#kootenay kidnapper

[carriagelamp]

My internet died for about half a week this month, so I had a really peaceful few days where I had an enforced excuse to do nothing but relax and read when I got home from work. It was incredibly zen and I really sank into my books that week.

The Call of the Wild

A classic novel that I’ve always meant to read. I was sick and headachy this month and decided that this was the perfect sort of relaxing, narratively rich book to listen to. I really enjoyed it, would recommend. It follows a dog named Buck who’s snatched from his home in southern California and is shipped off to work as a sled dog in the Yukon, where a need for strong dogs to help transport goods over the snow and ice makes them very valuable. Buck has to learn how to survive in this harsh environment as everything from the weather, his fellows dogs, and his human masters seem to fight against him.

A Complicated Love Story Set In Space // How To Bite Your Neighbour and Win A Wager

Putting these two together because my experience with them was pretty similar. For both I was intrigued by the title, got them from the library on a whim, and didn’t really mesh with either. I didn’t really get far enough in either to give much of a review, they just didn’t vibe. A Complicated Love Story Set In Space set up a scenario that didn’t really interest me — not surprising, I’m picky about my scifi — and How To Bite Your Neighbour and Win A Wager just had an… odd writing style to it. It very much feels like it’s main goal is to be a kinda horny about vampires which, if that’s what you want, all the power to you, but it’s wasn't doing it for me. I had to suspend way too much disbelief for the scenario to function.

Indiana Jones and the Cup of the Vampire // Indiana Jones and the Curse of Horror Island

A pair of choose your own adventure books I found at a used book sale. I picked them up out of sheer amusement, and they were basically what I expected and paid for: cheesy 1980s adventure stories with Indiana Jones as a nominal protagonist. They were both varying degrees of improbable, ridiculous, and racist so YMMV but they were fun to play with while I was down and out on the internet front.

The Kootenay Kidnapper

Eric Wilson is a classic Canadian author who writes children’s mystery/thriller novels. I’ve never read him before and decided to remedy that. At this point I choose to withhold judgement until I read another… I’m not sure how I felt about The Kootenay Kidnapper. It had some nice descriptive language, successfully raised the tension from time to time and made me really try to piece together who the villain was, but then also had some strange dead zones as well. The whole thing read a bit like a 1990s stranger danger PSA which was also… weirdly nostalgic? But also just weird. Would try another.

Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation comic v3

I continue to be a MDZS simp, this is not news. 

The Radium Girls

I don’t read much nonfiction, but this book was so narrative in its writing that I seriously couldn’t put it down. Kate Moore took a historical event (the girls that were paid to paint watch dials with radium paint in the early 1900s) that had been written about in scientific and legal styles, and instead retells it with a primary focus on the girls themselves. You follow a variety of real life women over the decades and learn about the all the machinations that went into them being horrifically poisoned by radium, and how that changed the very foundation of American workplace safety. Super engaging, unspeakably appalling.

Scott Pilgrim v1/2

My brother and I started watching Scott Pilgrim Takes Off on Netflix and… wow, it is not what either of us was expecting but we are loving it. We’ve both been big Scott Pilgrim fans since the naughts. Since I haven’t reread the series in years I decided I should pick it up to help notice the differences between the original series and this new show — I have the big, coloured omnibus version, so I reread the first collection of stories which amounts to volume 1 and 2 of the original. 

Scott Pilgrim is one of those comics that if you’ve somehow never read then you really need to, it’s one of my all-time favourites. It’s a story about Scott Pilgrim, a young adult who’s awkwardly trying to figure himself out, combining a coming-of-age slice-of-life with magical realism. The mysterious girl he meets, Ramona Flowers, can travel a subspace highway through Scott’s dreams — of course, don’t they teach Canadians how to do that? Huh, maybe it’s an American thing. Scott is known to be the best fighter in the province and when he defeats an enemy they explode into a pile of coins. One of the Evil Exes has Vegan Powers, and another can summon demonic back up dancers. This story just does whatever the fuck it likes and I adore it for that.

Heaven Official's Blessing v3/4

I continue to be TGCF simp, this is not— seriously, the series continues to be excellent and I only get more and more invested in not just Xie Lian and Hua Cheng, but also in the side characters that are introduced. I was thrilled to have Shi Qingxuan become a bigger player in book 4, and really liked the whole plot with the Venerable of Empty Words and Black Water. Please, someone, help this guy…

The Wind in the Willows

Another classic I had never read that I decided to pick up. It was excellent, I can see why it’s stayed so beloved over the years. Though I love a good cute-animals-in-lil-clothes-living-cute-lil-lives story, so I was an easy sell. It was much more tame than the likes of Redwall, but had a bit more going on than the likes of Brambly Hedge — it keeps you very engaged, but never raises the stakes so high that it stops feeling light and comforting. It is essentially a collection of stories that follow Mole and Rat, a pair of friends that live together on the river, through the seasons and the various misadventures they and their friends go on.

The Woman They Could Not Silence

Since I liked The Radium Girls I decided to pick up another one of Kate Moore’s books. This one follows a woman who was intentionally committed to an insane asylum by her husband, purely because she was intelligent and outspoken, refusing to be cowed to his opinions or beliefs. This story details her time in the insane asylum, the abuses that the patients suffered, and how she came to fight the laws that allowed for such abuses to be perpetuated in the first place. A fascinating read about a historical figure I had never heard about before.