#like one is a comedic memoir and it’s.. i mean it’s great but it’s a lot

[fingertipsmp3]

I’m not sure if I’m actually in a reading slump or if it’s just that every single book I’m currently reading is a lot

[shitty-check-please-aus]

2020 Books Read So Far

Note: Most of these are audiobooks (listening to books counts as reading books and if you disagree I’d ask you to consider why you believe that), books I started and didn’t finish will be listed but not reviewed, and all my opinions are extremely subjective. I’m putting this on this blog because I want to and I think it’ll help me keep track of what I’ve read if I write it down in a couple places. 

Some notes:

I’m surprised that most of these are nonfiction! I don’t usually think of myself as a nonfiction reader. 

Having audiobooks has made me way more productive as a reader, since I can read while I’m doing repetitive tasks at work, when I have to stand on the bus, when I’m running, etc. 

Naked, by David Sedaris

3/5, the audiobook was “unabridged selections” which means “we didn’t edit the individual essays but you’re only getting half the book”– it would probably have been a 4/5 if it was a whole book. I liked that Amy Sedaris was reading parts of it, but that’s because I like her more than I like her brother. This is sort of an example of the difference between “comedic” and “humorous,” because it’s definitely the latter. 

Read it if: you want to read something pretty fucking weird. 

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, by Sarah Vowell

4/5, I saw this recommended a lot when Hamilton first came out so it’s been in the back of my mind for a good while. The book had a great cast, and having different people reading the historical quotes was an excellent touch! 

However, I think Vowell’s conversational style is a little jarring here sometimes. It’s like “wait, why are you talking about Bruce Springsteen, I’m not that familiar with his work but he definitely isn’t from Revolutionary War times.” I got her book Assassination Vacation at a used bookshop recently as well, and both books suffer from post-2016 hindsight, where she’ll say something about how incompetent and foolish the politicians of her time are, and I just have to snort to myself and say “Sarah, you’re going to lose your goddamn mind soon.” That’s a bit of an unfair reaction, but it’s hard to avoid having it.

I was also, maybe unfairly, expecting to learn more than I did. The problem is that I know a Lot about the Revolutionary War, and from the introduction I thought we’d hear more about Lafayette’s later life (my knowledge drops sharply after about 1810). The book basically ends after the Battle of Yorktown, though.

Read it if: you have not seen/listened to both Hamilton and 1776, or if you want to read a summary of the Revolutionary War with a focus on one French captain. 

Assassination Vacation, by Sarah Vowell

3/5, honestly maybe a 2.5/5. Okay, so. Either I know a lot more about American History than I felt like I did or this is again a very surface level thing. Part of it is because she spends 123 pages on Abe Lincoln. There are 255 pages total. 2/3 of the states I’ve lived in are Indiana and Illinois, two states that fight about claiming Lincoln as their own, and I’ve been to D.C. 4 or 5 times, so I feel like I know enough about Lincoln. I know about John Wilkes Booth, and his brother Edwin who saved Lincoln’s son’s life, and the death train that took Lincoln’s body around the country. I did enjoy learning about the doctor who was probably conspiring with Booth and how he ended up saving tons of lives in prison when there was a yellow fever outbreak (also to be briefly unbearably nitpicky: I think she might have mixed up dengue and yellow fever? She calls yellow fever “breakbone” but I can only find instances online of people calling dengue fever that. Maybe they called them all breakbone in the late 1800s. If anyone reading this is an epidemiologist, let me know).

It was interesting to hear that Charles Guiteau, killer of President Garfield, was part of the Oneida cult. I’m trying to think of anything notable she said about Leon Czolgosz, killer of President McKinley. I guess she talks about how people assumed he was a foreigner because of his name, but I already listened to “The Ballad of Czolgosz” in Assassins, so I knew “Czolgosz, angry man, born in the middle of Michigan.”

This one is from 2005 so the politics stuff is a little more interesting, since at the time I was busy learning multiplication and spending one entire baseball season learning about baseball and following my team (they won the world series, I have excellent timing). I will say that in 2005 we did have Google, so I am again annoyed with some of her asides and personal anecdotes. Look, if you go to the Hemingway house and you don’t know there will be cats there, that’s on you if you don’t bring your Claritin. Hemingway is associated with only two good things, six-toed cats and Daiquiris. 

She also does not acknowledge that the parties basically switched platforms? Lincoln’s Republican party is not today’s Republican party, in fact kind of the opposite, so it’s weird that she starts the book with a dedication that’s like “to my lifelong Democrat grandpa, he’d be pissed I dedicated a book about 3 Republicans to him.” I guess she does sometimes say stuff like “how did Lincoln’s party become Reagan’s” (paraphrase), but she doesn’t actually get into it. 

Speaking of Democrats, she literally spends more time talking about Pablo Picasso than she spends talking about JFK. She doesn’t explain why she didn’t talk about JFK, but it seems bizarre to me to write a book about American assassinations and to leave out John Fucking Kennedy. Literally I’ve talked more about JFK in this section than she did in her assassin book. It’s not until page 253 that JFK gets a full paragraph. There are 255 pages total. Truly, if she’d taken a paragraph to be like “I’m focusing on the presidents who were elected before 1900″ or “the presidents whose immediate families aren’t still alive” or even “I didn’t want to travel to Dallas for research” or SOMETHING to explain why she left out JFK, I would have understood it more instead of flipping through the pages wondering what was going on. 

Read it if: You do not listen to too many history podcasts and you didn’t read the Wikipedia page for the musical Assassins. And I guess if you don’t want to acknowledge that JFK did also get assassinated and that was kind of a big deal. Actually just listen to Assassins instead. 

And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie

5/5 as a mystery, 0/5 for its original title (not gonna say it here but if you’ve ever googled the name of HP Lovecraft’s cat, it’s along those lines). Less than 6 hours, narrated by Dan Stevens from Downton Abbey, fairly ideal as an audiobook. I am 95% sure I’ve already read this, because I spent the summer before I started high school reading every Agatha Christie book in the library (I do not have a list of all the Agatha Christie books in my library the summer of 2010, so there is some question). 

Read if: you want to hear the guy from Downton Abbey deliver the line “I’m not a complete fool!” in a tone that makes it sound like “I’m not a fucking moron!” Sidenote: Can anyone tell me if Brits say “solder” by pronouncing the L that I’ve always heard as a silent L? Or if Dan Stevens just fucked up that one word?

Over The Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love, by Jonathan Van Ness

4.5/5

This was a super enjoyable audiobook! It’s a testament to JVN’s considerable charisma that this book is full of him giving people in his past who would rather be anonymous Russian names, and it doesn’t get grating (as a Marina, however, I was shocked to not hear my name at any point; most of the other Marina’s I’ve met in my life are Russian). JVN has had a wild ride in life, and it’s a really raw, honest story of how he became who he is. I will say that if you are interested in reading this, please look up the trigger warnings; there are a lot of things that could be triggering to people. 

I feel a little bad at how much more I liked this one compared to Tan France’s memoir, but I also feel like whoever was ghostwriting that one did a bad job at making Tan seem... not extremely defensive, cocky, and prickly (it seems that JVN did not use a ghostwriter; Tan’s on the other hand, let the phrase “I’m proud to be a petty bitch” make it into the final proof several times). Also JVN advocates going to therapy in his book, while Tan kind of says that you should only go to therapy if you have no friends or family or life partner to talk to, which I fundamentally disagree with. I don’t know. I also feel like, if I were to get a makeover from the Fab 5, Jonathan would love my hair (I have great hair) while Tan would say that I’m dressing too old for a 24 year old and then take me to fucking Lane Bryant or Torrid (I wear a size 16 US so IRL options are limited). 

Read if: You like Queer Eye or Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness

Medallion Status, by John Hodgman

4.5/5

I really like John Hodgman’s podcast, and I got to ask him a question at an event he did at the Field Museum and he was very nice, so I went into this inclined to enjoy it. 

And I did! I had a good time reading it. I read it the first week of January and now it’s the second week of February so I have already erased much of the book’s content from my mind, but he somehow made the perspective of being a formerly kinda famous person really interesting. I would also recommend Vacationland, particularly if anyone wants to write an au where Nursey, as a New Yorker, has a vacation home in Dex’s town in Maine. That’s right, I brought it back around to the topic of this blog. And that would be a fucking fantastic au. 

Read it if: you like memoirs! it’s a good one. 

Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie

Gonna give this one a 3/5 for performance, because Dan Stevens (again, because I liked his narration in the other one) does a really annoying American accent for a few characters, and an extremely bad Italian accent for another. I’m starting this review only a few hours in, so if it turns out that the Italian man is not Italian, I’ll revoke my criticism. Still a 5/5 mystery, though. I did have to stop many times when they were talking about Istanbul to go over to Spotify and play “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” by They Might Be Giants. 

Books abandoned in 2020 (so far) (no real spoilers, I didn’t get more than a few chapters into any of them):

The Unhoneymooners, Christina Lauren

I got to a point where the main character was telling a lie that would put her newly accepted job into jeopardy, and it stressed me out so much as a relatively new hire that I stopped listening for the day and started another one, and then the week had passed and then the library took it back. I think I’d enjoy it more if I was reading it physically and I could control how fast I got through awkward parts (I am practically allergic to secondhand embarrassment). The performance was good and I did get a hankering for cheese curds. 

Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris

I had like three audiobooks checked out at the same time, and even though this was again an abridged version, I just didn’t have time for all of them. My mom has a physical copy, I’ll borrow that at some point. 

The Witch Elm, Tana French

This is one I may revisit someday. The main character is kind of an asshole, which is the point of his character I think, but it made it hard to get into the story. It’s also a 22 hour audiobook, which is kind of insanely long. Additionally, the narrator has a very slow way of talking, but if I tried to speed up the rate of playback I had trouble understanding his accent (I think I just have trouble processing really fast speech in general as well, but I would’ve had an easier time understanding someone with the same accent as me). Anyways, someone put a hold on it at the library and then I didn’t check it out again. 

[sportsintersections]

16 Awesome Queer Sports Books: Books with LGBTQIA+ Athlete Representation

Image: Daniela Porcelli/Getty Images.

In some ways, the last few years has been a golden time for LGBTQIA+ athletes. The 2019 Women’s World Cup was a record tournament for LGBTQ+ visibility, with at least five players on the U.S. women’s national soccer team being openly queer (Ali Krieger and her now-wife Ashlyn Harris, Megan Rapinoe, A.D. Franch, and Tierna Davidson), as well as coach Jill Ellis, and another player coming out in the moment captured in the photo above, kissing her girlfriend in celebration. Rapinoe’s girlfriend, Sue Bird, another out lesbian athlete who plays in the WNBA, wrote an open letter to the President of the United States. A blockbuster movie told the story of iconic out lesbian tennis star Billie Jean King. Jason Paul Collins came out in 2013 (but retired the following year). Michael Sam was the first openly gay man to be drafted into the NFL in 2014 (but he has since retired).

But, according to the Human Rights Campaign, 70% of LGBTQIA+ people don’t come out to their teammates while still playing a sport, and 82% of athletes have witnessed homophobic and/or transphobic language in their sport. It is still more common, especially for male athletes, to come out after they have already left their sport (TW for homophobic slurs/statements and suicidal ideation), and many athletes who are still playing face backlash (TW for misgendering & general transphobia).

These books, from memoirs by professional queer athletes to YA romances with LGBTQIA+ athlete protagonists, explore these issues and more. 

Books are YA fiction unless otherwise noted.

Spinning, by Tillie Walden (graphic memoir)

This beautiful graphic novel memoir captures Tillie’s experience with figure skating and why she eventually decided to give it up. Full review here.

Girl Crushed, by Katie Heaney

Quinn thought her senior year would be perfect: college scouts recruiting her to her dream school for D1 soccer and her best-friend-turned-girlfriend at her side. But then Jamie dumps her, a month before the school year begins, and it’s getting a little late to have heard back from schools, if she’s going to end up on one of the top teams. Over the course of the school year, Quinn learns that her binary black-and-white, gay-and-straight, success-and-failure ways of seeing her world could stand to be a little more complicated. This book is about identity, self-esteem, friendship, crushes, and soccer. There are also many fun USWNT references! TW for some (challenged) bisexual erasure.

The Reappearing Act: Coming Out on a College Basketball Team Led by Born-Again Christians, by Kate Fagan (adult memoir)

Kate was thrilled to be playing basketball for a nationally-ranked school and to have a close-knit group of teammates. Her best friends were part of Colorado’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and she tried to join them and learn about their church, but she started to realize that she might be one of those people whose “sinful lifestyles” they talked about. She had to figure out how to come out without losing her friends, and her team.

Check, Please! Volume 1, by Ngozi Ukazu (graphic novel)

This adorable graphic novel (which was originally published as a popular webcomic) follows Bitty, a former junior figure skating champion and enthusiastic baker, who somehow ended up on the Samwell University hockey team. He’s terrified of checking (what if he gets hurt??), trying to figure out if he can win over the guys with pies, and also feeling some kind of way about the hot but grumpy captain.

Keeper of the Dawn, by Dianna Gunn

Lai wants to become a priestess, like her mother and grandmother were before her, but first she must prove herself in the trials she’s been training for her whole life. Nothing goes according to plan, but she can still depend on herself and her skill as a fighter and a horseback rider and take matters into her own hands. This fantasy novel features an asexual protagonist and a f/f romance.

The Passing Playbook, by Isaac Fitzsimmons (2020/2021 release)

This book hasn’t been released yet, but there are so few (if any) own voices YA sports books with trans characters that I decided to include it anyway. A queer, biracial, trans soccer player is benched, and has to decide whether to fight the ruling, even though that would mean coming out to everyone…including the Christian teammate he’s falling for.

Running with Lions, by Julian Winters

This coming-of-age novel follows Sebastian, a bisexual rising senior who’s excited for his last summer at soccer camp, where his teammates are great and the coach doesn’t expect anyone to stay in the closet. But then Emir Shah, a Muslim British-Pakistani new recruit, shows up. He also happens to be Sebastian’s former best friend, and they left things on pretty bad terms. So why is he finding himself attracted to Emir all of the sudden?

None of the Above, by I.W. Gregorio

I am hesitant to recommend this non-ownvoices intersex representation, but it’s the only book I know of about an intersex teen athlete, and, while it is imperfect and seems geared towards a non-intersex audience, there are certainly some good things to be said about it. It is informative, well-researched, and moving. Kristin, a homecoming queen and champion hurdler with a cute boyfriend, seems to be having a great high school experience. But a doctor’s visit reveals that she’s intersex, and, while she’s still coming to terms with what that might mean for her and her identity, her diagnosis is leaked to the whole school. TW for transphobic/anti-intersex slurs and bullying.

Forward: My Story, Young Readers’ Edition, by Abby Wambach (memoir)

U.S. Women’s National Team soccer star Abby Wambach tells her story with honesty and vulnerability, sharing how she came to lead her team to a World Cup win in 2015. She is open about her sexuality and romantic life (including a named mention of a certain pink-haired teammate, who also happens to be her ex-girlfriend) and how it affected her career.

