79. Fierce Fairytales and Other Stories to Stir Your Soul, by Nikita Gill
Owned?: No, library
Page count: 155
My summary: A collection of poems and fairytales for modern times; fairytales where girls are prized for their cleverness rather than their beauty, where gaining a husband is not the only thing a woman can do, and where the girl and the dragon have more in common than you think.
My rating: 2/5
My commentary:
You're not really meant to read a poetry book cover-to-cover, the way that I do. That can make the reading experience worse. I fully acknowledge that. But I don't think reading these poems alone would have saved this collection from being just…meh. You know that breed of #girlboss feminism, trotting out tired statements about how you're a strong independent woman who doesn't need a man, how girls run the world, like a Spice Girls song but somehow more annoying? Yeah, this collection was just that, with nothing on top to elevate it. It's just full of route one girlboss poetry that is the kind of thing that would get passed around on tumblr in, like, 2012 with everyone tagging it #omg Deep. Women are fragile beings that are also possessed of an inherent strength that just needs you to let it out, men are all evil, and most of our understanding of fairytales seems to come from Disney, as per. The Cinderella ones even quote the 'have courage and be kind' thing from the live-action Cinderella. And it's just so bland. Maybe one of these poems on their own would pass muster, but the problem with collecting them all together like this is that it just shows off the fact that they're all the same, fundamentally.
There's also a severe lack of nuance going on. Women are supposed to never want to be mothers or wives or anything like that according to the philosophy of these poems, but what they are supposed to want is sort of vague - be #brave and #strong but not, like, in anything specific. It mentions things like anorexia but never strays into anything more complex than the standard clichés around women with eating disorders. After a certain point Gill just seems to give up on the fairytale framing and just starts writing generic girlboss poems without anything else to them. And all of the fairytales are exactly what you would expect - mostly from Disney's playbook, including things like Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. And all of them are typical for those kinds of 'Twisted Fairytales' - Alice is on drugs! Peter Pan and Hook were kids together or something! Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat! It's just so banal, so route one. Ugh. Give this a skip.
Next, no one would do what the Lamberts have done…
Owned?: Yes
Page count: 412
My summary: Captain Jack Aubrey has only just gained his captaincy - upon a sloop named the Sophie, a fourteen-gun ship that is not, perhaps, the best ship in the fleet. After a near-duel with a doctor named Stephen Maturin, he ends up tempting the man aboard as his ship's surgeon - and he is determined to make the most of his command.
My rating: 3.5/5
My commentary:
Okay. So. I feel like I am not going to make some friends in certain quarters if I say that I was not the biggest fan of Master and Commander. In fact, the reason that I am reading it now is because our work book group's book theme for the month is a book that you DNF'd for whatever reason. Now, I don't DNF books all that often - I read fast enough that by the time a book starts annoying me, I'm far enough in to get hit by the sunk costs fallacy, and finish the damn thing out of stubbornness anyway. Nevertheless, after thinking on it for a while, I remembered this book. A while back, I started it - I read the first fifty or so pages, but I really wasn't into it, and decided to put it aside for a while. I suppose now is the time to get reading. And…I was not all that fond of it, I'm afraid. I think it's a pretty good book, it just wasn't for me.
I think it's the writing style that turned me off this the most. This book belongs to the genre I call 'granddad fiction' - the same as the Westerns that we have at work, the kind of thing that the prototypical granddad would be caught reading. And that's not a bad thing at all, it's just that the kind of thing that might appeal to someone who was a young man in 1970 would not necessarily appeal to a me here in 2026. And, well, what would appeal to the kind of men that Master and Commander was written for is, apparently, naval jargon. A lot of naval jargon. Now, I've said before that, while I do know some things about how tall ships operated, it's not exactly my area of expertise. And I got very, very lost. It seemed to me like there were so many interesting things that happened in this book, but not a lot of them actually made it into the narrative, because the narrative is instead going over the specifics of how the foremast topsails are rigged. Like, at one point Maturin does brain surgery on a man, who unexpectedly survives the whole thing, but it happens entirely off-page! It was infuriating to me in a way, but also, I kind of understand it in one sense. Styles of writing change, and this book is over fifty years old - that this book is not as character-focused as I would like just tells you what my priorities are, moreso than an objective statement on how books should be. Still, that's a reason why I didn't connect to it specifically. And, you know, this isn't necessarily a criticism that only I have. I hear that fans sometimes tell people to start with the third book in the series, and there's whole books written to explain the naval jargon and references in these books! (One of which I might get, because I still really wanna understand how boats work.)
Because despite everything else, this book has a lot of charm. I persevered because I wanted to see what was going on in one of the most famous tall ship books of all time, and I did get a fair amount out of it! There were just so many small moments of charm in between the tall ship jargon and the battle scenes and the politicking. Like, there's a moment where we see Maturin engrossed in watching two praying mantises fuck, or the ongoing implication that Aubrey fucked around and was a little shit all the time when he was a midshipman. That's part of the reason that I persevered with this book; while the book is not necessarily character-focused in the way that I would prefer, there's still consideration put into the characters and world, it's not like it's completely sidelined for the battle scenes, which I think is nice. I'm probably not gonna read any other Master and Commander books unless someone convinces me it might be worth it for me, but I can see why this series has fans. It's good! It's just not for me.
Owned?: No, library
Page count:
My summary: Frankie survived a bombing of a gender identity clinic. She's survived being a trans woman in England for her entire life. But now, listless, trying to deal with her awful job and claw back a life from the rubble. That's when she meets Vanya. Vanya is…mysterious. They're eager to please, strange, and reluctant to talk about their life outside of Frankie. But as Frankie draws closer and closer, she's drawn more into Vanya's world…and the mysteries that entails.
My rating: 5/5
My commentary:
This book is probably not for you.
But damn, I fucking loved it. Look, this book is gross. It's very decidedly gross. I don't usually have strong emotional reactions to fiction (beep beep boop I am a robot) but this one made me actually gag with how gross it was. Parasites are a major theme of this book, and they're not just a metaphor - characters really, actively get infected with parasites, and this is described in detail. There are also themes of the scatological, and other similar things. If those things are not for you, then you should not read this book. Alison Rumfitt is very deliberate in how she uses these themes and ideas, however. Because what this book also is, is a potent story about the horrors of being a transgender woman in England today, and it pulls exactly no punches at all. It isn't an easy book, but that's because it isn't trying to be. And if you have the stomach for it, it's a very worthy read.
First of all, parasites. Vanya has a kink for being infected by parasites, which is something that they actualise on a few occasions. They are also in an abusive relationship with a cis man called Gaz, who is part of an underground anti-trans cult which is seen in the middle of the book tearing apart a trans woman as part of some kind of fucked up ritual. Sometimes, characters can see worms coming out of the orifices of people in this cult. Have I mentioned this book is fucked up? But really, this serves as a potent metaphor on how people use other people. Gaz is using Vanya, grooming them to fulfil his fetishes and manipulating their life. Vanya's mother, who (spoiler!) is the one who bombed Frankie and devolved into a full-on TERF is a parasite on Vanya and their brother's lives, hating them for being trans. Frankie has a thing about pregnancy, wanting to become pregnant in a way that rings true for many real-life trans women, and uh. You can imagine how the parasite theme comes into play there. Especially in the first scene, which chronologically occurs at the end of the narrative and is recontextualised when we see them at the end.
