sticky notes

thought and quote repository for books i'm reading/have read! mainly interested in speculative/science fiction, horror, and literary fiction

[noirredeemabledespair]

welcome!

i'm erin (30, she/they) and this is my reading sideblog.

genres i'm interested in: speculative/science fiction, horror, literary fiction. i read more widely than these genres but will probably post about them the most!

currently reading: the obelisk gate by n. k. jemisin

[vehicularmotorcycle]

Book 1: Ancillary Justice

Book 3: Ancillary Mercy

[along-the-coast]

No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year. We’ve followed our road too far.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

[noirredeemabledespair]

demon copperhead took me OUT, i just finished so i don't have coherent thoughts but i Did cry after finishing it--in a form of overwhelm and release--especially after reading kingsolver's final dedication ("For the kids who wake up hungry in those dark places every day, who've lost their families to poverty and pain pills, whose caseworkers keep losing their files, who feel invisible, or wish they were: this book is for you.")

[annori]

Barbara Kingsolver from Demon Copperhead (2022)

[sunshinesere]

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone / This is How You Lose the Time War

[no-where-new-hero]

Angela Carter and the "So Fucking What" Approach to Writing

[thedreamthieves]

it’s time. tell me ur favorite book you read in 2024. also least favorite if you’ve got one!

[noirredeemabledespair]

i only finished tell me i’m worthless 45 minutes ago and definitely need to marinate in it (and probably reread the last ~40 pages) but some initial thoughts:

rumfitt does an Excellent job weaving fascist ideals into every character, especially both alice and ila. since i finished this book right after the 2024 us presidential election, i’ve been thinking a lot about what fascism is, who is a fascist, how its ideas spread, and why now in particular it is (further) entrenching itself. how can you separate the ugly history of a country from the people who populate it today? this book seems to suggest that you can’t, it’s impossible, and i think i agree

but also: nobody is immune from engaging in or upholding fascism, no matter what identity/ies they may occupy. i Loved the slower reveal about alice’s racist, anti-immigrant, and antisemitic thoughts; we know from the get-go that ila is mixed race, jewish, And a t/e/r/f, but alice is the character talking To the audience the most. she gets to use first person in ways that other characters don’t, so of course she’s not going to be honest about that herself (since iirc all the reveals happen in third person).

on a more detailed level, the style of hannah’s section in the house watching ila and alice attack one another worked so well, and clearly demonstrated the fragmented (and sometimes competing) nature of trauma (narratives), and memory.

[noirredeemabledespair]

tell me i’m worthless by alison rumfitt

[wapisiw]

“Any horror story could be said to work in two pieces: the fear of being wholly alone and of realising that one has company.”

Julia Armfield, Private Rites (p. 269)

[soracities]

“We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.”

— Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

[lesmiserabelles]

eliza clark's new book, penance, is a literary masterpiece and a savvy examination of true crime entertainment, but it's also a nightmarishly vivid time capsule of mid 2010s fandom tumblr

[dykeselfcest]

People think it's just hellfire and brimstone, four horsemen and out, but actually the end times go on and on and on.

Julia Armfield, Private Rites

[punkrockismyreligion]

How does one hate a country, or love one? […] I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?

— Ursula K. Le Guin – The Left Hand of Darkness (1969, p. 212)

[feral-ballad]

Susan Abulhawa, from Against the Loveless World: A Novel

[Text ID: “I wanted to be chosen, maybe loved. I wanted out of my life, out of my skin,”]

[book-quotes-and-moodboards]

Or is anyone’s identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?

Ancillary Justice (by Ann Leckie)