finished

• shadow life, hiromi goto & ann xu (0106) ♥
  • first book of the year but probably the best book of the year, other books are gonna have to work real hard to beat it
• lurch, don mckay (0106)
  • hit or miss, but the hits were real good and the misses weren't too bad
  • some ancient emptiness,
  • something we'd never had but lost
• this radiant life, writ. chantal neveu, trans. erín moure (0118)
  • oh boy. i might try to read this in the original because the french bits in here did hit just right, but the rest... no shade to the translator intended (she seems real cool and does great work!) but i just don't think this was translatable
• llewellyn 2022 magical almanac (0124)
  • my yearly reminder why i don't fw wicca anymore
  • the piece by lupa was incredible, i would read a whole book of that
  • crosson's piece was useful tbh
  • the rest really exemplifies the absolute worst shit about wicca (and neopaganism broadly), ie the piecemeal cultural appropriation, the embracing of obviously fake histories, the continuing influence of gardner, the weird gender shit, stressing a need to understand nature while promoting activities that actively and blatantly harm it..... pls it's 2022 and i have been suffering through this for 25 years can we please just think critically
• congratulations, rhododendrons, mary germaine (0124) ♥
  • This is the night the Lord has made,
  • the wind and sour snow,
  • blades of fluorescence and jalapeno taquitos,
  • from 7-Eleven — all this
  • is the Lord's domain.
  • also just extremely relatable if you too have ever been awake all night in the lounge of the overnight ferry from north sydney to port aux basques
  • overall: this is just so good
• where the words end and my body begins, amber dawn (0130)
  • liked this a lot, generally
  • those rhythms goddamn
  • seen too much uwu soft sapphics~ stuff lately so it was in fact real great to read a poem about lesbian fisting
• taaqtumi: an anthology of arctic horror (0203)
  • horror anthologies are usually hit or miss for me, but this had consistent suspense levels, which was very nice!
  • tended to be gorier than i like, though
  • would watch the hell out of a movie adaptation of 'lounge,' that worldbuilding was incredible
• disintegrate/dissociate, arielle twist (0411) ♥
  • oooof, incredibly raw
  • 'Cause what they don't teach,
  • we learn in hospital beds
• crush, richard siken ⮌ ♥ (0501)
  • did not mean to do a reread at this time but some nights just be like that
  • still a king
  • but we are at the crossroads, my little outlaw,
  • and this is the map of my heart
• stand still stay silent, minna sundberg (0704)
  • well i regret coming back to this lmfao. christianity really does poison people, huh
• my art is killing me and other poems, amber dawn ♥ (0721)
  • library ebooks actually open for me again so my long book drought is over!! glad to be starting back up with this one, amber dawn is incredible
  • And besides, what's another bruise?
  • What's a bruise? What's a bruise?
  • What's a blue moon bruise to do but pull young blood to and fro like the tide? What's a bruise
  • but a testament to the sharp art of surrendering to time and place?
  • and then in the same poem, like that wasn't perfect enough:
  • You (literally you) are reading queer and desperate poetry, and so
  • I already love you like a stopped clock
  • this is just the FIRST POEM
  • and then in another poem:
  • But you (literally you) are reading queer and desperate poetry
  • so may I assume you too have never been afforded
  • an uncomplicated story?
• when the body says no, gabor maté (0811)
  • i put this on my library waitlist like nine months ago because i was gonna do a reading challenge and needed a self-help and/or health book, and this was the only library book available that felt tolerable. no longer doing that challenge but forgot to release my hold so i was like "ok i might as well" but boy howdy was it NOT tolerable
  • it is so weird to read something where you come in ready to learn because the premise is something you believe absolutely (that stress is implicated in almost every condition and exacerbates it) but all he does is actually undermine your belief because his evidence and reasoning are just kinda wild bullshit??
  • like he is so definitely right on stress as a major contributor to so many problems and then he just entirely reduces it to early childhood trauma? like i'm literally someone who believes it is impossible to not experience trauma during childhood and i'm still here like "buddy this is NOT how it works"
  • i think my thing is that... okay so i saw a critique of him that said he was like a victorian medium in a seance, just vaguely being like "a trauma happened to you" and his patients all agree that yes it did, because again, some kind of trauma is inevitable. but then he keeps referring to people who have not experienced trauma? and it's like man, by your own model, trauma can include "not telling your parents something" or "your parents worked" so who the fuck are these people who have not experienced it??
  • i know this was written 20 years ago but leaning so hard on freudian analysis?? in THIS millennium??? sir
  • also multiple times he kept being like "ahh, this ancient knowledge we have forgotten" regarding ancient greek/roman physicians and i don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater but i cannot reconcile maté's focus on, and understanding of, female stress with his admiration for dudes who would have diagnosed all these women with wandering wombs and told them to have a baby to fix their problems
  • i do appreciate though that he's very firm in stating that "positive thinking" as a preventative/cure is simply not a thing and in fact harmful
  • i have since read that maté unabashedly supports the AA/12-step framework so fuck him
• atlas of the heart, brené brown (0814)
  • one of those books where a lot of my friends who do not share my tastes loved it and i'm like "ok let's see what all this is about then."
  • this is what i wanted the maté book to be lmao, what a blessing having this come up in my library holds right after that one. because that's the other thing i hated with maté—all this stuff on how stress is killer and stems from repressing feelings or not understanding them, absolutely fuck all on what to actually do about that
  • anyway this was a very good read BUT i feel like the venn diagram of "people who absolutely need to read this book" and "people who will never, ever pick up a book like this" might not have much overlap? but i hope i am wrong
• the haunting of hill house, shirley jackson ⮌ ♥ (0827)
  • fav book of all time and i felt a reread coming on!
  • No Human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice.
  • me every time i read this book, hollering at whoever will listen: hill house is kinda hot though
  • Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.
  • every time i reread this i come away with a dozen new opinions that i just wanna yell about, who wants to start a book club with me where we meet every month but only talk about this one book
  • Nothing irrevocable had yet been spoken, but there was only the barest margin of safety left them; each of them moving delicately along the outskirts of an open question, and then, once spoken, such a question—as "Do you love me?"—could never be answered or forgotten.
  • i will always be desperate to know what theo saw when she looked back! i've read some good analysis and come up with my own theories but i wanna KNOW
  • Around her the trees and wild flowers, with that oddly courteous air of natural things suddenly interrupted in their pressing occupations of growing and dying, turned toward her with attention, as though, dull and imperceptive as she was, it was still necessary for them to be gentle to a creation so unfortunate as not to be rooted in the ground, forced to go from one place to another, heartbreakingly mobile.
• ghost stories of an antiquary, m. r. james (1009)
  • my dude truly did NOT need to include 'of an antiquary' in the title. it uh. shows
  • good shit though! what's spookier than having scholarly interests
  • also relatable if you've ever not been great at latin, stayed at a terrible hostel, told ghost stories to classicists, or worked in a haunted museum. somehow i'm all of these
  • my only real issue with these is that he occasionally takes the jules verne approach to ending a story, which is to say some wild and exciting shit happens and then it's like "ah! that shit was weird. anyway then i went home"
• hell house, richard matheson (1014)
  • okay so first thing: i read a sketchy pdf version so i don't actually think that i'm getting the true experience here. like someone was described as "rocldike" so i think it's safe to say this is a badly scanned or transcribed thing i am looking at
  • even so! this is good. i love an evil house, and i love when a house and a person haunt each other
  • i do feel like matheson read hill house and was like "what if this house was even hornier" but like, i'm not here to kinkshame
  • loved edith looking at the list of observed phenomena at hell house and it's just an exhaustive list of the horror tropes i like
  • the stuff with florence's spirit guide or w/e was gross but i did like that fischer side-eyed it a little at the end, and it is incredibly on brand for 19th-/early 20th-century spiritualists
  • anyway i enjoyed this overall but when the explanation came i was like.... not bamboozled by a plot twist or confused about it but like "oh THAT'S what all that was about?" just like "ok i guess this is logical?"
  • Go where you will, and do what you will--these are the cardinal precepts of my home.
  • ^ that whole monologue is great but i kept imagining it as one of those pinterest-style "in this house" signs in porches

