currently

• the tombs of atuan, ursula k. le guin
• understanding a photograph, john berger
• archive fever, jacques derrida

current library waitlist

• camp damascus, chuck tingle-
  • i actually preordered the ebook bc preorders got a free bandana from my favorite artist. but i hate kobo so i'm just gonna read it from the library, lmao
• doppelganger, naomi klein
  • me immediately upon seeing her name: if your naomi be klein, you're doing fine. ok good it's the good naomi
    • then reading the summary and laughing til i cried. yeah i gotta read this
• black harbour, xaiver michael campbell & heather barrett
  • gonna be a heavy read i think, but a necessary one
  • also came highly recommended by a prof whose opinion means the world to me
• the secret history, donna tartt
  • every year i say it's gonna be the year i read this. but every year i am still like "no, as a recovering ex-classics major it's still too soon" and i just keep essentially hitting the snooze button on the library hold
• silver nitrate, silvia moreno-garcia
  • this sounds exactly up my alley and i really loved mexican gothic so i am fuckin EXCITED. set the hold for just as the semester ends as a nice treat for myself!
• ducks, kate beaton
  • not sure if i am emotionally in a state for this rn but that's what the waitlist is for

finished

books

• carmilla, j. sheridan le fanu (07??)
  • oh man the goat. i wish i'd made notes when i read this but it was under very strange circumstances:
    • hour ten of staying out of my hotel for twelve hours so i could avoid the staff member who was aggressively hitting on me :/
    • i read this sitting in a mall bookstore after grabbing it because i realized somehow i'd never actually read it, and also it was short enough i could finish it in my two remaining hours
  • anyway i loved this, beautiful and charged. perfect bite-sized read, no pun intended
• explore everything: place-hacking the city, bradley l. garrett (0613)
  • i love reading urbex accounts so this was a really great read for me. got my hit of great stories/pictures and also got a lot of anti-securitization analysis so i'm thriving as a geographer rn
  • Over the past four years, the city has seen countless reasons to increase security measures in order to match an imaginary threat level [...] And yet after each of these events ends, the security levels remain 'heightened' the security infrastructure remains in place.
    • love the observation that as places become more heavily securitized, it becomes easier to bypass security (because more complexity = more exploitable weaknesses)
  • locating sites of haunted memory, seeking interaction with the ghosts of lives lived
  • halfway through he started recounting how everyone on the forums hated him and consequently i stopped reading to spend like a day and a half on uer reading 15-year-old forum drama. modern social media simply does not and cannot compare to the forum experience in this regard
    • literally broke out 'lurkers support me in emails' in a published book ok man sure
    • this book is all like 'people despised us because we were REBELS we were LIBERTINES we were RENEGADES' and the forums were like 'yeah this guy got every single one of his team arrested because he would not stop bragging to media. he was pretty nice when i met him tho'
  • had a similar reaction to this book as i did to on the road. which is to say i read this whole thing like "cool story but i am unable to fully enjoy it knowing that real live people were this fucking stupid"
    • kept imagining myself as this man's poor beleaguered lawyer facepalming upon hearing his client be like "yeah so the cops are investigating us and detained me and took my passport and i went straight from my detention to an interview with a reporter from GQ"
  • anyway. great writer, very cool stories, don't fucking talk to the media about laws you broke and don't talk to cops about fucking anything ever. what the hell
• lord of the butterflies, andrea gibson (0530)
  • reading through this like yeah. yeah. yeah. oh that's a bit heavy-handed but -- oh yeah no yeah. yeah
  • You don't want a soft death.
  • You want a hard life that is your life.
  • ooof the poem about the pulse shooting, i had to take a break
  • There will be music for you
  • one day.
• denison avenue, daniel innes & christina wong (0528)
  • the preface explicitly setting out that colonialism is an ongoing process and that gentrification is part of that pattern of displacement? oh i am hooked already
  • oh ok ok ok ten minutes in and i'm crying already
  • this is so beautifully written, i love the way she changes the text formatting to illustrate
  • a really great read and daniel innes' illustrations are beautiful, i enjoyed this so much
• wintering, katherine may (0503)
  • ok so here's the thing: i am glad this has resonated with so many people because we really do need to fight against hustle culture and the protestant work ethic, we all need to do less. however, this was very much a book about a very english person discovering things that other cultures know and being shocked at every turn and it's like. ok. just incredibly english (derogatory)
    • but then i got incredibly annoyed at the bad reviews that are like "oooooooo so PRIVILEGED to be able to WORK LESS" and it's like yeah but is that not the point. that overwork is killing us. like i just hate arguments that are like "a remedy isn't worth considering unless everyone in the whole world can access the remedy immediately" like. i cannot take these arguments seriously bc it has the same energy as "i suffered so everyone else should," you know, the kind of arguments that justify indefinite harm to future people based on current suffering, it's so antisocial and bleak and cruel. and yet: i didn't really like this book so i'm mad these arguments made me so defensive of it
  • samhain description straight from wikipedia except for the parts that are critical of frazer lmfao
  • my big issue with the book isn't even the englishness but that the throughline between the chapters is just ???? like i was happy to see the whole rejection of linear time for cyclical time thing show up, that is in fact something i am passionate about, but i was reading the epilogue like "oh that's been the central thesis this whole time?? oh yeah i guess. ok" because some chapters just didn't slot in with that especially well
  • anyway not a five-star read imo but definitely a five-star thesis. reject linear time!!!
• another language of flowers, dorothea tanning (0215)
  • as a rule i do not love poems about flowers but i was like "well i love tanning" but unfortunately the poems are still. poems by other people, about flowers
    • one of them had a line about keats and i was like this is what i'm saying. this is why. fuck flower poems and FUCK keats
    • one of the poets rhymed "eye" and "enemy" like! miss me with that 19th century shit
  • as a rule i DO like flower paintings and i love tanning but maybe just not here? like they were lovely, but they left me a little cold
    • lmfao the exception was one of a blue flower on a blue background and it looked like there were stars painted across and i was like OH but then the stars were uh. dust on my screen
  • finally hit a poem i liked!! the last one lmao. it's by brenda shaughnessy, would quote but the formatting makes it and i cannot recreate it here alas. i am sidetracked now bc i am reading her poems instead, here is a good one
  • squinting at the screen like "wait can anyone just create some art about a flower and some basic bitch will buy it. is this the secret to art"
• ways of seeing, john berger (0206)
  • i actually had a real fun time not just reading the text and agreeing or disagreeing with it, but reading the comments pencilled in by a previous reader of this book that was then scanned and placed online for pirates to do their thing (and, of course, agreeing or disagreeing with them). by the end of the book i felt like i'd had one of those discussions where you and the other person are fundamentally opposed but you find common ground in really surprising places and come out of it feeling good instead of miserable?
    • i have long thought that reading a book with a stranger's notes in the margins is the ideal way to read a book but this, on top of that, being a pirated ebook with at least one page missing... this book that gets into how duplication and distribution creates multiplicities of meaning...... fuckin transcendent, man
  • anyway! i read this for my thesis and i am so glad i did, this was a fun read but also so influential on pretty much everyone i am reading for my methods
• a wizard of earthsea, ursula k. le guin (0129)
  • this would have been a boring series if i were the protagonist bc i woulda stayed with ogion forever. rip to ged but i'm different
  • ged's a fuckin dumbass lmfao. like i know that's the point but he sucks so bad
  • vetch is a real one though. absolute king
  • Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evil powers: evil is of earth.
  • yessssss it's yarrow time. the only character i actually remembered from when i read this as a kid, lmao
  • enjoyable reread but i am so focused on the afterword rn... "war as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous" yes ursula you are as ever right about everything
• listening for the dead bells: highland magic in prince edward island, marian bruce (0121)
  • following my local witch lore up with some neighboring supernatural lore... it's honestly wild how much of this is extremely different despite being neighbouring provinces (nl & pei) with folklore passed down from neighbouring countries (ireland/england & scotland (/england also? i'm kinda unclear on that tbh)
    • lmfaoooo at yeats being like "the scottish trying to get rid of the fae? rip to them but we're different. those are our respected frenemies" like actually yeah that IS one of the things i noticed as being very foreign to my local lore
    • also yeats: "in scotland, you are too theological, too gloomy. you have made even the devil religious" go off king
  • lots familiar too though: changelings, knot magic, visitations, seventh sons, random old women with second sight pertaining solely to fishing grounds
  • "most distinguished man of letters in english history" samuel johnson: "wow i wanna know if second sight is real. seems like a lot of accounts of it in gaelic-speaking places so i will go there. [five minutes later] ew why is everyone speaking gaelic. impossible to tell if these accounts are true because i don't speak gaelic. why did no one tell me they speak gaelic in gaelic-speaking places"
  • anyhow really enjoyable read! i do wish the final chapter (on losing the gaelic language) had been elsewhere in the book (or a separate piece altogether) bc i felt like it undermined the whole thing to end on a note that wasn't supernatural-related at all. but at the same time, like [sighs in 'lost a lot of ancestral culture to the english'] yeah
• making witches, barbara rieti (0113)
  • lmfao i was like "i gotta read some shit that isn't for work or class this year" and then. read something that inadvertently ended up being kinda helpful for my thesis
  • anyway great book, loved getting context for like. things i have known all my life but never really thought about i guess? plus stuff i didn't know even though it comes from areas my family is from
  • also made me think of my supernatural folklore class when my prof asked about the old hag and all the non-newfoundlanders were like "the what" and those of us from here were just like "yeah yeah the old hag, of course we all know her." like that one xkcd comic except it's like "the average person only knows 1-2 sleep paralysis demons"

