Cupid Bow Mouth

DNF.

Piranesi was not for me. Made it 1/3 of the way through (80/245 pages) and Did Not Care. At any point. I found Piranesi tedious and excruciatingly boring. I wanted to like it. I've heard so many things! Alas, not my cup of tea, and if it does get interesting at some point, it took too long to get there. My general rule is you get 3 chapters. I gave the essentially chapter-less Piranesi more than a fair shake.

It's an allegory of the mind is the best I can come up with. I'll go read a recap later. The specifically opaque and meandering plot, at times, reminded me of The Sound and the Fury. Other times, I was reminded of Beloved. I LOVE Beloved. As a narrative committed to the very limited (re: intentionally restrictive) interiority of its main character, I was reminded of Sold and The Drowning Girl. Books that I love. Piranesi could not get me there. After falling asleep on it for the umpteenth time, I woke very cranky and out of sorts with this book. So we are done. Broken up. Don't let the door hit you on the way out, Piranesi. Not everything is for everybody. And we are never, ever, ever getting back together.

C'est la vie.

Also, it wasn't as terrible as Hemlock Island. So there's that.

Edited to add: I loved This is How You Lose A Time War which is arguably just as structurally complex as Piranesi. It is perhaps all of the mindless cataloguing that broke this book for me.

Holy Mary Mother of Fucking Gods!!!!!!

What did I just read?! The twisty, bendy, creepy psychological tale spin that is We Used to Live Here just kicked my chest in. I wasn't sure what to expect except that every review I came across was a good one. Finally the Bookstagram algorithm actually used its powers for good.

We Used to Live Here was deliciously creepy and strange and felt like walking on shale or sand that's falling away beneath your feet. No matter how fast you try to move to keep up, its never going to end with you on solid ground. Firm footing is impossible to obtain.

Its like Everything, Everywhere All At Once had a baby with The Shining and then moved to Silent Hill. It's a slippery book and every time something changed, I could SEE it but still couldn't put my finger on how or why.

AND THEN THAT END. I was not prepared. I'm having thoughts about a conversation I had with sarahbatistapereira this July and how much I need to decide on the landing for the end of April and Darling.

For this! I don't have words. Just get thee hence and read it. Let's discuss. I need my slippery, creep loving storytellers to read this and help me think about how it works.

I'm digging the surge in Gothic novels.

What Moves the Dead is atmospheric and chilling in the best way. The waitress at lunch startled me TWICE while bringing me water where I sat outside in the afternoon sun!!! Its written close to the bones of its inspiration (its a rework of Edgar Allen Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher) and carries well the flavors of Romantic 19th century literature. I loved the ways that it was updated, Easton and Miss Potter specifically, but also the creepy fungi with a side of body horror. Oh, yes, please!

I love when I read a book that, somewhere along the way, warns me this will not end well.

Addie LaRue shoved my heart into my throat and left me light headed for better than half the book. All I could think was "this way lies disaster." I adored it. How did it take me so long to discover V.E. Schwab? How was The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue such a gift waiting to be found?

I'll be over here pondering and melancholy and deeply in love for a good long while.

Damn, that was a good book ...

Edited to add: I think Gideon the Ninth was the last book to leave me in an emotional hole quite this deep. Damn.

Started: 1/19/22
Finished: 2/2/22
Pages: 352
Goodreads Shelves: apocalyptic; post-apocalyptic

Intimate and curiously interwoven stories about life, how it inexplicably tangles up, and how important and difficult choices are. A bit slow sometimes but always interesting. A character piece set smack in the middle of the end times.

Without a traditional plot, its almost like reading a narrative history of events fleshed out through the lives of people. Elegant is a good word, quiet. A more literary version of World War Z or Robopocalypse minus the official UN documents. I liked the opaque nature of parts of the stories. Things happened and no one understands exactly what why or how. The characters, as happens in real life, are forced to make up their meaning ... the meaning of their lives and their existence, who they are as they go along. In true fashion, its all anyone can ever do.

It was easy to read and there were an abundance of characters and POVs. I liked the time slips so that the world before and after are explored along an adjacent narrative through line. My biggest critique is that the plotty aspect of the ending is more than a bit anti climatic. The plotty aspect of the ending is also, in the end, the least interesting and the least important thing about the book. A solid read and a good start to the 2022 reading challenge.

