Now March was truly surprising in how low-key of a month it was. No preorders, no big impulse purchases, and no substantial trips to any thrift stores. As usual, I wonder if I’ve forgotten something, but I’m fairly confident the thing I did get is all I have to show for the past month. It’s probably for the best; some personal expenses have come up, so I should be a little less spend-happy anyway.
Let’s check out what I did pick up.Read More »
Annihilation is a 2014 science fiction horror novel by Jeff VanderMeer and the first novel in the Southern Reach trilogy. Area X, a once lightly populated region, has been under quarantine for decades for unknown reasons, long since reclaimed by nature. There have been 11 expeditions into the region, most of them meeting bizarre and violent ends. The last expedition had all of its members return home under mysterious circumstances, mere husks of their former selves, before all succumbing to aggressive cancer. Now, the 12th expedition is underway, made up of four women including our narrator, the biologist, whose husband was part of the 11th expedition. They struggle to comprehend the phenomena they uncover in this hostile yet strangely captivating environment, the trust between them slowly eroding.Read More »
WWW Wednesday is a weekly book meme run by Sam over at Taking on a World of Words. Check out her post and others over on her blog!
The Three Ws are:
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?
I’m happy to report that I’ve made some fairly decent progress on Watership Down by Richard Adams since last week, considering that I haven’t had a huge reading window to sit down with it. I’ve finished Part One, which has me at nearly 120 pages in. Though I have no clue how things will develop going forward, I am excited by this story being an odyssey, though the promised land of the title that I presume they will be seeking hasn’t even been mentioned yet. Already they have faced many tribulations and encounters with other creatures and rabbits. I’m quite captivated by how many of the rabbits are characterized, with certain concepts being difficult for them to grasp; there’s an interesting balance between them thinking like people and thinking like the animals that they are.
Nothing this week, as I have sadly continued to neglect comics and graphic novels.
As I laid out in the spring TBR I posted yesterday for Top Ten Tuesday, I want to make myself read more from my comic book backlog. Already I plan to be reading A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll soon, though this is hardly an old book that has been left waiting, but I also want to make myself read Vermis I by Plastiboo soon, a mystifying art book about a dungeon-crawler RPG that never existed. I hope I can make myself start or even finish these by next week, but we will see, as I’m not quite sure how my reading time will be divided up in that time.
Until next time, thank you for reading! Feel free to share your own post down below.
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly book meme run by That Artsy Reader Girl. I always love putting together a seasonal TBR list, even though I rarely complete it and a lot of books end up being repeats in the line-up. I just like to get a decent idea of what I might want to read in the near future. With that in mind, half of this list includes books that are neither novels nor nonfiction prose. With no plans to complete/read through any comic book series this year, there are some books I want to make sure I finally crack open and read.Read More »
WWW Wednesday is a weekly book meme run by Sam over at Taking on a World of Words. Check out her post and others over on her blog!
The Three Ws are:
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?
In keeping with a trend lately toward starting books almost entirely on a whim, I decided to finally start reading Watership Down by Richard Adams, a book I’ve heard a lot about since childhood but have never taken the time to actually engage with; I’ve not even seen any of the adaptations. I only started it a couple of days ago, though, after finishing what I was previously reading, so I’m only about 25 pages in right now. So far, I’m surprised by how deeply Adams is building up rabbit social hierarchies, folklore, and even cultural terms, especially since it feels otherwise grounded in reality. It almost feels like a fantasy novel, but the only real fantasy is the notion of rabbits being able to think more like people. It’s feeling a little dry so far, but I’m hoping I’ll get more into it as I get further along.
On Monday I managed to finish reading Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh. Although the tone did indeed feel a little more humorous for much of this, as the protagonist seemed mostly swept away by her own wild imagination, this took a perhaps unsurprising dark turn towards the end considering Moshfegh’s inclination towards telling bleak stories. I’m typically expecting such things from her work, but I found the penultimate developments in this story before the ending to be especially depressing and anger-inducing. I’m not mad at the author, she’s excellent at her craft, just the character, though it did make the book fall in my esteem overall. With time, I will perhaps regard it differently, but for now I’ve got to say that I’m a little soured.
I’m not sure what I’ll read next, since Watership Down is a bit longer than the books I’ve been reading lately so I’m not sure how long it’ll take me, but I would really like to read the graphic novel A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll sometime soon. I really enjoy her art style and one of her short stories from Through the Woods is one of my favourite horror stories ever, so I’m excited to read something longer in form from her.
Until next time, thank you for reading! Feel free to share your own post down below.
WWW Wednesday is a weekly book meme run by Sam over at Taking on a World of Words. Check out her post and others over on her blog!
The Three Ws are:
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?
I’m still making my way through Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh. I think I’ve only managed another chapter or so since last week, but I’m continuing to enjoy it. However, I’m starting to feel like this experience is going to go one of two ways for me: either a shoe will drop that makes the story a lot more interesting or things will stay nebulous with the character ruminating on the ideas of her wild imagination. Though I don’t think I’ll hate the latter thanks to the strength of Moshfegh’s writing, I will be somewhat disappointed. On the one hand, the character does seem to be a really anxious person, more so than she realizes, and on the other hand she does seem sound enough of mind that I don’t think she’s imagining everything. Perhaps by next week we’ll see how things turn out for me.