short stories

• why don't we just kill the kid in the omelas hole, isabel j. kim (0225?)
  • happily i read this juuuuuuust in time for all the omelasposting on cohost or i woulda been confused
  • i liked it but as i said on cohost, idk something about seeing a story 1) on clarkesworld 2) by a writer named isabel 3) that is very pointed and yet could easily be deliberately misunderstood by a bunch of bad faith actors chomping at the bit to do a bit of targeted harassment. well it's not my first rodeo. and i don't like the rodeo, so i'm very tense as i hold my breath waiting for the threat of a rodeo to pass

zines

• k's recent zine (0119)
  • she gave me a copy just before driving me to the airport and i am so glad she did, it was heavy and yet really lovely to read

other things i read and want to talk about

• two poems by nora hikari (0220)
  • I HOPE THAT WHEN WE ARE GONE YOU WILL MISS US AND I HOPE THAT WHILE WE ARE HERE YOU WILL CALL US BY OUR NAMES AND I HOPE THAT WHEN WE HAVE BEEN LED DOWN THE LONG ROAD TO HELL YOU WILL REMEMBER THAT WE WEPT THE WHOLE WAY DOWN.
  • these poems both hurt so bad/good. i hope these hopes and i want these wants.
• i will fucking piledrive you if you mention AI again, ludic (0619)
  • 🔥🔥🔥
  • if you continue to try { thisBullshit(); } you are going to catch (theseHands)

abandoned

• a court of thorns and roses, sarah j. maas
  • this was recced to me sooooo many times but it's uh. shall we say not my cup of tea and move on