Reading Wednesday
Aug. 9th, 2023 07:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyJust finished: The Power of Story: On Truth, the Trickster, and New Fictions for a New Era by Harold Johnson. This was really good! It felt like sitting around a fire listening to someone extremely smart and wise in conversation. The parts about the role that story plays in shaping and reshaping political narratives around colonization were particularly relevant to my interests.
Cold Rising by Rohan O'Duill: This is a sci-fi novella by a friend of mine, the first of presumably several stories set in the Cold Rush universe. It follows Olgo, an amoral agent dispatched to ensure their company's Martian subcontractors comply with UN labour laws, only to get caught up in a workers' uprising and retaliatory act of terror by the cartels that run the planet. Trapped by an explosion in the mines, they must rely on Suong, a 12-year-old worker, to escape. I am an absolute sucker for badass-and-child stories, and union stories, and sci-fi with (more or less) real-world physics, and this is a riveting take on all of the above. Also it has a great cover. :)
Currently reading: Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson. Because Emerson was on that podcast I posted about on Friday and said that the answer to "yeah but was there a real Alice????" was definitively answered in the book. Which. Begins with "well you can skip to the end but it'll be more fun to enjoy the ride." So that's why I'm doing.
So there was definitely at least a few stories that inspired Alice, neither of which involved people that Sparks knew personally. There was definitely a real kid behind Jay's Journal, her third book, and it's fucking HORRIFYING because the real story is a sad, romantic Mormon kid with leftist leanings and clinical depression who shot himself. His parents had attempted to get him help and the psychologist continually insisted that he didn't have "real" depression. His younger brother was the one to discover the body. He left a diary with a few journal entries, which his mom entrusted to Sparks after it came out that she "edited" Go Ask Alice, hoping that it would help give his death some meaning or help other kids.
Without the mom's consent, she published the entries with a bunch of entries that she flat-out made up about witchcraft, Satanism, and animal sacrifice, none of which had anything to do with the kid's actual story. She made him out to be a complete monster and misrepresented basically everything about his life.
Also it doesn't seem like she was a psychologist or even graduated from the college she claimed to attend. So far.
This book is a real trip (ha ha) and I can't put it down.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville: We here following Whale Weekly are now at the halfway point and it will end in September 2024. That seems like a long way away but I am enjoying the real-time discussion too much to want to read ahead. Basically this chapter had Ishmael bodyshaming the whale for not having a neck which. Shut up, Ishmael. The whale also probably thinks you look weird too.
Cold Rising by Rohan O'Duill: This is a sci-fi novella by a friend of mine, the first of presumably several stories set in the Cold Rush universe. It follows Olgo, an amoral agent dispatched to ensure their company's Martian subcontractors comply with UN labour laws, only to get caught up in a workers' uprising and retaliatory act of terror by the cartels that run the planet. Trapped by an explosion in the mines, they must rely on Suong, a 12-year-old worker, to escape. I am an absolute sucker for badass-and-child stories, and union stories, and sci-fi with (more or less) real-world physics, and this is a riveting take on all of the above. Also it has a great cover. :)
Currently reading: Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson. Because Emerson was on that podcast I posted about on Friday and said that the answer to "yeah but was there a real Alice????" was definitively answered in the book. Which. Begins with "well you can skip to the end but it'll be more fun to enjoy the ride." So that's why I'm doing.
So there was definitely at least a few stories that inspired Alice, neither of which involved people that Sparks knew personally. There was definitely a real kid behind Jay's Journal, her third book, and it's fucking HORRIFYING because the real story is a sad, romantic Mormon kid with leftist leanings and clinical depression who shot himself. His parents had attempted to get him help and the psychologist continually insisted that he didn't have "real" depression. His younger brother was the one to discover the body. He left a diary with a few journal entries, which his mom entrusted to Sparks after it came out that she "edited" Go Ask Alice, hoping that it would help give his death some meaning or help other kids.
Without the mom's consent, she published the entries with a bunch of entries that she flat-out made up about witchcraft, Satanism, and animal sacrifice, none of which had anything to do with the kid's actual story. She made him out to be a complete monster and misrepresented basically everything about his life.
Also it doesn't seem like she was a psychologist or even graduated from the college she claimed to attend. So far.
This book is a real trip (ha ha) and I can't put it down.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville: We here following Whale Weekly are now at the halfway point and it will end in September 2024. That seems like a long way away but I am enjoying the real-time discussion too much to want to read ahead. Basically this chapter had Ishmael bodyshaming the whale for not having a neck which. Shut up, Ishmael. The whale also probably thinks you look weird too.
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Date: 2023-08-09 11:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-10 12:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-10 08:49 am (UTC)https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/satan-wants-you-2023-film-review-by-jennie-kermode
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Date: 2023-08-10 10:59 am (UTC)