• Welcome to Talking Time's third iteration! If you would like to register for an account, or have already registered but have not yet been confirmed, please read the following:

    1. The CAPTCHA key's answer is "Percy"
    2. Once you've completed the registration process please email us from the email you used for registration at percyreghelper@gmail.com and include the username you used for registration

    Once you have completed these steps, Moderation Staff will be able to get your account approved.

What'cha Reading?

Finished a reread of Dune by Frank Herbert. It was 11 years since I read it last. Much better experience this time around. Will be reading Messiah some time next month
 
Song of Solomon was what I read in high school, which it now feels is one of her less popular books and I'm curious why the school chose that book over Beloved or others. Still, so many scenes from it have stuck with me decades later and all her books are incredible as noted.
 
Read Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito (and boy, was that disturbing), and I just now finished The Eye of the Bedlam Bride by Matt Dinniman. I'm going back and forth whether I want to read the next book in August or September, because it's huge
 
Read a bunch of stuff! Mostly of it good! I'll link each review there.

Mort and The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett, both delightful reads, as you might expect. I liked Mort a whole lot more than Light though.

I definitely enjoyed Mort a lot more of the two, I think because it just has a cleaner, stronger story, it's easy to connect with the characters and understand the stakes. I like how he blends scifi concepts like "rogue timelines" with fantasy, he always handles this in a whimsical way. Everything with Death was the highlight for me, particularly his curiosity with humans, done presumably for the sake of his daughter and his apprentice, more than his own feelings (of which he has none).

I was less enamored by The Light Fantastic, which is good and fun and funny, but also really scattershot, and clearly written as a comedy first and a fantasy story second. You can see his style develop from here to *Mort*, it's pretty interesting - for example, in *Mort*, he doesn't step out of the story to deliver a gag like he does here. It's also very wizard-heavy and man, Pratchett really really thinks wizards are the height of comedy, while I am personally a little lukewarm of them here. Still, I liked it, it has a ton of fascinating little places they visit, spend time exploring, then immediately move on from.

Waters of Versailles by Kelly Robson, which I saw a reading of at Readercon and enjoyed a lot. This one was a good read, maybe doesn't come together all the way but made me interested to check out her more recent work. Lot of fun ideas in here.

Hobson's Choice and They Don't Make Life Like They Used To by Alfred Bester, both pretty mid! Hobson's Choice was one of those Asimov-style "here's my one scifi idea, I'm gonna tell it to you" non-stories, and Don't Make Life was, to me, very pointless and rudderless, I have no idea what he was trying to do with that one.

Vampire Valentine by Lynsay Sands, which is a vampire romance I threw on my Libby after looking through a reddit thread and trying to find what people considered the best of These Kinds Of Books.

I honestly think this was pretty fun for a while! It starts with the main vampire Mirabeau LaRouche as she and grizzled detective TINY MCGRAW (who is anything but 😉) escort a newly-turned teenager through the sewers, and the banter is pretty solid, it's flirty and does a decent enough job laying out their personalities. I liked the trio.

Then they get out of sewers and get a hotel to shower and the story takes an extremely dumb turn, which I suspect is how a lot of these stories go: It is revealed that when you become a vampire, for Reasons, you become fated to pair off with a specific soul mate who you will be with forever. The story begins with the vampire matriarch saying that she intends to pair her off with someone, which she resists, but the matriarch dismisses this in a very motherly "aw you don't know what you want" way that really rubbed me the wrong way, but the story doesn't seem to think is bad.

So yeah, it turns out the matriarch is correct, Tiny is her soul mate, and they immediately bond at the hotel and are joined forever. The story then turns to camera to explain shit about how becoming a vampire works and how everyone is going to be happy forever, immortal and perpetually youthful in domestic bliss forevermore.

THAT'S IT THAT'S THE END OF THE STORY

I looked up some reactions to the story and people generally liked it a lot, specifically that everyone got a happy ending. This doesn't count!!! You can't just make up some guys and then have them be immediately granted a perfect fated ending!!! There has to be some kind of story here folks!!

I will say, I liked the power reversal at the beginning where Mirabeau was the physically strong defender type and Tiny was more of the planner and guide, the story did not linger long on how this was an unusual male/female dynamic and I appreciated that, gave us a glimpse of a world where vampire stuff is so prevalent that the old modes of thinking don't apply any longer. That's about the best I can say about it.

I was pretty floored the entire journey of courting and learning and talking and discovering one another was completely circumvented by a cosmic fate thing, followed by a mind-reading ability that let them both immediately know each other's mind completely. What's the fucking point? Where's the fun in any of this?

Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey, an early influential book in the romantasy realm. This ended up being a DNF for me due to its kinda creepy system, where dragonrides are forced to pair if their dragons do, leading to this scenario where the female protag resists but later caves in to her forced pairing. Ugh.