Secondly, this book is about transmisogyny, and is not aiming to be subtle on that mark. Rumfitt directly addresses the audience a few times, and does so before the main narrative to talk about how she is writing from 2030, when being transgender is illegal. Later, there is a section about banning public bathrooms in general, which is a pointed commentary on the public bathroom 'debate' here in the real world. Frankie is constantly denigrated for being trans. One horrible moment that is so resonant to the abhorrent treatment of trans women in reality and also constantly on this very website is one night when Frankie sees a notable TERF being awful on social media, and lashes out, tweeting at her that she should kill herself. And her life implodes overnight. She is fired, socially ostracised, and placed in the middle of a media furor that basically wants her dead. Just for lashing out one night on social media over a person who wants her, and literally everyone like her, dead. It's at this point that her life truly descends into darkness and, like, this kind of thing is happening literally every day. This is what trans women have to face, constantly. They have to be constantly perfect all of the time, or society will treat them like monsters. Hell, they're treated like monsters even if they don't actually do anything, and this is one of the points the book was making.
If you think I haven't really described the events of the book particularly, that's deliberate. There's a lot going on in this book that, honestly, needs to be fully read to be understood, and I don't think that I can do it full justice here. The tone is completely disturbing, weaving between the seemingly mundane and the surreal, with this sort of heightened reality that is close to the realistic, but is just a little off. Strange things happen constantly, but outside of some hallucinogenic sequences, nothing gets too away from the real world until the very end. It's honestly better experienced that described. There's so much meaning packed into it, so much detail and nuance and messiness. If you can handle it…I'd definitely recommend it.
76. The War of the Spanish Succession, by James Falkner
Owned?: Yes
Page count: 217
My summary: The War of the Spanish Succession raged between 1701 and 1714 - yet another time that Britain and Spain were at war, this time after the death of the previous Spanish king. Two men - Archduke Charles of Austria, the pick of England, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Dutch Republic, and Philip of Anjou, the choice of France, Barvaria, Cologne, Liége, Portugal, Savoy, and Mantua. Who would succeed the throne depended on who won the war.
My rating: 3/5
My commentary:
Hoo boy. This is a book that I am not going to have much to say about, mostly because I don't want to bash a book that isn't bad, just isn't my thing. I need to know about the War of the Spanish Succession for research purposes, but the thing is that I am not very good at military history. It just doesn't interest me. Social history is more my bag - how people lived, the stories of regular humans in different periods of history. So this book was never going to be particularly interesting to me. I found it dry, kinda dull, and sometimes hard to follow due to the fact that I cannot keep things like names and titles and who belongs to which faction in my head. So, I kind of struggled through this book, but that was not really this book's fault. I'd definitely check it out if you're interested in the subject, but if military history isn't really your thing, don't expect much.
Next, a book that I would not, necessarily recommend…but absolutely loved.
Owned?: No, library
Page count: 1248
My summary: The Alethi have reached the secret city of Urithiru. Away from the Voidbringers who have savaged Kholinar. But they are not safe, not yet. Kaladin has been sent out to assess the damage and see just what is happening with the parshmen. Shallan is locked inside her rooms, sketching and drawing and practicing her Lightweaving. And Dalinar is beginning to see the ghosts of his own past, as his memory returns slowly. But what are the Voidbringers planning? And when they march, will Dalinar be enough to unite the opposing countries against them?
My rating: 4/5
My commentary:
More Stormlight! These ones take a good while to read even for me, on account of being twelve hundred pages long and change. Still, I'm gonna finish this series by the end of the year, and I'm still really enjoying it! For all it's long, it's well-paced - I never really feel like the narrative's dragging or that I'm slogging through. I was reading about a hundred pages a day, roughly fifty in one sitting, and I was always sorry when I had to stop. As ever with the Stormlight Archive, there's a lot going on in these books, so I can't possibly talk about literally everything that happens because, you know, gestures again at the page count. Instead, I'm gonna go over our main three characters, then have a kind of free-for-all section at the end where I waffle about other stuff. Sound good? It better! Let's go.
You know, I think there's something radical in the fact that Dalinar hates his wife. This is not true. Dalinar to this point has been under a curse - he was given strength, but lost all memory of his wife, and could not even remember/hear her name. His stoicism around that in the first couple of books invites a particular narrative - Dalinar loved his wife and giving up her memory was a great sacrifice. But the truth, as revealed here, is more complicated. Dalinar did love Evi, but she often exasperated him because she was very much his opposite, a peacebringer where he was a warmonger, sensitive where he was sharp. Their mutual frustration led to a rocky marriage, and their philosophical disagreements led to tragedy, when Evi followed Dalinar into a city he was attacking to try and make peace, and was killed when Dalinar set fire to the city in vengeance. That Dalinar is a war criminal (by our world's understanding) is not all that surprising. Career soldier, and all. But the disparity between the angry, vengeful man of the past and the stoic, disciplined man we see now is stark, even moreso when Dalinar gets the full context of what he did and lapses back into alcoholism to deal with the trauma. Funnily enough, you can't character-develop your way into having Absolutely No Trauma over something terrible you did. But he's in a better, more reflective place now. Really, that's the interesting thing I find about Dalinar - his capacity for self-reflection and his ability to at least try and make peace, try and change, try and be better for the world he wants to create. His moments of power, physical and mental, are glorious. And his big moment on the battlefield in the climax? So juicy. I love it.
Shallan, in this book, has DID. Like, that's just what this is. She creates new personalities for herself when she can't cope with a situation because of the trauma that she has been through. Her main two are Veil, the streetwise thief from the last book, and Radiant, a newcomer who doesn't have Shardblade related trauma so that she can learn to spar with Adolin. Of course, Shallan's personalities are literalised in the way that fantasy can (she can Lightweave their appearances over her) but at its core, it's still a highly traumatised woman literally constructing alters to help her deal with stressful situations. What I find interesting is that, though I don't think Sanderson was conceptualising this as DID per se, it's still an interesting way of looking at mental health and mental illness. Shallan is clearly struggling, but she's also competent and manages to pull off some impressive things, even if she makes a lot of mistakes and is dealing with her fracturing mental state as she goes. She's a really strong character, and the return of Jasnah in this book really encapsulates how much she's changed and grown since we first saw her - she's no longer cowed by Jasnah, making things up as she goes along. She's a Knight Radiant! She has power! And she uses it well.
