Alison Rumfitt - Tell Me I'm Worthless

Listened to the audiobook, and finished early this week, likely while doing the dishes, or something in the kitchen. I remember that specifically for the first scene of (what I believe was) the last part: the flashback to the house's history. I think something like that is always powerful: when a novel suddenly shifts to the speed and focus of a short story.

Overall: a pretty good horror book. Perhaps a little to "online" for my tastes (what a terrible phrase. what a terribly dismissive way of referring to an entire subsection of expression), but realistically that critique is self critique: how would I know that if i didn't waste time online.

JoJo's Bizzare Adventure

Finished part 6. Read the first chapter of part one.

I've debated counting manga in my reading log, but who cares! It has words!

JoJo is such a unique reading experience. I've been going through it slowly for more than a year now, and I'm still not sure if I know how to read it. Is it a joke? Is it almost uncomfortably earnest? I don't know at all, and I love to read it even if only for that.

But if I keep reading this slowly, I might have more time to think over that idea. This week I wanna take a moment to marvel at part 6, and how of all the fictional representations of Florida I've ever seen, none have come closer to capturing what it feels like that Stone Ocean, which really gives me a soft spot for the manga, even if its maybe as messy as its got since part 1. (Footnote: I grew up in Florida. My family lives in Florida. I'm not there now, but previously I've lived like everywhere in the state) Maybe this accuracy has to do with what I described in the paragraph above.

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

Got about halfway through book five. I've been reading them again to see if I like them, but I really don't think I do. Book 1, when it was playing with hobbits.... that was the stuff. This tho...

Ok, so let's be fair. I don't like fantasy much at all. Part of why I wanted to re-read these books (well... re-listen) was to sit with these feelings and try to understand them. So maybe expect more on that at a later time.

Joyce Carol Oates - Last Days (stories)

I read the last two stories in this collection this week: Lamb of Abyssalia and Our Wall.

Let me talk about this collection: Oates is back baby! This seems to be where she started to write more of her more fantastical, Kafka-influenced stories (no, not Kafka-esque. We're talking Kafka fables, not his bureaucratic kink), which is one of my favorites of her styles.

Joyce Carol Oates - Mysteries of Winterthurn

Started this after finishing the short stories above. I remember not liking it as much as the other gothic novels when I read it before, but we'll see what I think now. I'm maybe twenty pages in, only enough to start to pick up the narrative voice.

KA Applegate, Animorphs 3: The Encounter

I am now old enough to "go back" to books I liked as a child. Look: as an audiobook, you can knock one of these out in less than a day, while at your job. They've been pretty good, so far.

Berserk

Read chapters 368 to 375, which is all of them out now.

An observation, in place of anything else: ever since the original author died, Griffith has not been drawn as a woman. In fact, every chapter he's appeared, he's had a conspicuously muscular torso, drawn as though to ascertain to the reader that yes, he is surely a man. Make of that what you will.

The Cincinanti Review, vol 20.1

New thing: I am reading the places that have rejected my writing, to learn what they like.

Thomas Pynchon - Against the Day

Read a little from part 2 this week. It's really spreading in this chapter, with new places POVs, etc, and much more of an obviously sci-fi bent. I'm enjoying it by letting my mind go, as tho listening to a boomer relative at Thanksgiving or something telling lots of jokes.

Ursula K LeGuin - Earthsea

I finished Tombs of Atuan and I started The Farthest Shore.

Maybe this is a good place to think about my opinions on fantasy, as I loved Tombs, and I'm finding Shore hard to get thru, as I felt about Wizard, the first of the Earthsea books. I think it has something to do with the way the political structures of fantasy books usually are: stable, or at the very least organic.

Le Guin is (of course) a great counter example to this. Her sci-fi doesn't have this "organic" feeling to it, and neither does Tombs. In Tombs, especially, the social structure built atop (though not of) a magical Real (or whatever) feels more like a trap then a structure, you know.

But then why do I not feel the same about the other two books in the series so far? Who knows.