I can see why this was influential in the 60's, it definitely brings up a lot of concepts we see now, especially in fanfiction. But they're as troublesome and wish-fulfillmenty here as they are in a lot of eye-rolling romantasy: The world exists as it is to relieve from you the need to choose, you are paired to another (here by the choice of your dragon) and this is your life now, you don't need to think about any of this, just enjoy it. Ughh.

Anne McCaffrey does have the decency to at least mention, in an offhand way, how this "could be called rape", but that idea does not get interrogated. She falls for him, their dragons love each other too, and though they go through some ups and downs, there's your story.

For the writing style, it's very matter-of-fact in a way that did not leave an impression on me. It is not bad by any means, but it lacks anything deeper than dialogue and description of action.

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks, which was excellent. A friend was recced this by her therapist, and she really found it helpful, so I grabbed a copy and sure enough, it's an enormously well-written, honest reflection on masculinity in our culture.

An excellent and thoroughly useful book, Bell Hooks pulls together a clear, consistent, well-cited argument for the disassembly of a system that traumatizes young men and leaves them lessened, weakened, and suffering as they live a lie. I loved how specific and careful she was with her wording, to the point of often using common words like "integrity" for their actual literal meanings. What she says carries the weight of a well-reasoned, true, deeply-felt conviction. I would also recommend the audiobook by Janian Edwards, she hits the tone perfectly.

The portions of this book that moved me the most were her frequent moves into the heart of male rage and male dominance, as it manifests in those who have been shaped by toxic masculinity and patriarchal rigidity. She tracks the source of the pain, the splitting that happens when a young boy is told their authentic self is weak, unfit, shameful, undesirable. That they must kill the thing in them that feels, that reveals the weakness of feeling, and fill it in with a rigid dominant mask they feel they must wear, or they will becoming dominated by others. She picks apart the false choices patriarchal thought presses upon boys and men, she diagnoses the motivators of fear, secrecy, control, and shame, and she follows these through their lives, to when angry men become frustrated defenders of a thing that traumatized them, that has never really served them, and has kept them brittle and afraid.

I think her childhood in a household with an abusive and controlling father, one not even deemed so by society, lends a lot to this book. She has personally endured the tragedy of a father who cannot allow himself to love, a mother who fears her mate and is as much an agent of this oppressive force as he, who becomes a proponent of a thing that has harmed her and her children greatly. Bell asks the questions she had, 'Why doesn't he like us?', simple, valid questions with foolish and tragic answers. I appreciated her honesty when she described feeling a shame for her boyfriend when he allowed himself weakness, in wanting to hide it from the world. She rightly faces these feelings and moments and holds on to them, following their thread. I really think that impulse makes the book.

I found this a very hopeful, honest, and incisive facing of a dark element of our society, one that may have possibly served us in a more chaotic time, but whose great, stifling, punishing costs are no longer needed for our survival. I very much appreciate her continuing to return to the simple question of why a boy, why a man, why a father or a brother cannot allow themselves to feel and show love, why this is such a shameful and inciting thing. For something that affects everyone in some way, it is absolutely worthy of staring into, in challenging, and in imagining a world without.

Many men are unable to speak their suffering. Their refusal is rooted in the fear that their weakness will be exposed. They fear acknowledging the depths of their pain, as their pain intensifies, so does their need to violence to cohesively dominate and abuse others.

Barbara Deming explains:

"I think the reason men are so very violent is that they know, deep in themselves, that they're acting a lie, and so they're furious. You can't be happy living a lie. And so they're furious in being caught in the lie. But they don't know how to break out of it, so they just go further into it.

For many men, the moment of violent connection may be the only intimacy, the only attainable closeness, the only space, when the agony is released."

Many victimize from the location of victimization, the violence they do to others is usually a mirroring of the violence acted upon, and within, the self.

Many radical feminists have been so enraged by male domination that they cannot acknowledge the possibility of male suffering. Or forgive.
Click to expand...

Barbara Deming writes that men are "in a rage, because they are acting out a lie, which means, in some deep part of themselves, they want to be delivered from it, are homesick from the truth.' She explains that 'their fury gives us reason to fear. But it also gives us reason to hope."
Click to expand...

The young boy learns that his core feelings cannot be expressed if they do not conform to the acceptable behaviors sexism defines as male. Asked to give up the true self in order to realize the patriarchal ideal, boys learn self-betrayal early, and are rewarded for these acts of soul-murder.

Therapist John Bradshaw explains the splitting that takes place when a child learns that the way he organically feels is not acceptable:

In response to this lesson that his true self is inappropriate and wrong, the boy learns to don a false self.

The feeling that, 'I have done something wrong, but I really don't know what it is. That there's something very wrong with my very being.' leads to a sense of utter hopelessness. This hopelessness is the deepest cut of the mystified state. It means there is no possibility for me as I am, there is no way I can matter, or be worthy of anyone's love, as long as I remain myself. I must find a way to be someone else, someone who is lovable, someone who is not me.
Click to expand...

