Cupid Bow Mouth

I don't spend much time anywhere online anymore besides scrolling mindlessly through IG when I should be writing. Executive Freeze or whatever it's called is a real.

This year, I've been reading small bites. Aiming to hit that 20 book goal by year's end, but also unwilling to expend the energy on things that are calorie lite. They have their place and sometimes they hit the spot, but this year I've been ... not interested. But here are the things that I have read this year! And mostly loved! Kelley Armstrong's Hemlock Island was the only flat out no. I did speed my way through the audiobook, but I finished it and it was ... insane and just ... No.

Everything else I read this year! Top Notch, Chef's Kiss. LOVED!!!

(sorted most recent at the top)

15 A Song for Quiet - Cassandra Khaw
14 We Used to Live Here - Marcus Kliewer
13 Don't Fear the Reaper - Stephen Graham Jones
12 What Moves the Dead - T. Kingfisher
11 Hide - Kiersten White
10 The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V.E. Schwab
9 Wild and Precious: A Celebration of Mary Oliver - various
8 Six-Gun Snow White - Cathyrenne Valente
7 Hemlock Island - Kelley Armstrong
6 The Spite House - Johnny Compton
5 Book of Night - Holly Black
4 Come Tumbling Down - Seanan McGuire
3 The Ballad of Black Tom - Victor LaValle
2 Beneath the Sugar Sky - Seanan McGuire
1 Hogfather - Terry Pratchett

DNF'd:
* The Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler
* House of the Sleeping Beauties - Yasunari Kawabata

On the List of Things with a Bookmark in Them:
* The Searcher - Tana French
* Salem's Lot - Stephen King (goal is to finish this for October)
* Perdido Street Station - China Mieville
* A Song of Fire and Ice - George R.R. Martin
* Strange the Dreamer - Laini Taylor
* The Foretelling - Alice Hoffman

Scott Westerfeld announced the release of Imposters, a new book in the Uglies series on sale September 11th. To that I say, hells yeah!!!!!

"Since the Uglies books came out, countless fans have told me how reading the series changed them. These conversations have in turn changed me. All that fan fiction, art, and critique has enlarged the Uglies world in my head, making it messier and more real. So when the idea for IMPOSTORS struck, it was time to apply everything you’ve taught me.

The original Uglies books were about revolution. But overthrowing an oppressive regime is just the start. What happens next? History is full of revolutions that falter, rebels who wind up becoming what they fought against. The question “what next” kept hitting me—especially given everything happening in our own reality. So I decided to return to the world of Uglies and find new heroes ready to take up Tally Youngblood’s revolution.

IMPOSTORS is about one of those heroes, Frey of Shreve, trying to find the truth of herself in a world where almost everything is false.

Hope you enjoy it."

Is there a character full of as much shit as Humbert Humbert? If you’ve never read (or listened to a reading of) Lolita, it’s easy to be dismissive. It is, after all, the memoir of a manipulative, self-aggrandizing pedophile who kidnaps and serially rapes his 12 year old step daughter. Lolita is, also, a gorgeous piece of writing. The story itself is supposed to be as difficult and impossible and exactly as off-putting as it is. Humbert Humbert is an unreliable narrator at best; a weak, delusional, loathsome, narcissistic character in reality. That Nabokov is able to pull this book off is a wonder and feat of creative and technical genius.

Nabakov illuminates the hateful, selfish, sinister Humbert using language and prose that Humbert thinks is a testament of his love for young Dolores Haze (aka Dolly, Lo, Lolita). I was simultaneously repelled and enthralled. The technical skill and execution lays out an impossibly disgusting tale of blind, unrepentant, obsession. Nabakov uses language and word play and builds a tyrant of a character who controls the entire narrative. We can’t believe anything that Humbert says because Humbert is telling the story and is completely incapable of seeing beyond himself. But Nabakov writes in such a way that it becomes very obvious, very early on, that Humbert isn’t what he seems and that all the ways that he wants the reader to be sympathetic are exactly the ways that we readers will come to loathe and despise him.

The only insight that we get into the other characters, Dolly/Lolita being the most important and most obscured, are through small, marked moments that Humbert is incapable of dissecting in any way that is negative to himself or self-revelatory to the kind of person that he really is. Of course, Nabakov sets the reader up to see exactly those things. Of course, and as some of the reviews indicate, there are still some people who are completely unaware of how the novel works. And that it is intentionally as distancing as it is. Let me say emphatically: Lolita is NOT a love story. Humbert Humbert is NOT a character to be sympathized with and the author does NOT intend that you do so. To feel sympathy for Humbert is to ignore all the clues and cues left behind. That he kidnapped and raped a 12 year old child and proceeded to hold her hostage and manipulate her for two years. There is nothing redeeming about Humbert, not even the empty murder of Claire Quilty at the novel’s close. Quilty’s murder, as per usual, has everything to do with Humbert and the loss of what he felt was his own possession, his Lolita. It’s about jealousy, pure and simple. And in the only glimmer of real insight, it is sometime before he heads off in search of Quilty that Humbert realizes and admits that he knows next to nothing about Dolores Haze and that in the course of relaying the events of the last five years he has conveniently forgotten or left out parts of the story.

It is amazing to me that the term Lolita has gained any real traction in modern usages because the Lolita, as defined and articulated by Humbert, is a fiction. She does not exist. Humbert has made her completely up. It’s very clear to the reader, but to Humbert, well, he is as clueless as they come.

I don’t think I would have made it through this novel if anyone else besides Jeremy Irons had been reading it. It was artistically, a gorgeous affair; however, the actual content of the story (its technical genius notwithstanding) is quite unsavory and very disturbing. Still, Irons made it a compelling read and he performed Humbert so well that it set my teeth, very often, on edge. I pulled one star for no other reason than that Humbert, who loves to hear himself ramble, drove me out of my tree quite a few times spouting pointless drivel and nonsense. I suppose I should add that star back because, really, that’s quite the point of who this character is. No one else matters except himself. Even the demented illusion of love that he claims to feel for Dolly has nothing to do with her and everything to do with his fantasy of the Lolita.

I just completed Scott Westerfeld's YA trilogy Uglies, Pretties, and Specials. They were a really fun read, although I can't say how much I loved the ending of Specials. I need to ruminate on it a bit. It was a little disappointing and part of that is because I very much wanted a Happy Ever After ending. Specials definitely does not give us that and I need to think a little more and sort out my thoughts before I talk anymore about it.

But, what these books did leave me with is an interest in the body as read through ideas of a utopian or dystopian future. How is the body understood or re-imagined to fit in with the philosophical changes in a future society? How is the body re-created, alienated or mechanized? How do those changes/differences reflect the interior ideas of the new society; do they? Are the physical adjustments representative of mental/intellectual changes? Westerfeld deliberately connects the changes in the physical body with changes in the mind. The physical differences between Uglies, Pretties and Specials are markers for the differences in the way that they understand and interact with the world. Within the individual 'types' there are also subdivisions that further finesse those pre-determined thought processes and their social ramifications.

( The Future Body (spoilers for Scott Westerfeld's Uglies trilogy) )

New layout up at Essential-Imperfect. I've decided to make it strictly a site collective/hub for the rest of my sites. All of which I've closed with the exception of Excess, Folly and Delight. I will, however, be opening three new sites.

In other news: Neil Gaiman's Stardust was a sweet read. Not his best work but enjoyable. I have to admit to a preference for the the complex darkness of American Gods and Neverwhere, and the chilling simplicity of Coraline. Still, it was fun and someone at work is loaning me the Sandman Graphic Novels so there is that as well.