The radio aches a little tune that tells a story of what the night
is thinking. It's thinking of love.
It's thinking of stabbing us to death
and leaving our bodies in a dumpster.
That's a nice touch, stains in the night, whiskey and kisses for everyone."
- Little Beast

My very first experience with Ricard Siken was part 24 of You Are Jeff, the penultimate poem in this collection. It is a perfect excision of all of the things that Siken excels at - poetry as sublime, but with a grounded rawness that makes it all too real. Reading You Are Jeff sent me on a hunt for Crush and inspired expectations that were easily met by the gorgeous collection that Siken pulled together.

Crush is everything! Desperate and needy, as much blunt force trauma as it is delicate and subtle. Siken draws threads together, weaving a tapestry of human emotion. The poetry is at times opaque and insists upon the readers complete focus and dedication to puling apart those threads, and at others it is gorgeously simple and utterly truthful. There are layers and layers of meaning that reflect the complexity of love, identity, and heartbreak. It tackles self destruction, the tragedy of pinning down and freely expressing sexual identity in a hostile culture, the devastating strangeness of finding love and losing it - as well as the spare, elegant place between the two moments, the questions of how do you know, and the terror of reaching out. There is nothing easy about Crush and I love that about it

Ronan and Adam. I am living and breathing for these two. I haven't shipped anyone this hard since Buffy and Angel. With Opal, Stiefvater gives us an alternately sweet and bittersweet glimpse into the life these two are winding around themselves. It's a summer in-between story presented from Opal's (nee Orphan Girl) oblique perspective on The Barns and its inhabitants. Ronan and Adam are hazed by diffused light and we get to see them folding themselves around each other in nook and cranny moments almost jealously given up by Stiefvater. Opal is full of the things that she does best: foreshadows that I suspect will stretch long into the upcoming Dreamer Trilogy, small, living moments used to reveal character (thus making me fall even deeper in love with Ronan and Adam). Opal, herself, is a great character and I loved how alien she is. She doesn't fit into the world that she now finds herself in, but at the same time she is OF IT. She's an odd, quirky corner of the Pynch universe and although I know fandom seems to like to make her a daughter of sorts (and I get that cause Ronan is totally kind of an odd dad of sorts - he SOUNDS like somebody's dad, anyway), but Opal really isn't, either. She is this curious reflection of Ronan and it is heartbreaking to realize that as much as Opal loves Adam is how much RONAN loves Adam. That realization is painful, sad, sharp, and so sweet that I ache with it.

All in all, a great tease for the coming Dreamer trilogy. My appetite is beyond whetted.

To be honest, I don't even know what to say about The Raven Boys. What I have learned over time is that not all books are for all people. Books, like many things, resonate differently for different people. That realization makes me more tolerant of readers who either love books that I hate or who hate books that I love. Hey, you just can't win them all. The Raven Boys may not be for you, but it sure as hell was for me.

There are many books in the world written about many things. Some books are written well, some not so much. Some books you swallow whole, desperate to reach the end of the story while at the same time loath for the magic to end. Other stories you might not finish because there's nothing tethering you to the universe caught between the book covers. Maggie Stiefvater's The Raven Boys falls in the former category of each kind of book. The Raven Boys is a gorgeous carrot cake of a novel, dense and meaty and filled with all the good stuff, but also topped with the sweetness of language used very well. It's got a solid foundation in the story and Stiefvater wraps it up in a beautifully unwinding tale of longing and friendship and family. It's savagely wonderful. The characters are incredibly individual and I fell in love with each and every one of them. No one feels like an afterthought (except maybe one and even that was on purpose). This book is sumptuous and wonderful and quirky and everything BREATHES!

It's crazy that I had never heard of this author or this series because now that I've read The Raven Boys, I am hooked well and truly. I wasn't looking for a series, had actually been actively avoiding YA series, when this kept popping up on my Overdrive app (I check out audiobooks from the library for my two hour commute home). I finally caved because there was nothing else that I wanted in particular. It was the best choice I've made since I picked Joe Hill's The Fireman which was so beautifully read by Kate Mulgrew. Actor Will Patton reads The Raven Boys and he is a god! I wonder if I would love the book as much if I had just read the paperback. I don't know. Good thing that I don't have to find out! (I suspect that I would love it just as much.) When I'm done with the entire series, I have every intention of buying these, but until I get through the last it's me and Will trapped in the car. He is amazing and should be winning all kinds of awards. Surely there are awards for voice actors who read books. OMG!!!