currently reading

• orestes, euripides
  • ok but i know in a past life i was sitting there in the audience of the dionysia in 408 BC hearing pylades say "not to me, when it is you" and i was rending my fuckin toga. the next day i went to the agora and punched an aeschylus fan in the face and told him this wouldn't have happened if he simply stanned euripides
• dracula, bram stoker
  • icb we're so far into dracula daily and i forgot to include it here? tbh it's probably because reading it this way doesn't feel like i'm reading a book. i'm just getting occasional letters from my dear friends, all of whom are polyamorous and horny
  • i stand by my firm belief that the only good casting for van helsing would be danny devito. all van helsing adaptations suck. no one has successfully captured the "weird but beloved uncle figure who loves his weird little adoptive family" vibe. who is more perfect for that than danny devito
  • Is it possible that love is all subjective, or all objective?
• come along with me, shirley jackson
  • i haven't actually taken this out of the library, i just grab it off the shelf whenever i'm there and have a free moment and read a story or two
  • god i wish come along with me had been finished! where the hell was this going!!

abandoned partway through

• devil house, john darnielle
  • thought this would be right up my alley because i knew it's pretty critical of true crime (and also i like the mountain goats) but the main character's continual insistence that he's not like those other true crime writers was so annoying i gave up, despite getting that that's probably the point of the character
  • also, the punctuation sure was something
  • love u john darnielle though, the prose itself was real good
• collected poems, al pittman
  • i've never read his earliest stuff, and a lot of it is honestly a little rough? but knowing a lot of his later stuff, i'm really excited to see that growth!
  • still some gems there, though (restraining myself from including all of 'ebb tide,' tbh, and the humor stuff is generally great)
  • had i been civilized enough
  • I would have died then
  • 'once when i was drowning' is still a banger of a poem, i am glad it kept me company on the metrobus for so many years
  • okay this has been on my 'currently reading' for ages but after having the ebook at least 8 times from the library, it's time i accept that this is just too many poems and i need to read his stuff one volume at a time
• the arbornaut, meg lowman
  • reading the childhood memoir bits nearly lost me because it is totally unimaginable to me that anyone remembers their childhood that well
  • i kept on though, and i was enjoying it, but she ended up reminding me too much of a superstar prof i had last fall and i hit the point where i just could not stomach another inspirational story about solving problems? like no shade to her or to my prof, kudos to them for doing the work, i just burned out kinda hard last year and i still need time to not be reminded of some parts of that lmao
• i'm glad my mom died, jennette mccurdy
  • only made it through the (very short) prologue before i realized "wow yeah this is gonna be too triggery for me"