Reading to soothe my jangled nerves | Library haul
The construction outside has been relentless, my brain is frazzled, and the only thing that's making me feel better is losing myself in fictional worlds!
So the wonderful Lars was dispatched to the library and came back staggering under the weight of a giant pile of books - we've got everything from gothic horror to lady pirates, chosen family to underground women artists, queer fiction, cosy fantasy, literary fiction, and a nice bit of murder. Something for every flavour of mood.
Prepare your (no doubt already overstuffed) TBRs and let's dive in!
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I am jangled today. I'm not gonna lie. We have construction going on outside our apartment on both sides of the building and it's been going on for weeks, and as someone who is hypersensitive and hypervigilant and has CPTSD, having voices and drills and banging and noise just constantly going on is an absolute fucking nightmare. So I'm feeling a little bit fried.
But the one thing that always makes me feel better is chatting with you and getting lost in a good book. So Lars very kindly went out to the library for me and got me this enormous pile of books. I thought I would just go through them with you and show you what's on my TBR this week. Hopefully that's fun for you and for me.
I'm not able to do a lot of work at the moment, which is blah. It's very frustrating. I'm very frustrated.
I have actually read a couple of these already because I've been holed up in my bedroom just getting lost in another world. So I think let's start with the ones I've already read, shall we?
The Ones I've Already Read
The Adventures of Amina Al-Sarafi - Shannon Chakraborty
I keep saying I'm not a fantasy girlie, but I have been reading a lot of fantasy lately, so I'm going to have to change that image of myself, I think.
This was fantastic. Absolutely brilliant. It's the story of a middle-aged lady pirate who is sent off on an adventure to rescue a kidnapped girl — I mean, you had me at middle-aged lady pirates.
One of the things that I was concerned about when I picked it up was that it was gonna be like, oh, but she just needs the love of a good man, and there would be some romantic element and they would take it out of how cool it is to be a middle-aged lady pirate and turn it into something like, oh, she was only a pirate because she never knew true love. Yuck.
But they didn't. And I was so excited. She was just cool. She was a badass pirate who had got old and gone to settle down with her family — her daughter and her mother and her brother and her brother's family — and then she was called out of retirement to do this job, and she did it. And it looks like — I know there's another book coming — but it looks like there are more adventures on the horizon for Amina Al-Sarafi.
I absolutely loved it. I was so happy just to have a story of a badass middle-aged woman doing the things she loves. It brought me enormous, enormous joy.
Mister Magic - Kiersten White
This is a sort of creepy horror about a television show — a kids' television show — that nobody can find any record of, even though everybody remembers it. So it's not on YouTube, there are no kind of articles or scripts or clips from it anywhere, and it turns out to be something actually magic.
I was a bit disappointed with this because it's really well written. The storytelling is fantastic. It's really creepy. It's got some really good kind of dark atmospheric elements, but overall the fundamental why this was all happening just felt really hollow. And yeah, ultimately it just couldn't bring it home, which was a real shame because I love the premise, I love the idea of — I love anything to do with stuff that's supposed to be for kids but actually is darker. So yeah, I was a bit disappointed. It's still a good read, but I was a bit disappointed with it overall.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed — Mariana Enriquez
The biggest disappointment so far of this bunch, and I was so looking forward to this. I've had it on my library list for ages and it finally became available. It's been blurbed by Patti Smith, who is a huge heroine of mine. It's creepy horror short stories — which I always feel some kind of way about. I'm not a huge fan of short stories, but when they're done well they can be amazing.
I love the cover, I love the title. I read about halfway through but I ended up not finishing it — I read kind of half the stories. They were creepy and atmospheric, there was a lot of weird body horror stuff which I quite like. But ultimately it felt like none of them were brought home. They ended before any kind of satisfying resolution. I get that that's kind of the style of this kind of story — they're sort of like little vignettes into a spooky thing — but I wanted more. I like a satisfying resolution. I don't like to be left hanging. So I was really disappointed by that because I thought I was gonna love it.
I just wanted it to be better.
The Examiner — Janice Hallett
This is really interesting. It's about six masters students on a multimedia art course, and the whole story is told in text messages, diary entries, and emails — so it's epistolary. Someone dies, someone goes missing.
I don't know if the story really works, but I had a really good time getting there, if that makes sense. It was engaging, it was gripping all the way through, but the actual kind of meat of what the story was — when I got to the end of it I was like, oh. Okay. It was very fast-paced, and because it's written in these little short segments it kind of drags you through the story very quickly, which I like. The characters were interesting and well drawn given the limitations of the format, and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. I probably will have completely forgotten about it by next week, but while I was reading it I had a good time.
What I Haven't Read Yet
So now we have six here which I haven't read. This is what I'm gonna be reading for the rest of the week.
All Fours — Miranda July
I feel like everybody has been talking about this — or maybe they've stopped now. I'm always a little bit behind when things are super hyped. But Miranda July's name has kept coming up in peculiar circumstances. One of my friends that I'm in a book club with — one of my closest friends, she's super smart, super brilliant — she asked me if I had read it because she wanted to talk about it, and I got the impression that she did not enjoy it. So I'm kind of intrigued.
It's about an artist, a sort of mildly famous artist who travels cross country and reinvents herself. And that's about all I know about it. Miranda July is supposed to be a very funny, acerbic, sarcastic author. So who knows? Who knows? But that's the one I am just about to start next.
