late august books
Aug. 28th, 2019 08:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skazkaI've been trying to cut back on my usual habit of stress-shopping, so I've been stress-reading instead -- now you all get to hear about it.
I profoundly enjoyed Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger -- it's an absolutely killer riff on class, gender, and the Gothic with an engagingly odious narrator (I'm sure it's been compared to Turn of the Screw/Rebecca/etc. into infinity already but it's really doing something distinctive with those textual parallels rather than riffing for riff's sake) and I want to read a lot more about the Ayres siblings one way or another. I'm finding it hard to write fic for, in part due to the distinctiveness (and obliviousness) of Faraday as a POV character, but I'll definitely be nominating it for Yuletide this year if you want fic about troubled gothic siblings all grown up and/or gay RAF pilots and Wrens.
I also revisited Emma Donoghue's Slammerkin for the first time in maybe a full decade -- it's fun to see all the ways Donoghue's prose and her approach to the material world of Georgian England has influenced the way I write (or want to write) but holy shit, I'm not sure any more why I was so ready to categorize the novel as YA back then simply because it had a younger protagonist. I can detect some interesting textual interplay going on (including maybe a sort of ghostly compare-and-contrast with Alias Grace) but mostly I'm shocked at my younger self's denseness. Most of my academic reading has been Victorian or neo-Victorian one way or another lately, so it's fun to dip into Georgian social struggles + Waters' emphatically post-Victorian Britain to sort of bracket or bookend it all.
I've tried to make the pivot from Audible to libro.fm at a friend's rec since it lets you support small booksellers/keep your actual audiobook files permanently, and so far I'm enjoying it -- the search function is annoyingly fucked up, but I've been listening to Wade Davis' Into the Silence (about WWI-era mountaineering, British imperialism, and the first attempted ascent on Everest) while I cook and it really slaps.
Nonfiction-wise, I'm back on the Plantagenet train researching John Bradmore/Shrewsbury maxillofacial injuries for something gross I'm working on; I loved/am loving Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture (ed. Larissa Tracy, Kelly DeVries) and Timothy Arner's "The Disappearing Scar of Henry V: Triage, Trauma, and the Treatment of Henry’s Wounding at the Battle of Shrewsbury". I've also been down a rabbit hole of Victorian prisons, 19th/early 20th century legal and medical responses to child sexual abuse (yes, it's wildly depressing, thanks for asking) and Soviet responses to homosexuality. Some of it is likely to end up in fic some day, but most of it is just filling the research-shaped hole in my life.
...on an unrelated note, jesus you guys, Netflix's The King looks like it's going to make my head pop off with incoherent Histories rage and yet I know I'm absolutely going to watch it. I'd say "watch it and get drunk", but I have a liquor tolerance of approximately zero right now. I understand it must be really tempting to cast oneself as Falstaff in one's own Histories project, but on what planet is that a Falstaff? I'm calling my mother.
I profoundly enjoyed Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger -- it's an absolutely killer riff on class, gender, and the Gothic with an engagingly odious narrator (I'm sure it's been compared to Turn of the Screw/Rebecca/etc. into infinity already but it's really doing something distinctive with those textual parallels rather than riffing for riff's sake) and I want to read a lot more about the Ayres siblings one way or another. I'm finding it hard to write fic for, in part due to the distinctiveness (and obliviousness) of Faraday as a POV character, but I'll definitely be nominating it for Yuletide this year if you want fic about troubled gothic siblings all grown up and/or gay RAF pilots and Wrens.
I also revisited Emma Donoghue's Slammerkin for the first time in maybe a full decade -- it's fun to see all the ways Donoghue's prose and her approach to the material world of Georgian England has influenced the way I write (or want to write) but holy shit, I'm not sure any more why I was so ready to categorize the novel as YA back then simply because it had a younger protagonist. I can detect some interesting textual interplay going on (including maybe a sort of ghostly compare-and-contrast with Alias Grace) but mostly I'm shocked at my younger self's denseness. Most of my academic reading has been Victorian or neo-Victorian one way or another lately, so it's fun to dip into Georgian social struggles + Waters' emphatically post-Victorian Britain to sort of bracket or bookend it all.
I've tried to make the pivot from Audible to libro.fm at a friend's rec since it lets you support small booksellers/keep your actual audiobook files permanently, and so far I'm enjoying it -- the search function is annoyingly fucked up, but I've been listening to Wade Davis' Into the Silence (about WWI-era mountaineering, British imperialism, and the first attempted ascent on Everest) while I cook and it really slaps.
Nonfiction-wise, I'm back on the Plantagenet train researching John Bradmore/Shrewsbury maxillofacial injuries for something gross I'm working on; I loved/am loving Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture (ed. Larissa Tracy, Kelly DeVries) and Timothy Arner's "The Disappearing Scar of Henry V: Triage, Trauma, and the Treatment of Henry’s Wounding at the Battle of Shrewsbury". I've also been down a rabbit hole of Victorian prisons, 19th/early 20th century legal and medical responses to child sexual abuse (yes, it's wildly depressing, thanks for asking) and Soviet responses to homosexuality. Some of it is likely to end up in fic some day, but most of it is just filling the research-shaped hole in my life.
...on an unrelated note, jesus you guys, Netflix's The King looks like it's going to make my head pop off with incoherent Histories rage and yet I know I'm absolutely going to watch it. I'd say "watch it and get drunk", but I have a liquor tolerance of approximately zero right now. I understand it must be really tempting to cast oneself as Falstaff in one's own Histories project, but on what planet is that a Falstaff? I'm calling my mother.