Over the weekend I read through Shuna’s Journey by Hayao Miyazaki, an illustrated work by the author that was originally published in 1983, before he even founded Studio Ghibli. Though I referred to it as a manga last week, it actually reads a lot more like a picture book, though with greater visual and thematic depth than one made for children. This actually had some of the weirdest and most quietly disturbing ideas I think I’ve seen from a work of his, specifically in the otherworldly forces presented in the story. It was fun to see early iterations on ideas that would pop up in later works too like the films Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke. Though this was a library read, I enjoyed it so much that I will likely pick up a copy to own for myself someday.
I still don’t really know what I’m going to be reading next, but I’ll have to make up my mind soon since I will likely be wrapping up Death in Her Hands pretty soon. I just don’t know what I’m in the mood for, only that I don’t want to read more nonfiction right now.
Until next time, thank you for reading! Feel free to share your own post down below.
It seems I allowed myself to get a little carried away last month, as I’m surprised by how many books I ended up picking up, and I have a nagging suspicion that I’m forgetting one or two (as usual). I can’t just blame thrift shopping this time either, as I’ve picked up more than one brand new book rather impulsively.
Let’s check out these books.Read More »
WWW Wednesday is a weekly book meme run by Sam over at Taking on a World of Words. Check out her post and others over on her blog!
The Three Ws are:
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?
Quite on a whim, I decided to start reading Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh; I was glancing at my shelf wondering what I wanted to read next, and I realized that I hadn’t read any of her books in a minute and this one was just sitting right there. I’m just under halfway through at the moment, and while I am enjoying it, it is also a little slow. Much of it has been about Vesta, the elderly main character, slowly divulging details about her life as we follow her stream of consciousness after finding a note in the woods talking about a supposedly murdered girl who is nowhere in sight. I had thought a more direct mystery would be at the heart of this story, but it seems it is much more about the narratives we weave on our own about the world around us, as well as how we go about constructing narrative for creative writing. I’m intrigued to see where this will go.
Over the weekend I managed to finally finish reading Video Game of the Year by Jordan Minor. Though I enjoyed it fine, I once again felt that he indulged himself a little too much with editorializing, this time in particular about games by the studio FromSoftware; if he wanted to talk about the conversations around game difficulty with their games, fine, but I didn’t need a personal anecdote on why he doesn’t like them and feels like they don’t respect his time. It’s a shame, because I know he is capable of writing entries in a more personally detached way because that’s how the earlier entries were done. I’m sure there’s a wealth of places to read Minor’s opinions elsewhere, and I hope this book brings people to those places, but this wasn’t the stage for them. I won’t be giving this book a full review, but I’d rate it a 3.5 out of 5.
The next book I plan on reading soon is something I picked up at the library after randomly coming across it: Shuna’s Journey by Hayao Miyazaki. This manga was originally published all the way back in 1983 but only saw a release in English in 2022. I’m a fan of Miyazaki’s animation work and had no idea he’d authored/illustrated any manga, so it was an easy choice to pick this up. I’d been needing a comic to read next too, and while this isn’t from the backlog of books I own, it’s still nice to have found something that immediately grabbed my interest. The aesthetics remind me of some of his films, but it appears that this is an original story unconnected to any of those.
Until next time, thank you for reading! Feel free to share your own post down below.
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly book meme run by That Artsy Reader Girl. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I’m a sucker for a good book cover, so a topic related to covers is right up my alley. At first I was going to pull from books I have read already, but instead I decided to plumb the depths of my ever-growing TBR list, reminding me of some books I had completely forgotten about.Read More »
WWW Wednesday is a weekly book meme run by Sam over at Taking on a World of Words. Check out her post and others over on her blog!
The Three Ws are:
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?
I’m still chipping away at Video Game of the Year by Jordan Minor, though I’ve been making more of a concerted effort this week to getting it finished, and I’m happy to report that I feel like I’m in the home stretch. I’m still enjoying the book well enough, though as it has started to cover more modern games I have found Minor to be a little too opinionated at times; this isn’t to say that the topics and issues he brings up aren’t relevant to the background details around the games being discussed, I just feel he occasionally digresses a little too much and editorializes more than I would want from a book like this.
I’m especially happy that I was able to finish The Ghost: A Cultural History by Susan Owens over the weekend, making good on a recent commitment to reading through more books from the library instead of buying them. Though my progress was a little slower due to it being nonfiction, I enjoyed this book quite a lot, and it got me thinking about how so little seems to actually change over time. Even hundreds of years ago, skeptics were publishing very similar arguments against ghosts as skeptics make now. It’s also really amusing to learn that phantasmagoria, which involved lighting effects creating ghostly effects on a stage, came first; the effect wasn’t created because that’s how people reported seeing ghosts, people started reporting seeing ghosts as floating, glowing apparitions after those shows became popular.
I’m still not entirely sure what I’m going to start reading next, but what I do know is that it’s going to be fiction. I don’t have anything against nonfiction, but there’s been a little too much of that going around for my liking. I need more narrative in my life now.
Until next time, thank you for reading! Feel free to share your own post down below.
Muse with Me 