Recent reading

[luzula]

My last actual booklogging post was more than a month ago! : / I just have less time for reading these days, I'm not sure why.

Flyaway by Kathleen Jennings (2020)
For book club; all of us were lukewarm towards this book. It is apparently a gothic, which is not a genre I know--I would have called it "creepy contemporary fantasy", or something. So it's possible I enjoyed it less because of not knowing the genre. When I first started reading, I thought, "oh, so it's going to be one of those books where every sentence has to be lush and poetic and contain an unexpected metaphor". But actually it eased off on that, and there are also perfectly simple sentences in it. I thought the setting (backwoods Australia) was the best thing about the book, though of course I can't know how accurate it is. For most of the book, everything is mysterious and creepy and I thought it would remain up to the reader's interpretation--but then near the end, the author decided to straight-up explain everything. I would have preferred a slow reveal.

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells (2021)
Comfort reading about characters I already know! Honestly this novella felt a bit like reading fanfic; I enjoyed it a lot. Although why all the parentheses? Once I started thinking about them, they got on my nerves.

I've also been reading some fic, mostly from Yuletide 2020. I do enjoy putting the longer stories on my ereader while they're still anonymous, and later discovering that something particularly delightful was written by a friend of mine!

Comments

[aurumcalendula]

Murderbot! I suspect the reason why I didn't noticed the parentheses is I tend to overuse them myself.

[luzula]

Whereas I don't use them much at all, so maybe that's why they get on my nerves! Semicolons and m-dashes, now, I use those a lot...

[regshoe]

Heh, that's an ingenious way of extending the Yuletide anon period!

I don't think I'd know how to interpret 'gothic' in the context of modern fiction—I'd think of 18th/19th century novels about terrifying haunted castles and improbable dramatic adventures and vampires and so on.

[chestnut_pod]

Oh, I've been admiring the cover on Flyaway for months now… /is shallow.

Huzzah, meanwhile, for Murderbot :)

[luzula]

Yes! I've got at least one of your Yuletide stories to go, as well. : )

And yes, that's what I think of as well. As for contemporary gothic, there's a short Wikipedia section here, but I don't know if it really helps me that much...

[luzula]

I can see why! It's maybe got a little too much going on for me, with the colors cutting across the patterns, but it is intriguing.

I've got another book club book I should get going on now, but really I just want more comfort reading...

[regshoe]

Huh, that's interesting—though, yeah, maybe not the clearest explanation. I do like the idea of 'eco-Gothic', though—that seems an interesting direction to take all those windswept moors and gloomy forests from the nineteenth-century stuff in.