We Ride Upon Sticks, by Quan Barry (adult fiction, with teen protagonists)

The 1989 Danvers high field hockey team finds themselves winning…a lot. Is it because they all wrote their names in a mysterious notebook with Emilio Estevez on the cover, and pledged themselves to dark forces so they could make the state championships? This darkly funny story explores friendship, sportsmanship, and what means to find power and sense of self as a teen girl.

Beautiful on the Outside, by Adam Rippon (adult non-fiction)

In his comedic memoir, Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon shares his journey from poverty and uncertainty to success and becoming a self-professed American sweetheart. He opens up about anxiety attacks, coming to terms with his sexuality and coming out, and some enjoyable behind-the-scenes gossip. He also narrates the audiobook.

Ana on the Edge, by A.J. Sass (middle-grade, fall 2020 release)

Twelve-year-old Ana-Marie is the reigning U.S. Juvenile figure skating champion, but that doesn’t mean everything feels easy or figured out. When Ana meets Hayden, a transgender boy, at the rink, Hayden mistakes Ana for a boy…and Ana doesn’t bother to correct him. In fact, it feels good to be seen as a boy. Now Ana must decide which identity feels the most right, in time for a big competition coming up. This book isn’t out yet, but it’s due to be released in fall 2020, and it is written by a non-binary (and autistic) author, who is also a figure skater.

Heartstopper, Volume 1, by Alice Oseman (graphic novel)

Charlie is neurotic and openly gay (after he was outed last year and bullied for months), and hoping that Year 10 at the British all-boys grammar school will be better. He meets Nick, an upbeat, sweet rugby player, and they become friends. Soon he finds himself hoping that their friendship turns into something more.

Fearless: Portraits of LGBT Student Athletes, by Jeff Sheng (non-fiction)

This is a memoir of an American artist who uses his story as a closeted high school athlete in the 1990s as a jumping-off-point to depict hundreds of photos of other LGBTQ+ high school and college athletes in the U.S. and Canada between 2003 and 2015.

Amateur, by Thomas McBee (adult memoir/non-fiction)

In this memoir, Thomas McBee describes grappling with the meaning of masculinity, violence, and sports. As a trans man, he has noticed since his transition that the world treats him completely differently and expects different things from him. But what does he want, and how does he want to define masculinity and strength for himself? He decides to train for a charity boxing match at Madison Square Garden as a way to find out.

Dryland, by Sara Jaffe

Julie is a cynical teen in Portland at the height of the grunge movement, struggling to define herself and her sexuality. No one in her family is willing to talk about her older brother, who at one point seemed destined for the Olympics but then fell off the map. Julie has never considered swimming herself, but then the swim team captain convinces her to join. Is this what she’s been looking for -- a way to get closer to her brother and maybe herself?

[All book covers belong to their respective publishers].

[birdlord]

Every Book I Read in 2018

Again, better late than never??

01 On the Town; Marshall Berman - A freewheeling personal and general history of Times Square, which had some great historical tidbits I’d never read before. I think I would have got more out of it if I were interested in Broadway musicals...

02 Stephen Florida; Gabe Habash - A slim little book that follows a college wrestler. One of those books that is described as muscular, when what they mean is brutal. 

03 Green Grass, Running Water; Thomas King - Four plot lines intertwine in a story blending mythology, creation, and modern First Nations people dealing with massive transformational change to their lands. I did sometimes feel like I would have enjoyed it more as an audio storytelling experience. 

04 People who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman; Richard Lloyd Parry - I don’t often read books like this, but this is essentially a true-crime sort of story, about the murder of a British woman who works as a bar hostess in Japan. Parry covers not just her story, but the whole aftermath, which even pulls in Tony Blair, eventually. 

05 My Brother’s Husband; Gengoroh Tagame - Weirdly, two Japan-related books in a row! Another culture-clash tale, when the Canadian husband visits his deceased husband Ryoji’s single-parent brother. The couple had never been to Japan while Ryoji was alive, and so the story of slow acceptance (helped along by little Kana’s openhearted curiosity) is suffused with sadness. 

06 Ghosts of the Tsunami: Life & Death in Japan’s Disaster Zone; Richard Lloyd Parry - And, let’s make it three! When the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in 2011, I remember thinking that the reaction seemed so orderly, so...Japanese. But this examination puts you right in the various affected communities, following different people, including schoolchildren from Okawa primary. Like with the other Parry book above, we hear about all of the grief, ghosts and lawsuits that follow the disaster. 

07 Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History; Rhonda K. Garelick - Once she became famous, Coco Chanel built a scaffolding of lies about her past, and the purpose of this biography is to attempt to see the truth behind them. Garelick concentrates heavily on Chanel’s collaboration with the Nazis, which must have been a challenge given that her company still exists, under her name.

08 Kubrick; Michael Herr - “They speak about the dumbing of America as a foregone thing, already completed, but, duh, it’s a process, and we haven’t seen anything yet. The contemplation of this culture isn’t for sissies, and speaking about it without becoming shrill is increasingly difficult, maybe impossible.” Whoa!

09 Call Me by Your Name; Andre Aciman - I did read this after seeing the film, so as usual it was hard to divorce it from the movie experience. 

10 The Left Hand of Darkness; Ursula K LeGuin - A thought experiment about a genderless world, seen from the perspective of an off-planet envoy, who has a range of reactions to the world’s inhabitants. The most enduring section of the book involves a brutal 3-month expedition undertaken by the exiled envoy and a local, a trial by ice, wind and snow. A winter read. 

11 Stamped from the Beginning; Ibram X. Kendi - I don’t think I’d really fully grokked the idea that southern white supremacy built itself in order to prevent an uprising of the black and white underclasses, together. The basic rubric of this book is separating American movements, parties and individuals’ thinking into one of three categories: assimilationist, segregationist or genuinely antiracist. Supporting results like abolitionism does NOT make one antiracist, since support could come those with less pure motivations. I highly recommend this one, though it was copy-edited in a pretty haphazard manner!

12 Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers; Barbara Ehrenreich & Dierdre English - A short book charting a couple of parallel stories, of women healers in Europe being dismissed as witches, and the masculinization of medicine (particularly midwifery and the medicine of birth) in the USA. 

13 Her Body and Other Parties; Carmen Maria Machado - Short stories skirting the edge of a lot of genres; horror, science fiction, dark comedy. These are women’s stories, that refuse to be dismissed as chick lit. It didn’t connect with me as deeply as it has for some, but I see the appeal. 

14 Look Alive Out There; Sloane Crosley - Largely comedic set of essays by a writer whose earlier work I read, about a decade back. It’s a strange experience, to return to someone who has written memoir that seemed to exemplify that late-2000s era and discover that she - and you - have grown. 

15 Homesick for Another World; Otessa Moshfegh - Moshfegh’s choice of words (not to mention her characters themselves) remain utterly revolting. I often found myself looking up, shaking my head as if to say THIS BOOK. Considerably funnier than Eileen, which was the first of hers that I read. 

16 My Year of Rest & Relaxation; Otessa Moshfegh - After reading this, I found out that Moshfegh basically set out to get her work noticed by populating it with these vile young women. Well, it worked! Your tolerance for unlikeable main characters will be tested by this rich Columbia grad who decides to prescribe herself into a virtual coma within her NY apartment, at the turn of the millennium. And yes, it ends where you think it does. 

17 They Can’t Kill us Until They Kill Us; Hanif Abdurraquabi - This collection of music-related writing is wildly far-ranging, poetic and emotional. For myself, I did find I was more interested in those that were related to bands or musicians I had some experience with myself , which was not always the case. 

18 The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully; Aaron Carroll and Nina Teicholtz - If you’re a reader of the food media, most of what’s in here will be familiar to you, debunking fears of meat, GMOs, gluten, MSG. The authors keep their own experience, taste and interests very much in the forefront, which ends up feeling smug and irritating. 

19 The Mere Wife: A Novel; Maria Dahvana Headley - My knowledge of Beowulf is scant at best, but this retelling stood very much on its own two feet, set in a tony suburb and comparing the experience of two very different mothers of two very different sons. 

20 How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays; Alexander Chee - I’m very much On The Record as being against writers writing about writing, but this might just be an exception. 

21 Vancouver Special; Charles Demers - A sort of update on Douglas Coupland’s City of Glass, a book I loved and reread many times. This one has both a more historical bent, and an actual political viewpoint, contrasting with Coupland’s Gen X remoteness.

22 Crudo; Olivia Laing - A rushing frantic little novel, incorporating Trump tweets and Kathy Acker quotes throughout. A difficult read so close to the events described, but I can see this being an amazing window into this weird time, once a few years have passed. 

23 Hits & Misses; Simon Rich - This might also be on the line of “writers writing about writing” but Rich manages to do so in a charmingly self-deprecating way. 

24 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the US; Jeffrey Lewis - Speculative fiction written as a government report, responding, as we all have been doing, to the endlessly unprecedented Trump presidency. It all started with a tweet, of course...

25 A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; Rebecca Solnit - This book is intended to counter the idea that disasters (“natural” and otherwise) lead people to indulge their worst sides. Solnit looks at the aftermath of some 20th C disasters like the Halifax Explosion, 9/11 and various earthquakes to find examples of people banding together to help the wounded and homeless, even taking the opportunity to create new institutions when authorities fail to do so. A tonic for a world in which disasters are likely to become increasingly common. 

26 How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them; Jason Stanley - When I lived in Scotland in 2010, I went to an anti-fascist rally in Edinburgh, and I remember feeling like those attitudes were closer to the surface over there, where at home in Canada they felt abstract. This book traces how fascist policies lurk within democratic frameworks, and can sometimes metastasize to take over the host. Suffice it to say I was probably wrong then, and I’m definitely wrong now.

[dysphoric-dumbass13]

All of the bookish asks. I hate you. And your stupid fucking face. Im so tired dude i stayed up ridiculously late to finish that

Hey I stayed up ridiculously late to finish mine too. Well not ridiculously late because me and then I couldn't fall asleep anyways but whatever. And you literally love me you jackass.

1. (what book did you last finish? when was that?) Willingly? Leah on the Offbeat by Becky Albertalli, in July. For school? Of Mice And Men. I didn’t care that much, and I forgot to finish A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but I still finished my project fine without any issue whatsoever and should get at least a B, if not an A. But whatever.

2. (what are you currently reading?) The Odyssey, for school. But also I’m like ¾ of the way through What If It’s Us by Adam Silvera and Becky Albertalli. (what book are you planning to read next?) Well for English it will have to be A Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass by Fredrick Douglass, Night by Elie Wiesel, Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, or Lord of the Flies by William Golding. However, I really want to read The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. And I’m also trying to get a hold of the Harry Potter books because I haven’t read them since I was 7, and I was a compulsive moron so I read them out of order based on length and the title. I did that a lot.

3. (what was the last book you added to your tbr?) I don’t fully know what it means by that, but I’ll give this a try. The last thing I remember actively seeking out that I need to read again (for writing purposes, and the fact that I’m a nerdy bastard) was the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling.

4. (which book did you last re-read?) Leah on the Offbeat by Becky Albertalli, I loved it so much that I read it twice in one month. I also re-read Simon vs. the Homosapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli twice before moving to the former.

5. (which was the last book you really, really loved?) Again, Leah on the Offbeat. I loved that book so much oh my god.

6. (what was/were the last books you bought?) I actually bought 3 books in September (after I got all my books for English), which were Leah on the Offbeat, Simon vs. the Homosapiens Agenda, and The Song of Achilles.

7. (paperback or hardcover? why?) Paperback. The hurt less to hold while reading, and they’re cheaper so I can buy more of them. But I do love a hardcover book if the cover is really intricate and beautiful.

8. (ya, na, or adult? why?) Idk. To me it doesn’t matter all that much as long as it’s a good book. I really like anything that isn’t racist, sexist, super heteronormative, transphobic, or hating of any particular religion (except like if it’s vaguely poking fun at catholicism and christianity because we deserve it)

9. (sci-fi or fantasy? why?) Fantasy. God I just fucking LOVE fantasy. I wrote a 20,000-word oneshot that was of the fantasy genre. I just love it too much.

10. (classic or modern? why?) Idk. Doesn’t really matter, again, as long as it isn’t racist, transphobic, against a religious group, or too heteronormative.

12. (political memoirs or comedic memoirs?) Idk man. But I hate politics in every way, shape, and form, so I’m gonna go with comedic memoirs.

13. (name a book with a really bad movie/tv adaptation) Um………. idk. I’m gonna go with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire simply because of the fact that they cut so much out and, sorry not sorry, if the whole series was written by someone not transphobic, homophobic, and antisemitic it would be better. It’s great, but it could be so much better.

14. (name a book where the movie/tv adaptation was actually better than the original) Again idk. I’m gonna say The Princess Bride because that movie is so fucking good guys.

15. (what book changed your life?) I know it’s not technically a book book, but Unknown Colors by Gabriels_Wings on Wattpad. It got me into reading again and that’s only benefitted me so far (except for distracting me from homework, but who cares).

16. (if you could bring three books to a deserted island, which would they be and why?) Well, obviously, Simon vs the Homosapiens Agenda and Leah on the Offbeat (ok I’m gonna some up with abbreviations now, LotO for the latter and SvtHA for the former), and the last spot would be between The Song of Achilles and The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein. Because they’re good books. And I’m gonna end up dying on said island and I need my gay fix with me.

17. (if you owned a bookshop what would you call it?) Oof, that’s hard. Probably….. Narnia. And it would be a very gay place with beanbags and a small coffee shop inside and it would be like this one place my mom went to all the time where you could buy a book and if you wanted to you could bring it back and they’d buy it back for slightly less than you bought it for. It was a great place. And my bookshop would be amazing.

18. (which character from a book is the most like you?) Toughie. I’m gonna go with… Blaise Zabini from Harry Potter or Abby Suso from SvtHA and LotO. Because Blaise is very gay and sassy (idk if he actually is in the books but hey, fanfiction) and Abby is a bi disaster and relatable af.

19. (which character from a book is the least like you?) Idk. Hannah Abbott? Because she’s a Hufflepuff? Idk man.

20. (best summer read?) LotO.

21. (best winter read?) Been a while since I actually remember reading a book in winter. I remember when I was in 5th grade I really loved reading Where The Mountain Meets The Moon by Grace Lin. That was good. But I think The Hobbit would be good too.

22. (pro or anti e-readers? why?) Pro, it makes reading at random places so much easier. Plus, I can then read gay fanfic at my christian grandparents’ houses.

23. (bookdepository or amazon?) I’ve never used Book Depository, but I looked it up (omg Kass you aren’t going to believe it, I googled something on my own!) and it seems smaller and cooler because it’s just books. So I’m gonna go with that one.

