#movedto book club

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rating some covers i found on archive.org (links under readmore)

The Yellow Wall Paper (Small, Maynard and Company, 1901; cover art by E. B. Bird)

rating: 5/5 the stark typography of the title presses almost uncomfortably to the top edge of the cover, immediately catching the viewer's attention and planting the seeds of unease. the pattern is subtle, yet intricate and the artist has clearly lifted details directly from the book's description of the titular wallpaper. the deliberate central symmetry of the composition, which is only broken up by the title, creates an impression of uncomfortable proximity and restrictedness: one would have to stand quite close indeed, to have such a perfectly symmetrical view. how long have you been standing there, following the patterns on the wall?

2. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Feminist Press, 1973; cover art by Gilda Hannah)

rating: 2/5 they picked a nice, sickening shade of yellow (personal opinion if mine) and it sure is torn. unfortunately the pattern is rather meh.

3. The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories (Dover, 1997; cover art by Manuela Paul)

rating: 5/5 in a stroke of genius, the designer added a distortion effect to the lower part of the cover, making the already dizzying pattern look even more disorienting. a great and subtle cover, so i wont deduct points for the yellow being almost too warm.

4. The Yellow Wallpaper and Selected Writings (Virago, 2009; cover art by Noumeda Carbone).

rating: 4.5/5. the floral patterns are organic and intricate, but there's nothing especially unsettling about them. there's even a woman (even though she's not creeping). the overall impression is nice and it suits the book -- i quite like it

5. The Yellow Wall-Paper (Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013; artist unknown)

rating: 2/5 a nice yellow shade, though not especially sickening. the artist made an acceptable effort with the pattern (they even included a woman), but it feels kinda sparse

6. The Yellow Wallpaper (Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015; artist unknown)

rating: 0/5 it's bad. like what in the aesthetically curated instagram infographic is this. if someone locked me in a room with this wallpaper i'd become a greige minimalist momfluencer within weeks.

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you should get into orv you will definitely not regret it [lie] *finger guns*

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also i wish more people took a crack at designing an unsettling wallpaper for their art and illustrations bc while slapping a regular old floral pattern on there has its own message (there was never anything wrong with the paper) it also feels a bit like a copout. you're illustrating the spooky wallpaper story and your art prominently features the spooky wallpaper. is it too much to expect to see a spooky wallpaper

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wait so someone in the tywp tag said that the narrator dies at the end, and like it's obvious too & i can see why but i don't think it's that obvious and beyond question

"I've got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her! But I forgot I could not reach far without anything to stand on! This bed will NOT move!"

-> like here it's kind of obvious what she's hinting at

-> it also took another reread to occur to me that the "nursery" might not be a nursery at all and the reason her husband insists on staying in that particular room is specifically because that room has bars on the window and the bed screwed to the floor which would in turn imply that he's taking her illness more seriously than he appears to and his insistence that's she's "fine" is just another instance of his infantilizing of her

"i am securely fastened now by my well hidden rope"

-> would this mean that she's dying/already dead at this point? i always thought since she is narrating she has to be alive but maybe that's just me taking the story at its word. this would mean that their last interaction is only in her imagination and in reality he cannot hear her at all & isn't reacting to her words but has instead fainted at the sight of her body.

i don't know, like i can kinda see it but it still doesn't feel so cut and dry to me. someone else also mentioned that it feels like a significant juxtaposition that the husband who insists on the narrator being "of a weak disposition" faints at the first sight of her wife "creeping around" on the floor whereas she had been seeing a woman creep for months at that point

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so earlier this month i read 2 king books for podcast reasons (i want to have read the books before i listen to the episode where they discuss it)

rose madder - does a good job of weaving the supernatural elements into a more grounded story. it looks like it has had more of a mixed reception but to me it didnt feel like a drag and i liked the way the characters were written

'salem's lot - VERY scary and depressing book. personally i didnt think there were too many characters or that the story was too slow paced -- i basically felt like i was being dragged from one chapter to the next. i feel very "i do not see it" about the Chapelwaite story tacked on to the end, it felt stylistically out of place and like it was uh.. "evoking" lovecraft a bit too hard (im especially thinking of rats in the walls). i'm also glad the scene where Ruth gets turned into a vampire was left out of the final published version

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so normal about this book

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continuing my first read through of disquiet im going to be sick

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like sometimes we just need to say someone is not smart and/or knowledgeable enough to write a certain book. your story is a sci-fi about the first (cis) girl born in 50 years and the society she's born into and yet there's no mention of gay and trans people?? your conclusion is that maybe (cis) girls disappeared because "Nature" "got mad" because people were meddling too much with IVF and other scientific stuff?