Kaladin is once more the universe's punching bag - well, I say that, but he does have some high points in this one. Bridge Four is coming into their own with their Radiant powers. He gets to go home, see his parents, and meet his little brother, which is absolutely adorable and I love him. But once more, he gets everything torn from him. While the messaging of it is a little on the nose (whaaaaaaaaat war causes ordinary people to fight and kill each other for someone else's gain you don't say) him befriending both the Wall Guard in Khloinar and a group of escapee Parshman slaves who then are on opposite sides of the fighting in Kholinar and end up killing each other is emotive, it's still a gut punch. I didn't like some of the writing around the Wall Guard? Kaladin seems to be learning a Very Special Lesson about how the privileged people who made his life hell are, in fact, people too which…I'm not sure it was needed. But anyway. I love his bond with Syl, as always; his protectiveness, his loyalty, trying to help his people in the best ways that he can. Even though he's separated from Bridge Four for most of the narrative, there's still an undying camaraderie there that's lovely to see. Have I mentioned how Broken Men are one of my favourite character archetypes yet?
For other stuff…Shallan/Adolin/Kaladin is still OT3, sorry not sorry. I have to admit, I am struggling with some of the wider-universe stuff - either the narrative is referring to stuff that happens in other books which I haven't read, or I've forgotten some of the metaphysics of how this world works because, you know, this isn't the only fictional universe I'm trying to keep in my head. There's a little bit of under-explanation, overreliance on the reader being able to recall information from the other Cosmere stories that means I feel somewhat left behind here when it comes to the specifics of Honor and Odium and the other godlike figures. As well as some of the specifics of the magic. Sanderson loves making up terms, and sometimes that becomes a bit too much. I know there's a gloss at the end of the books, but that doesn't help me in the moment remember what all this terminology means and why it's important. Maybe it's a me thing, maybe I'm just stupid, but I feel like the story could use a little more exposition at times, just to make clearer what is obviously meant to be clear. Also, unrelatedly, I really like Taravangian. I think his philosophical conversations with Dalinar are fascinating, especially in light of what we know about him; the dramatic tension of how Dalinar sees him is palpable, and only really comes to a head at the end. Interesting lil guy. Anyway, this book was great, and I'm looking forward to the next! Just…not for a little bit, okay?
Next, we take to the seas…but not about pirates, this time!
74. Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean, by Edward Kritzler
Owned: Yes
Page count: 324
My summary: A non-fiction text about Jewish immigration from Europe to the Caribbean, in defiance of the Spanish Inquisition and all who would oppress them in their home countries - including the Jewish people who became pirates to do so.
My rating: 3.5/5
Another research book, and another re-read - this one is less focused on pirates than the title would imply, it's a little clickbaity. Sure, there's pirates involved, but it's mostly about the history of Jewish people in the New World, specifically how mainly Sephardic Jews emigrated to the Spanish, English, and Dutch areas of the Caribbean, and the complex legal wrangling that led them there. Jewish people were not allowed under Spanish law to travel to the New World (or those descended from Jewish people, because at that time, on paper, there were no Jewish people in Spain) but many managed to make the journey anyway, with forged papers and a bit of luck. Away from Europe, they could in theory create havens away from persecution, although there were still some difficulties in doing that given that the places they were moving to were European controlled. And yeah, some Jewish people in this era became pirates. The focus, as I said, is more on the fight against persecution and the move from Europe to the Americas, which to be fair is interesting in itself.
The problem with this book, however…well, there's two. The first is that, due to the nature of many Jewish people hiding the fact that they were practicing their religion so they didn't, you know, get murdered, it's impossible to tell where many conversos (Jewish people who converted to Catholicism) and their descendants sat on the spectrum from 'actual Catholic' to 'practicing Judaism in secret and just faking the Catholicism'. Understandably, these conversos didn't leave much evidence about their secret, illegal Judaism (known as crypto-Judaism) for future historians. The thing is that Kritzler just tends to assume conversos were also crypto-Jews by default, and as such paints every single achievement of the era as being basically a Jewish achievement because conversos were involved. And it's like, okay, I can understand wanting to write Jewish people back into history where otherwise they have been ignored, and there's solid evidence for some of the groups of conversos being crypto-Jews that he cites! But other groups it's more just 'take my word for it' kind of evidence, and that's not good enough to prove that someone would have identified themself as Jewish. I don't mean to imply that conversos were definitely committed Catholics unless there's a smoking gun to the contrary, just that it can't be known for a lot of people where they sat between Catholicism and Judaism unless there's evidence that points one way or another. Which, for many people, there's not.
The other problem is how the book treats Indigenous and enslaved people. You know how I said that the book presents a lot of European achievements in the Caribbean as being Jewish because of the conversos involved? That includes trade. The rum trade, the sugar trade, and the slave trade. Kritzler treats Jewish people being successful in the slave trade as…kind of a good thing. Now, to be fair, there is a passage that points out that Jewish people were no more complicit in the slave trade than other white people of the era, which is true! But they were still complicit in it nonetheless, and the book kind of glosses over the fact that every white person in the Americas at this point was either outright committing, or was passively benefitting from, the colonial genocide of Indigenous people and the widespread slavery of Africans and African-Americans. Again, this is not to say that Jewish people were to blame for all of this - absolutely not, they were a minority among the white people who were committing these acts, and the blame can be equally if not moreso placed at the feet of non-Jewish white people. But to not acknowledge that the Jewish settlers in the Caribbean were complicit in these things is to whitewash a part of history, and it feels like Black and Indigenous people were somewhat thrown under the bus by this book.
Next…hoo boy. I've been plugging away at this one for a while. Time for more Brandon Sanderson!
Owned?: Yes
Page count: 185
My summary: Thorn Estragon has a big problem. A kid's fallen through a hole between universes and gotten stranded in his reality. It just so happens that the kid is a younger version of himself, from a world where he's a magical boy fighting supernatural threats. Now, Thorn has to look after the kid as best he can, while trying to figure out how to get the boy home. And beside all of that, there's Kale, whose secret is slipping out…
My rating: 5/5
My commentary:
Leif and Thorn! It's one of my favourite webcomics of all time, and I've religiously kept up with the print copies when they're up on Backerkit. This is the newest, which got to me remarkably quickly (I'm writing this on the 24th of April, and the book got to me by the 22nd - it was only sent out on the 16th!) considering that I'm on a different continent. Anyway. Leif and Thorn is a webcomic, as I said, and it's freely available to read right now! It's the story of Thorn, a guard at an embassy in a fantasy world, and his love interest, Leif, an indentured servant owned by said embassy. There's a lot going on in the comic - themes of oppression, class, poverty, LGBT+ identity, mental and physical health, trauma, and also there's magical people and unicorns and Thorn fought a dragon that one time. It's also pretty lighthearted - there's a lot of comedy in the comic, and it balances that really well with the more dramatic beats! Like, this is the story of a teenager isekai'd from a magical girl universe to a more modern-ish fantasy universe who meets his adult self. There's so much potential for both fun and drama in there. And once again, it sticks the landing perfectly!