24. (do you prefer to buy books online or in a bookshop?) In a bookshop without a doubt, you can browse for hours. I love bookshops

25. (if you could be a character in a book for just one day, who would you be and why? bonus: any specific day in the story?) Simon Spier. From SvtHA. On the day of the carnival fair thing. Because zqawxsedcrfvtgbyhnujmikolplomiknujybhtvgrfcedxwszqa

26. (if you could be a character in a book for their entire life, who would you be and why?) Again Simon Spier. Because infdjfcdncewhfiubdkjcnsoawehfwedscnsaoufgrwiofbv cisahcsoainh

27. (if you could change one thing about mainstream literature, what would you change?) NO. MORE. DISCRIMINATION! And I swear to god people, quit idolizing authors who are racist or sexist or transphobic or homophobic or against certain religions or anything else because I swear they don’t deserve it! No more discrimination in the media guys.

28. (how many books have you read so far this year?) A lot. Idk the actual amount but a lot. Especially if we’re counting fanfic.

29. (how do you sort your shelves?) I don’t actually own enough books to sort lol. But I assume I would sort them alphabetically by author. And if I had a ton of books, I’d sort them further into genres.

30. (who’s your favorite author?) Becky Albertalli.

31. (who’s your favorite contemporary author?) Idk. I’m not that smart, I don’t put authors into genre categories.

32. (who’s your favorite fantasy author?) See above.

33. (who’s your favorite sci-fi author?) See above.

34. (list 5 otps) Oh god, here I go. Pansmione (Pansy Parkinson x Hermione Granger from Harry Potter), Wolfstar (Remus Lupin x Sirius Black from Harry Potter), Sabriel (Sam Winchester x Gabriel from Supernatural), Johnlock (John Watson x Sherlock from Sherlock), and Merthur (Merlin x Arthur Pendragon from Merlin).

35. (name a book you consider to be terribly underrated) What If It’s Us by Adam Silvera and Becky Albertalli.

36. (name a book you consider to be terribly overrated) Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck.

37. (how many books are actually in your bookshelf/shelves right now?) 19, including a book I accidentally stole from my 7th grade LA teacher (sorry), and a college workbook I stole from my dad on lifesaving first aid for heart problems. + 1 movie (Love, Simon), 5 comic books, and an adult coloring book because why not. I also have 2 full boxes downstairs full of kids books (about half of which I've never read or have any interest in reading) from when I moved.

38. (what language do you most often read in?) English because I’m a dumb bitch and don’t know other languages well enough. I might be able to stumble through a kid’s book in French, and I could read a basic novel in Spanish.

39. (name one of your favorite childhood books) Goodnight Moon was one of my favorites. I also was obsessed with Where The Mountain Meets The Moon by Grace Lin, and when I was about 5 my mom would read The Hobbit to my brother and I when she got home from work if she was working a half day, or she wasn’t held up too late on a normal day. Ah, some actually decent childhood memories.

40. (name one of your favorite books from your teenage years) SvtHA.

41. (do you own a library card? How often do you use it?) Yeah, and decently often.

42. (which was the best book you had to read in school?) The Outsiders. In 7th grade.

43. (are you the kind of person who reads several books at once or the kind of person who can only read one book at a time?) Multiple at once. I kind of have to if I want to read for fun while I’m in school.

44. (do you like to listen to music when you read?) Honestly, my mind is like an iPod I can’t fully control, I was laying in my bed half asleep singing What I Got yesterday morning for no reason, so I don’t have a choice. There’s more of a choice if I’m listening to music, so yes.

45. (what is your favorite thing to eat when you read?) Nothing? I don’t really like to eat when I’m reading, unless I’m reading on my phone and then it doesn’t really matter. But when I'm reading I usually forget to eat.

46. (what is your favorite thing to drink when you read?) Tea. Without a doubt. If I’m not too lazy to make it, that is.

47. (what do you do to get out of a reading slump?) Well, I do one of two things. I either try to convince Kass (@eyeforaneye-toothforatooth) to write something for me, or I’ll write (because I know I have to read over it a bajillion times, and I write too much for anyone’s good)

48. (where is your favorite place to read?) In my mind palace. I have a little place in my mind palace that I go when I’m reading or writing, and it changes. Sometimes it’s in a cottage at night with the only light a fireplace that I’m sitting in front of, sometimes it’s leaned against a tree. Three of my favorites are leaning against a cherry blossom tree looking out at a river, on a beanbag in a cozy, quiet bookshop/library, and on a beach in Roatan, Honduras. Other than that, it’s curled up on my UFO couch in my front living room, in front of the gigantic window.

49. (when is your favorite time to read?) It actually depends on the season. In the summer, always because I don’t want to go outside because it’s too hot. In the winter it’s during the evening. Spring it’s early in the morning. Fall it’s around sunset.

50. (why do you love to read?) Because you’re taking yourself and delving into a different universe, where nothing you know exists and only what you’re reading does. It takes me away from the world and all of my struggles, and puts me somewhere where that doesn’t exist. It’s refreshing. I hate you too

[ckerouac]

3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27, 30, 33, 36, 39, 42, 45, 48

SO MANY TO ANSWER

3: What book are you planning to read next?

So the next one after I finish what I’m currently reading I think will be Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful by Arwen Dayton.

6: Which book was the last one you really, really loved?

Hmm, the last one I really really loved was probably Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island by Earl Swift.  If you want a great portrait of a unique community being slowly washed away because of climate change and a refusal to recognize that as an issue, this is great.  It’s a really compelling read.

9: YA, NA or Adult? Why?

...I don’t know what NA means.  And does adult mean like just regular fiction or like adult sexy times?  I’m very confused *lol*

12: Political memoirs or comedic memoirs?

Comedic memoirs.  I don’t think that politicians are able to reflect on bad decisions enough to make it either useful or engaging as a memoir, especially because most political memoirs are written when they are looking to run for a higher office and so the goal is to present them in the most heroic light.  Now, a book about a politician from an outsider perspective?  I’m all about that.

The only exception to this is What Happened by Hillary Clinton.  Because that shit is... ugh it’s so good.  And frustrating.  But hopeful.  And proof #1039485726 that she would’ve been an amazing president.

15: What book changed your life?

Probably A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle.  

18: Which character from a book is the most like you?

Hmmm, you know I don’t know.  I feel like that’s a better question to ask other people.  What character from a book do I remind y’all of?

21: Best winter read?

The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well by Meik Wiking

24: Do you prefer to buy books online or in a bookshop?

I prefer to borrow books from my library.  Seriously, they see me a couple times a week and the librarians know me on sight.  

27: If you could change one thing about mainstream literature what would you change? (i.e. more diversity, better writing, better plot etc.)

More female protagonists.  Always more female protagonists.  

30: Who’s your favorite author?

Oh wow, that’s hard.  Because there are so many, and so many of them are specific books that I love.  But probably if I go with consistency of enjoyability that I find in their writing, I’m going with Christopher Moore (Lamb, Coyote Blue, Sacre Bleu, etc)

33: Who’s your favorite Sci-Fi author?

Again, SO HARD.  Probably Octavia Butler.  She’s a master.

36: Name a book you consider to be terribly overrated

Recent books?  The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin.  I’ve had it recommended to me by multiple people who loved it and I hated every single page to the point where I finished it out of spite.  Because it was awful and depressing and poorly written.  Classics?  I’m just not a fan of Pride and Prejudice..  

39: Name one of your favorite childhood books

I was obsessed with the Babysitter’s Club.  All of them.  Especially the double sized mysteries.

42: Which was the best book you had to read in school?

I adored Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and I got to read it in both high school and in college.  

45: What is your favorite thing to eat when you read?

...why would I eat when I read?  Nothing.  No.  

48: Where is your favorite place to read?

My bed.  I’m a big ‘before bed’ reader.

ASK ME ABOUT BOOKS

[lizziestudieshistory]

Book Challenge: your favourite series

Day 3 was a difficult one for me! As an avid fantasy reader there are so many series I have read and adored over the years, so choosing one was almost impossible. However, I've managed it! But if you ask me tomorrow or in a week's time this answer might change...

Anyway Day 3 is going to Discworld by Sir Terry Pratchett!

In the end I chose Discworld for two reasons:

It was the series I've read the most books from and enjoyed the vast majority of them (18 so far)

This is the series that brings the most fun to my favourite genre

Fantasy is quite often very serious with a few comedic moments here and there, Discworld on the other hand is a brilliant comic/satirical fantasy series that offers a refreshing perspective on a much beloved genre. This is the world that flies through space on the backs of four elephants who in turn ride on the back of a giant turtle, the Great A'Tuin, after all!

Discworld is a series that has something for whatever mood I'm in, even if I want the story of an ex-con man who's unfortunate name means damn fake-moustache, and is forced to go straight and reopen a post office by a tyrant patrician... (Got to love Going Postal 😉) It's crazy how much scope is in this one, rather long, series of books!

What I love the most are the sub-series and choice of genre involved in Discworld. There's the satirical take on the classic sword and sorcery fantasy with Rincewind and the Wizards, or the crime mysteries of the City Watch, and, still there are stand-alones that I have adored as much as the main series! Yet most of these stories hold some sort of real world commentary to get your teeth into (I quite like the commentary on nationalism in Jingo as an example).

Throughout all this Pratchett offers some amazing stories, brilliant characters, and a fantasy world unlike any I've ever read before!

(Image: Guards! Guards!, The Colour of Magic, and Going Postal by Pratchett (featuring The Luggage!))

A few honourable mentions for favourite series:

The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson (incomplete)

Middle Earth (everything, not just Lord of the Rings) by Tolkien (the closest, but sometimes I'm not in the mood for Tolkien's prose, it's very dry 😱)

The Memoirs of Lady Trent by Marie Brennan (very fun, but ultimately bested by the complexities of the other series)

[faketextson-ice]

~Admin Hidari Ver.~ elliott and I talked about this a little and being the great content creators we are,,,, decided to copy paste an ask meme to satisfy your curiosity. questions are from here --> http://fyeahaskmemes.tumblr.com/post/152629812132/identity-askoh-shit

I’ll now answer them under a cut so if you don’t give a shit you don’t have to read it. it’s 30 questions. 

if someone wanted to really understand you, what would they read, watch, and listen to? -deep inhale- let’s see, on the trash side, just sO much gay manga, kpop, and youtube filth. on my Intellectual™ side, I quite like sci-fi and horror, a lot of Stephen King, right now my favorite novels/series are House of Leaves and The Monstrumologist. So the answer is, a mix of wholesome sparkly gay content, and just like, the darkest shit out there. Shout out to My Favorite Murder, the podcast I’m listening to now. Stay sexy, don’t get murdered.

have you ever found a writer who thinks just like you? if so, who? It’s hard to tell since I mostly read fiction, but i’ve read a couple of comedic biographies/memoirs I really feel, like you go through this Bad Shit™ but you laugh at it, y’know? Trevor Noah is a fuckin icon, I read his book Born a Crime in one night, it was so fascinating and funny.  

list your fandoms and one character from each that you identify with. listen. We could be here all day. let’s just boil it down to what I’m currently following in the weeb world. anime: violet evergarden, no one on this show is really relatable to me, but I love Violet and anyone who’s ever mean to her will catch these hands sanrio boys, I stan Hasegawa Kouta gakuen babysitters, I identify with the guy running the daycare tbh, I just always wanna take a fuckin nap manhua: their story, both girls are super cute and super gay, HEAVY RELATE  19 days, Guan Shan, probably because I also want to slam dunk He Tian into a trash can kpop: ikon, probably Chanwoo, I’m always ready to roast someone bts, Yoongi is absolutely just me 1000% blackpink, idk but I want each and every one of them to punch me in the face

do you like your name?  is there another name you think would fit you better? I use ‘hidari’ here, which is just the kanji reading for my last name. which reminds me, y’all can follow me @hidariprince on insta even tho I never post u can see some of my art

do you think of yourself as a human being or a human doing? do you identify yourself by the things you do? mate, I’m barely even a human

are you religious/spiritual? nope, wasn’t raised that way, never picked it up.

do you care about your ethnicity? I have a slightly complicated family history that’s not directly acknowledged, so in the broader sense I just refer to myself as Asian, or east Asian. but I’m totally here for racial equality, representation, and making fun of white people lol

what musical artists have you most felt connected to over your lifetime? my all time favorite band is 2NE1, and I will never fucking forgive YG for disbanding them what a fuckin gremlin that man is. 

are you an artist? yes, but I’m aiming to be an animator. even though I’m awful at digital stuff.

do you have a creed? things I repeat to myself a lot are ‘do no harm, take no shit’ and also ‘but did you die though’

describe your ideal day. I sleep until noon. we eat the most calorie/carb filled brunch, then we go to the dog park. we stay there until sundown. we buy more disgusting junk food, and go home to binge watch movies or shows. it’s 3am, we’re eating cereal and talking about everything and nothing. we fall asleep at sunrise.

dog person or cat person? both, but definitely more dog

inside or outdoors? hella indoors, my bedroom is a dank cave with the blinds always closed, I emerge once in a blue moon

are you a musician? a terrible one. I played flute and piano but it’s just a casual hobby, I guess.

five most influential books over your lifetime. the bell jar -sylvia plath house of leaves -mark z. danielewski one hundered years of solitude - gabriel garcia marquez the shining -stephen king complete h.p. lovecraft collection

if you’d grown up in a different environment, do you think you’d have turned out the same? I grew up in a totally great environment and I’m still constantly on the verge of losing my fucking mind, so yeah, maybe. genetic predispositions and all that.

would you say your tumblr is a fair representation of the “real you”? not this one, but my personal, @skribblindaydreamer, is 100% me, just a living shitpost, just,,,, a mess

what’s your patronus? a polecat, according to pottermore.

which Harry Potter house would you be in? or are you a muggle? we all know I’m a hugeass fucking slytherin, I’m not even in the hp fandom and I knew well before I took the pottermore thing

would you rather be in Middle Earth, Narnia, Hogwarts, or somewhere else? I wanna be wherever the wi-fi is, tbh

do you love easily? my first thought was ‘god I fall in love with every dog I see’ but then it occured to me this question probably means people, and in a romantic sense, listen I’m more about platonic love ok

list the top five things you spend the most time doing, in order. -staying the fuck in bed -watching/reading/listening to something -drawing/writing -taking a fuckin nap -spending time with my doggo

how often would you want to see your family every year? I kinda live with them. I’m like,,, move out?? in this economy???

have you ever felt like you had a “mind-meld” with someone? I don’t fucking know what that means, but I heavy relate with anyone who’s depressed, anxious, and gay af

could you live as a hermit? oh yeah abso-fucking-lutely, as long as I can have everything I need shipped to me. But also keep communication open and not run off into the woods because that’s how you get fucking murdered.

how would you describe your gender/sexuality? am I a pretty boy or a cute girl? who knows? I’m pan, so it doesn’t matter either way.

do you feel like your outside appearance is a fair representation of the “real you”? absolutely not. I’ve had many friends refer to me as ‘cute, until you open your mouth and speak’ 

on a scale from 1 to 10, how hard is it for someone to get under your skin? I mean, on a superficial level, it’s easy to make me snap something harsh if you’re being an asshole, but really get under my skin?? you’d have to have done something pretty bad because I’m honestly dead inside. Like, something goes wrong and I skip straight through the 5 stages of grief to acceptance.

three songs that you connect with right now. honestly, anything from the kimi no na wa (your name) soundtrack immediately hits me straight in the kokoro, especially Nandemonaiya not today -bts also literally any of Big Marvel’s screaming chicken covers is such a Big Mood

pick one of your favorite quotes. ‘Get a job. Buy your own shit. Stay out of the forest.’ -MFM

[blurrypetals]

Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living by Nick Offerman - blurrypetals review

originally posted aug. 29, 2018 - ★★★★★ 

I've been meaning to read this for ages now and, at long last, I finally have. When I told my brother how much I adored Nick Offerman's comedy special, American Ham and he told me it's basically like a condensed version of this book, I mentally added it to my perpetually-growing stack of books to be read. It took this book going on sale on Audible for me to finally read it, but I'm glad it took me this long to get around to it. I just barely got done rewatching all of Parks and Recreation and fell back in love with the show and its players all over again. I also started watching Making It, which Offerman and his former costar, Amy Poehler, host together, and it is one of the most wholesome, inspiring, and heartwarming shows ever. So that, combined with the Audible sale, meant it was time for me to find out how to paddle my own canoe. This can be said of just about any human being, but I truly believe Nick Offerman is a one of a kind person. His values, his humor, and his history all combine into what is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting human beings ever. The reverence with which he speaks about the people he cares about (especially his wife, Megan Mullally) is unmatched in any other memoir/autobiography such as this that I've yet read and, of course you can hear it in his voice when you hear it in the audiobook, but that love and respect is in each and every single word choice. Offerman isn't just the incredibly talented and hilarious actor we all know and love, he's also a very gifted wordsmith with great respect for the English language. I love Nick Offerman more now that I did before and I thought that was impossible, considering his laugh, which I maintain could probably cure cancer, his demeanor, which is jovial and positive, and the amazing comedic timing he has, and yet, here we are. I want to read all his other books, but I'm specifically excited to read The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, which comes out next month and is co-authored by Offerman and Mullally. Great work, Nick; I'm definitely going to take into account many of your wise words, stories, and sentiments as I go forth with my life and, even though I don't know how to literally paddle my own canoe now, I do now figuratively have some great advice on how to manage the metaphorical canoe of my life and that's thanks to this book.