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i feel like i should have started a bingo card for stuff that also appeared in King's books

Kingisms in Mine (Mccammon): an incomplete list

- one of the main characters (the antagonist) is basically Misery who at some point also disguises herself as a nurse. she has a large build and is an extremely competent killer who is also extremely unstable mentally -> Misery

- there's a graphic description of a dog attacking a woman and a small child (there's actually three dogs) -> Cujo

- there's a showdown in a park adjacent to a hotel during a snowstorm (instead of hedge animals theres concrete dinosaurs) -> The Shining

- there's also the strained marriage trope and the 'hallucinations that veer into the supernatural' but that's sort of low hanging fruit and it's also not really exclusive to King so

honestly i don't think it's copying so much as paying homage but it was funny how they kept popping up when the style was also pretty similar. although it may just be the case of *person who's read a lot of King reading another american author and "getting a lot of King vibes from it"*

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first day of the third round of dracula daily! this time for sure

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closure on my fifteen-year-long beef with a short story and a lesson on why you shouldn't have too much faith in your "reasonable inferences" on subjects you don't know much about

KLIMAX A házmester vette észre a gázszagot. Betörte az ajtót. A búcsúlevél a konyha kőpadlóján hevert, rajta egy kis kerámia hamutartó, benne az utolsó cigaretta csutkája.  ,,Ma van az ötvennegyedik születésnapom -olvasta a házmester - A házban nem szeret senki. A K.I.K. nem hajlandó rendbe hozni a plafont, mely beázik. Meg akarok halni.  Özv. Berger Mihályné."  A cigarettacsutka rúzsos volt. (Örkény István: Egyperces novellák)

CLIMAX¹ The janitor was the first to notice the smell². He broke down the door. He spotted the farewell note³ on the stone floor of the kitchen. It was tucked under a small ceramic ashtray holding the butt of the victim's last cigarette. IT IS MY FIFTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY, it said. THE TENANTS⁴ DO NOT LIKE ME. THE LANDLORD REFUSES TO FIX MY LEAKY TAP. I WANT TO DIE. Signed: Mrs. Mihály Berger⁵. The cigarette butt bore traces of fresh lipstick. (tr. Szöllősy Judit, 1995 in One Minute Stories)

⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂ ⠂⠄⠄⠂☆⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂

well first some notes on the translation.

¹ - (as in menopause) ² - the smell of gas specifically - this will be important later (although strictly from an understanding-the-story perspective i guess it's omissible) ³ - it's a suicide note, i don't know why it was translated like this ⁴ - technically i think her flat is part of a condominium rather than being a rented apartment and consequently it's the management board ("kerületi ingatlankezelő") that refuses to fix her leaking ceiling (why they changed it to a tap i don't know) ⁵ - the original hungarian version specifies that she is a widow: "özv." is short for "özvegy" meaning widow/widower. it was customary for widowed women to put it in front of their name but i don't think it's that widespread anymore. it's strange that the translator didn't think of a way to include this information (ie. that the main character is widowed) in the english version bc i think it has all kinds of implications to the story (could be a motive but isn't included in the story - why; explains why it was a stranger who discovered her etc.)

⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂ ⠂⠄⠄⠂☆⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂⠁⠁⠂⠄⠄⠂

i've had two teachers make fun of me on two separate occasions because of this story.

so for context, all of the short stories in this collection are meant to have some kind of ironic twist. some of them you needed to know the political context of to properly understand, or know about specific politicians by name so i was fine with not "getting" those bc i was like 14 and we havent made it that far in history class. but this one i felt i should understand so when the teacher finished reading it out, i raised my hand and asked what the twist in this one was.

and he was like "well it's the last line. because who would think to put on lipstick as they're about to commit suicide?" maybe people who take things too literally aren't the target audience to this kind of story or maybe it's just not a very good twist - cast your votes in the comments on whether you liked it!!

