have an indifferent new year

So, it's not exactly off to a great start. The best book I read was one about funerals so as far as indications on how the new year will go, on a scale of one to ravens cawing under a blood moon, I'd give it a finding the Grim in your tea leaves.

January Book Reviews

Sleeping Beauties (Stephen King, Owen King)

4.5/10 This is the first Stephen King book I read and it's probably an understatement to say it wasn't the best first impression. The premise sounded like it had potential: a mysterious illness turns women into cocoons after falling asleep, if disturbed from their rest they become inhumanly violent and while they rest they are transported to another place. So it sounds good! A disease that affects only women allows a chance to explore important gender issues and societal dynamics! The inhuman violence sounds like a good taste of the horror that King is so well known for! Oooh transported to another place has a hint of sci-fi and mystery as well! Unfortunately not only did I not think any of those were done well, even if they were I think it would've been bogged down by the mind-numbingly boring amount of filler this book has. It was an absolute slog trying to get through this book. First of all, while I'm understanding that King usually focuses his story in small towns in America, the implications of the illness are so large that I feel somehow cheated of a better story by only showing the effects of it in this random US town.

AND imagine my eye roll when it turns out that the mysterious figure responsible for all this somehow decided that this one town is the decider for the fate of women ALL OVER THE WORLD????????????? Can you be more American-centric??

Then, as if to make up for the constricted setting, the book decides to introduce apparently all 100 something people living in the town. People keep getting introduced even halfway through the book and I stopped caring somewhere around the first 30 pages. Then the highlight of the book, the look at gender issues, was so heavy handed that it lost all believable nuance. Like wow, men angry monkey brain, women group motherly brain. Any male characters that aren't total creeps are bland as bread, including the so-called hero we're supposed to be cheering on. Not even the supposed genre tag helped. There was nothing horrific about this book, not the exaggerated violence at least. The most tense I felt the entire time was probably trying to finish it before my library hold was up.

Also hoooly shit the ending was so bad. Like listen, introducing some mysterious godlike entity named Eve as the cause of all this fine. It might have worked better if there was no real reason but I digress. But giving her the oddest mix of motive and powers and personality? One second she's basically god, the next she has rules to her power (Like they get drained or something???) And adding in some weird animal/nature thing like what does that have to do with women?? THEN the ultimate insult having the whole thing be resolved by some bland white psychiatrist convince her to save some other random dude because he's what?? volunteers on the weekend??? is a "good guy"??? I hate this ending so much I can't believe I pushed to finish all 1400 some pages just for this ending.

Fool (Christopher Moore)

4.5/10 So. Apparently this book is supposed to be comedy but I didn't laugh even once while reading it. Like there were some parts I thought was pretty witty? 'There's always a bloody ghost'. I like that kind of self-referencing, fourth wall kind of in-joke. Unfortunately for me, most of this book's humour seemed to be based on just dirty jokes and....that's pretty much it. It won't stop describing people's naked bodies or how clearly ready for sex most of the women are (except for the main love interest because OF COURSE SHE'S GOTTA BE PURE). Like I guess it's supposed to be outrageous, raunchy humour? And I'm just not a fan. But even if I were into sex jokes and making every woman a whore, I don't even like the actual plot. So it drew me in because it was supposed to be a retelling of King Lear from the Fool's perspective. It's a fantastic story and I loved the idea of telling it from the Fool's point of view given that he's one of the very few people who survive the play. But this book made Fool less of a wry, meta commentator and more of a traditional protagonist. He's the one who sets the play's events in motion! He gets with all the women! He's a jester but gets to take down the nobles! It just loses the novelty of the idea that got me interested in the first place.

So not only is the ghost his past lover or whatever, she's also his current love interest's mom?? He's secretly the brother of the king??? He finds some random witches borrowed from Macbeth who give him this drug that makes the evil sisters into him?? He gives the idea for the sisters to turn against the king but it's okay because they were all dicks and bitches anyway??? Cordelia doesn't die instead she becomes queen of France and starts a war against England just so she can come back to him and marry him because she's been in love with this literal clown since she was little?????????????? He becomes king of like four countries or something?????? I hate this.

I will give it this, I like how it combined Shakespeare's iambic meter, ye olde English with modern ways of speech. It was mixed together organically and didn't feel off and I enjoyed the originality of its writing even if I hated its contents.

From Here to Eternity:Traveling the World to Find the Good Death (Caitlin Doughty)

8/10 This was a really interesting book to read! The author, the director of a funeral home, travels around the world as well as within the states to look at different ceremonies for the dead. It was fairly short, so not really comprehensive, but I enjoyed the size of it. It offered a good variety of different cultural practices while still feeling just long enough for it not to get overwhelming. I also liked how the author lent her expertise in standard American funeral processes as a comparison especially since it's not common knowledge. The comparisons included both the technical details (e.g. cremation vs burials) as well as more philosophical questions (i.e. how we treat the dead, the topic of death in different cultures). Not only was this entertainingly informative, but it also gives us food for thought on a topic relevant to us all.

The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror (Mallory Ortberg)

4.5/10 Listen, I'm not being lazy when I keep giving the same score to all these books. I just genuinely don't care for them. This book was promised as a dark re-telling of familiar fairy tales which of course, I'm always interested in. The subtitle being 'Tales of Everyday Horror' was interesting in its use of 'everyday'. But what the book gave me was stories that weren't fantastical enough to be engaging and not everyday enough to be sinister. The endings are often abrupt, leaving me with less a sense of tension than a sense of confusion. There wasn't a purpose, just a meandering sort of mix of whatever the stories are inspired from (which judging from the footnotes, is really just a complicated clutter of everything from the actual fairy tales themselves to Shakespeare and the Bible). The story I liked the most was probably 'The Six Boy-Coffins' and really only because that one was the most faithful, and followed the format of an actual story. I also kind of enjoyed 'Cast Your Bread Upon the Waters'; the idea of a sensible mom in a fairy tale who knows that her son is getting tricked by a mermaid wanting to drown him has some pretty good potential. But of course, that's just potential.You know, sometimes a lot of stories seem to follow a similar structure, like having an introduction, rising and falling action, a climax etc. Don't you feel like there's a reason for that? Trying something new is all well and good but...let's just say Rome wasn't built in a day.
Also the author uses a lot of gendered names with opposite gender pronouns, e.g. Paul is the name of the 'daughter' in a retelling of Cinderella, the youngest daughter in the story of the Frog Prince is referred to as 'he', etc. Honestly, I can't really think of a real reason why this is? If the author was trying to make some kind of commentary on gender roles in folklore, I don't think just changing around the words made any kind of point. The only thing they served to do was to distract me. So really, in summary: this book didn't make me scared, it just made me confused.

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year end review

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