[findmyhouse]

EMERSON, LAKE & PALMER - LOVE BEACH (1978): 4/10

Yeah! How do you like that album cover? What the hell happened? Okay, time for a little history lesson. Remember how the band used an orchestra on the previous two albums? Well, one day Keith said to the other guys: “Hey, wouldn’t it be a great idea if we took an orchestra with us on our next tour?” And… well, to be honest, it actually was a great idea. Artistically, at least. Backing up the old and the new ELP hits with orchestral arrangements resulted in some outstanding performances that were captured on the live album Works Live, which I heartily recommend to anyone who's interested in the band. Financially however, this was a really bad move. Paying the musicians and transporting their equipment was such a financial strain that the band would inevitably lose money unless they sold every last seat at every venue. And they didn’t succeed at that because the popularity of progressive rock as a whole took a nosedive in the late seventies. The genre's emphasis on complex rhythms and structures, esoteric concepts and instrumental virtuosity became more and more associated with snobbish elitism and was rejected by the new generation, which instead flocked to the more approachable, raw and rocking sound of punk rock bands such as the Sex Pistols, who regularly mocked progressive rock bands as part of their performances, with their famous “I hate Pink Floyd” t-shirts, and their burning of Yes and ELP records on stage. In addition, the music industry itself changed around this time and became far less receptive towards experimental music than it had been throughout the decade.

So, to make a long story short, ELP were in a bad spot in 1978, and were further plagued by deteriorating personal relations between the band members, as well as conflicts with the record company which demanded a hot-selling record. Love Beach was made in a desperate attempt to reach out to a new audience: it’s made up primarily of a bunch of lightweight pop songs but also throws in a few progressive-sounding tunes to please their old audience. The result, predictably, pleased no one at all and made ELP the laughing stock of the music world. Even the band members themselves have frequently mocked it. What else could they do? This album is just too easy to mock. Just look at it! Even the liner notes hardly say anything about the music and mostly just talk about how much fun the band had on the Bahamas, where the album was recorded.

I mean, you can tell that there are some creative problems when a singer has trouble trying to make the third line on an album fit within the meter. At the same time, Keith changes his synthesizer tones from otherwordly and ominous to sickly sweet and sappy, and Carl plays an awkward drumming part that never seems to get off the ground. And despite all of that, I still have to count “All I Want Is You” among the better songs on here, because it shows at least a wee bit of classical influence and of the old production style (and to be fair, this is hardly worse than Greg’s pop stuff on Works, Volume 1).

However, things very rapidly go off the deep end with the title track and “Taste Of My Love”, which are basically guitar-led cock rock anthems that have Greg singing oversexed smut that would make even Gene Simmons blush with embarrassment (Oh, I almost forgot: all of the lyrics on this album were written by Peter Sinfield, who originally rose to fame by supplying King Crimson with his hallucinatory texts about 21st century schizoid men and rusted chains of prison moons, and who just five years earlier thought up the apocalyptic machine warfare themes for Brain Salad Surgery. Now he writes such lovely slices of poetry like “I’m gonna love you like nobody ever loved you; Climb on my rocket and we’ll fly”). Anyway, these songs are far too tame instrumentation-wise to appeal to the general sleaze-rock crowd, and far too simplistic to not infuriate anyone expecting to hear the ELP of old: Keith’s synthesizer parts feel like they were added to these tracks more out of obligation rather than because they actually contributed something of substance to the music.

“The Gambler” goes for a comedic mood again, but really overstays its welcome with its generic female backing vocals as well as some shitty ukelele and some equally shitty harmonica to spice up the pill. Oh well, at least it has some funny keyboard playing. And "For You" ... well, that one's actually alright. Unlike the rest of the album, it's more melancholic and reflective than sappy and jolly, and it has some nice echoey guitar playing, too. I couldn't care less about the "rocking" coda though (in quotes because it just sounds kind of torpid).

In contrast to the first side of the LP, the second side holds tracks that are basically bones thrown toward the band's traditional audience. The first track on here, "Canario", is also not bad. It's another classical cover (of a piece by Joaquín Rodrigo) that still sounds overly sweet and kinda cheesy but at least it has some dang energy which is sorely missing on the rest of the album, particularly on the next track, where things get really murky when the boys try to pen one more epic multi-part suite in the old prog style, called “Memoirs Of An Officer And A Gentlemen”. Don’t expect another “Tarkus” here: this whole suite is just a big toss-off. Almost the whole thing is in the same key and the same plodding tempo, and it sticks to the same disgustingly cheerful atmosphere that dominates the rest of the album. Furthermore, the lyrics try to sound really grandiose and world-shattering but, when taking the utterly banal subject matter into account (a soldier falls in love with a nurse but oh no she died the end), just come off as pathetic. But worst of all, Keith's keyboard playing feels completely sterile and forced throughout the whole thing, and there's no impressive synth solo to hear for miles around. The final movement, "Honourable Company", is a gradually intensifying march that's obviously intended as a rewrite of "Aquatarkus", but it has no climax and just ends up sounding like really bad theme park music (I apologize if I overuse this analogy in my reviews but I really can't think of a better thing to compare it to. Do you remember waiting in line for an Indiana Jones ride and hearing some super-cheesy tune for the grand, magical adventure you're about to go on? Yeah, that's the one ). Not even the gratuitous Chopin quotations help bring the suite to life or anything resembling life.

Oh, I'm sorry. I must come across as angry right now, but honestly, the spectacular stupidity of this album makes it impossible to actually hate or get angered by. The incompatibility of Emerson, Lake & Palmer with their newly created popstar image, combined with the unconvincing manner in which they pursued this new direction, makes Love Beach one of the most hilariously ham-fisted and ill-conceived products in the history of mainstream rock music. So just don’t take it too seriously. Don’t look for quality here. Just let the stupid sink in and have a blast.

Allmusic's original review of this album consisted of just one sentence which read: "A record that ELP released only because they owed it to their original label, and that's all one needs to know." I suppose it’s a mystery whether the band just wanted to make a few dollars and please Atlantic Records or if they actually wanted to make a turn in this direction, but in any case, the album flopped both commercially and critically. Now reviled by their former fans and belittled by their enemies, the trio finally called it quits and went their separate ways.

Best song: eh, I guess it's probably CANARIO

[lazybarbarians]

For the Emperor, by Sandy Mitchell

Kalinara: So, we had a bit of an unintentional hiatus as real life hit both of us pretty hard. But now we’re back. It was my turn to pick the book this time, so I thought I’d try something a bit different. I chose “For the Emperor”, the first of the Ciaphas Cain novels in the Warhammer 40K series

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Okay, so, disclaimer. I don’t play Warhammer, any version. I only have the vaguest idea of how it works, or who the major players are, or what the hell is even going on. All of my knowledge of the setting comes from the tie-in novels. And I have to admit, as someone used to trudging through Forgotten Realms (I honestly suspect the popularity of the Drizzt books, despite the irritating nature of the main character, comes from the fact that they’re one of a handful of series that are reasonably coherent), the Warhammer 40K novels that I’ve bothered to read are actually, legitimately enjoyable.

Ragnell: I don’t play Warhammer either, but I appreciate being able to google what the aliens look like.

K::One of the most interesting aspects of these books, to me, is seeing how the writers tackle the innate ridiculousness of the setting. I mean, don’t get me started on the thousands of people sacrificed a day to keep the undead Emperor alive so that chaos doesn’t consume all of humanity thing. The setting uses the word “grimdark” unironically. Enough said.

R: This setting is like the world/universal version of Ash from the Evil Dead sequels. And now I think I’ll picture Ciaphas Cain as 90s Bruce Campbell forever.

K: And I can see why the setting works great for the game, but it’s got to be a challenge for any writer to dreg up human stories out of that mess. And it’s interesting to see how different writers handle that.

Dan Abnett’s Gaunt’s Ghosts series seems to downplay the most ridiculous aspects of the setting to focus on trench warfare in space. Sandy Mitchell, on the other hand, seems to be embracing the over-the-top aspects of the setting and matching them with an equally over-the-top protagonist: Ciaphas Cain.

According to history, Ciaphas Cain is a legendary hero, a paragon of heroic virtue whose courage and honor are unparalleled. However according to his secret memoirs (as compiled and annotated by Inquisitor Amberley Vail), Cain has a different point of view of the events. Ciaphas Cain, according to Ciaphas Cain, isn’t a hero at all, but a selfish coward who obtained his heroic reputation through a mixture of luck, good timing, and a really good facade.

The plot of the novel is pretty straightforward: it represents an extract from Cain’s memoirs about his first mission with the 597th Valhallan Regiment. But it’s the characters, not the plot, that make the story interesting.

The Valhallan 597th has an interesting backstory in its own right. It’s made up of what had been two separate companies that were devastated during a recent battle. One of the companies was an all-male front-line regiment, the other an all-female rear echelon group. This required a bit of an adjustment period, especially since the new senior officer was one of the latter.

One thing I liked about the conflict was that while sexism was a part of it, it wasn’t simply a matter of “ew, girls” so much as the fact that these were two very different companies with very different ways of doing things. And there really wasn’t any doubt that the women were as capable as the men in actual combat.

It was however a nice set up to ensure that we had about as many prominent female characters as male characters in the story.

R: Yeah, I appreciated that too. This is an extremely macho space fantasy, and it would have been easy to have one female character for the love interest for the whole thing but this writer went out of his way to give us a mix. That was really cool.

K: We also get to witness the first meeting of Cain and his annotator in person, which is a rather nice touch. Inquisitor Vail is a fun character in her own right, and she and Cain have a lot of chemistry. One thing that I stands out for me, on reread, is how much is said and not said about the relationship between the two characters. Neither of them ever use the word “love”, but Cain himself states that she made “half a lifetime of running, shooting, and bowel-clenching terror” worth it. From Cain, that’s saying something. Vail is less effusive, but in a footnote notes that she and Cain felt “more at ease in one another’s company” than either were used to. In a way, it’s possible to read the entire Cain series as a declaration of Vail’s feelings for Cain: she’s presenting us not with the legend, but with the man that she knew. Warts and all.

R: She seems to prefer him to the legend. I like that they have a kind of stock action hero-love interest thing on paper, where she’s a spy who surprises him and she relies on his combat prowess, but there is something really fresh about it. She never gets taken out specifically to prop him up, for example. They have their own strengths and weaknesses, and some social abilities in common. And they bond over the fact that she can see through him. In fact, this consummate liar seems pretty attracted to the fact that she perceives the true him and likes him.

K: It’s probably fair to note that his initial knee-jerk fear of being discovered is not as neurotic as it might seem. His personality foibles might well be an executable offense in this universe.

The fun of this particular series is in the unreliable narrator aspect. We actually get layers of unreliable narrator here. Since the stories are presented as parts of Cain’s memoirs, we’re getting Cain’s in character version of events, decades after the fact. Assuming, of course, that Cain is telling us the truth. And assuming, of course, that Cain’s recollections aren’t clouded with self-doubt, hindsight, or foggy memory.

Vail is another layer of unreliable narrator. She claims to be impartial, supplementing Cain’s account with outside sources when needed, and adding her own footnotes to provide contextual explanations (a good way to deal with the minutia of the Warhammer universe for those of us without the patience or attention span to read through the source books), but every so often her footnotes end up with a little more personal color than necessary.

We know that Cain’s heroic deeds happened. It’s documented clearly and reinforced. But the “how” and “why” is an interesting question. Is Cain the selfish coward that he thinks he is? Is he a hero suffering from imposter syndrome who doesn’t give himself enough credit? Or is he just a normal man dealing with a batshit insane society that has no comprehension or recognition of human weakness?

R: I have to say, whatever it is results in Cain having an extremely practical and grounded focus. The setting is so overblown, so masculine, so honestly scary in how the Imperium is set up and works and how brainwashed all these conscripts are that it’s helpful to have a guy like Cain as your narrator.

K: Other notable characters include Jurgen, Cain’s aide, and probably the person that Cain values most in the entire universe (though he wouldn’t/couldn’t admit it. But his reaction when he thought Jurgen might be dead was pretty telling), and Sulla, one of members of the 597th who annoys Cain the most.

I think I like Sulla because she’s a character who absolutely did not have to be female. Her major traits: a gung ho attitude that annoys the hell out of Cain, a tendency to purple prose, and a steller career in her own right, do not require Sulla to be female. She’s a comedic foil, not a romantic option, and is never discussed in terms of physical attractiveness. In most stories, she’d be a male character. And she could have been a male character here, as the Valhallan Regiment is co-ed. But instead, the future retired General Jenit Sulla is female. And I like that a lot.

R: Sulla’s great. I’m more a fan of Kasteen though, who did pretty much have to be female to balance out the co-ed thing, but has that practical side I like. Sulla’s more gung-ho “For the Emperor!” Kasteen and Broklaw are more down to earth like Cain, focusing on the immediate goal and how to obtain it without getting the regiment killed.

K: It’s probably worth talking about Cain’s role for a moment. He’s a Commissar, which, for people who aren’t familiar with the setting, operates something like an advisor, morale officer, and secret police. As near as I can tell, with my own limited exposure to the setting, their job primarily consists of shooting people for cowardice and heresy.