Anyway, The Raven Boys is highly recommended. The story unfolds rapidly and no space in the story is wasted. Steifvater gives us a story full of complex, nuanced, fallible characters and it is a beautiful thing to behold. Because these people are damaged and they get things wrong, but they are friends anyway. I like stories like that. I also LOVE that this is not so much a YA love story as it is a story about a group of people who are all in love with each other in one way or another. Steifvater does what many YA don't manage, she gives them all equal time and pays homage to the different KINDS of love that exist in the world. From Blue and her haphazard and unconventional family, the (essentially) three Shakespearean witches, and the boys, these characters are knitted into each other's lives and sewn into each other's skins. There's familial love and motherly love, sisterly love, brotherly love, and romantic love. Everything gets tangled up together and examined from many angles. It takes a gentle pass at classism and poverty, does quite a lot more with issues of self-esteem, self-perception, the nature of families, and abuse.

I love that Blue is a girl who wants to be special, knows that she is not really, and is mostly okay with it. Her falling in with the titular Raven Boys has less to do with her needing them to feel better about herself (a terrible trope in many YA fantasies) and more about her curiosity and desire to have an adventure. She recognizes in them something outside of her comfort zone and she tackles that. Embroiling herself in this THING because, well, why not. She is whole-heartedly complicit in all the shenanigans and I really LOVE that.

I don't know how many ways I can say that I loved this book. There are flaws, I'm sure. Nothing is truly perfect. But to be honest, what didn't work is, for me, severely overshadowed by all that does. Including, Ronan Lynch and his knife edged smile. Ronan, who is very possibly the thing that I love best about this book besides Steifvater's glorious and deft use of language. He is such a character. An exposed nerve, a beating heart, a train wreck of a boy careening wildly and enthusiastically towards catastrophe. I ADORE him. But then so do I love all of the Raven boys, and Blue, and the ladies of 300 Fox Way. This book is so much magic. SO So So much magic!

I was, as usual, not prepared for how creepy this book got. David Morse was divine reading it and I LOVED how he nuanced the telling.

Revival is a gorgeous slow burn of a novel, building over decades to this horrific ending that sets up the potential for a sequel. I loved seeing the evolution of the characters over the years, how Jamie goes from being a sweet-faced boy to a 50-something man, all of the bad choices and tragedies of his life thrown in between. I also liked watching the unraveling of Pastor Charlie and how he lost himself as sure as Jamie found himself. It's an interesting study in contrasts and one that King does well. He is a master at throwing his characters in the mud and making you want to follow them down the rabbit hole of their nightmares.

The writing and the imagery of the Null was vivid and horrifying. I was creeped out every time I got out of the car and once I finished the ending, I slept the night with the lights and the TV on.

Now, the end of the story is kind of a gimme. King lays out the ending and goes heavy handed with the Frankenstein mythology in a fast paced ending that doesn't quite do justice to the slow build that the rest of the novel is treated to. Which might be why I'm hankering for a sequel. There feels like a lot more to tell in this story and the resolution is anything but. Definitely worth reading. Infinitely worth listening to the great David Morse narrate.

I liked A Wrinkle in Time as a child. I don't remember that I loved it, but I do remember reading it and liking it. Unfortunately, I didn't remember exactly what it was about when I set out to re-read it ahead of the movie release. It's a short book, 232 pages, but it took me a couple of weeks because I kept putting it down. Unfortunately, this classic of childen's literature didn't stand up against my childhood memories.

There were things about the story that I really liked:
- Meg's complete and utter ordinary uniqueness. She is just herself and she has no super powers. In fact, her complete commitment to being herself and no one else IS her version of a SUPER POWER and I think that's pretty awesome.

- Meg's fear and how she has to work very hard in order to overcome it. I also loved how she never really gets over her fear, just shoves it down enough to do what needed doing. In fact, I love how everything was just difficult for Meg, but how she gets on with things anyway!

- Charles Wallace cause he's just pretty awesome overall. I also liked that Charles Wallace was the one even with all of his special skills and abilities who has to be saved.

- The kids with the balls in Camazotz. Super creepy.

Otherwise, A Wrinkle in Time, unfortunately, didn't do it for me. The Black Thing and IT were kind of unambiguous evil, but not in the good way like how the original Michael Myers is pure evil for no good reason. Space and reality hopping evil intending to take over the universe, I don't know, kind of needs more of a raison d'etre. I was left with just a lot of questions and the ending was a little anticlimactic.

So, not my favorite ever, but I'm sure that there are tons of kids who need to read this and who will find it awesome. If for no other reason than that they need to meet Meg who is a hero worth knowing.