The Reading Ace 🖤🤍💜
I'm not overly into poetry, but I get extreme enjoyment from this poem. (And honestly, Edgar Allen Poe's poe-try in general.)
I mean, "And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain" makes me stupidly happy when reading it. I want to just roll around in the words.
"Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—"
I feel that one in my SOUL.
This was such an interesting dissection of the way that elf/fairy lore has evolved through the years - mostly focusing on Ireland and Iceland, though the author makes the point that really, any country's fairies would have followed a similar path towards the end result of an international form of fairy lore.
As someone who also prefers the older, more nuanced versions of elves and fairies, I loved seeing someone else get so passionate about the topic! He even brought up Tolkien and Lang's views on the subject matter.
Also, he called Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell as a "literary masterpiece" so I trust his judgement.
I don't know that audiobook was the proper format for me for this poetry collection. I like the themes that a lot of the poems present, but I don't know...Atwood herself did the narration, and everything was kind of flat and monotone.
There's a poem about girlboss werewolves upsetting traditionally male stereotypes, for heaven's sake! I should have been more invested.
Upgrade to Werewolves
In the old days, all werewolves were male.
They burst through their bluejean clothing
as well as their own split skins,
exposed themselves in parks,
howled at the moonshine.
Those things frat boys do.
Went too far with the pigtail yanking—
growled down into the pink and wriggling
females, who cried Wee wee
wee all the way to the bone.
Heck, it was only flirting,
plus a canid sense of fun:
See Jane run!
But now it’s different:
No longer gender specific.
Now it’s a global threat.
Long-legged women sprint through ravines
in furry warmups, a pack of kinky
models in sado-French Vogue getups
and airbrushed short-term memories,
bent on no-penalties rampage.
Look at their red-rimmed paws!
Look at their gnashing eyeballs!
Look at the backlit gauze
of their full-moon subversive halos!
Hairy all over, this belle dame,
and it’s not a sweater.
O freedom, freedom and power!
they sing as they lope over bridges,
bums to the wind, ripping out throats
on footpaths, pissing off brokers.
Tomorrow they’ll be back
in their middle-management black
and Jimmy Choos
with hours they can’t account for
and first dates’ blood on the stairs.
They’ll make some calls: Good-bye.
It isn’t you, it’s me. I can’t say why.
They’ll dream of sprouting tails
at sales meetings,
right in the audiovisuals.
They’ll have addictive hangovers
and ruined nails.
I'm probably going to try physically reading this one.
He has several interesting ideas about what a "good" bookstore entails, but they are more idealistic then realistic. The Seminary Co-op Bookstore, where he was formerly co-director, is lauded as a not-for-profit bookstore. Is it nice that they're able to keep stock on shelves, and not worry about miscellanea to boost their profit margins? Sure - it's a very romantic idea of a bookstore.
But most bookstores these days - even bigger chains, like Barnes & Noble - aren't large endeavors supported by a university. They can't afford to live up to Deutsch's ideal of the "good" bookstore.
Also not a fan of the consumer shaming.
Deutsch makes the argument that, rather than spending $17 on a cigarettes or a latte, people today should be spending that $17 on a book instead!
"The average consumer who would think nothing of spending $17 on a couple of packs of cigarettes, or a couple of lattes and some baked goods, bristles at spending the same amount for a copy of a book that might provide untold hours of reflection and unquantifiable fulfillment.
I don't continue to derive pleasure from - nor even recall - what I had for breakfast last week, much less last year, but I can tell you what I was reading when I took my first bookselling job in 1994: Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone by James Baldwin."
Because food is gone after you eat it, but a good book can touch you forever. And, I mean, I get it - people should definitely buy more books. But the entire thing just smacks of the whole "Millenials are killing the x industry because they're spending all their money on avocado toast!" mentality. There are several social and economical reasons why people might balk at the cost of new books (especially hardcovers, which are more durable in the long run) and I promise you that buying themselves a nice coffee in the morning is not one of them. You are upset at the wrong people.