They’re generally not popular, for fairly understandable reasons. (It’s a warning sign as to how bad the situation was that Kasteen was actually glad to see him.) And represent one of the more mundane horrors of the setting, when you stop and think about it.

But that’s where Cain’s pragmatism and self-centeredness serves him well. Cain knows that Commissars are generally unpopular, and that the worst often meet with friendly fire accidents as often as they’re killed by the enemy, and he has no intention of allowing that to happen to him. Besides, he has a vested interest in keeping as many of his troops alive as possible so they can stand between him and the enemy.

R: Which is another great bit, a book where the intelligent survival choice is to actually build relationships with others and keep them alive. It stands out again, against the culture Cain’s immersed in.

K: Ultimately, what appeals to me the most about this book, and this series beyond it, is that it takes a premise that ought to be cynical: the legendary hero is nowhere near the paragon of virtue that he’s reputed to be, and makes it strangely optimistic. Even if we take Cain completely at his word that he’s the selfish, cowardly phony that he labels himself as, the end result is that he has had a legitimately positive influence on a lot of people. He’s saved worlds and he’s saved lives. And when you look at it like that, it’s hard to say that he doesn’t deserve to be called a “hero” after all, even if he’d never meant to be.

In the end, instead of a story in which a hero is exposed as a scoundrel, we have a story about how a scoundrel accidentally becomes a hero.

[itsomgitsgreenblogging]

New Perspective: A Solangelo Fanfiction

Drew’s the best and also the worst, and also I haven’t written a lot of witty dialogue lately, I missed that. So you know I had to bring back some of the snap. Also all the lube available and Nico with a ponytail. Cause you know, those things should never be mutually exclusive in fanfiction ;) 

(this fic takes place after the events of Lover-Cares)

Enjoy!

Read on AO3

Preview:

“Nico, what the heck?” Austin said, looking rather startled. “Did you seriously just refer to yourself in the third person.”              

“It’s never too early for some good old fashion dissociation and self-hatred my guy,” Nico said with a probably terrifying half-smile half-baring of teeth he cheers his coffee and downed it. Noting Kayla and Austin’s genuinely unamused faces, he scoffed. “My comedic skills are lost on you people, I swear.”

“—I’m just saying, Drew Tanaka can shove it up hers if she has enough room besides the giant stick up her butt,” Kayla fumed, and Nico couldn’t help but look up from where he was absentmindedly stirring him cream of wheat. “I swear sometimes I just want to smack that girl upside the head, and the Stolls, and—“

               “—and Nico di Angelo, by the gods he’s such an asshole am I right?” Nico said irritably as he took a sip of his coffee, watching as Sebastian from Aphrodite Cabin and Malcom from Athena Cabin got into an argument about if Beyoncé was or was not the most influential philosopher who tackled the properties of love and relationships in modern time.

               “Nico, what the heck?” Austin said, looking rather startled. “Did you seriously just refer to yourself in the third person.”

               “It’s never too early for some good old fashion dissociation and self-hatred my guy,” Nico said with a probably terrifying half-smile half-baring of teeth he cheers his coffee and downed it. Noting Kayla and Austin’s genuinely unamused faces, he scoffed. “My comedic skills are lost on you people, I swear.”

               “It’s more like you have a really screwed up sense of humor but alright man whatever floats your boat,” Kayla said with a shrug.

               Nico stewed in his general daily angst, definitely not upset that he hadn’t seen Will all morning because he was in charge of taking care of a camper, no, Nico was not that petty. Or at least, he was trying to convince himself that he wasn’t as he sat in the shadow of a tree that was diagonally across from the infirmary, a book laying on his lap that Nico wasn’t reading. He hadn’t managed to get any alone time with Will in so long, he was actually missing Will even though he had seen Will every single day, and his head wasn’t feeling so great.

               Pathetic, Nico thought at himself angrily, wanting to bash something or break something to get the raw feeling out from beneath his nails and his head. Get used to being around people and suddenly you are clinging again.

               “Oh hey there lover-boy, what’s the reason for the doom and gloom and the fact you obviously haven’t combed your hair?” Drew Tanaka said as she placed one hand on her hip and looked down at Nico as if he had walked out of his room wearing only orange from behind her pink eyeliner.

               “Oh wow, it’s almost like I can hear something…but I can’t quite make it out over the sound of all the hot air escaping your face,” Nico said saintly.

               “You are lucky you are hot and an asshole,” Drew Tanaka scoffed. “Otherwise being around you would be a chore.”

               “I’m gay, Drew.”

               “First off sweetie,” Drew said with the inflection she would give “cancer” or “Walmart clothing sale”, “did I say I wanted to suck face with discount Brendon Urie from circa 2005? No I did not. Stop projecting your insecurities onto me, every time you do so another fabulous bitch like me gets a blister when walking in heels to the club. Secondly just because you are gay does not mean you stop being hot. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive. “Mutually exclusive” meaning two things that cannot both be true at the same time, like eating bread on the Atkins diet or Ellis Wakefield not wanting to suck Markowitz’s dick when he walks into a room. Being gay and attractive can definitely both happen so deal with it, and it makes your shitty attitude worth it because I can appreciate good bone structure when I see it.”

               “Drew you are an awful human being,” Nico told her seriously, rubbing his temples adamantly. “Like really, is something wrong with you?”

               “What can I say, I’m just keeping it real,” Drew said with a toss of her hair. “So what’s got your panties in a twist? Is it Will?”

               “Drew, if you seriously think I’m going to talk to you about relationships you have another thing coming,” Nico said with a vague ache starting up behind his eyes.

               It was when Drew and Nico were about to have their version of a heart to heart (which was basically them insulting each other) when it sounded like the Asphodel Fields broke out in the center of camp. It looked like Butch from Iris Cabin was barely holding back Sherman as Lacy, Mitchell, and Sebastian milled on the edge of the archery fields. Julia Fiengold, who was good friends with Lacy, had planted herself by Lacy’s side but looked concerned as Alice casted a few solid glares in Sherman’s direction (and Nico wouldn’t have been surprised if she was carrying some serious prank artillery with her). Clovis had somehow fallen asleep on one of the white lines in the center of the archery field, and Nico found himself somewhat glad for it as Will had emerged from the infirmary to try to drag him off with the intervention of Lou Ellen and Cecil Markowitz—though they had all apparently dropped Clovis mid-carry as the fight broke out as he was snoring, looking rather at peace on the grass.

               “So what’s going on?” Nico asked in general as he and Drew approached the chaos.

               “Oh, you know, the daily life at CHB,” Will said weakly. “Honestly they had been arguing when I got here, I think things started escalating.”

               “What you are saying is disrespectful to all the warriors—!” Sherman half-screamed, looking very much like he wanted to shove Lacy out of a moving car. “Get off me Brony!”

               “Ugh, man, do not make me regret this or I swear!” Butch snapped at him.  

               “I was just saying…!” Lacy half-sobbed, her brothers who were comforting her looking like they were planning to switch out Sherman’s spears with makeup brushes and for Cover Girl makeup and lots of highlighter to be in Sherman’s immediate future.

“Wait, can we all hold up a hot second! What is happening and why is Tweedle Dumber threatening Lacy?” Drew said, holding out her hands and flipped her dark hair out of her face. There was charmspeak laden in her words, and with the threat of physical violence gone, the actual situation came out.

“So I was Iris messaging with Piper and she said that her dad told Jason he knew a plastic surgeon that could fix his lip and how Jason thought that was funny. But I said, oh that might be a good idea for scars, and then Sherman overheard me!” Lacy blurted out, her words a tumble of panic.

“A warrior should take pride in his scars, anything else is a weakness!” Sherman snapped back at her. Drew looked like she just rolled her eyes so hard she might have sprained something, and Nico just sat back and let the madness start as Drew opened her lipsticked-lips.

“Okay so I hear that Jason’s got some scars. I wouldn’t really know because like Medusa I try to avoid eye contact with him on the account of someone cough cough Piper cough cough being absolutely sure I’m a homewrecker. I don’t know what the big deal is. If you don’t like something about your body, you should just change it. Or maybe not, maybe Jason needs his scar to get into some lesbian biker gang or maybe he’s leaving Piper and going on an Eat-Pray-Love style self-discovery vacation and the scars will help him sell his memoir as “a man with a troubled past takes the road to new enlightenment”. Anyways, it’s not like we haven’t all thought about something like that. I’m convinced every time that Jackson opens his gab Annabeth reasons over the pros and cons of mouth reduction surgery. I’m sure Butch’s thought of getting that rainbow tramp stamp removed because let’s be honest he’s not slaying the ladies with it—“

               “Drew I am going to kick you in the head—!“ Butch threatened.  

               “—Cecil has probably rifled through pamphlets about fixing that huge beak of his because he isn’t really using it to break nuts and seeds over here. And Alice has definitely thought about getting an eye-deslanting.”

               “Screw you Drew, that’s racist,” Alice Miyazawa scoffed, as Cecil suddenly turned to Lou Ellen who gave him an apologetic look in return.

               “Self-hating Asians oughtta stick together,” Drew retorted with a shrug.

               “I don’t think that’s necessarily true, Drew. I mean, sure, everyone has insecurities, but it’s also good to try to embrace them,” Will told Drew as he placed a hand on Alice's shoulder to keep the girl from giving Drew a probably well-earned knuckle sandwich.

               “Oh please, Solace, you’ve got a weird spiral belly button. You could frost it and pass it off as a cinnamon bun,” Drew said with a roll of her eyes, Nico had to cover the laugh of surprise that came out of him with his hand, and Will gave him a long-suffering look. “I’m just saying, there’s this thing called plastic surgery. It’s science. And if you look in the mirror and don’t like what you see and also have the means, you should go for it. If you don’t want to, don’t. Simple as that. Passing judgment is so un-hot, and who knows? Maybe Jason will wake up from general anesthesia and realize who the hotter child of Aphrodite that he could be with is. Either way, what people do or do not decide to do with their bodies is no one else’s choice,” Drew said before with a final hair flip and sway of hip, Drew was off to terrorize another section of camp. With Hurricane Drew now over, the campers who had gathered dispersed to mutter amongst themselves, Sherman and Ellis and Butch grabbed Clovis by his appendages and dragging him off the field as he slept talk about Great White Sharks, macaroons, and a tennis racket.

               “I hate that girl with a fiery passion, but by all the Gods she’s a freaking insult-genius,” Lou Ellen said with a sort of strange awe.

               “And she really loves what she does,” Cecil said just as quietly. “She has a gift.”

               “Yeah she’s something alright,” Will noted before looking to Nico with an almost shy grin, bumping his shoulder against Nico’s. “Hey there, long time no see.”

               “Oh yuck, mushy feelings. We’re out,” Lou Ellen called as she and Cecil made kissy faces at Nico and Will before also walking off.  

               “How’s the infirmary?” Nico asked him as they began to walk, he tried to pat his hair down absently.

               “Not so busy, were you really busy? You look like you just rolled out of bed,” Will noted and Nico sighed heavily.

               “I desperately need a haircut,” Nico groaned, twisting a lock of hair around his fingers and trying to get it out of his eyes.

               “Well, why don’t I at least get you a hair tie? Kayla keeps a whole bunch on the desk,” Will offered.

               They walked to Apollo Cabin in companionable silence, when they got there Nico sat down on the bed as Will grabbed one of Kayla’s dark hair ties from her desk and his own brush. Kayla and Austin were spending their free period helping Nyssa and Harley with some new target practice gadget, so for once in a long time Cabin Seven was quiet.  

               “My hair’s pretty thick,” Nico warned him as well approached with a few things in hand, a brush among them.

               “I’ve got some spray in stuff,” Will offered, holding up a very suspicious slender bottle filled with what Nico would have assumed was a cream based dessert.

               “Isn’t that Aphrodite stuff?”

               “Personal grooming is not just an Aphrodite Cabin thing,” Will scoffed and Nico resisted making a son-of-Apollo-joke before Nico allowed him to do whatever he was planning on by motioning to the spot next to him, and he couldn’t help but sigh as Will’s fingers ran through his hair. “You have really nice hair though.”

               “It’s so dratted thick,” Nico scoffed, tugging at a renegade curl. “And it curls weirdly. I was thinking of maybe shaving it.”

               “Really?” Will asked and Nico felt the gentle tug of the brush through his hair.

               “Yeah, when my dad first gave me my card I tried to go to the hair dresser’s, but when they were shampooing my head and they started rubbing my scalp and stuff I really couldn’t take it. I almost kicked the lady in the leg,” Nico admitted awkwardly with a shudder at both the memory and how nice whatever Will was doing felt. “I’ve been trimming it myself ever since, I sort of forgot to though.”

               “That sounds like you,” Will laughed, and Nico could almost hear Will’s smile. That was the nice thing about Will’s voice, it didn’t hide anything, it was pure and genuine. “You aren’t a huge fan of other people touching you, are you?”

               “It’s hard when you don’t know them,” Nico groaned. “I’m normally fine when it’s people I don’t hate. You’re just too laid back.”

               “Maybe,” Will chuckled good-naturedly and Nico leaned his head back so he could see Will’s bright and slightly sheepish smile. “Hazard of the healing arts. I’ve gotten used to people touching me out of the blue because I heal them. I think your hesitance is one of your cute features anyways.”

               “You’re a weirdo,” Nico said with a roll of his eyes.

               “You’re the one dating a weirdo, what does that say about you?” Will asked, and with gentle fingers his pulled the hair that was about his neck up into a tie. Immediately, Nico felt his warm lips press against the back of his neck, making Nico jump slightly at the unexpected sensation. Will immediately moved back, but Nico grasped his arm and kept him close.

               “I know things have been awkward since…since last time,” Nico said quietly. “But I want you to touch me, I do.”

               “But you…you really hated it,” Will nearly whined, sitting back on his heels. “Honestly, I’m fine being on the bottom for the rest of my life if it makes you so uncomfortable.”

               “I didn’t hate it, I just froze,” Nico corrected him, before sighing heavily. “I’m…there’s a thing about me I wish I could change I guess.”

               “If you want to talk about it I’m open ears?” Will asked, and didn’t push. There was no trace of judgment in his features, and somehow that made Nico feel even more desolate.

               “I just…I’m always worried I’m being selfish.”

               “Nico, you are the most unselfish person I know,” Will said, eyes wide with shock, as he sat back on his heels thoughtfully. “I mean, holy Hera, you almost killed yourself for your friends and everyone else. You are constantly putting other people before yourself.”

               “I…” Nico tried to begin to explain, but just shook his head. “It’s just hard for me is all. Sometimes I feel like I don’t see you as much as I want to, but I know you’re busy. And then when I do see you, I’m uncooperative.”

               Will was quiet for a moment, before he felt Will’s hands slip beneath his shirt, Will’s mouth tenderly pressing against the back of his neck. Nico gasped as Will’s fingers brushed against his nipple.