Thorn has to deal with having his teenager self around, and it's interesting how both of them are characterised - Thorn has an immediate protective instinct over Kid!Thorn, but his instinct is to treat him like he is literally himself as a teenager, as opposed to a parallel teenager, which causes a little tension between them. Kid!Thorn is eager to get home, but all of the adults are either treating him with suspicion or lying to him, which isn't necessarily helping. Thorn's PTSD comes up here - his former commander is involved with testing Kid!Thorn's abilities to see how they differ from the magic available in their home, but his former commander is the one who got half of Thorn's squad killed and Thorn's arm irreparably damaged in the aforementioned dragon fight. Thorn is understandably nervous letting him near Kid!Thorn, but he's being professional about it; ready to jump in if there's an issue, but not causing arguments, even when it's clear that he's strained by the interactions he has. See, this is where I keep going on about Thorn being Good, but not boring - he's clearly affected by PTSD, he's clearly unwilling to give this guy an inch, but he's trying to be diplomatic and work for the best of everyone, while still making contingencies. Kid!Thorn is just adorable, too. A little more emotional and impulsive than our Thorn, but you can clearly see that they're the same person underneath everything, and he's so easy to sympathise with. Especially when he's playing Fantasy Candy Crush for hours. Same, kiddo.
The other character with a lot of focus in these storylines is Kale, aka former dark magical boy Kudzu, who is trying to get over his own trauma at being manipulated into mind-controlling people by a dodgy pharmaceutical company, which led to him killing a lot of people when his buttons were pushed the right way. Kale is honestly trying to get past the cult mindset and heal, which is difficult when a lot of people think he's history's greatest monster, including himself. Not helping is the fact that Kid!Thorn was sent between universes by Kid!Kale, which means he, too, has a mini-me out there somewhere making all the same mistakes he used to. Kale is always an interesting character to me because yeah, objectively, he has done some horrible things - but that doesn't make him a horrible or unsympathetic person. We see why he did what he did, and we see how he reacts to it going forward. One of the things in this collection is his meeting with Hermosa, to whom he was close and who he hurt terribly when things went bad. There's an ambiguity to Hermosa's thoughts and feelings around it, which is interesting (Hermosa has pretty bad brain damage because of what happened) and there's definitely a lot of nuance around everyone's perspectives. None of them are entirely wrong, all of them are at odds with one another. Kale's self-loathing, Dex (Hermosa's cunning and devious spouse) wanting to kill Kale for all he did, Hermosa being somewhere in the middle of sympathetic and antagonistic to Kale. It's interesting to see unfold.
What's some other stuff in here? There's a neat subplot with Thorn's magical teammate, Atarangi, who's part of a DID system - one of her alters, Kallie, has completely different magic to her, which means her DID comes out when she helps with a water-magic thing that Atarangi, a fire mage, couldn't. This series' treatment of DID is pretty sensitive and, as far as I can tell as a singlet, realistic to how DID develops and what it looks like to have DID, so kudos there! Plus, the Neineikura system is cute. Justice for Pond Thing Neineikura. There's also one of the best and cutest moments in Leif and Thorn's entire relationship, where Kale rents Leif for an evening so that the couple can finally sleep together without there being a power imbalance. (Short version, Leif is an indentured servant who cannot spend time outside work unless he is being rented. There is a sexual services package Thorn can buy, the problem being that Leif would then be compelled to follow Thorn's orders on pain of punishment, which is a power dynamic that Thorn wants to avoid. If it's Kale renting Leif, and Kale just gives an ambiguous 'have fun!' kinda order, Leif is free to do whatever without consequence.) It's been coming for a long time, and the scene where it finally happens is so sweet, they're just overjoyed at finally having this opportunity to act like they're in a less complicated relationship for a night, and they're practically floating on air afterwards. I love these boys, I'm so glad they finally get some happiness!
Owned?: Yes
Page count: 334
My summary: The story of women in the Age of Sail has been condensed to a short one - there were no women at sea, women were not allowed to be sailors. And while women were, in fact, not meant to go to sea, that doesn't mean that none of them did. In this 2001 look at the history of women on the ocean in the Age of Sail, David Cordingly tells us about the women who pioneered sea life - the pirates, pro-stitues, wives, nurses, helpers, and others who took to the sea in this period.
My rating: 3.5/5
My commentary:
I've been looking forward to rereading this. I think I got it at a charity shop, a long time ago. David Cordingley is meant to be one of the foremost authorities on pirates in his generation, and a lot of his information is solid. Even apart from that, he's writing about women in the sailing world, a demographic who often get ignored. Oh, sure, you have your Anne Bonny and your Mary Read. Maybe, if you're knowledgable on the matter, we can throw a Mary Anne Talbot in there. But women's roles in naval life tend to get overshadowed by the vaster majority of men who were out there, and the fact that none of them were there officially. And it's not just the classic 'woman dresses as a man to go to sea' trope. Lots of women went to sea as women, which was against the rules but was still tolerated, for certain classes of women. The wives of officers on ship could be brought on so that they actually got chances to see their husbands, and so that they could have something resembling a normal life even though their husband was at sea for many moths. This book spans the Age of Sail, so a lot of it wasn't useful for my setting (1711), but it was still really good, really interesting look at women's lives on deck in this kind of period.
Now, this book is from 2001, so both scholarship has advanced since its publication and some aspects of it are looking a bit dated these days. For example, the book is largely focused on women, but there's chapters where that focus slips, and we're back to talking about Important Men (one specifically is John Paul Jones, apparently a famous womaniser, but he gets more focus than the women he's with). Oftentimes women-in-general are discussed rather than specific examples, but to be fair I imagine that we don't have a lot of first-hand evidence of what it was like to be, say, a working class sex worker at a random dockside in the 17/1800s, so you have to generalise at least somewhat. In fairness to it, too, this book is pretty comprehensive, chronicling women across class boundaries and in different nautical settings - pirates, the wives of officers, the wives of common sailors both at sea and at home, the 'girls in every port', women who served in battle, women who kept lighthouses…there's a lot here for a relatively slim volume, and it's good to see! I did enjoy this book, and I'm glad I had the chance to reread it.
66-71. Bloodborne Comics, Bloodborne Comics, by Kot, Kowalski, and Simpson
Owned?: Yes
Page count: Unknown, not numbered
My summary: The Hunt has begun. Foul beasts stalk the streets of Yharnam, the victims of the ashen blood plague. But is it enough to just survive the hunt? The Hunter seeks paleblood to transcend. The scientist and the priest seek answers. The Crow seeks her past. And when the veil is torn asunder, one traveller seeks the mysteries of the universe itself…
My rating: 5/5
My commentary:
I have talked about these comics before. Bloodborne is one of my all-time favourite video games, despite me never actually having played the damn thing until recently. What can I say, I'm not good at games, but I am pleased to report I beat it with all the bosses taken down bar a few Chalice Dungeon ones that I couldn't be bothered to seek out! And when I can't play the whole damn video game all over again, I microdose it by reading all of these comics! There's six at this point; the first four are all standalone, and the last two are sequential. I don't wanna do six posts, so what I'm gonna do is talk about all of them in one, with one paragraph per comic.