He also gets weird about libraries, which I'm choosing to chalk up to his romantic ideal of what a library "should" be:
"While municipalities offering services to their communities, such as internet access, civic activities, maker labels, and tool-lending libraries, is a wonderful development, there is no reason why these services should be adjuncts to the library when they would fit more naturally in a community center. As it stands, these services, currently offered by many libraries, dilute the original purpose of a library as a storehouse of books, just as socks and tchotchkes dilute the bookstore's ability to do the same."
Would it be nice if libraries were only repositories of books? Sure - not having activities or supplemental lending libraries would increase the space for books, which helps serve a wider variety of readers. But in the 4 US states and 6 cities that I've lived in, only ONCE have I been within reasonable distance to a community center. You know what were always close and accessible to a dirt-poor teenager who couldn't even afford bus fare, though? Public libraries.
I did not mean for this to turn into such a rant. I'm just gonna stop myself there, before I start on about his ideas about the kinds of books people "should" be reading.
My son aspires to be an endless fount of trivia, so you know that he was the one who picked this book. I'm pretty sure that his favorite part of the entire experience was looking up the events on all of the family's birthdates. There was a decent amount of historical information for each day, though some had more entries than others.
This book has had the unexpected bonus of making him more interested in history, as a subject. He generally sticks to science, but he's been seeking out more videos and books on history since he picked this one up. I love to see it!
Note to self: It was a terrible idea to jump directly into Nona the Ninth, when the last time I touched the series was back when Alecto was scheduled to be the third book.
I spent so long confused and disoriented, until the memories of Gideon and Harrow started coming back to me and helped provide some context for what was going on. (Although honestly, I feel like part of that disorientation is just automatically baked into the Locked Tomb series as a whole.)
There was a lot less necromancy in this one, and a lot more time dedicated to children with names like Born in the Morning, Honesty and Hotsauce. Half of the story is a creation myth for this world's universe, and I found that those were my favorite parts. I repeatedly found myself laughing at just how batshit insane everything was, and oh my god, the descriptions.
The other half of the story is looking at the civilian perspective on the war, and following Nona as she discovers herself, the universe, and the secrets that her little family are hiding.
I've learned my lesson, though. I hereby promise that right before Alecto comes out, I'm reading the books again to refresh my memory.
This book is atmospheric AF - some people like haunted house stories, give me a haunted forest ANY DAY. Bonus points if the book's about people going missing or dying in the woods. I don't know, I can't explain it...it just works for me.
I really enjoyed the slow, melodramatic build-up to the various reveals in the story. I knew one of them as soon as it was introduced, but the journey getting there was still a lot of fun. You've got a lot going on, too...Naomi dealing with the inciting incident, Olivia calling her home out of the blue, having to come to terms with her father's hoarding issues and how much worse it's gotten since she moved away to escape everything, memories of the Goddess Game being unburied, the secret of Persephone, and a stranger coming into town to dig all of that up for a podcast episode.
The narrator was also really good - I'm just starting to get into audiobooks, so it was a nice introduction. It was an absolutely fascinating time.
A very UK-centric collection of nursery rhymes, and not an incredibly thorough one. It's also not really a history history - there aren't really any detailed explanations or theories on the hows or whys of these rhymes. It's more of a commonplace book collecting the known and popular rhymes of the time.
The author goes out of his way to list a handful of rhymes from (British-colonized) India, and his descriptions of the people and the culture are just down-right offensive and patronizing. 😬
There honestly isn't much of anything in here that would make me recommend this book to anyone. Learn from my mistakes!
It's actually kind of funny - I try to have 3 books or so going at any given time: one physical book, one e-book, and one audiobook. I tend to listen to a lot of true crime audiobooks, because those are my cat's favorite (long story) and for some reason, all of the audiobooks I was finding through Libby that day were WWII/Holocaust-related.
I wasn't really in the mood for something that dark, so I picked up this book.
Which was great! It's got a touch of magical realism, decadent descriptions of pastries, lots of interesting characters, and a good moral at its heart.