               “Nico, this doesn’t feel uncooperative. This feels sensitive,” Will sighed as he continue to tease with loving mouth and hands in a way that made all of Nico’s blood travel south.  “And I would never want you to change that. So what if it takes a bit for you to get used to my touch? The fact I get to touch you at all makes me happy and then you make these noises that turn me on so much.”

               “Greedy asshole,” Nico snarked, turning to meet Will’s lips, opening his mouth so he could pull Will in deeper. Nico reached over to palm the very obvious heaviness in Will’s great sweatpants and smiled against Will’s lips. “Someone else is pretty sensitive too.”

               “Oh, yes, sometimes it’s good to be selfish,” Will told Nico with a sweet look that could have melted Nico, and Nico lay down and let Will lay his body on top, reveling in the delicious weight. “Especially when you have someone like me who could be happy spoiling you for the rest of your life. But please, give me a head’s up? I’m not a mind-reader so I appreciate specific directions.”

               “I can be pretty demanding,” Nico said somewhat weakly, reaching up to trace Will’s cheek. “If you give me a little bit, I’ll just want more.”

               “And I can be pretty stubborn, anything you want, I’ll be happy to give you,” Will promised him. “Just let me, Nico. Tell what you want.”

               “Can we try…again?” Nico asked, but his words stopped as Will caught his hand and kissed it, perking up immediately as Nico’s gaze drifted over to the left.

               “Of course,” Will asked him and Nico nodded and reached over to the bedside table Nico had been eyeing and opened up the drawer.

               “How should I…um?” Nico asked him and Will shrugged.

               “Do whatever you think will make you the most comfortable,” Will said as he unscrewed the bottle and almost doused his fingers in it, warming the lube between his fingers.

               “Alright,” Nico said, laying down on his stomach, helping Will place a pillow beneath his hips.

               “You can be selfish with me, Nico,” Will promised him as he kissed Nico’s neck and shoulder comfortingly, and Nico shuddered as he felt Will’s fingers gently rub against his entrance. Nico couldn’t understand why it felt so good, his whole body jolted as Will’s slick finger slid inside, the intrusion not entirely pleasant or unpleasant as he moved it. “Relax, as much as you can.”

               “It feels…weird…!” Nico admitted between clenched teeth, forcing his body to remain relaxed despite what urges he felt. He wanted to try this, Nico reminded himself.

               “Does it hurt?” Will asked worriedly and Nico shook his head. “Here, I’m going to add another one. Try to stay as loose as you can, alright?”

               Nico nodded and gripped the pillow, just as a second finger pressed inside of him with the help of ample lube. Nico fought and lost against the desire to clamp down, and his lack of control over his body’s reaction was damn near infuriating to him. As if sensing this by Nico’s stiff-lipped reaction Will reached down to slide his hand along Nico’s length, which had softened considerably at the previous activities. The smooth, almost comforting sensation of Will’s hand on him, and the gentle probing finally got Nico to relax.

               “It’s okay, Nico. You’re doing so good right now,” Will promised as he kissed Nico’s back.

               “Ugh…this feels so bizarre,” Nico couldn’t help but groan as he turned his head and gave Will a look.  

               “Does it hurt?” Will asked as his fingers continued to move inside Nico, and with him massaging and rubbing him on the inside and outside, a thankful sigh escaped Nico’s mouth. It was beginning to feel vaguely pleasant now, and he naturally relaxed against Will’s touch.

               “Trust me, you would know if it hurt,” Nico promised him. He could do this, Nico thought very rationally. It certainly didn’t feel bad, and judging by the hooded expression and the evidence of Will’s desire pressed against his thigh, if Will wanted to do this then—

               Suddenly Will found something inside of Nico that made him surge with pleasure, and his breath caught harshly in his throat. Will’s fingers hit it again more adamantly and Nico moaned into the sheets as he pressed back against Will’s fingers as he searched against for that feeling.

               “There!” Nico moaned demandingly. “Oh Gods, is that what I hit in you? Oh—that feels so good.”

               “Nico, allow me to introduce you to your prostate,” Will chuckled good-naturedly, as close as they were Nico could feel that rumble in Will’s belly, and it made Nico’s face get hotter.

               “Don’t be a dork,” Nico groaned. “Just do whatever you just did again.”

               “Alright then, needy,” Will teased, as Will’s fingers continued to scissor and rub and hit the plac inside of him that felt so good that Nico’s vision swam. His cock ached with desire, and Will removed his hand to grab the bottle and add a third very slick finger inside and Nico felt so full and so good that he couldn’t think straight. He wanted—needed more.  

               “I want you inside,” Nico blurted out, his hand reaching blindly and clamping on Will’s wrist. “Will, I want to feel you on the inside.”  

               “Shit!” Will said sharply, and Nico stared at him in concern. Will answered it with a delightfully embarrassed expression. “Sorry, that was—that was just really sexy, like whoa.”

               “Um…sorry?” Nico said, feeling himself blush hard because had those words really come out of his mouth? He couldn’t believe it himself.

               “Don’t be sorry, I feel like I deserve a pat on the back,” Will said with a wide smile that Nico returned before turning, hooking Will’s hips with his legs, and pulling Will down on top of him. Both of them laughed into their mouths as they kissed with more intensity, Will fumbling with the foil on the condom. He rolled it on and slicked it with lube, before reaching back to Nico with newly spread fingers.

               “No, I don’t need anymore more,” Nico complained half-heartedly, but spread his legs as Will’s fingers sank inside of him with relative ease. Oh Gods, Nico thought before his thoughts went fuzzy as Will crooked a finger and found a weak spot that had his jaw hanging open. He could get addicted to this, and now he totally got why Will was totally into this.

               “We have to make sure it doesn’t hurt, don’t we?” Will teased as he kissed Nico’s neck.

               “Just put it inside me,” Nico half-begged, half-growled.

               “Are you ready? You sure?”

               “Yes,” Nico agreed, his head nodding vigorously.

               “Alright then, your wish it my command,” Will chuckled, and Nico felt him line up and slid inside.

               They both moaned, the sensation was intense to say the least. There was the barest twinge of discomfort, but he had been so thoroughly prepared that it disappeared quickly as Will seated himself fully inside. What mattered most was the divine sensation that was making him tremble.

               “Oh Will,” Nico gasped breathlessly, wrapping his legs around Will’s hips as Will trembled. “I can feel you.”

               “I feel you too,” Will moaned, his eyes fluttered, and Nico couldn’t help but find his expression to be utterly adorable. “Oh gods you are so perfect, Nico. I love you so much.”

               “Yeah? Does it feel good?” Nico asked, unable to stop himself from smiling an odd grin as Will nodded desperately. “You can move, Will. I want you too. If it hurts I’ll tell you, I promise.”

               “You promise?” Will asked, faking being very obviously suspicious.

               “You’ll be the first to know, scout’s honor,” Nico said making a Live-Long-and Prosper sign with his hands. Will laughed and leaned down to press a kiss to Nico’s forehead.

               Will began to move in gentle controlled thrusts, Nico suspected it was half for him and half to keep Will from coming. But he couldn’t help but enjoy and be frustrated by the movements in equal measure because while it didn’t hurt, Will’s broad shoulders and larger chest was making Nico feel oddly caged. Finally, Nico pressed up on Will’s shoulder’s.

               “Will, I can’t breathe,” Nico told him between kisses. “Maybe change position?”

               “Yeah, uh, what do you want to…?” Will asked with a hitched breath as he pulled up, Nico let Will sit himself against the headboard and settled himself firmly on Will’s lap. “Better?”

               “Yeah, I can—oh,” Nico groaned as he latched onto Will, arms wrapped around Will’s back. In this position he could feel Will’s length, pressing in deep and filling him. Will bent down and their mouths melted against each other, and they rocked together, slightly unsteady as they worked together to find the perfect angle, or when Will reached down to grasp him, or Nico bucked up unexpectedly as Will once again struck his prostrate. Finally something was building up, white hot pleasure that Nico almost wished could keep building inside of him forever so he could keep burning with it, but it couldn’t happen. Nico moaned into Will’s mouth and felt himself come into Will’s hand. Will continued to move for a moment or two, thrusts uneven, and Nico felt a pulsing inside as Will came into the condom.

               Nico lay down as Will removed the condom and threw it out, falling back on the bed with an exhausted huff.

               “So what did you think?” Will asked, as they both tried to catch their breath and curling his arms around the pillow in front of him. Nico normally would have chastised him for getting sweat all over his pillows, but with Will stretched out looking so content and with those golden arms of his Nico just couldn’t fault him. Instead Nico grabbed the nearly empty lube bottle and held it up with a crook of his brow.

               “Are you kidding?”

               “What, you were totally into it and you were super hot and it helped, you’ll be thanking me when that wow-that-seat-was-uncomfortable ache doesn’t turn into a holy-shit-was-I-hit-by-a-train ache,” Will told him as he gave Nico a grin and a thumb’s up as he placed the bottle on the bed side table.

               “You are insufferable did you know that,” Nico sighed as he turned over to kiss Will’s shoulder and give his back an absent scratch, which had Will sighing in pleasure. “But yeah, that was pretty hot.”

               “Mm, I must have done something right for you to be so good to me,” Will said as he turned his head to look at Nico, eyes a deep hazy blue, a warm grin glinting across his teeth.

               “You are an idiot,” Nico sighed as he leaned down to kiss him. “But you are also disgustingly sweet.”

               “Don’t say it like a compliment or I’ll believe you like me or something,” Will teased as he pushed up to meet Nico’s mouth again.

               “How embarrassing that would be,” Nico murmured between brushes of lips. “It was good, Will.”

               “I’m totally down if you want to torture me with those sexy pianist fingers next,” Will told him, and Nico honestly couldn’t tell if he was being serious or joking. “I have more lube in my cabin—“

               “Will, seriously—?“    

               Nico sat down to get his hair cut by Mitchell, and could see Drew smirk at him from the corner of his eye. Nico immediately flipped her off. 

               Just another day at CHB. 

[haleyfury]

I’ve been buying more books lately for a variety of reasons including:

I want to be supporting the book industry as much as I can right now

I don’t know when my county public library will be re-opening. I live in regret that I didn’t put more on hold or borrow more books before everything shut down

I need so many, aka ALL, the new releases immediately

I have a love for stress buying

I live in fear of running out of books to read on-hand

I apparently enjoy ignoring the books I do already own and still haven’t read

I thought about dressing up for this photo, but it’s an honest  depiction of my quarantine outfit: sweatshirts everyday and sunglasses for reading outside!

While I did buy some books in March, I decided to keep my book-buying momentum going in April. I knew I wanted to buy more books in this month (see reasons above) and while watching one of Jessica of Peace Love Book’s April book hauls, she noted that she had ordered books from Better World Books. Better World Books is a company that sells used or donated books and then matches the amount of books you purchase to donate to non-profit organizations. They also do have new editions available. I thought this was a great way to buy books while supporting a good cause and saving some money- let’s be honest, buying multiple print copies from a retailer can quickly add up. I ordered four books and the all came in pretty great condition – I think all four came from libraries and it was fairly simple to take off the library plastic covers off the three hardcovers. There’s some glue stuck on the inside, but you can’t tell from the outside and the dust jackets stayed in great shape. My only ‘complaint’  that obliviously makes a lot of sense (especially right now) is that they don’t have many new books available at used/bargain prices.

Additionally, I’ve been fortunate enough to receive some really exciting upcoming releases for review. You probably know that I am not the biggest e-book fan, but I’ve been changing my ways lately and have started using Netgalley- despite having an account for two years now,oops! I use an iPad to read-books, either through Kindle or Aldilko – I tried setting up my Netgalley copies with Kindle and it wouldn’t work. If you’re an e-book reader or want to branch out into them, I’ve been telling everyone IRL to check out Libby, which synchs up to your local library and provides their e-book and audiobooks.

Purchased Books

The Dazzling Heights and The Towering Sky (Thousandth Floor #2 and #3) by Katharine McGee –  The Thousandth Floor series falls into a bunch of my reading moods combined: books I should’ve read a while ago, author whose earlier works I want to check out (PSA TO PLEASE READ AMERICAN ROYALS), and books with a lot of drama and extravagance that are bound to distract me for a while. I read The Thousandth Floor earlier this month and really enjoyed it. I see myself reading the next two books back to back.

The Selection by Kiera Cass – I would just like to note that I ordered The Selection BEFORE the Netflix adaptation was announced. I feel like I’m in this reading mood at the moment where I want to catch up on all the classic YA or hyped reads that I haven’t read. I also really want to read Kiera Cass’s upcoming release, The Betrothed, which isn’t related to The Selection, but I want to read something of hers before that comes out in.

You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone by Rachel Lynn Solomon – Rachel Lynn Solomon is an author I’ve been meaning to read forever. With her upcoming release, Today Tonight Tomorrow (which I have a review copy of), there’s been so much love for books lately on Instagram and Twitter that made me finally get a copy of her debut.

Library Books 

Becoming by Michelle Obama (audiobook) –  Becoming is one of those books that everyone has to and will read at some point. Two of my friends are currently reading this one and absolutely loving it. I decided to read the audiobook to listen to on my daily walks and out of my love for listening to memoirs that are narrated by the author. I started Becoming last week and have been carving out time to read it outside of my walks because I’m enjoying it that much!

On hold:

Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman (e-book) – Unorthodox had been on my TBR radar for a while, but its Netflix TV show adaptation made me decided to finally check it out. I put this one on hold on Libby- it wasn’t offered in audio and I sort’ve lost interest in listening to it as audiobook because it’s not narrated by the author. The holds list is currently 15 weeks long, but I’ve found that holds end up not being even half as long as Libby says.

Dear Girls by Ali Wong – Ali Wong is one of my favorite comedians (PSA to check out all of her Netflix specials and her movie, Always Be My Maybe), so I think listening to her book will also be a fun and entertaining experience.

ARCs

10 Things I Hate About Pinky by Sandhya Menon (e-ARC) –  I’m saving 10 Things I Hate About Pinky for when I’m officially done with my school work as a treat-myself read! This highlight anticipated 2020 release of mine comes out on July 21.

The Sullivan Sisters by Kathryn Ormsbee (e-ARC) –  As soon as I heard about The Sullivan Sisters, I put it on my TBR because I loved Kathryn Orsmbee’s Tash Hearts Tolstoy back in 2017 so much! I love books about sister dynamics and relationships, which is at the heart of The Sullivan Sisters, as the sisters face a family mystery when they receive an inheritance they knew nothing about. The Sullivan Sisters comes out on July 8.

Brunch and Other Obligations by Suzanne Nugent (ARC) –  Brunch and Other Obligations peaked my interest because its synopsis reminded me so much of the fifth/companion  Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants book, with a more women-fiction and comedic spin. Brunch and Other Obligations comes out on May 5.

  All the Right Mistakes by Laura Jamison (ARC) –  I’ll basically read any book with any sort of college or college relationship-esque setting, which led me to Laura Jamison’s All the Right Mistakes. All the Right Mistakes comes out on August 4.

I see myself ordering more books in May as a treat-yo-self moment since I officially graduate from college next week! I honestly keep forgetting about graduation with all the changes going on, but my school does plan on holding our commencement ceremony at a later date.