The Death of Sleep is the first, and imo the best, of these comics. This is the story of a Hunter before the events of the game, trying to understand the meaning of paleblood and trying to survive. For me, this is the best of the comics because of how much it plays with the idea of being a prequel to the story; it obviously telegraphs this with Iosefka still accepting patients, Old Yharnam not yet being burned and Djura being mostly friendly, but it also plays with the game mechanics being literally what it happening. We see the Hunter die and go to the Hunter's Dream, replaying stretches of the game and seeing enemies respawn. There's a sense of inevitable doom about it - this is not your Hunter, the Hunter who will one way or another win the game, but a Hunter who failed, a Hunter who died, a Hunter who struggled and bled like the rest of them but did not make it to the end. And that's interesting, right? This is the bleak kind of world that Bloodborne is. But maybe there's hope. The Hunter does make it to the Fishing Hamlet with the child, and while the child is not the paleblood that they need to end the Dream, they still manage to escape in a way. Out into the unknown.
The Healing Thirst is also a prequel, set among the people of Yharnam as things start to get bad outside, and follows a scientist and a priest as they attempt to figure out the source of the sickness that is covering Yharnam. If Death of Sleep is the best at showing the game world, this is the best individual, standalone story. There's a very real sense of the world crumbling and collapsing around the protagonists, and the desperation of their struggle to keep people alive and try and do what they can to survive. Not that they don't have their own secrets. The scientist begins to believe, while the priest's opinion of the church grows lower and lower as the story carries on, and not all is as it seems with these two characters. It's also interesting to see a version of this story where Hunters are antagonists, as opposed to the hero of the game.
A Song of Crows is focused on Eileen the Crow, the hunter of hunters from the game who is an early influence on your character. This is her backstory…sort of. It's weird. It's surreal, a story told out of time, spiralling around and around the same ideas. We see a funeral, a ritual, a boy drowning in a lake. Another hunter, this one with a human mask, is targeting her. It's very abstract, with similar symbols and ideas being repeated throughout. Honestly, I don't think I'm smart enough to be able to interpret it completely. If I were to pitch an idea, it would be that Eileen is so affected by the death of the boy - her friend - that she begun to get this deep respect for funeral rites and dying well that she shows in the main game. She is, towards the end of her life, haunted by the mistakes that led to the boy dying, to hunting hunters; something she is resigned to, but does not enjoy. The masked Hunter could stand for her guilt and grief, that idea that something has been chasing her throughout her whole life, something with an unknowable human face. It's a hugely interesting story, and I love Eileen so much.
The Veil, Torn Asunder is the weakest of the stories, in my opinion. It's got the surreal trippiness of Crows, but where it falls down is that the protagonist is not someone we already know. And, frankly, not someone I care about. Healing Thirst made me care about its protagonists, it gave them a lot of character and understanding, whereas this guy…was in a war? Killed people? Maybe? I don't know anything about him, because it's just that surreal nightmare nonsense over and over, but this time it's far less engaging. It doesn't help that this guy seems to have just murdered some sex workers, and there are women in his life but they only exist to be dead and motivate him, which. Ugh. I didn't like it at all.
The Lady of the Lanterns is the first of a duology following a set cast of characters - a pair of hunters, a boy whose sister was killed by the titular Lady of the Lanterns, and a few others. This explores a few things - the Chalice Dungeons, Queen Yharnam and the Pthumerians, the Winter Lanterns and the Chime Maidens. The latter two seem to be conflated, or at least placed together, which is an interesting place to go. The stories here are interesting, switching between the Hunter and her apprentice, the boy struggling to survive and his sister waiting for their father to return with food, the old Hunter that they try and help - it's all a very coherent story from the world of Bloodborne, and I really engaged with all of the characters here. I felt like the story telegraphed their whole deals really well, and I thought it was interesting. Although, did the boy really have to have a fridged sister? C'mon.
The Bleak Dominion continues the story, with the boy having been apprenticed to the Hunters until he went rogue, hearing the voice of his dead sister imploring him to lead the Hunters into a trap for Queen Yharnam, who rules the Chalice Dungeons. The Dungeons themselves are just sort of treated as a fact in the world of Bloodborne, so I think it's interesting to see the characters reacting to them being this strange, otherworldly, nightmarish thing. Similarly, seeing the Chime Maidens respawning enemies is just sort of a thing that happens in video games, but imagine seeing that in real life? Nightmarish! That's the strength of these two comics, I think, they take things from the video game and place them into more of a realistic setting, and that makes the reader reevaluate exactly what these kind of things would be if you encountered them in real life.
Next, another research book, this time with more women!
Owned?: Yes
Page count: 284
My summary: On the first day of his summer vacation, Dipper Pines found a journal in a tree stump, and his life was never the same since. This is that journal, originally written by the mysterious Author, then expanded on by Dipper, Mabel, and their friends as they fought to stop Bill Cipher and save their dimension. Also, there were a lot of gnomes.
My rating: 5/5
My commentary:
Oops, it's time for Gravity Falls! I think I got this for Christmas, and it's been sitting on my shelf just sort of looking at me ever since. But I couldn't sleep one night, and I needed to read something a bit lighter than the tomes I'd been exploring, and so a book for 10-12 year olds that is a defictionalisation of a book inside Gravity Falls felt like it'd hit the spot. About an hour later I was trudging downstairs searching for a pen and some paper, because I'd had a brainwave and realised I could work out the Author's code, so I needed to scribble some stuff down…yeah. It's that kind of a book. And I really liked it! I feel like I definitely got value for money out of this, it took so much longer to read than I thought because I spent the whole time scribbling and reading and staring at how gorgeous the art is. If you're into Gravity Falls, I'd highly recommend this!
The actual text of the book is about what you might expect, if you know Gravity Falls. The first part is all Stanford all the time, featuring some of the pages we actually see in the show, like the ones on gnomes and zombies. Woven into this is the backstory of Ford's stay in Gravity Falls, his attempts to create a Grand Unified Theory of Weirdness, and his tangles with Bill Cipher, culminating in him descending into paranoia and being shoved into the portal by Stan. Then we switch over to Dipper, who gives a summary of the events of the show, then back to Ford when he returns to finish up the show and give us a little bit of expansion about some of the events that happened towards the end. It's a really good, coherent narrative! It's carefully written, so that Dipper not knowing or intuiting things about Ford until the show has him know these things makes sense, and there's a definite shift between Ford's narration, Dipper's narration, Mabel's little bits here and there, and such. There were some really touching moments in there, and some legitimately scary things, such as Ford trying to go without sleep after Bill starts to go after him for real and possibly seeing Bill do some bullshit, possibly hallucinate. It's creepy as hell!
But, being a House of Leaves fan, what I really liked was the ability to decode and decipher different codes throughout the book. I didn't even get all of them! There was Ford's letter-substitution cypher and Bill's symbols, but there was also one that looked like Bill's code but sideways, and some numbers that I didn't bother to look at…still, I really enjoyed going through what I could. Bill's symbols are revealed at the end of Ford's first section, before we switch over to Dipper's POV, so going back through what was at that point half the book to see what Bill was scribbling all over it was really cool, particularly given that Bill's bits add some extra context, as well as him taunting Ford all the way through. It was really fun! I like that it didn't handhold you through the whole thing, it trusted the reader to be able to work this out - sure, the cyphers are simple, but again, aimed at kids/younger teenagers. The only problem I had was that some of the letters in Ford's handwriting font were quite ambiguous, so 'g' and 'q' looked very similar, which caused a fair bit of confusion. Still, solid book, I really enjoyed it!
