16. What is the most over-hyped book you read this year?
definitely x by davey davis. i follow the author and the book was blurbed by npr and the new york times and all kinds of places left right and center and i was soooo unimpressed by its scope and structure and directions tbh. i think all the readers were just shocked by the frank depiction of queer leathersex in a literary novel when (ahem) those of us in the know are familiar with works elsewhere that do it better........ i was also really disappointed by how little was done with the "exporting" authoritarian/fascist plot in terms of actual critique or examination, rather than just limply dropping it in every so often
17. Did any books surprise you with how good they were?
emily brontë's wuthering heights, actually!! i know it's a classic but all you hear about is the moors and so forth, but i actually love how wild and rich and semi-incestuous it is, and also i love the frame-within-a-frame-within-a-frame story so that nothing is unpolluted by bias and perspective (just like how no family bloodline is unpolluted by revenge or the enfeebling hand of jealousy and covetousness...)
vermiculated replied to your post “vermiculated: Kimberly J Charles, A Seditious Affair; George...”
the real problem is that I don't know enough about Georgian foodways to write an animal banquet, excepting the silver marrow forks which are described with great care and Dominic leans forward, a hand on Silas' thigh, to take a bite. A decorous bite, a bite all the same. He looks up at Silas through his lashes. Silas wants to knock him back and to kiss him all at once: he tenses his knee and finds Dominic digging his fingers tight.
vermiculated
replied to your post
“vermiculated: Kimberly J Charles, A Seditious Affair; George...”
insofar as the entire Charles oeuvre is "two weirdos fall in love" I do really like these two weirdos and I think that it's a shame they only have ONE romantic feasting scene when they could have several. because the problem with these books is there is not enough sensory phenomena (this is a joke)
I’ll be honest: I’ve lost track of whether anyone in this particular comment is a badger.
But...even if they’re not animals in clothes, I would still read a feasting scene with pleasure, is what I’m saying. Richard has an entire country estate; somebody deserves to be fed on strawberries. (Dominic sucks juices from his fingertips and smiles coquettishly to see Silas pick up the silver bowl of cream.)
AS FOR sensory phenomena - have you noticed, though, that (as far as I recall) none of them are at all musical?
vermiculated replied to your post: the second quarter of 2019 in books
re: 30, 35, 38: when we asked for f/f, we should have be clearer about our desires: "I want a good book and when they have sex, they can get a little freaky. also I already know about feminism so please take that as read and let them have interesting flaws."
Truly. “I know you’re afraid that books about women won’t sell, but the answer to this is not making the blandest possible characters have the blandest possible romance. No, really, I promise.”
34: ha ha, I assume you are referring to the part where the first third is about various insuperable objections to what happens over the next two-thirds of the book and are never really answered? Not a single book in her oeuvre has a real ending, and I've decided to just live with that.
Right, though? And it comes with the intriguing corollary of a plotline that splits completely at roughly the halfway mark (did you know that Richard’s mother’s death isn’t mentioned one single time after they return from her house?). I think this is perhaps a book that suffers for its genre: I always have the feeling I’d enjoy David/Richard a lot more if it were upfront about its weird tragical nature, and did not try and paper over those cracks with sweeping romantic sentiment.
39! I was entirely swept away by this series last fall, even the kind of clumsy parts. I am glad you did read it, it's weird as all get out but I feel like it owns that in the best sort of pastiche/way where I was always hoping some dude in a Wilkie Collins novel would up and have a husband.
I am pleased I gave it another shot, and while it felt rushed in parts (in truth I want all Charles novels to be like three times longer than they actually are), there were enough interesting feelings that I mostly forgave it.
Ali Smith and Alan Hollinghurst, knocking it out of the park this summer! I agree with you entirely on Hollinghurst: a book is a bunch of sentences, the sentences are admittedly great, why is the book not better? why not, Alan?
Hollinghurst is such a mystery to me: I love the concepts of his books and the great sentence ratio therein is so high, and yet they still are just not that great. Reading Line of Beauty, I think one reason is that I feel so removed from what’s actually happening: the irony that fosters so many of the great lines also leaves the characters feeling somewhat flat and washed-out, and the relationships hardly visible.