What books did you borrow or buy in April? Have you read any of the books that I mentioned? Share in the comments!

STRESS PURCHASES, ARCS, & LIBRARY HOLDS: April 2020 Book Haul I’ve been buying more books lately for a variety of reasons including: I want to be supporting the book industry as much as I can right now…

[robbieinterviews]

INTERVIEW: A CONVERSATION WITH SCREEN SIREN MARGOT ROBBIE, 2016

Since her sensational breakthrough in The Wolf of Wall Street, Margot Robbie has continued to dazzle critics and audiences alike with turns in last year’s heist-thriller Focus (opposite Will Smith) and the recent sci-fi thriller Z for Zachariah. Her talents are in such demand that she’s recently completed filming two major blockbusters: DC Comics’ highly anticipated Suicide Squad opposite Jared Leto (pictured right) and The Legend of Tarzan, a US$180-million production co-starring Alexander Skarsgård. Both films are slated for major summer tent-pole releases and could well establish Robbie, already a two-time Golden Globe winner, as one of the hottest actresses in the business.

In the meantime, audiences will be able to see the blonde beauty display different sides of her ebullient persona in new-release Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, a dramatic comedy set in war-torn Afghanistan and Pakistan and based on reporter Kim Barker’s memoir, The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Robbie plays Tanya, a journalist who is fully immersed in the occasionally bacchanal life of a war correspondent.

Things change, however, when she befriends a newly stationed reporter, Kim (Tina Fey), and shows her some survival tactics amid the chaos that surrounds them. “I think I could handle the partying side of being a war correspondent but I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live in a war zone on a daily basis,” Robbie says. “It’s a very difficult and dangerous job and I have so much admiration for the journalists who are able to handle that life on a daily basis.” The 25-year-old Robbie is currently in a relationship with British assistant-director Tom Ackerley whom she met 18 months ago while working together on the set of the World War II film, Suite Française.

Is it true that you got to meet Prince Harry recently? Yes. Suki [Waterhouse] was having a housewarming party and I thought I would pop in for a short while to say hello. Then of course I got into the party mood and I wound up talking to Prince Harry for a half an hour and I didn’t know it was him.

You’ve been working in some very big films of late including Tarzan and Suicide Squad. Does it ever feel unreal? Sometimes I wake up and it’s like I’m living in this other world like being in a dream. Just getting to be in The Wolf of Wall Street was a shock and ever since it’s just been great and so exciting to have all these opportunities. With Suicide Squad, it was so much fun to play Harley [Dr. Harley Quinn] who’s absolutely nuts and you never know whether she’s going to kill you or laugh and give you a hug. But it’s fun getting to do crazy things and live vicariously through your character that way.

Were you happy to get to work with Will Smith again in Suicide Squad? Will is such a great guy on and off the set that when I heard he was negotiating to play in the film I kept texting him: “You better be in this movie!” I enjoyed working with Will so much on Focus and I was overjoyed when I finally heard that we would be working together again.

What can you tell us about your character, Tanya, in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? She’s a war correspondent who has already spent some time in Kabul prior to the arrival of Kim. Tanya kind of takes her under her wing and they become unlikely friends because they’re very different personalities. At the beginning there’s this healthy rivalry and competition between them; Tanya is very brazen and can adapt to just about any situation. They encourage each other to keep raising the stakes in the kinds of assignments they’re willing to go on but by the end Tanya takes things too far and she’s a cautionary tale for Kim. Things between them eventually get a little ugly and their relationship becomes not so healthy.

What was it like working with Tina Fey? I have to admit it was intimidating at first when you know you’re working with someone who is one of the greatest sketch comedians and comedic actresses of all time. We were kind of thrown together in the way our characters in the film meet, but Tina is such a wonderful person, so generous and friendly, that she made it very easy for me to feel comfortable working with her. Tina is also so talented and so good at what she does that when you’re on the set she inspires you to lift your game.

Were you familiar with some of her films? Oh, of course. I love Mean Girls. I can recite most of the lines the film and sometimes I would do that in front of Tina until I remembered that she actually wrote the script. [Laughs.]

Your career seems to keep gaining momentum. After playing a very glamorous and sexy role in The Wolf of Wall Street, is it hard to steer clear of the bombshell tag that comes with that kind of character? I’m not very thrilled with being labelled that way. It minimises your work in a film like that where you’re working with Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio. I don’t want to be reduced to the clichés that come with being called sexy or a blonde bombshell. I want to keep looking for roles where the main interest will be in the character itself; her importance in driving a story forward rather than her relationship with the male character. But I think films like The Wolf of Wall Street and Focus gave me a chance to play very charismatic and clever women – even though they do have a glamorous side.

As a child growing up in Australia, were you one of those girls who was a natural-born actress? I was always creating in talent shows and putting on little plays. I would force my family to pay one dollar for each performance! [Laughs.] Then in high school I took an acting course and that pretty much made up my mind as to what I wanted to do with my life.

You skipped university to go straight into acting, didn’t you? When I was 17, I found a job working on the Australian TV series Neighbours straight out of high school and moved to Melbourne to live there, and I never had the chance to go to university. But I would still get to go to all the parties with some of my friends and at least I got to experience some of the fun side of university life. Sometimes students would come up to me saying they hadn’t seen me around before and ask me what I was studying and I would say, “marine biology”. I kept going to all the parties and usually I would invent a new major each time.

With all the films you’ve been working on this past year, are you going to be taking time off? I won’t have a chance to take a break until August, and even then I might be working on another project. Between now and then, I’ll be doing promotional work for my films so I don’t think I’ll be able to have any serious time off until next year. But I love what I’m doing and I’m trying to enjoy every minute of it. So for the next year I’m going to continue being the girl with the suitcase.

You’ve said in the past how much you enjoy travelling. Any wild experiences you’d like to share? I went to Italy for two months with some of my friends and we went to San Marco square [in Venice] where we had some Cokes, but the bill was so incredibly high that we ran off like mad without paying. But unfortunately one of the girls had left her backpack behind with her passport and so we had to go back. We all had to pay a fine!

[bakechochin]

The Book Ramblings of May

In place of book reviews, I will be writing these ‘book ramblings’. A lot of the texts I’ve been reading (or plan to read) in recent times are well-known classics, meaning I can’t really write book reviews as I’m used to. I’m reading books that either have already been read by everyone else (and so any attempt to give novel or insightful criticisms would be a tad pointless), or are so convoluted and odd that they defy being analysed as I would do a simpler text. These ramblings are pretty unorganised and hardly anything revolutionary, but I felt the need to write something review-related. I’ll upload a rambling compiling all my read books on a monthly basis.

[apologies for the delay with this one: I was binging Good Omens and contemplating spending 200 quid on a pair of shades to match Crowley’s sweet pair]

Falstaff - Robert Nye I’ll admit that I was ready to embrace this book as fucking great right from the word go, because it seemed so up my alley; Falstaff is a titan of the carnivalesque and one of my very favourite Shakespeare characters, and so from the very premise I figured that there was very little that could go wrong. The book takes the form of the memoirs of Sir John Falstolf (no, I don’t know about the ever-changing name spelling nonsense) told over the course of a hundred days, and becomes a journey through history told from the perspective of the fat drunk knight and interjected with lengthy insults to his cook or scribes and even lengthier songs of praise for his own cock or his innumerable sexual exploits. Everything about this is fucking great. In the course of the book you’re given incredibly evocative descriptions of carnivals or tavern debauchery, followed by hilarious anecdotes on fantastically crude subjects, and holding it all together is a narrative voice that can effectively handle both the grandiose reminiscing and the tales of shagging and farting. I also want to praise this book’s fantastic blending of the characters of Shakespeare and other popular fictions of the time with the characteristic Falstaff flare, including one fucking genius link between the character of Bardolph and the stories of the pig-faced woman Tannakin Skinker. Shakespeare’s characters probably are not that difficult to adapt, or at least not inasmuch as adapting the character traits that I perceive as responsible for making Shakespeare’s characters great - you’ll inevitably get some people arguing that Falstaff is Shakespeare’s greatest character because of his complexity, but for me the fact that he is a corpulent tanked-up knight bloated at the seams with sack and fabricated tales of grandeur is enough to make him a quality guy. The archetype is captured splendidly by Nye, but the book doesn’t half remind us of how fucking amazing Shakespearean dialogue is by comparison to Nye’s attempts at Falstaffian humour, and thereby highlights the difference between Shakespeare’s Falstaff and the basic character shape. The book delves into numerous specific events of I Henry IV (and a couple from 2 Henry IV), often quoting lines from Shakespeare’s play verbatim, much to the deficit of the rest of the text that has to string it all together with writing that obviously is not up to snuff with Shakespeare’s amazing writing. The dedication to the plays from which Falstaff was spawned seems at times odd, when a good few chapters are dedicated to extrapolating on one minor event in Part 1, which, to my understanding, was but one of the jests that Hal pulled on Falstaff, and but one of the instances that he was called out for his obvious bullshitting. If Falstaff was repeatedly made a fool of by Hal, he wouldn’t have directly addressed only one of said instances as if it was a big deal, but of course, it was a scene in the play and so it had to be adapted in this book. Whether this was down to Nye not having faith in his own ability to make up more pranks that Hal pulled on Falstaff, or simply because he knew that he had to write in this sequence because he needed a direct link to the play, is a question that I can’t really answer. But let’s talk about Falstaff’s bullshitting, and the complexities that arise from it. Falstaff’s whole shtick is that he is a mighty bullshitter, spinning yarns of heroic exploits and trying to talk his way out of trouble, and thus it stands to reason that his memoirs would reflect this, right? As I first went into the book, I was fully taken in by what I was reading, for although it was dumb, the story was centralised within a world of farce and Rabelaisian carnival, a world in which French armies can be defeated by drunken Englishmen brandishing hogsheads for weapons, men can eat enough food for seven men and still demand dessert, Irishmen will stab you up the arse from below while you sit on the bog, and every woman is inexplicably attracted to a fat drunken knight. It also mythologised Falstaff’s character, that he was conceived atop the knob of the Cerne Abbas giant and that his father died from laughing at nothing in particular. Is this not enough to make the story worthwhile? Would second-guessing Falstaff’s words at every turn, cross-referencing them with what we know of the truth from the Shakespeare plays, not only render the reading experience a pointless trudge, but demystify this world of carnivalesque absurdity? Falstaff’s overblown postulating on whether or not he is lying, or indeed his reasons for lying, are enough to satisfy me without contemplating the book from a meta perspective. There is also the character Scrope, who acts as one of Falstaff’s scribes and uses his position to call out Falstaff’s fabrications for us in a dramatic way, but a) there are discrepancies in his so-called truths and b) he’s a colossal dickhead, so regardless of Scrope’s presence in the story, we’re given the option to still side entirely with Falstaff and his comical version of reality. This is my perspective, but it is worth considering that I am a vacuous fool incapable of complex thought, so adopt my opinions with caution. I do, perhaps, have a few criticisms about Falstaff’s gratuitous descriptions of sexual escapades, not because I’m a prude who can’t stand the mention of the secrets of our own sinful bodies, nor even because it is unjustified in the narrative (because of course Falstaff is going to brag and give too much detail, if not for the sake of posterity than to make his servant scribes uneasy), but because I don’t feel that it fits the comedic tone of the text. Shagging is a staple of fabliaux and folksongs, but the comedy comes from who’s doing the shagging, or where they’re doing the shagging, or the extraneous circumstances surrounding the shagging. This book just describes shagging, which is funny when considering, as mentioned above, the fact that Falstaff within the story is including such titillating or sensational tidbits to vex his scribes (a strand which reaches its high point when Falstaff makes his amanuensis transcribe his words WHILE he is in the act of shagging), but taken as it is, it doesn’t seem in line with the rest of the book and its comedy. When this story has to plod on without its Falstaff-centric source material (or indeed, even from 2 Henry IV, in which Falstaff doesn’t really do a whole lot), it can get rather tedious as it becomes a mere listing of historical events and Falstaff’s minor parts in them, but at that point the book is rather winding down anyway, so perhaps I can’t complain too much. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: HELL YEAH, IF YOU’RE INTO SHAKESPEARE

The Hike - Drew Magary I picked this book up because I’d heard it compared to The Third Policeman in terms of it being a journey narrative, and I had a hankering for a book in which the story is not driven by the actions of the character, but rather the situation that they were thrown into, mainly because I’m interested in seeing how different authors go about doing this and not making the resulting narrative crap. Immediately upon going into this book, the acerbic narrative voice reminded me of John Dies at the End, and as the book continued and began to unveil other similarities, most egregiously the technique of using the bizarre weird reality-warping and monster-centric nonsense as a means of juxtaposing or disguising the book’s true content, that of the heinous DMC (that is, the deep meaningful conversation), I thought that I was in trouble. The reason why this is a book ramble, and not just a flat-out review, is that at this point I feel like I’m just rambling about the broad genre of contemporary American horror-centric weird fiction, and so to go through the book point-by-point may be a tad redundant when we already know exactly what to expect from the genre; a review would in all probability just devolve into quibbling about minor semantics. The story follows a man who, getting lost on a hike, stumbles into a world of nightmares and oddities, half of which were presumably inspired by the author’s obscure fears and the rest being absurd non-sequiturs to amp up the kookiness. It is nothing if not memorable, with its foul-mouthed crabs and murderous men wearing the faces of Rottweilers and whatnot. The book eventually develops to be smarter and more twisty-turny than such a randomly-selected clusterfuck of ideas might suggest, but these moments become transitory stops scattered amidst the rambling improvisational D&D campaign that is the main narrative. The story does have a habit of periodically bringing us to a formative experience in our protagonist’s life in the form of dream visions, with some interesting blurring between reality and fiction that doesn’t detract from the sheer fucking ludicrousness of the amount of shit that our protagonist has gone through, or at least the sensational self-reflective tone of these events’ retellings. This put me in mind of John Dies at the End, as did an ineffable sense of self-importance that the protagonist of this book seems to impart. I can’t properly word it, but there’s something to our protagonist’s narration, in that we see the world through his eyes but the retelling seems embellished somewhat to make him seem better off, and the fact that I noticed this at all speaks to me of shoddy characterisation. That’s not to say that the character is an unflappable badass the whole way through the story; it just seems like the character beats are cookie-cutter and that his moments of weakness or breakdown only occur because they have to, in order to make us feel sympathy for him. Both this book and John Dies at the End utilise new nomenclature on the fly for the horrors they find, but in all cases it just seems so pre-meditated, and the insistence on using these terms makes it seem like we ought to be on board with them as well, regardless of how stupid they are. Some of these terms are also tinged with an element of our narrator’s feelings of repulsion or standoffishness, in a manner similar to a downtrodden kid trying to stand up to a bully by referring to him with an insulting nickname. It’s all just rather tonally dissonant, the fact that we have to align with and appreciate our protagonist juxtaposed with the reality of our protagonist not really being that likeable. John Dies at the End (or at least its sequel) attempts to obfuscate the angst of its protagonist by admitting at the end to having a retrospective ghost writer, attributing the changes to the story and relatively inconsistent character fuckery to an unreliable narrator and details being altered in post, but this book lacks this safety net. What this book does have at the end is a bit of life-affirming reality-changing nonsense, and more importantly a fucking sweet twist at the end which, whilst not having much to do with the rest of the story (being dependent on memories and characters who didn’t have much to do with the overall narrative), leaves the story on a bittersweet note. In all my time spent reading classic literature, I’ve really missed experiencing twists that a) I didn’t already know about or wouldn’t have predicted, and b) actually have some fucking oomph. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: PROBABLY