Next…well, time for you to guess what one of my all-time favourite video games is.
Owned?: No, library
Page count: 292
My summary: The history of childbirth is a long and complicated one. From what we can tell of the prehistoric parents who gave birth thousands of years ago to more recent times, and the reversal of Roe vs Wade, this is ht story of birth and labour from the perspective of those who made history.
My rating: 4/5
My commentary:
I picked this one up largely at random because it seemed interesting, and it was! Childbirth, for all it's literally the foundation of every human life, is a subject that doesn't really get talked about so much, which is a shame because it's an absolutely fascinating history. And this is a really good overview of what childbirth looked like through most of history. The major downsides are that this book is largely Anglo-American focused - I'm sure there were interesting advances in midwifery and the medical side of childbirth in countries other than England and the USA, but this book doesn't really talk about them all so much. I was also somewhat alarmed by the author's praising Mumsnet in a very late chapter, given the horribly transmisogynistic history of the site, but other than that, this book was a solid, interesting book about birth and what it means.
The thing that most impressed me about the book was that it did not shy away from the politics around childbirth and the advances in medicine around childbirth. Sure, this doctor may have made some incredible leaps forward into repairing the vaginas of people who had complicated births, but he did so by experimenting on unconsenting enslaved women and that has to be at least acknowledged. Many of the doctors and scientists who made breakthroughs in the 19th and 20th centuries were doing so for eugenicist reasons, and eugenics is a major theme in some of the later chapters of the book. It wants to tell about the history of childbirth, and presents all of these facts straightforwardly, but never unthinkingly and with full acknowledgement of how thorny this history is, which is really interesting and commendable.
Next, a dip into the mysterious town of Gravity Falls.
Owned?: Yes
Page count: 314
My summary: Pirates, fact and fiction, have long dominated the pop culture sphere. But what is the reality behind the fantasy, the truth behind the tales? Helen Hollick seeks to separate the truth from the fiction, weaving her fiction into the stories.
My rating: 1/5
My commentary:
One thing that you have to understand about my pirate books is that they fall into three categories - random books about piracy that I have picked up at various book/charity shops or been given by others, library books that I have found by searching 'pirate' on our system at work, and books referenced by the former two that I've needed to track down for various reasons. This is one of the former, something I picked up I think at Foyles in London because it looked interesting. Well, reader, I couldn't have been more wrong. This book is more on the pop-history end of the scale, which is absolutely fine - just because it's not exactly what I am looking for doesn't mean that it's bad in and of itself. But when the book is so poorly put together, when it's self-congratulatory, when it's so full of filler and poor history? I just can't understand it, and I don't like it, and now I'm going to tell you all about it.
First of all, the content itself was just poor. The actual facts skip around in time so often without much rhyme or reason. Chapters will go between her talking about various bits of pirate fiction, to a profile of a real-life pirate, to talking about more general non-fiction around pirates, then delving back into fiction again with no particular throughline or reason to it. This is meant to be a non-fiction book, and yet I'd say only about half of it is dedicated to actual pirate non-fiction. And the actual facts given are dubious, to say the least. She seems to have only done some cursory research on the topics she's discussing, instead going off on tangents about Black Sails or Pirates of the Caribbean and arbitrarily dismissing some sources and blindly trusting others. (She lists Definitely Legendary pirate Jacquotte Delahaye as having been a real female pirate, for one.)
Second, there's just so much filler. Whole chapters are taken up with lengthy excerpts from the author's own pirate novels, and she will just not stop talking about her pirate, and her novel, and what she did in her own writing, and it drove me up the wall. This was marketed as a non-fiction book, I'm sorry, why are we talking about your fiction novel? Especially when she'll be disparaging towards other works of fiction for being inaccurate in one breath and then talk about her own inaccuracies in another. But more than that, there's a chapter that's just other people's reviews of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. (Her opinion seems to mostly be 'isn't Johnny Depp hot?') Twenty-odd pages are given over to copy-pasting the lyrics of sea shanties and sea songs, which weren't even a thing in the Golden Age of Piracy! And for what? Just to bulk out the page count?
But the thing that was the most heinous to me was how she talked about slavery. Which is to say, not at all. Slavery is something of an elephant in the room when it comes to discussions of Caribbean pirates - it's important to recognise that this was a time where chattel slavery was legal and was probably perpetrated by pirates of this era, as well as the 'legitimate' authorities such as the British Navy. Does Hollick talk about chattel slavery at all? Nope! She talks about how awful indentured servitude (which she calls 'indentured slavery') was for the (usually poor white) people who were subjected to it. She doesn't talk about chattel slavery. She gives the impression that white indentured servants were the most downtrodden people in the Caribbean, the most exploited. She praises Woodes Rogers, an actual slave trader, and considers him 'a man who should have received far more credit for his achievements'. In a chapter entitled 'Trade, Tobacco, and Slavery', she dedicates exactly one sentence to Black chattel slaves and spends the rest of the time talking about how bad indentured servitude was. Which, yes, it was awful! But indentured servants had some rights, and an end date to their service, unlike enslaved people. This is a glaring omission and honestly makes me wonder if Hollick actually thinks at all about the Black people who suffered in this era, or if she just dismisses them as not important? Either way, it's a horrible thing to just gloss over. Don't read this book. It fucking sucks.
Owned?: No, library
Page count: 82
My summary: Tiny is the runt of his litter. His siblings look down on him for being small, and even his mother does not seem to like him much. He wants more than a life of being ignored by the humans, ignored by his family, belittled by the other cats. There's more out there for him. Out there in the forest. Away from the human world...
My rating: 3.5/5
My commentary:
I was never a Warrior Cats kid. This is a thing that tends to surprise people, their main evidence being that I am a massive fan of the musical Cats, so getting into Warrior Cats would have been something of a lateral move from there. This is, I don't really remember Warrior Cats being around when I was a kid? Not all US kids' book series made it over here, after all, and Warrior Cats might have not been as widely published in the UK, or not picked up by libraries, or something. Or maybe I just didn't see it! Whatever the case, it was never part of my reading as a kid. Now, the graphic novels seem to be getting newly published over here, because my library's buying in a modest stack of them. And every time one of them crosses the main desk, I always pause and have a moment of 'what if'. I don't know what it was about this one that made me crack. Maybe because it seems a bit more a side-story, maybe cos it's short, maybe it was just the mood I was in that day...but I thought, sure, why not. Let's see what's going on with these.
I'm going in, like, almost completely blind, but I'm an adult who knows enough of narrative convention that I can get the gist of what's going on around the edges of the story. (I'm saying this so I feel better about being like 'I assume Tigerstar is, like, an important character' and having all the Warrior Cats girlies laugh at me.) It was a pretty good little graphic novel! I liked that the colours were bright and bold in a very 8-10 year old demographic way, and yet Scourge is definitely murdering people (cats, and also a dog) and we even see blood here and there. The story is very simple, it's a basic 'start of darkness' for the titular character, but it's very well-executed. He goes through the helpless kittypet (oops I'm picking up the terminology) to badass avenger arc, ending with everyone being scared of him. It works really well, and you know what, it's whet my whistle where Warrior Cats is concerned. I wonder, does the library have any copes of the prose version of the first book...