What did you think of "Lie With Me" because so far the only people who have said that they like it are people whose judgment I do not trust, as "Call Me By Your Name" was a much weirder book than any of them will admit.
I didn’t not like it, though unfortunately that might be the best that can be said. The CMBYN comparisons aren’t wrong, though not perhaps for the reasons people are making them: the weird alienation from its own characters and somewhat poisonous nostalgia are certainly present in both. I thought LWM was going to end up doing more interesting things with storytelling and narrative construction, but it never quite got as far as I wanted it to. And, in my view, it really needed to do something intellectually interesting to make up for the fact that it’s not particularly emotionally interesting: the narrator’s voice really prevents you from actually feeling anything about the book, as he has such a stranglehold on the narrative throughout that none of the characters, including his younger self, ever really emerge as people. (It turns out every creative writing professor really is right, and it really is super boring to be told everything in a book.) Combined with the fact that it’s so short--really more novella-lengthed--it felt like it never really got to breathe properly as a story.
anyway, I am evidently excited and will have to read a number of these -- I do love your booklists!
Your bookish enthusiasm is always highly appreciated around these parts, and I would love to know your opinions if you do read any of them!
They’re just literary fiction waiting to happen. Guilt! Repression! Middle-aged people contemplating adultery! Truly, they have it all.
(I would say “on a serious note” except that it would indicate the above was not in 100% earnest: it does fascinate me how easily and painlessly genres can be traversed, especially two which pride themselves on being so different from one another. I have not yet summoned either the courage or the foolhardiness to write down any iteration of the modern au (of which there are many!), but this is the one that might convince me, despite or perhaps because it’s the worst/niche-est/only one I can’t figure out how to tack a happy ending onto. It really is just unabated misery and bad sex. I really can’t overstate how much I love it.)
vermiculated replied to your post “Books, July - August 2019”
regarding 110. hahahaha
Am. I. Wrong. I could have told you that at...
vermiculated replied to your post “Books, July - August 2019”
I'm so glad you'e read the Dutton: it's engagingly strange in a way that a lot of serious historical fiction (Emma Donoghue, Ruth Scurr) is not because everyone else is writing about people in a struggle to be of the firmament and Margaret is so consistently oriented toward her own world. I would have recommended it to you if I had known that you had not read it.
That’s a very good way to put it! I think I’m going to have to track down a paper copy; I read the ebook, and it deserves the sort of attention that insists you flip back and forth as you go. (And I’ve never read The Blazing World, either, so there’s that for the to-do list. Did I know there were bears? I don’t think I knew there were bears.)
As for variety/impressiveness/etc. - I am of course flattered, but also, here’s looking at you.
vermiculated replied to your post: oh my gosh, your latest tags
this sounds amazing, I have so many further thoughts but my one is to implore you to write it down (for I am a greedy creature and like words)
Shoutout to you for being always supportive of niche au ideas; if I do write it down it will be for you. Why are modern aus so hard to write! You would think they’d be smooth sailing without having to OED whether a given word existed every fourth sentence.
"contemplating adultery" oh it's the WORST THING in the WORLD, I love it. (my read on them, as modern au ff, is that they broke up their senior year at Smith, #niche) this is WONDERFUL, i'm so glad I asked.
“they broke up their senior year at Smith” oh my GOD. Do they vacation in the Hamptons? Did they do cotillion together? (Did Dominic get off on fucking in their cotillion gowns?) Did neither of them go to their first-place college choice because they were so determined to go together? I want to know EVERYTHING, even (especially!) if I’m wrong. What a gem!
one hundred percent ultra serious oh my gosh Richard probably likes PHILIP LARKIN. they have a glass of wine out on the deck and refuse to cuddle a la that scene in Clueless and they both can't figure out why this isn't working because marrying someone is supposed to set things up for life. (please tell me Richard's parents got d-i-v-o-r-c-e-d, if so his greatest fear is both imposing on Dominic and moving away from him. ahhhh)
sorry this is YOUR STORY i am not the boss and you don't need to hear my madcap rendition of Richard/Dominic The New Yorker Story especially about their hot neighbors (or whatever the precipitating event ACTUALLY IS) ahhh, i am howling in happiness, truly a modern au!