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court - Mark Twain The question of authorial intent loomed over me as I begun reading this book. The introduction places the story firmly within the framework of Twain’s own righteous vengeance at the age he lived in, whereas I was under the impression that the book was naught but a dumb burlesque of middle English romances with some fun anachronisms thrown in for comedic effect. I thought that Twain’s ‘dream of being a knight errant in armour’ was funny as shit, but according to this introduction writer geezer Justin Kaplan (who apparently knows a better way of enjoying the book than myself), Twain’s dream ought to be interpreted as ‘a nightmare of being swaddled in iron, confined and helpless, just as Mark Twain was often to feel confined and helpless in his way of life’. As such, I sought advice from my friend, who told me to just go in with my unsophisticated cap on and I’ll be fine, and also took solace in Twain’s squib 1601, his exercise emulating my main man Rabelais in which famous Elizabethans hit the shit about shit and shagging, to adopt the mentality that Twain is just fucking about and that I don’t need to think too much about what I’m reading. Now I’ve sat through enough seminars of medieval literature to have heard every imaginable inane comment from every single vacuous shitwit grabbing at the lowest hanging fruit possible when it comes to pointing out the silliness of Arthurian romances; I’m a dab fucking hand, albeit unwillingly, at recognising all of this shit, and at suppressing my groans when slack-jawed fuckheads go over the same empty points about how middle English romances are ever so daft. “I mean, what’s up with all these knights running around attacking each other for no reason?!? That doesn’t make much sense!!” they all opine to each other, confident that they’re bringing something original and nuanced to the conversation, to jolly plaudits and insufferable guffaws. (No I’m not bitter about this, I have no idea what you’re talking about). Twain of course touches on all the usual points that you’d expect in a romance parody, but I needn’t have braced myself for an onslaught of unoriginality, as he does so with fantastic wit and evokes an actual comedic image rather than just commenting on the world’s lack of logic. He paints a delightful picture of naive and foolish knights howling with laughter at slapstick and ooo-ing and ah-ing at one another’s exaggerated tales, which is not only a great representation of Arthurian knights to explain their questionable behaviours, but justifies how they are so easily swayed and led by our protagonist Hank Morgan, the eponymous Yankee. I’m also a great fan as to how far they take the delusions of the Arthurian chaps to, believing with complete conviction that a swine pen is an ogre’s castle and that the pigs within are kidnapped noblewomen; there’s a lot of fun to be had with this, and as absurd as it seems, I’m glad that the explanation isn’t any more complex than it just being a result of everyone’s unyielding belief in everything. Our protagonist sets out to whip this century into something resembling nineteenth-century society, and putting aside the suspension of disbelief we must have in Hank’s apparent knowledge of every-fucking-thing imaginable required to accomplish this transformation (from building phone lines and electric fences to a ludicrously precise knowledge of the timing of eclipses), the story is a great romp of technology trumping magic and the grim realities of an unfair world, with some fantastic memorable scenes here and there. The plot somewhat meanders, the stories of Arthurian legend being rather directionless beyond the overarching call for adventure, and so we get a bit of that and we get a bit of blending in with peasant life, but overall the book is made up of a series of encounters and problems to overcome, which is fine to read for the most part (for some adventures are more fun than others). Though I want to pooh-pooh the idea that the story is a castigation or attack on the political structures and struggles of the time, and indeed can continue to pooh-pooh it so long as such content is if not subliminal than overshadowed by the story’s fun content, this unfortunately bubbles to the surface in an overt form when the book draws to a close, with a swift arrival of reality and sudden need for a bloody war. The mask of fun burlesque is stripped away to give us a galling look at a stubborn England, the denizens of which would rather die than change their faulty unfair ways. It’s not enough to tarnish the rest of the book, but it did leave a sour taste in my mouth, not because it’s an objectively bad thing but because scathing attacks of that calibre and of that level of overtness seemed to come rather out of left field. The transformation of the book from one thing to the next is dependent on a swift plot progression that occurs in a short period of time and is conveyed by a massive exposition dump which rushes through the last chapter of the Morte D’Arthur and plunges us into a fight between the Church and our protagonist, a fight that the story, apparently now being a treatise on the inability for people to change and our helplessness in altering the state of things, must regrettably end with our hero losing. But now I’m prattling on about an approach to the text that I was adamant I was not going to take. Don’t let it tarnish the rest of the book; that’s all still good shit. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: YEAH PROBABLY

Tales of the German Imagination (trans. by Peter Wortsman): - ‘The Singing Bone’, ‘Hansel and Gretel’, and ‘The Children of Hameln’ (the Brothers Grimm) - I struggle to place the Grimms fairy tales in terms of an analytical approach, and so it’ll suffice to say that these stories are exactly what you’d expect from the Grimms, in that they’re short and dark and make for easy reading - ‘Rune Mountain’ (Ludwig Tieck) - a proper romanticism story with a fantastic dream-like storytelling tone and incredibly evocative imagery throughout - ’St Cecelia or the Power of Music’ (Heinrich von Kleist) - a well-written actualisation of a cool suspenseful horror story concept with a few nice spooky bits, albeit with a rather slow middle and generally anticlimactic end - ‘Peter Schlemiel’ (Adelbert von Chamisso) - an amazing idea for a story that, while bogged down with unexplained magical objects straight out of Hoffmann’s fairy tales popping up every now and then to take the story in weird directions, and based on a social ostracisation that really does not seem like as big a deal as the story makes it out to be, is still very enjoyable - ’The Marble Statue’ (Josef von Eichendorff) - another story that brings to mind Hoffmann’s fairy tales (which I should perhaps instead just consider the archetype for German romanticism?), this time in terms of its romantic setting and soppy protagonist, and indeed its dumb allegorical dream-quest nonsense ending - ‘My Gmunden’ (Peter Altenberg) - so short that I didn’t really know what I was meant to be laughing at - ‘The Magic Egg’ and ‘A New Kind of Plaything’ (Mynona) - absolutely amazing little snippets of madness and laughter at oddity, the first story being an absurdist exercise in stupidity with a cast-aside veneer of meaning to the story, and the second being a jolly examination of a ludicrous idea - ’The Seamstress’ (Rainer Maria Rilke) - a compelling and vaguely unsettling story with fantastic character descriptions of the titular seamstress and an ending that casts our narrator adrift - ‘The Island of Eternal Life’ (Georg Kaiser) - a short and enjoyable story of rapid cartoon-like escalation, albeit with an ending more befitting a cynical satire on humanity - ‘In the Penal Colony’ (Franz Kafka) - a story I’ve read before and my favourite of Kafka’s writings; it’s dark and compelling (if a bit long-winded at point when describing the intricacies of the machine), and has a fantastic culmination (specifically the fate of the Officer) with elements of regret and serious fucking brutality - ‘The Blackbird’ (Robert Musil) - possesses a narrative voice that, while philosophical and high-minded, was not enough to embellish the story’s rather boring content (or at least seemed a tad misused when utilised to describe warfare) - ‘The Lunatic’ (Georg Heym) - over-the-top and gruesome and overall fucking hilarious; godspeed to ridiculously hyperbolic depictions of madmen in literature - ‘A Conversation Concerning Legs’ (Alfred Lichtenstein) - a conversation on one absurd subject, with dialogue that possesses all the necessary elements to make the humour work; it’s matter-of-fact and occasionally stupidly verbose to juxtapose the oddity of the subject matter, there’s rapid escalation from one train of thought to the next, and the conversation ends as abruptly and pointlessly as it had begun - ‘The Onion’ (Kurt Schwitters) - one of the first surrealist stories that I’ve read that has properly made me consider the ineffable and indescribable genius of the minds that concocted it, as well as having a pretty fucking sweet premise even before the text starts getting properly surreal and fragmented - ‘A Raw Recruit’ (Klabund) - a very funny story with a satirical premise I’m well used to - ‘The Time Saver’ (Ignaz Wrobel) - a story with an interesting abstract premise that is continuously built on in a manner that put me in mind of Krzhizhanovsky, but with an ending that didn’t seem very connected to the plot that preceded it (though perhaps that was somewhat the point) - ‘The Tattooed Portrait’ (Egon Erwin Kisch) - perhaps the funniest story in the collection, possessing the satire of people in power and absurd turns of fate to knock esteemed people down a peg as to be found in Gogol or my favourite Leskov short stories - ‘The Experiment or the Victory of the Children’ (Unica Zurn) - a story that takes the same general steps as Mynona’s ‘A New Kind of Plaything’, but seems less tongue-in-cheek and satirical and more like it’s trying to make some sort of grand statement - ’The Secrets of the Princess of Kagran’ (Ingeborg Bachmann) - purportedly a modern day fairy tale (albeit set in a mythologised past full of names for places and people I’m unfamiliar with), with the influence of modernism presumably being evident by the nonsense anticlimactic ending WOULD I RECOMMEND?: HELL YEAH

[techdex]

As 'Springsteen On Broadway' Closes, Its Excellent Film Welcomes A New Audience

As 'Springsteen On Broadway' Closes, Its Excellent Film Welcomes A New Audience

https://echoingwalls.com/blog/as-springsteen-on-broadway-closes-its-excellent-film-welcomes-a-new-audience/

As 'Springsteen On Broadway' Closes, Its Excellent Film Welcomes A New Audience

Bruce Springsteen Springsteen on Broadway, which will have its final date on Dec. 15, 2018. The show has been documented in a new film, to be released just after that final performance. Danny Clinch/Shore Fire Media hide caption

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Danny Clinch/Shore Fire Media

Bruce Springsteen Springsteen on Broadway, which will have its final date on Dec. 15, 2018. The show has been documented in a new film, to be released just after that final performance.

Danny Clinch/Shore Fire Media

On Saturday night, Bruce Springsteen will perform, for the 236th and final night, Springsteen on Broadway, his intensely personal one-man show at the intimate, 975-seat Walter Kerr Theatre. Just a couple of hours after that, Netflix will make public a document of the show, filmed during a July performance.

Director Thom Zimny, who has worked with Springsteen on a number of film and video projects since 2002, reproduces the no-frills aesthetic of the Broadway production, including no backstage scenes, no interviews, no shots of the audience. Live, Springsteen often speaks or sings off-mic to reinforce the mood — Zimny does nothing to alter that sound effect in his film. It’s unlikely that a filmed reproduction of such an intimate experience could capture its intensity, but Zimny has hit the mark through his austere approach, which elegantly preserves the live show’s quiet focus. (Albeit with one tonal casualty: Springsteen’s show was often hilarious, showing off the comedic timing he’s honed over the years. Here, it’s the painful stories that hit the hardest.)

At the two performances I attended over the course of Springsteen’s run on Broadway, one in December 2017 and the other this past September, the show changed little. At each, Springsteen set up the night by telling the audience that he’s tinged with the same “fraud” associated with Asbury Park, New Jersey, the boardwalk town where he formed his bands: “I’ve never seen the inside of a factory and yet it’s all I’ve ever written about. Standing before you is a man who has become wildly and absurdly successful writing about something of which he has had absolutely no personal experience. I made it all up. That’s how good I am.” It gets a big laugh, but it’s not quite true; Springsteen doesn’t write about the insides of factories. He writes about the insides of our messy psyches and hearts.

Springsteen has been very open, in both his 2016 memoir Born to Run (on which the Broadway show was based) and in recent interviews, about his own internal messes — his struggles with depression and the value he’s found in therapy and medication. The stories in his show come from many years of therapy, yes, but they have also been honed over years of onstage storytelling. Springsteen has woven long, often harrowing tales into his stage shows since the early 1970s. If you’ve followed him a long while, you know that these stories are the ones that won’t leave him alone.

One of the best introduces “My Father’s House,” a dark song about unresolved father-son conflict taken from his 1982 album Nebraska. Springsteen and his mother head out to retrieve his father, Douglas, from a bar. The scene he paints of that place — the smoke, the regulars — is full of wonder and fascination, remembered as a “citadel of great mystery” redolent of adulthood, and manhood. But his father, a physically imposing and grotesque figure, with a face “distorted into some booze mask,” is an impenetrable wall, unhappy and likely humiliated to have his son in his space. Zimny’s thoughtful, subtle editing between extreme closeups and wider shots get at the awkwardness of the story, the shame and heartbreak of seeing a child mediating between parents who can’t communicate, and the child’s confused awareness of his parents’ weaknesses.

Bruce Springsteen greets the crowd assembled outside of the Water Kerr Theatre in Manhattan on Oct. 12, 2017, for the opening night of Springsteen on Broadway. Bruce Glikas/Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic hide caption

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Bruce Glikas/Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic

Bruce Springsteen greets the crowd assembled outside of the Water Kerr Theatre in Manhattan on Oct. 12, 2017, for the opening night of Springsteen on Broadway.

Bruce Glikas/Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic

But a Bruce Springsteen event can’t end without some kind of hopeful affirmation. In a story paired with the song “Long Time Comin’, ” from 2005’s Devils and Dust, Springsteen describes his father making an unexpected visit to his house, just before Bruce’s first child was born. Douglas finds a way to offer an apology for how he treated his son, and the singer takes it as a warning and as advice for his own impending fatherhood. “We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children’s lives. We either lay our mistakes, our burdens upon them, and we haunt them, or we assist them in laying those old burdens down and we free them from the chain of our own flawed behavior. And as ancestors, we walk alongside of them, and we assist them in finding their own way and some transcendence.” After many years as a ghost, Springsteen sees that moment as the one when his father “petitioned for a role” as an ancestor. Zimny keeps the camera close and tight as Springsteen chokes up, slows down and wipes away tears. “It was the greatest moment in my life with my Dad, and it was all that I needed.”

In one of the show’s final speeches, as he looks back on his career, Springsteen says: “I took my fun very seriously.” The sentiment encapsulates the central plea of the production, and its film document — there’s no escape from Springsteen’s assertion that his life story is worth two-and-a-half hours of your time, much of it spent focused tightly on his face. For the whole thing to work — what he calls “my magic trick” in the opening monologue — you have to believe that he means it. You need to want the trick, and to believe the authenticity.

Coming after several years of retrospective projects — the memoir, two album-based documentaries and several box sets — Springsteen on Broadway feels like a chapter is ending. The final speech in the film, a look back on his career, resembles a retirement speech. The film gives you a sense, more than the live experience, of how hard it must be to tell these stories night after night. To tell them 236 times. With his 70th birthday on the horizon, Springsteen may have cleared the decks of his own ghosts. What’s next?

Springsteen on Broadway premieres on Netflix on Sunday, December 16th at 12:01 am PST. An album of the show will be released Friday, December 14th.