guess who's back in their compassion fatigue for library patrons era!!!

reading update

what's up, tumblypoos? it's going to be a pretty short one this month, because I have NOT finished a lot of books since last time. the semester has started and made work hectic and exhausting, so much so that when I took a week off and hoped to spend most of it devouring books I ended up spending more time just vegetating to repair my brain.

also, unfortunately, I ran into my first DNF (that's Did Not Finish, for people who don't keep up with profoundly annoying book blogger terminology) in a LONG time, which I will absolutely be detailing below.

what have I been reading?

Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov) - I've always been vaguely curious, but then I listened to Jamie Loftus' brilliant Lolita Podcast and curiosity became somewhat urgent. (I'm relistening to it now, for the record, and I'm looking forward to being able to appreciate Loftus' empathetic analysis in a brand new way now that I've actually read the book she devotes ten episodes to talking about.) you all know I love a sharp, well-written profile of a monster; I had a great fondness for Alissa Nutting's Tampa, a book that follows a 21st century female pedophile that, in hindsight, takes place in vigorous conversation and has many clear parallels with Lolita. I'm also a huge sucker for a book about a truly miserable son of a gun pontificating on their own wretched time, and my god does Humbert Humbert pontificate. he's an excellently unreliable narrator, a heinous monster on trial doing his damndest to downplay his own violence. he wanders back and forth between talking himself up as improbably handsome and charismatic and insisting that he's quite harmless, basically innocent, totally a guy that we should just let go. and did he mention that he definitely didn't kill Dolores' mom? he definitely didn't, he just happened to think about killing her pretty often and in extreme detail and then coincidentally she died at a time that was terribly convenient for him. who hasn't been there? it's a funny story, not in a comedic way but in a painfully dry and brittle way, a deluded man viewing life through a nauseating lens that the reader can see through in an instant, all the way to the melancholy end. I absolutely understand anyone who says it isn't their cup of tea, but I'd highly recommend at least giving Loftus' podcast a listen if you're interested and able.

Women, Race, and Class (Angela Y. Davis) - this one also comes with a recommendation, and it's much shorter than the Lolita Podcast. I'd been meaning to get around to reading this for something like a year, ever since reading Davis' autobiography, but of all things it was a brief reference to Women, Race, and Class in Lily Alexandre's video "Do "Binary Trans Women" Even Exist? The Politics of Gender Conformity" that finally prompted me to nab it at the library. sometimes the universe just sends a sign, you know? it's a concise but thorough history, a tour through American slavery, suffragettes, social stratification, and socialism, presented in the no-nonsense style of Davis' that I appreciate so much. (seriously, if you want to start doing more antiracist and/or abolitionist reading but are intimidate by terminology - Davis. read Davis.) I particularly appreciated the dissection of certain white suffragette leaders turning their backs on antislavery and suffrage for Black Americans, fueled not only by racism but also by the perpetual pressure upon activists to turn upon each other and squeeze out causes that are seen as too radical to be convenient. it's illustrative, and unfortunately still supremely relevant. I wish this was the kind of thing I was reading when I was learning baby's first feminism.

what did I give up on?

Star Eater (Kerstin Hall) - beloved readers, I was excited for this one; you may recall that it was the last of the books on my Hot Book Summer list. it sounded like an incredibly promising dark fantasy about corrupt power structures and cannibalism. in short: the story takes place in a city floating above a world filled with undying monsters called Haunts, ruled over by the Sisters - an order of all-women magic-users whose powers are passed hereditarily from mother to daughter. but there are a few catches: the Sisters have a limited supply of magic, which is best replenished by eating the flesh of other Sisters. further, they must create more Sisters to maintain their power, but any man who has sex with a Sister is doomed to become Haunts who hunger for Sisters' flesh. so how do they solve these problems? easy: the Sisters reproduce through the ritualistic sexual assault of men who have received the death sentence, and maintain their magic by "martyring" their own mothers, essentially placing them in a coma to be consumed slowly. readers, none of this is what turned me off of this book. if anything, it all made me very excited. how absolutely despicably bleak! what an awful world! what a clever depiction of power, and the way it turns bodies into commodities to be devoured and thrown away! I was so excited to see how our hero, Elfreda Raugh, would take it down. and then... oof. and then, dear reader, Star Eater ended up feeling like a book that was written by going down a checklist of fantasy/dystopia YA tropes with a little rape and cannibalism thrown in for flavor. no spoilers (okay, maybe minor spoilers) but the most egregious points for me were the boring boy who was a childhood friend turned love interest, and Our Hero turning out to have extra special BONUS superpowers that made her, essentially, a living MacGuffin. I hope this book is someone's cup of tea, readers, but I cannot say it was mine.

what I'm reading now?

Midnight Sun (Stephenie Meyer) - you all knew this was coming. it's SO FUN and absolutely unhinged, and exactly what I needed to get out of my Star Eater-induced slump.

Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal (Heather Widdows) - this one is a bit of a tough read, because it's heavily rooted in philosophy and that's not the kind of reading I'm accustomed to, but it's eye-opening nonetheless. incidentally, also the result of a YouTube videos; link will be included in my next reading update.

what do I have on hold at the library?

The Other Black Girl (Zakiya Delila Harris)

Rewriting the Rules: An Anti Self-Help Guide to Love, Sex and Relationships (Meg-John Barker)

Iron Widow (Xiran Jay Zhao)