The House in the Cerulean Sea — T.J. Klune
Another super-hyped book that eventually kind of trickled its way down into my consciousness. This one intrigued me because it's described as a delightful Orwellian fantasy, which seems at odds. One of the blurbs says "1984 meets the Umbrella Academy with a pinch of Douglas Adams thrown in" — so make of that what you will. I have no idea what to make of it.
I know that it was one of those books that everybody adored. I'm not very good at liking the same things as everybody else, so we shall see. The premise is that it's about a sort of found family — finding an unlikely family in an unexpected place — which, if you know, if you watch my last books video, that is something that is a topic I love very much. But this is about a character called Linus Baker, who is a caseworker in the department in charge of magical youth, and he's tasked with determining whether six dangerous magical children are likely to bring about the end of the world. Which sort of reminds me of something else, but I'm not sure what that is. But anyway, no idea what to expect.
The Foundling — Stacey Halls
This has been on my TBR for so long that I can't remember why or anything about it. And it came around on the library, so I was like, oh, okay, I'll have a look.
It's a historical fiction and it's about a woman who leaves an illegitimate child at London's Foundling Hospital and then comes back later when her circumstances have improved to reclaim the child, only to be told that she has already claimed her child. And shenanigans ensue, I guess. I don't know. I don't know why it's on my TBR. It doesn't sound like something I'm particularly into, but somebody that I trust must have recommended it because otherwise it wouldn't be here. So we'll give it a go and we'll see. I'm not adverse to children in stories — children are allowed to exist in the fictional world — but generally stories about mothers and babies, really not really my thing. But we'll see, we'll see.
Detransition, Baby — Torrey Peters
This is on the list because it was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. I always like to keep up with the Women's Prize for Fiction — I like a lot of the books that they recommend.
It's another one about a family, but as far as I know the titular baby doesn't actually show up very much in the story, and it's more about the complications of being an unconventional family, being in a queer family, and navigating all of the difficulties and challenges and joys that that might bring.
The thing that appealed to me about it is that it is about trans characters who, from what I've heard, just get to be ordinary human beings. Which obviously, as we know, trans people are ordinary human beings — but so often in popular culture they are stereotyped. I'm always on the lookout for characters like Sin-Dee in Tangerine, who is a trans character who's just allowed to be a total bitch the whole way through. And I just love that. Any time somebody other gets to be a three-dimensional human, and even an unlikeable three-dimensional human — I love that. I think that's fantastic. It really brings me joy. So yeah, we'll see. We'll see what this one's like.
Women of the Underground: Art — Zora Von Burden
I only actually got one non-fiction book this time around, which is unusual for me. Usually non-fiction is my happy place, but like I said, I'm feeling jangled and there isn't enough room for facts in my brain at the moment. So just one non-fiction.
This is interviews with 24 radical women artists — doing something interesting, doing something radical, doing something different — and what they felt about their own work and how they talk about their own work. Obviously I'm interested in that, being that I am an artist, I am something of an underground artist, and particularly after my last collection Things Men Have Said To Me Instead Of Hello, I'm very interested in other women artists who are doing interesting, radical, feminist-type things. There might be something in the future that I'm doing with a friend of mine to tie in with this, but I'm just gonna leave you hanging on that one for the time being.
The Starless Sea — Erin Morgenstern
I just read her other book, The Night Circus, and it was my first five-star book of the year. I absolutely adored it. It was sort of like magical fantasy circus, but the thing that I loved most about it was it had a sort of Rube Goldbergian, mechanical clockwork sort of thread that ran all the way through, which I just adore. I'm obsessed with Rube Goldberg machines, I love clockwork, I love mechanical things, I love the tactility of analogue machinery. And that book just described it all so lovingly, and then it had this magical element, and then it was a circus — and it just, tick tick tick tick tick, so many of my boxes. It was very exciting.
I've heard that The Starless Sea is a bit more opaque than The Night Circus — a little bit more difficult to inhabit the world that she creates. But it sounds just as exciting, honestly. It's about a graduate student called Zachary Rawlins who discovers a mysterious book hidden in a library and comes across a story in the book from his own life, and that sort of leads him on a sort of scavenger hunt — finding clues, trying to get to the bottom of how his own story came to be recorded in this book.
I think just as a premise that's really exciting. I love the idea of finding yourself in books — I think that's a fairly universal theme for all of us who love to read. And coming across your own story? Give me a scavenger hunt and I'm happy, you know? I just think that's a really cool premise, and I'm looking forward to digging into that one.
Hoping that I will love it as much as The Night Circus, and prepared for the inevitable disappointment when I don't. It's always very, very difficult to follow up a book you loved. It's rare that the next book you read is as good or better. But I'm open. I'm open to surprises. I'm always open to being delighted.
That's about all the juice I have in me this week. I hope you've enjoyed this. I hope that some of these books sound interesting to you and you want to add them to your own TBR. I will find a way to let you know what I thought of them — maybe I'll put it in the description over time, or maybe I'll just put it on my blog or in the newsletter. The ones I particularly love, you'll hear about again, obviously. And if there are any that you're particularly interested in finding out what I thought of, leave a comment below and I'll let you know.
Other than that, I hope you're having a better week than I am. I hope that wherever you live, there isn't construction going 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and you're having lots and lots of peace and quiet to deal with everything else that's going on in the world at the moment.
Thank God for books. That's all I can say. Thank God for being able to escape into fictional worlds and self-soothe when shit hits the fan.
Love you all loads. 🐱✨
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