at Wylding Hall, a local who took photographs of the band's infamous last recording session - for a documentary investigating what happened that fateful summer, forty years before. Was it drugs? Ghosts? Ghosts on drugs?For me, the spookiest parts were when the one guy stumbles into a room full of dead birds, and when Lesley goes into Julian's room after no one has heard from him in three days, to find an impossibly small spatter of blood and a bird thrashing itself to death against the locked window. I found the scene with the photographs, and the girl with too many teeth, less scary than I would have had I read it, say, at night before trying to fall asleep, as opposed to in the morning, over breakfast. It's hard to be properly creeped out when it's 7 am and you're shoving a bagel in your mouth, you know?
I also discovered that Libby has comic books/graphic novels, so I read Noelle Stevenson's Nimona and an adaption of The Adventure Zone podcast's "Here There Be Gerblins" arc. Both were very cute! I'd read Nimona back when it was a webcomic, so that made me super nostalgic for all the webcomics I followed in high school, and then I ended up listening to the entirety of TAZ's "Murder on the Rockport Express" arc while home sick on Monday.
Currently reading
The Trials of the King of Hampshire: Madness, Secrecy, and Betrayal in Georgian England by Elizabeth Foyster, non-fiction about John Charles Wollop, the 3rd Earl of Portsmouth, who in 1823 became the subject of "the longest, costliest, and most controversial insanity trial in British history."
To read next
In keeping with the theme of Weird Shit Goes Down In Rural England, my next-available hold on Libby is Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-06 12:00 am (UTC)ETA: Also, for me, the descriptions of the girl in the photographs just felt too creepypasta-ish to be really effective... the guy who stepped on what he thought was a splinter or exposed nail and turned out to be A DISEMBODIED BIRD BEAK, though?? I physically recoiled in horror!
no subject
Date: 2020-02-06 01:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-09 03:27 am (UTC)I just felt like they didn't coalesce into enough of a narrative for me to feel much about the story as a whole? Like, normally this genre of horror does benefit from not seeing the monster directly, but the glimpses we got all seemed to point in totally different directions and I wanted some sense of how they fit together.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-09 05:13 am (UTC)I just felt like they didn't coalesce into enough of a narrative for me to feel much about the story as a whole?
Yes! It felt very....sketched in, in a way. And I get that it was meant to be evocative and using the "never let the audience see the monster directly" technique, but sometimes that also leads to an all sizzle, no steak feeling. Like, Shirley Jackson can give me the screaming heebie jeebies by barely describing a supernatural picnic? (mostly by writing extremely evocatively about the sheer terror of the people fleeing from it). But she's a mistress of technique. -- It wasn't bad at all, just kind of underdone.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-09 03:22 am (UTC)TBH I was also underwhelmed by the dead bird scene - I have dogs that like to pick up dead animals outside so my first thought ws more "Oh, god, cleaning that up would be so exhausting," and then I just couldn't get into it. I was really interested in the wren hunt photos though and a little frustrated by how little we found out about what the villagers knew.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-10 11:36 pm (UTC)I also feel like it kind of came out of nowhere, because there had been a very specific theme to all the creepy moments up until that point? In retrospect, I'm confused about where the story was even going with the bird theme, considering we got all these pieces of that particular puzzle - the song! the photographs in the pub! the walls carved with feathers and room full of dead birds! - but they didn't seem to fit in with either of the hints as to what happened to Julian (the wristwatch; the alleged sighting) at the end.
ARGH. I feel like this is one of those books that isn't necessarily frustrating while you read it, but then the more you think about it afterwards, the more confusing it becomes.
TBH I was also underwhelmed by the dead bird scene
Obviously, I know that not every reader will react to a book in the same way, but it's been cool to actually see that play out in the comments!
no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 01:11 am (UTC)What did you think was going on in the sighting scene? I had NO clue.
TBF I'm pretty sure most people would be pretty horrified by stepping into a closet full of birds, this is just one of those moments when eg. the fact that my childhood best friend had a yard full of deer carcasses because her dogs dragged them in and played with them and ripped them apart becomes influential.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 03:03 am (UTC)........................vampire, maybe??? Vampires that turn into birds instead of bats?
TBF I'm pretty sure most people would be pretty horrified by stepping into a closet full of birds
Honestly, the part that made that scene stick-in-my-brain horrifying was less the actual room/discovery of it than the part where the guy thinks he's stepped on a nail or gotten a splinter, only to pull a tiny broken-off bird break oUT OF HIS FOOT. It's, like, the feeling of when you see something out of the corner of your eye that causes your fight-or-flight reaction to kick in even as your brain is processing that it's some mundane and harmless inanimate object.... but worse, because it's a thing you assume is mundane but is in fact creepy!!