Reading Wednesday
Jun. 24th, 2020 09:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyJust Finished: Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell. I loved this one. It was funny and poignant and relevant to my interests. As I probably said last week, I found it a surreal read, as it was published this year but before our Actual Apocalypse, and it's mainly about reactions to climate change. Which is, of course, still the looming Big One—even more so this week, with the "you have six months" warning—but reading about people preparing for the Wrong Apocalypse is weird. O'Connell is a great writer, weaving in exposés of mostly terrible people with his own reflections on bringing children into this doomed world.
Currently reading: The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter by Theodora Goss. This is a Victorian public domain horror mashup about the daughters of various literary characters. Mary Jekyll is destitute after the deaths of her parents, but going through her mother's accounting, she discovers Diana Hyde, her maybe-sister, in a Magdalene home. They're drawn into a murder investigation alongside Holmes and Watson. None of this is particularly novel except that it's really well written, in a po-mo framework that has interjections by the characters and author. and also it seems to be along the lines of "badass women getting their lives back from the shitty fathers who ruined them," which is quite relevant to my interests. Very fun so far.
Finally, on a personal note tangentially related to books: I have assembled all of mine into a Google Drive folder in some semblance of order. I would like some people to read it. If you have any interest in reading a 350-page messy sprawl about dysfunctional wizards, Canadian politics, and the apocalypse (but not the one we're living through right now—it has magic and more tentacles), drop me a PM or comment with your email address and I'll send you a link. But, like, be gentle because also I'm really scared to have people look at it.
Currently reading: The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter by Theodora Goss. This is a Victorian public domain horror mashup about the daughters of various literary characters. Mary Jekyll is destitute after the deaths of her parents, but going through her mother's accounting, she discovers Diana Hyde, her maybe-sister, in a Magdalene home. They're drawn into a murder investigation alongside Holmes and Watson. None of this is particularly novel except that it's really well written, in a po-mo framework that has interjections by the characters and author. and also it seems to be along the lines of "badass women getting their lives back from the shitty fathers who ruined them," which is quite relevant to my interests. Very fun so far.
Finally, on a personal note tangentially related to books: I have assembled all of mine into a Google Drive folder in some semblance of order. I would like some people to read it. If you have any interest in reading a 350-page messy sprawl about dysfunctional wizards, Canadian politics, and the apocalypse (but not the one we're living through right now—it has magic and more tentacles), drop me a PM or comment with your email address and I'll send you a link. But, like, be gentle because also I'm really scared to have people look at it.