“Richard/Dominic The New Yorker Story” is precisely what it is, and I most definitely need to hear all your renditions of it (it is after all your au, I merely brought it into the modern era and made it worse). They’re both absolutely trapped in their ideas about what a marriage should be but especially Richard, who has built his ideas about who they are as a couple around the extremely shoddy scaffolding of “not his parents”; that and his own nesting instinct have verified to him the idea that marriage is in fact supposed to be sort of boring, and they’re maybe not really supposed to talk to each other that much or tell each other anything; after all, if no one’s shouting or breaking things, everything has to be fine, right? He can’t figure out why Dominic’s so unhappy. (Richard, of course, is fine, and completely happy, and has everything he wants, definitely. He’s very happy.)
genre is an illusion, nothing is real. you know I love a happy ending but I love middle-aged people contemplating affairs almost as much as I love a declaration of love.
notifications for all of this are of dubious value sorry to be your worst acquaintance.
I just really like this idea. (Dominic cheated in his heart. oh my gosh RICHARD, you can't THINK that. their marriage is so .... it's fine! they have so much invested in an ego-image of themselves as married people that everything is fine.) and it's AWFUL in the sense of AWE-INSPIRING.
I’m extremely glad you like it and that I can tempt you aware from happy endings with the lure of people being quietly very awful to one another: I’m not saying this is my raison d’etre as a writer but I’m also not not saying that. Also, excuse you, anyone who will engage with me re: terrible romance novel aus is clearly one of my very best acquaintances.
Dominic cheated in his heart and feels guilty about it; Richard cheated in his heart and has so repressed this fact that when Dominic points it out to him (your secretary, Rich, could you be more cliche) it genuinely shocks him. But everything’s fine! They’re never ever getting a divorce, so anyway everything has to be fine.
secretagentofcaos replied to your post: inclineto replied to your post...
I agree on wanting to see Fen's POV. She’s more insightful than Pat, has to deal with more society nonsense without any allies. Even the subplot about Pat's brother would have been more fun from Fen's POV.
(I was disappointed to hear Charles' next will be m/f romance. Meh)
I do feel like something important was lost without Fen’s pov, and I do wonder if it would’ve affected the overall plot and relationship structure as well: perhaps with Fen having a say Charles wouldn’t have felt the need to quell all conflict the minute it showed up? I don’t know: she certainly didn’t have that problem in ToE (or at least not to the same extent: being myself I confess I always want Archie and Daniel to hate each other for about thirty pages longer than they actually do).
I confess I’m not overly enthused by the premise of Charles’s next, either. Despite that I’m a consummate and very hardcore m/f shipper in fandom, I’ve not yet got on the m/f romance bandwagon (is it a bandwagon when it’s 99% of the overall output?), and “shady guy ends up being helped by uptight woman who has a secret thing for him” is one of my most roundly despised plotlines pretty much ever. So I might be getting this one from the library, rather than insta-downloading it from Barnes & Noble.
vermiculated replied to your post: inclineto replied to your post...
I want to bang my hands on the table and yell: romance point-of-view switches are not below any of us!! they add intrigue and nuance in a way that obviates the need for fake-outs and late-period plot complications!! this I believe!!
Truly. Truly! And in a genre that depends on people having very specific and believable emotions about one another, not being able to see one of those people having those emotions really throws the whole thing off its axis. Not that it can’t work, but you do have to put effort into counterbalancing in a way that I think often gets neglected.
'romance novel exegesis' it's simply the best <3
I do love how much we all wanted to like this book and ended up feeling disappointed. that's how i like my literature: fundamentally unsatisfactory.
<3
We had such hopes! KJC’s reputation around these parts plus historical f/f plus characters we were already at least slight intrigued by: the ingredients were all good, but alas, the final product bland and unfortunate.
poor Daniel da Silva: that's probably not even the worst work trip he's taken that year.
Almost certainly not, and here’s yet another argument for multiple points of view: would love to have seen Daniel ruminate on, say, his job; his life/background/family; what he actually saw in Archie.