Owned?: Yes
Page count: 176
My summary: They’re rascals, scoundrels, villains, and knaves - but this time, they’re all too real. A history of pirates and piracy, focusing on the Caribbean during the Golden Age of piracy in the early 18th century, featuring such notable brigands as Charles Vane, Jack Rackham, Blackbeard, Anne Bonney, and Mary Read.
My rating: 3.5/5
My commentary:
Yar! This is actually one of my favourite pirate non-fiction books that I've stumbled across. I will admit my own bias in this - the books that universally portray pirates in this era as being evil torturers and murderers (as opposed to the more heroic fictional pirate) get my hackles up. Not because I think pirates didn't do all that, but focusing on pirate murder and rape and torture and slavery tends to obfuscate the fact that their opponents, the various European governments, were also doing all of that. Pirates murdering people was not a unique evil, neither was them torturing or raping or enslaving people. I am not saying that, because everyone was doing it, it was somehow good. Just that this needs to be taken into account when we talk about these kinds of actions. Books that go to great lengths to point out that pirates murdered and raped and tortured and enslaved, but are curiously silent on the fact that the legal system did all of those things too, are being somewhat hypocritical in my book. Woodes Rogers, notable anti-piracy governor of Nassau, was an enslaver. Stede Bonnet was an enslaver before he ever set to sea - given that he was a pretty shit pirate, he probably committed more atrocities as a civilian than as a pirate. I think some books can go too far the other way when talking about historical piracy - the one-dimensional brutish pirate is just as lacking in nuance as the one-dimensional heroic pirate.
Anyway, all this to say, I think this book gets the right balance when talking about actual piracy. It dives into what we know of actual pirate politics and attitudes towards the idea of the pirate life, at least insofar as we can know the inner thoughts of men who didn't really record them in any way. Because the idea of pirate-as-rebel bears out - many pirates got into piracy by mutinying against bad captains, or after being treated brutally in their regular lives. If the choice is between being legally murdered through poor working conditions or facing the noose but gaining freedom, why would you not go for the latter? True, some pirates might have been in it more for the money than anything else, but that doesn't mean that they didn't have a conception of these higher ideals. And this book actually explores that, looking at the dying speeches of executed pirates and how they behaved after being caught. It tries to reconstruct what we can about how these people thought and behaved, without straying too far from established history. True, it trust Captain Charles Johnson more than I'd like, but still. It's a solid book, and I've gotten a lot out of it even on a reread.
Owned?: No, library
Page count: 285
My summary: Gia is on the brink. No job, no money, debts piling up. In desperation, she signs up to be a sugar baby on a mostly-reputable app. She thinks she knows the job and what it will bring. But when her new patron, Nathan, takes her home and shows her the cage he keeps in his room, Gia soon realises she is in for more than she ever thought…
My rating: 1/5
My commentary:
Let's start with this. This book has recently (as of the day I'm writing this, the 27th of March) been decried and pulled from US publication due to rumours that it was written, wholly or partially, with AI. I am not going to give any conclusions on this. Personally, I hate that the first response to art that people do not like these days is invoking an AI witch-hunt. Just because a drawing has wonky anatomy or a book has clunky phrasing does not 'prove' AI was involved - humans make mistakes too. The spectre of AI is often brought up to imply some kind of impurity in art in a way that makes me very uncomfortable. I don't know that this book was written with AI, and I am going to proceed as though Ballard wrote it herself. Because honestly, that's far more damning than if it'd just been a machine. Folks, this is a bad book. I hated it intensely, and I do not think it is worth much artistically. How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.
First - there is an upsetting lack of depth to this book. Gia's character is that she has OCD, she is desperate for a job, and…that's about it. She's an incredibly passive character, and most of the narrative is just things happening to her. In fact, the only two things she does in the book are making an account on the sugar baby app (then just kind of going along with whatever the first guy who messages her wants), and killing Nathan, which feels more like a symptom of the narrative getting to the point where that would happen moreso than anything else. We are told that Gia is held captive by Nathan for seven years, and in that time we see her mostly just kind of sitting there accepting everything that is done to her. Note that her not fighting every inch of the way is not what I'm criticising - if I felt like she had more interiority and agency as a character, her choosing to not resist would feel more like a choice.
As-is, all we see is her going along with what Nathan says, and the narration regurgitates the same few lines about how he's made her into this numb thing, and then we do it all again in the next scene. Even the things we know about her don't add up. We're told that Gia is risk-averse and loves sticking to routine - she tells her friend that she has come up with a list of potential risks in being a sugar baby and ways she can mitigate them. Except we never see this list, and the next thing we know, Gia is going out with the first guy who messaged her, going to his house after meeting him once and not telling anyone where she is going, then doing it again a few days later. We do not see her actually doing anything that might have averted the risks involved, so clearly being risk-averse isn't a part of her character - so the sum total of what we know about her is reduced to 'not a lot'.
This extends to Nathan, the only other real character. He is even worse, a one-dimensional abuser without any other character traits. I can't tell you anything about the man other than 'really into puppyplay' and 'kidnaps women'. That's it. That's all there is to him. He's not really seen to be charming, since most of his conversations with Gia pre-kidnap are all business (at her behest). If this is meant to be a story about female revenge against terrible men, why have the terrible man be a cardboard cut out? Surely that narrative is strengthened if we see him as a full character, and know his motivations and how he came to be the way he is? His actions also make no sense. He keeps Gia locked up for seven years, during which time she literally starts turning into a dog, and only gives up on her and aims to get rid of her way late into this transformation, after she's been eating rats, eating glass, giving herself parasitic worms…and then when he does look to get rid of her, he just…pays her off and expects her to leave? Surely it's better for him if he just kills her? Fewer loose ends, lesser chance that she'll raise any kind of alarm or, you know, kill him as she does.
Another issue was that nothing really happens in the book. Like I said, Gia's kidnapped for seven years, but that amounts to seven short chapters with one scene each. Gia's narration repeats ideas over and over, like she's losing time, or forgetting how to be human, over and over so that the new chapters don't often feel like they're establishing something new. It's like Ballard was rushing to the meat of the book, then realised she didn't have anything to fill it with other than pointing to Gia and saying 'that's fucked up!'. Gia doesn't really change as a character, Nathan doesn't get any more developed. Honestly, the events that we see could easily have filled about three months, not seven years. And then Nathan abruptly lets her go, Gia kills him, and…that's the end of the narrative. Except it's not, because we then get a few chapters of Nathan backstory where he is exactly the same as he is in the main narrative. He's a Mormon dad abusing his daughter who kept a babysitter, then a second wife as his dogs - the second wife being the victim prior to Gia. It adds nothing and jarringly derails the ending from being, you know, an ending into backstory.
