#just finishing reading Horror by Xavier Aldana Reyes

[blodeuweddschild]

Does anyone know of any good non-fiction books which cover horror and the history of it and focuses on countries that aren’t the UK and USA?

[patheticphallacy]

Helllllo! I’m back!

For everyone who keeps up with my blog, I’ve only been gone for two weeks. In reality, I wrote every single post that’s come out in April mid-March, so I haven’t written a single post since Quarantine properly kicked in. Wow.

As is usual for me, I really just needed a break. I’ve spent 4 weeks playing Stardew Valley and listening to audiobooks, and I can’t even be mad about it. It’s really rejuvenated my creativity, and it’s given me some new ideas on how I want to do wrap ups for this blog.

What better way to come back than with a Weekend Reading post? As you might have guessed from my absence, I’ve barely made a dent in the OWLs TBR I made. So… I’m just gonna do the OWLS for two months. Rules mean nothing to me.

My laptop is also really buggy at the moment, so I won’t be able to spend as long writing blog posts. I’ll aim for my usual 1 or 2 reviews a week, but the amount of ‘long’ posts I can manage will probably be cut down until I have enough money to get a new laptop for writing!

1. Dig by A.S. King

Dig was actually recommended to me in a webinar I took part in, hosted by Reading Glasses and Professional Book Nerds.

I asked for books with nihilistic teens and dark humour; I was recommended Dig and Glory O’Brien. I’m only two or three chapters in, and the chapters are super short, so I know I’ll breeze through it.

  2. Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky

This is my current audiobook listen, and boy is it a long one!

I’ve been listening to it on 2.5x speed so it won’t take me too long to get through what’s left. But that’s still over 300 pages, which is about 12 hours of listening, and just feels like way too much. I don’t think this book has anything unnecessary in it, honestly, I just wasn’t prepared for the sheer size of it.

  3. Kappa Quartet by Daryl Qilin Yam

This will probably be the first book I finish this weekend on Friday.

It’s ‘weird fiction’, and by weird, I mean it’s very weird. The way characters are connected, with recurring characters throughout, is honestly incredible. It feels almost seamless in how it’s done, and I’m so glad I took my friend’s recommendation to read this!

  4. Horror: A Literary History edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes

I’ve been steadily making my way through each essay in this collection for a few weeks. Each essay is literally just a breakdown of horror throughout history, focusing on American and British horror.

I’ll have to find other non-fiction for going outside of Western literature, and I feel like it’s a real shame that there weren’t added essays by experts on this fiction, since the stories and beliefs of other cultures– oral storytelling being a major part of their long ancestries– have been appropriated so frequently by Western horror authors. Even one or two essays focusing on this writing would have been a helluva lot better than the ‘0’ in this, and there’s a shocking lack of non-white authors even mentioned in what was presented.

They mention ‘horror adjacent’ work so often, even going on long explanations of how horror’s roots are more in the gothic and the feeling of horror, rather than cliches and tropes, for a long time, and yet they barely spend any time on Beloved by Toni Morrison, which is an incredibly important text within the ever-changing horror genre. I’m not sure it’s even mentioned in the chapter on horror between 1970-2000. It’s just highly disappointing!

5. Rules for Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

You may know this as Eight Perfect Murders. The title change is exactly like The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle; i.e., completely fucking pointless.

Based on the premise– which reminded me a lot of one of my favourite crime shows, Castle– you think this is going to be a lot more exciting than it really is, considering someone is literally committing murder. It’s all tell, with absolutely no show. I don’t think the reader is ever left to find things out by themselves, without some massive infodump, and I’m just glad this is a quick read so I can cross it off my list in another 100 pages.

YES! I’m finally carrying on these series! I haven’t read One Piece since August of 2019, and Haikyuu!! since May of 2019, which is, frankly, disgusting, considering both are favourite series of mine. I ended up buying a Shonen Jump subscription, so I have access to 100 chapters of manga a day for only £2 a month. The price was lowered to combat the rise of piracy within the industry, and researching into it has just made me realise that this is the best way to consume my manga from now on.

Shonen Jump actually has a lot of the longer series I read, so I’ll be reading those on there. I’ll still be keeping up with My Hero Academia physically, but it saves a lot of money on over 150+ volumes of other series I would have otherwise had to buy. I can afford £2 a month, and I’ll put money into manga with the volumes I’ll no doubt buy of what I can’t find on Shonen Jump!

I hope everyone is doing okay during this quarantine!

Thank you for reading ❤

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Weekend Reading #4: I’m Back! Helllllo! I'm back! For everyone who keeps up with my blog, I've only been gone for two weeks.