And it also heavily revolves around the Nazi occupation of Compiègne.
This is technically a re-read/viewing for me, but every now and then I have to give in to the urge to flip back through this book and look at the beautifully haunting sculptures.
And I mean, the introduction's by Philip Pullman AND Jack Zipes worked on the translation. It doesn't get more legit than that!
A lovely bestiary about various mythological/folklore creatures that call the woods their home.
The book leans more heavily into the mythology side of things, but it was still an enjoyable collection. Especially for someone who loves the wild potential of the forest to spin the imagination. Not talking about anyone in particular here...I definitely do not have any plans to run off into an old growth forest and let the trees consume me.
But, seriously - I can understand why so many stories and creatures have come from forests. They're practically an inherently magical thing, themselves...it only makes sense that we would fill them with similar stories.
Oh my gosh, I was not expecting this book to be as absolutely insane as it was.
The book follows three women who all fell for the same fake profile - how they met him, how they fell in love, how they started getting suspicious, and finally, how they all ended up finding each other to band together and stop him from taking advantage of other women. (Because there were other women - a LOT of them.)
And like...there was no monetary gain here. It was all emotional labor, and torment.
Mostly, I'm just trying to figure out where "Ethan" found the time to catfish multiple women at the same time, staying up late to talk to each and every one of them.
I listened to this one as an audiobook - and let me preface this by admitting that I'm new to the audiobook scene. I have trouble focusing on things like movies, podcasts, and audiobooks if I'm not doing something to keep myself just occupied enough that my brain will slow down and focus on them. But when I tell you, this audiobook is THE best-produced that I've listened to...the author is the one narrating, and she talks as if she's telling you the story personally, and they got a male narrator on to do the Ethan bits, so you don't have that weird "woman trying to do a man's voice" thing going on...just, amazing choices, all around.
It is honestly a crime that I've read (and enjoyed) as much Naomi Novik as I have, but still haven't even touched the Temeraire books.
Buried Deep is a collection of short stories, most of which tie into Novik's other works. There were a couple of stories set in the Temeraire universe, the proto-type short story that became Spinning Silver, a story set in the Scholomance universe (which reminded me, I really have to go back and finish that series!), and a lovely Irene Adler piece that goes out of its way to represent the femme fatale as an actual equal to Holmes.
Of all of the stories, I feel most comfortable commenting on the Spinning Silver addition. The original short story more closely followed the fairy tale that it was based on, with Miryem having to meet the challenge of the king of the Staryk for her reputation for being able to "turn silver into gold" (with smart economic practices!)
I kind of like the way that the original short story ended? It's a satisfying conclusion...but I really love seeing the way Novik built on that premise and created something deeper. Something...Buried Deeper?
Okay, yeah, no, cool. I'll just see myself out.
I'm low-key in love with the way Lafebre draws characters. I had to stop reading several times to just admire facial expressions, or their eyes, or their posture...like, this thing is SO pretty!
The story is also funny - well okay, not funny funny, it's a murder mystery built around a bipolar psychologist who is guided by the ghosts of the women in her family, but the entire thing is very tongue-in-cheek and the events keep escalating until the absolute end of the story.
I am 100% there for books with secret underground cults that accidentally bring about the end of the world. Lovecraft has ruined me in that regard.
The plot outside of the cult stuff felt kind of...stale? Is stale the right word to use for a book? Like, SO much of the story revolves around a Viking reenactment, which (potentially) justifies the links that the story has to Norse mythology.
But it was a strange choice for a small, English town - even stranger when there's little time actually spent with the reenactors. They show up like a deus ex machina to act as an army against said secret underground cultists, and that's pretty much the extent of their actual appearance.
My daughter picked this one up from the library - she's been on a board book kick, because she likes how heavy the pages feel.
It's honestly a pretty decent phonics practice book. The stories build on the long vowel sounds, adding in more as you progress through each of the little stories.
It really brought me back to my Hooked on Phonics days.