Boys in patriarchal culture continue to the tradition of creating a false self, of being split. That split in boys and men, is often characterized by the capacity to compartmentalize.

It is this division in the psyches and souls of males, fundamentally wounding, that is the breeding ground of mental illness. When males are required to wear the mask of a false sense, their capacity to live fully and freely is severely diminished. They cannot experience joy, and they can never truly love.

Anyone who has a false self, must be dishonest. People who learn to lie to themselves and others, cannot love, because they are crippled in their capacity to tell the truth, and therefore, unable to trust.

This is the heart of the psychological damage done to men in patriarchy. It is a form of abuse, that this culture continues to deny. Boys socialized to become patriarchs are being abused.

As victims of child abuse by a socialization in the direction of the patriarchal ideal, boys learn they are unlovable.

They learn that relationships are based on power, control, secrecy, fear, shame, isolation, and distance. These are the traits often admired in the patriarchal man.
Click to expand...

Teaching boys to despise their vulnerability is one way to socialize them to engage in self-inflicted soul-murder. This wound in the male spirit, caused by learned acts of splitting, of disassociation and disconnection, can only be healed by the practice of integrity. Wounded males must recover all the parts of the self they abandoned in serving the needs of patriarchal maleness. Such recovery is the necessary groundwork for restoring integrity to male being.

Rabbi Harold Kushner: "Integrity means being whole, unbroken, undivided. It describes a person who has united the different parts of his or her personality, so there is no longer a split in the soul."

Patriarchy encourages men to surrender their integrity, and live lives of denial. By learning the arts of compartmentalization, dissimulation, and disassociation, men are able to see themselves as acting with integrity in cases where they are not. Their learned state of psychological denial is severe.
Click to expand...

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders was a particularly excruciating read for me. I should have DNFed this but I powered through.

I liked the first few chapters quite a bit, when it had only introduced magic, the world tree, talking animals, witches, and time travel. But, as the story went on, more and more and more elements were piled on top of each other (AIs, superscientists, assassins, multiverse travel, the healing/trickster duology of magic, natural disasters, The Unraveling, the bird's riddle, curses, the Science vs Magic conflict, the planet escape plan, the giant killer robot) and it became clear that genuinely none of them would be given the time and the text to turn into anything. Sure enough, each one was forgotten just as soon as it was introduced, and the story wrapped up as hastily as it could. I checked and she's working on a sequel, so, maybe all of it was for that.

I think it helps to see this as a RTD Doctor Who script, where wacky zany ideas are introduced, and just move around a little, and then our heroes chase and get chased, and leave at the end, and that's the episode. This book was a lot like that. One thing it really reminded me of is when a gag-focused webcomic does a big dramatic arc, but still has to have a joke at the end of every strip.
 
Finished the month off strong with The September House by Carissa Orlando, one of the most interesting haunted house stories I've read in some time
 
Few more:

Blood Over Bright Haven by M. L. Wang. I absolutely loved this one, I'm definitely checking out her others, like Sword of Kaigen.

I think her writing style was mostly what made this sing for me, she really gets into everyone's head and shows not just what they believe but how they think, what they want, how they feel, even how little time they spend considering something. When the book's twist happens, the main character Sciona can't possibly escape it, even with the entire society built around providing easy excuses. For any bit that seemed heavy-handed, I think it worked because Wang put in the work to go all the way with the concept, they faced the pain again and again.

Sunshine by Robin McKinley. I think I ultimately liked this, and that's largely because the world was well-realized, feeling like a living thing with history and unique culture and a direction it was heading in. I also generally loved the characters, she does a great job making everyone feel distinct and, again, like real people with history and needs and wants.

I had some gripes but I put those in the review there. I forget what set me on this "read a whole bunch of vampire books" kick but this was on that struck me by thinking through what they would would actually be like, and how it would actually be different, with the Others having always been in it.
 
Been reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl series and a part of me wonders how much the fan base are in a Gundam/"Cool robot" mindset about it.
 
I finished a reread of The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub. I read this last about 25 years ago, it was also my first Stephen King. I loved it my first time around. This time, I definitely felt it dragged. Should have been half the length. Still had a nice time with it, though. I also finished a Spider-Man omnibus called Birth of Venom. It goes through most of the issues of Spidey wearing the Symbiote and then the origin of Venom. Very good. Highly recommend
 
We have a tale of two different reads here that I recently finished. First, we have The Girl with a Thousand Faces by Sunyi Dean. This was a very cool story filled with ghosts, revenge, and forgiveness. Then, we have The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig. This was a bit of a mess, sad to say. Kind of reminded me of that Netflix series Dark in a way.
 
Finished Daniel Kraus's Angel Down on my commute this morning, and I can see why this book won the Pulitzer Prize. I was skeptical about how good it was going to be since I didn't love Whalefall, but this thing was an absolute tour de force. There's a whole lot of Faulkner in the writing and I came away extremely impressed. Easy recommend to anyone who's even remotely interested.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top