And, I'm sorry, as with Alchemised, I have a real problem with the framing of BDSM dynamics in this book. Nathan is a kidnapper and abuser, so of course he's a dominant sexually. But more than that, the book frames being a sugar baby (and, implicitly, sex work) as being inherently demeaning, and puppyplay as being inherently bad as well. Firstly, sex work is work like any other, and should not be devalued - it's a skilled job, same as any other job! Sure, it's realistic for a character to have mixed thoughts about being driven into it by poverty, but at the same time, it's not any more demeaning than any other low-paid, underappreciated job. The work isn't demeaning, it's just the attitude that people have towards it. Secondly, puppyplay is a form of sexual expression like any other, and there's plenty of people who would really want to be someone's dog full-time! Sure, the kidnapping part of Gia's situation here is the part that is objectionable, but the framing of the arrangement between Gia and Nathan even before Nathan escalates to actual kidnap seems to imply that the reader is meant to take it being demeaning and humiliating and only something fucked up men can enjoy for granted. It's an undercurrent running through a lot of bad ideas about BDSM - that only someone abusive can be dominant, or all doms secretly want to actually abuse women. But that's just not true; sexual situations like this are roleplay. I'm a DM, I've roleplayed being a coloniser in the narrative of our game, that doesn't mean I want to be one for real. It's not inherently awful to roleplay being a dog, what's bad in this narrative is that it's non-consensual, but the narrative itself doesn't seem to draw that distinction and decides that the whole thing is bad.
But the core issue here is that the book markets itself on the idea of female rage, autonomy, and girlhood - but it doesn't deliver any of that. Gia is such a passive character, and doesn't even feel angry in the course of the narrative, just scared most of the time. Gia killing Nathan, like I said, just happens because the story has reached the time for that plot beat; it doesn't feel real, and it certainly doesn't feel earned. Gia has no autonomy either diegetically or narratively, because the narrative doesn't let her do anything other than sit around repeating 'I am trapped and helpless' in her head until the end. She doesn't make plans, she doesn't have interiority, she just sits around letting things happen to her until the narrative remembers that she has to do things. Her turning into a dog literally is bizarre in a narrative that hasn't felt surreal enough to earn that spot of the supernatural, and only really serves to justify her being able to kill him at the end. Even the idea that it's a metaphor for her being treated as a dog long enough to become one is sorta lost, because she doesn't have much of a problem starting to speak and stand again at the end when given the chance. Ugh. This book annoyed me, and I'm glad to be done with it.
Next, more pirates! Are you sick of them yet? Because I'm not!
59. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson
Owned?: No, library
Page count: 224
My summary: Jeanette was meant to be one of God's perfect beings. A missionary, a believer, a preacher, sent from above to spread the word far and wide. And for so long, she believed that. But as Jeanette grew up, she began to think of things far beyond what the church ordained. Is God really the most important thing in her life...or is it the young women she's coming to love?
My rating: 4/5
My commentary:
So the book club at work has switched from a 'we all read the same book' model to 'we draw a loose subject/theme/genre out of a hat and all read different books on that theme'. Our first was 'books set in the local area', that being West Lancashire and Merseyside. And I...really did not want to read a fucking family saga called 'A Lancashire Lass' where every line of dialogue is like 'eyup, chuck, we may not 'ave nowt but bah gum we are 'appy, now eat tha' pud' or whatever. Finding something local that fit my interests was a challenge...but then I remembered that Jeanette Winterson is a local lass. Not too local (she's from Accrington, which is East Lancs), so I lost the 'who could get the most specifically local' contest. (My colleague who found a crime/thriller where the protagonist works at the police station just down from the library won that!) But I still found a classic.
Now, I knew very little about this book other than the fact that it's considered something of a lesbian classic. So all the God stuff, which is in fact the larger part of what this book is about, took me by surprise. This is such an English, small time version of a cult mindset. Don't get me wrong, other countries presumably have similar dynamics, but there was something very recognisable in the depiction of an extreme religious atmosphere. Maybe it's the fact that I grew up in the Church of England to a lay preacher who would later become a vicar and a Sunday school teacher, going to what I'll call 'church camp' for brevity every spring. In honesty, this book made me kind of uncomfortable for how close it hewed to my own experience within the church. Everything Jeanette does is meant to be for God and for the church, it's meant to be her whole focus and the entirety of her life. Never mind that she is a whole person with her own hopes and ideas and developing opinions. God is above all of that, and it doesn't matter if Jeanette is a person - she's a vessel for the Lord first.
Speaking of, I also really liked the development of Jeanette's lesbianism here. You can tell this is a slightly more realistic approach because, despite Jeanette being completely smitten with the young women who enter her life, none of them are ever treated as though they're her Fated One True Love or anything. Jeanette's romances are deeply within the realm of the real, awkward young flings that feel like the most important thing in your life, and at the same time, they are the most important thing for Jeanette's development as a person, and her understanding of herself as a lesbian. She suddenly has to choose - this love she insists isn't wrong, or the God she was taught to fear above all else, and that's something that a lot of people have to face every day.
Winterson in the introduction refutes the idea that this is an uncomplicated autobiography, and I get it, but on the other hand if you give your main character your name and a pretty close approximation of your life story, people are gonna draw some conclusions, you know? I don't know enough about Winterson to say how much of this is fact and how much of it is fiction, but from a few cursory searches it does seem that this hews pretty close to being her history. That makes it all the more bittersweet, in my opinion - the protagonist here is a version of Winterson who she can control, because it does not seem like the real Winterson had a lot of control in her real life. She's been pulled around from pillar to post and then effectively ostracised when she dared to want her own life. I am glad that she was able to tell her story.
Owned?: No, library
Page count: 185
My summary: Ghosts, spirits, monsters, and other apparitions have manifested across the world, taking on different shapes and stories as they move between cultures. Here are fifty such spooks drawn from all across the world, from the poltergeists of Germany to the yurei of Japan to Madam Koi Koi in Nigeria.
My rating: 4/5
My commentary:
Why does the library buy a bunch of coffee table books? I'm not really complaining, just confused - you'd think that coffee table style books would be pricier and less appealing due to their focus on aesthetics and sparse information. And yet, every so often, one pops up on the shelf. I'm not going to decry this book for being a coffee table book; it does exactly what it promises, gives an overview of fifty ghost stories from around the world, with gorgeous full-colour illustrations of each and a surprising amount of information given how little room there is for it, and how much the format necessitates said information being at least slightly abbreviated. It does what it sets out to do, and it was an entertaining enough read. If I had infinite money, I'd totally display this in my entirely hypothetical lavish mansion.
I was impressed by the diversity of the entities showcased in the book - there really was a good spread across the world, it didn't feel at all too Eurocentric or America-centric. Granted, most of the entities showcased were ones that are easily researched online or otherwise can be found on Wikipedia, but the retellings of their stories here were fun enough. Each chapter starts with a second-person narrative of how you might meet the ghost, then a couple of paragraphs on who the ghosts are, what their stories are, what their significance is, and any other notable stories involved in their existence. Each is accompanied with a full-colour illustration of what that ghost might look like, complete with smaller images of things relating to the ghost if the narrative stretches over more than one page. It's cute, it tells the stories well, and I'm pleased enough with it!
