break my arms around the one i love

poem: Shauna Barbosa GPS art: @mmelodyj / unknown / Ainslie Hogarth Motherthing / Keaton St. James HISTORY STUDENT FALLS IN LOVE WITH ASTRO PHYSICS STUDENT / @555w4 / unknown / Ada Limón The Good Fight / @sunsbleeding

ainslie hogarth motherthing

kofi

oh to deny the greatest desire you've had since you were a child after you saw the weirwood tree through your wolf's eyes

jon xii - asos // ainslie hogarth - motherthing // jon i - adwd

I have been fixing up my notion and revising notes for the new school year today. Actually I —accidentally — deleted most of my notion, all of my greek and latin notes from last year are gone, luckily i had them written down on my notebook which i still have so i will try to get them all written down and intelligible before the school year starts. God, how I fear growing up, I wish the school year would never start and I could be 17 forever...

I have been listening to Motherthing on audible while i walked my dog because it was impossible for me to get through it. I kept reading frankenstein too.

Love u, Anna 🫶🏻

Spooky Season 👻

just finished motherthing by ainslie hogarth - nothing to call home about but it was a fun read and i liked it; it amounts to something something, the female anxieties/delusions/lovehate relationships wrt motherhood. everyone's mother sucks and being a mother within a straight nuclear marriage will make life worth living. psycho mommy issues ensue!

mostly it made me ponder this newish genre of the past couple of years that's like.... white straight liberal millennial contemporary literary magical realism. novels that are about mundane (white, straight) jaded millennials living mundane lives but something slightly and/or ambiguously supernatural happens but it is absorbed into the narrative and accepted into the mundane. motherthing by ainslie hogarth, my year of rest and relaxation by ottessa moshferg, a touch of jen by beth morgan, nightbitch by rachel yoder, the pisces by melisssa broder, bunny by mona awad... some of them are legitimately good (of the ones i've read, only the pisces stands out)(GOD i hated bunny so much) most of them blend into each other and are rather forgettable. never nearly as good as the classical latinamerican magical realism of the 20th century

the prose and style is what we identify with contemporary literary fiction. the narrator is usually a woman, unreliable, somewhat unstable, often unlikeable. her life sucks in some deeply unspecial way and continues to do so through most of the novel, which is just her day to day life. in the end, the supernatural thing affects change in some ambiguous way, usually in her favor, regardless of whatever crimes (anything from being a plain old asshole to murder) she has committed. you get the impression that the writer is trying to "defy" reader expectations by not punishing the character for her wrongdoings. the novel ends abruptly in this world of sudden magic. you are left wondering if what just happened was real or not. anyway i don't have a way to wrap up this post i'm just noticing and observing... i think reading so many like... NOT bad, but ultimately forgettable, so not good either? novels in this genre is starting to get annoying though

Just One More Page Challenge Day 25: Book Haul

Happy Holidays!! Here are some of the books I got for Christmas this year, I’m especially excited for Motherthing and Patricia Wants to Cuddle.

Have you read these books? What did you think?

The books in the background are ones I already own and am still getting around to reading, just fyi!

book food

books read in 2023

motherthing by ainslie hogarth ‪★ ★ ★ ★

"You've endured the suffering that makes mystics; that fills them with gems of transcendent wisdom."

goodreads review | books read in 2023

"Cud, all dogs really, must think they're magic. They can do a thing like bark at the back door, and it immediately opens for them.

Kids too, at least for a while. They cry and someone runs to them. They stretch their arms at a thing they want and the thing appears in their hands. They believe they're magic until grudgingly, painfully, they learn they're not. And all their powers, pointing and crying and screaming and hitting, stop working. They're punished for their magic instead. For thinking they were special. It's no wonder people kill each other."

- Motherthing, Ainslie Hogarth

ainslie hogarth motherthing

kofi

okay enough complaining about books. here's a good one!! domestic horror, funny and visceral. an unreliable narrator with a very interesting writing style.

Title: Motherthing | Author: Ainslie Hogarth | Publisher: Vintage (2022)

the cover of motherthing is so *chef’s kiss*

Are the 2 horror books that shocked you the most also the ones you would most recommend? I’m looking to get more into horror books too :)

definitely! there is a trigger warning for cannibalism and suicide in motherthing and i know a lot of people have Feelings about trigger warnings in horror novels but those are such heavy ones that imo can never be ignored.

motherthing is i think around 150 pages, you can knock it out in a day and get it out of a library if yours carries it, and just by the cover you can tell it's an excellent homage to 70s pulp horror. it really plays up the unreliable narrator aspect of it all and is the best use of first-person narration i've read all year.

how to sell a haunted house is good all the way through, but the scares really ramp up about halfway through. it's an excellent slow burn with things going wrong and they keep increasing. louise is one of the best women protagonists written by a man i've experienced in a while and it really hits the nail on the head about the horror of southern gothic coming from family secrets. this is another good use of an unreliable narrator, though this time to highlight how childhood trauma impacts memory. it is a little stephen king-esque, in that this graphic designer from south carolina is... making his main character a graphic designer from south carolina, but this is a far superior haunted house book to horrorstor (which i still enjoyed, but i would consider a dark comedy thriller because it wasn't all that scary)