Just about as fun as the first, and very good for background listening while working and, yes, while knitting.

I'm not sure what I can say about this book that hasn't been said already. It's a harrowing read that you can't look away from. I'm glad that Jennette McCurdy got out of acting, and yeah: I'm glad her mom died, too.

Look: I love the ocean, but it is TERRIFYING. It is TOO BIG. There is TOO MUCH STUFF in there. Anything could happen to a frail human body in that unfathomable and indifferent abyss, and it's fascinating and horrible to think about, which is why I spend so much time before bed looking at r/thalassophobia and r/submechanophobia and why I was so excited to read Whalefall.

I found it almost impossible to stop reading this book. A riveting survival plot, emotional backstory revealed in flashback vignettes, and very short chapters all make this a "say 'fuck it' and stay up past bedtime to finish because I HAVE TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS" sort of book.

Very character-driven and language-forward, but it doesn't skimp on harrowing survival efforts and the gross details of being swallowed by a whale, which is not the spacious situation that children's Bible illustrations of Jonah led us to believe back in Sunday school.

Highly recommended.

Hmm, I'm not sure about this one, friends. I love cursed and spooky fictional media, so I was on board from the minute I read the synopsis, and for the first half of the book, I was very much hooked. It's not even that the shift in concept as the plot became more apparent is something I disliked, more that I wanted the execution of the concept to have more finesse and be a bit less on-the-nose. At times the tone veered too close to YA for my tastes, which is something I've heard people say about White's Hide, as well.

Perfectly fine, but not my favorite.

I read this because the members of my work book club selected it, and it's probably not something I would have chosen on my own, despite years of watching Jeopardy! with my parents. It reads less like a typical memoir and more like someone got Alex Trebek a Storyworth subscription: fond and very brief anecdotes, no conflict and no hard feelings. As such, it's listenable but not always compelling. But I have to hand it to him for donating the proceeds to charity, and I have to admit that his reflections on dying got to me as someone who recently lost her dad.

Purely by coincidence, I ended up listening to this four months to the day since my dad died.

Grief is uncomfortable and gross and makes you feel deranged, so I appreciate that this book is similarly uncomfortable and gross and deranged.

I resonated a lot with the image of the crow picking the dad up and refusing to put him down until he greeted the crow properly. In a lot of ways, I feel like I still haven't greeted my crow. Mostly it bobs around the perimeter of my life while I try to keep it together and get on with things, because I have to, because I have a job and a widowed mom to look after and other problems that distract me and push my grief aside in favor of other types of pain.

But listening to this book gave me some time to sit with the crow today. I think that's probably a good thing.

I'm going to reproduce a text that I sent to the person who recommended Females to me at about 25% in:

I started Females, btw. Finding it interesting so far. Reviews on Goodreads are a nightmare. People really missed 1. That it's written in response to Valerie Solanas's ideas, 2. That Chu is committing to a bit and making provocative claims in order to explore ideas, a la Solanas, and 3. That "females" in the book does not mean AFAB people, it's an ontological category and socially constructed and in the scope of the book, includes everyone. And it's interesting that they miss these things, because they are explicitly stated in the first quarter of the book.

You'd think TERFs would have to hand it to a book that says "Janice Raymond was kind of right," but no!

(To quote Andrea herself: "That's a joke, of course, whether or not you find it funny.")

Since it's so short, I'll give the obviously bad-faith one-stars the benefit of the doubt and believe that this time, at least, they actually read the whole book. They just (willfully?) missed the entire point and apparently suffer from a tragic condition that renders them incapable of discerning when a writer is stating her own opinion or beliefs and when she is stating an assertion made by another author or another work.

So what did I think? I found Females interesting, but up its own ass (pun intended) in the way a lot of highly specific academic writing often is. The person who recommended it says that she interprets this quality as intentional, an effort to be full of oneself metaphorically, as the condition of being female in society is to be full of others, metaphorically. And I think this is a valid enough reading, even if I didn't arrive at the same conclusion, myself.

Where I get hung up the most is in wondering whether it's all that worthwhile to expend such time and energy engaging with the work of Valerie Solanas. YMMV. Not mad that I read it.

I've loved the original Exorcist movie since before I was old enough to watch it (but absolutely did, ruining my life forever), but I'm only now reading the book because I'm really excited about the new movie coming out next month. (Will it be good? I don't know, but as Stephen King observes in Danse Macabre, horror fans will go see anything, knowing that it might be bad, but hoping for something great.)

Parts of the book dragged a bit and felt kind of weird from a 2023 perspective, sometimes to comical effect: Father Karras spending what feels like dozens of pages agonizing over whether Regan is "just" exhibiting telekinesis and telepathy (definitely real things, because idk, Freud?), only to have Sharon show him the "help me" emerging on Regan's belly, after which he immediately goes to seek permission for an exorcism.

But everything that I love about the movie is right here in the source material, and everything that I think makes the story really scary, too. Namely, the overwhelming guilt and uncertainty that Chris and Father Karras are wrestling with. Sure, a tween spewing obscenities and pea soup is creepy, but what really fucks me up is the prospect of feeling like you've failed a loved one, that you could have done more, but didn't. "Why you do this to me, Dimmy?"

Good stuff. Will read Legion too, sometime soon.

I’ve read all of Rachel Harrison’s books, so I know what to expect from her: spooky chick lit horror. Normally it works for me, but this one… It reads as excessively goofy in a just-shy-of-camp way. I wish that it took itself less seriously in regards to its message, because the earnestness about religious trauma pairs oddly with, well, the goofiness: the boiling nacho cheese and the Spirit Halloween Satanist vibe of it all. (No shade to Spirit Halloween.)

I see the concept, I like the concept, I just think that the execution falls short.

"I'd rather arm myself / in blood than be a pretty statue / to stare at."

The spooky season is upon us, and I'm trying to read more poetry this year, so what better time to start exploring horror poetry? I decided to start with I Am Not Your Final Girl because I've heard about it off and on for years now--I remember it getting some favorable attention on Book Riot--but never got around to it.

In the introduction, Holland addresses the 2016 election and how collectively tired we were at the time, so I was a little apprehensive that the poems would feel dated already. Maybe that sounds silly, but I know that I, for one, am a wholly different person than the girl who sobbed in the fetal position on election night. Like yeah, that was bad, but I've since then lived through the pandemic and watched the rise of christofascism on a speedrun. I am a much harder person now, and my definition of what makes a bad year has changed accordingly. I think that's true of most people I know.

But luckily(?), these poems about hacking your way to survival as a woman in a world that wants to destroy you still feel relevant! They're a bit more aphoristic than the types of poetry I typically prefer, and the themes feel slightly repetitive, but I still enjoyed them, especially the ones about horror movies that I've seen and enjoyed: The Witch, The Craft, Antichrist, Carrie, Ginger Snaps. I might end up using this book as a list of suggested films as I watch horror movies all next month, so that I can revisit the poems that didn't hit me as hard and see if the context changes the effect, as I suspect it will.

My only other grumble is that the perspective feels less universal than it perhaps intends to be, but it's drawing from source material that doesn't prioritize the experiences of women who aren't cis and straight, so.