reading 12/5/18

[skazka]

I'd like to post more often here on what I'm reading, but I've done almost no reading of physical books since my move, so that would be a tall order. I liked The Lost Girls Of Camp Forevermore by Kim Fu very much; the novel is about a group of girls who find themselves stranded in the wilderness on a summer camp trip gone wrong, but also about who those girls grow up to be and how they deal with trauma in their adult lives. I appreciated that the structure of the book unfolds the past and present sections more or less simultaneously so it never felt like trauma itself was supposed to be some kind of guessing game. I've begun Fatal Vision but MacDonald's 1960s-typical cavalier attitude toward women in the excerpts from his interviews creeped me out even more than the graphic details of the crimes; ultimately it was too much for me to listen to in an empty house, and I'll have to pick it up later. My most recent Audible pick is Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, which I'm enjoying the hell out of as an examination of espionage and weird relationships between men. Other than that... I'm still making my way through Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties and enjoying it very much but it's not exactly easy reading, or suited to my usual nightmare collection of multitasking tabs.

For whatever reason I have a hard time relaxing reading things that aren't at least somewhat grim. I need to stock up on things that stay just this side of dismal.