as for the other case, smarter people might know that the natural gas we use in gas stoves and for heating in some cases is not the same gas that was originally used. coal gas was "a mixture of methane, hydrogen and carbon monoxide"(x), the last component being notably poisonous, whereas while natural gas can cause asphyxiation the real danger it poses lies elsewhere. well in any case, armed with the knowledge that "gas" is used in "suicides by poisoning", as implied by Örkény's short story, when the chemistry teacher asked why people need to be vigilant of gas leaks, i announced with perfect confidence that it's because it's poisonous and she had to be like "no you dunce, it's because it's highly flammable and might explode"

idk how to conclude this tbh i don't really like this short story and the more i thought about it the less i liked it. like it's trying to make fun of her because of the more "frivolous" aspects of her suicide, like including the leaky ceiling/tap in her note, the plaintive "Not a soul in this whole house loves me", the fact that she put on makeup and the title literally being "menopause" and it's like. is that really what this evokes in you

[movedtoeskew]

— Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (Penguin, 2006)

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maybe it's time to read tlt ☺️<- hasn't read homestuck or the bible

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taking a bit of a break from King (im currently on night shift), read two of the most random novels

the push (ashley audrain): starts out promising, an examination of how people can end up passing down unaddressed trauma to their children, develops into a sort of gone girl for wasp soccer moms but ends with an absolutely, unsalvageably evil and mean conclusion

the narrator/main character comes from a lineage of women who had motherhood basically forced on them and were left to their own devices to tackle the arduous task of raising a child they basically resent for existing, for which they end up basically punishing said child.

the main character's fiance/later husband, while showing some support and understanding, comes from a very different background (an extremely wholesome and functional family), doesn't actually realize how the childhood abuse she suffered continues to affect her (she doesn't want to talk about it and he is content to let the subject lie). he pressures her into having a baby but, although during the pregnancy she kind of psychs herself into being enthusiastic about it, after her daughter is born, it all comes crashing down. she feels like the baby (!) hates her and she resents her husband for fucking off to work and leaving her home alone with her. she thinks the baby is scheming against her and annoying and even hurting her on purpose (it's a baby it can't do that) for which her retaliation ranges from small acts of pettiness to basically leaving her to cry alone for hours while she works on her writing. their animosity only deepens through the years, culminating in her second child (a baby boy whom she adores) dying in a horrific road accident for which she believes her daughter is directly, intentionally, responsible.

this would be all well and good, a psychological horror story with an unreliable narrator, we've seen it, it could have been an interesting albeit not groundbreaking read.

IF the author didn't feel the need to tack on 1. a direct confession from the daughter that she did indeed push her baby brother's stroller into oncoming traffic and 2. a distressed call from her husband's second wife that all but explicitly says that the daughter has killed or at least severely injured her new baby brother. this basically severs the thread of trauma connecting the previous 3 generations (it wasn't the main character who inflicted her own trauma onto her daughter that resulted in her behavioral problems -- she was born evil), absolves the mother of the very real harm she had done (it didn't matter because the daughter was going to be evil anyway), and casts the daughter as a basically inhuman, irrationally evil entity which evokes an extremely unfortunate trope in horror involving children and also calls to mind the way some parents talk about their disabled child, while casting themselves as the biggest victim in the situation.

lexicon (max barry): an action/thriller novel about a secret society of people with an almost supernatural ability of ~persuasion~ which they learn and hone at their own special school and upon graduation they take on the name of a famous poet or writer. it starts in medias res with an action scene where things keep happening but you don't understand why, or who the people they are happening to are, or most importantly, why you should care (as you can tell i don't really care for this device and each time i encounter it, it annoys me a little more).

initially, you think the main character is Emily, the spunky former street performer who had run away from home and was eventually picked up by a talent scout, and who upon graduation was given the name of none other than Virginia Woolf. but no! turns out Emily has been being manipulated the entire time (to the point of becoming first a mass murderer and then a sexy sexy slave) and the actual main character was her only love ever ^^ the stoic no-nonsense gun-toting australian macho who's so stoic that he Never Talks About His Feelings and so no-nonsense that he's basically immune/almost immune to ~persuasion~.

one thing that was sort of funny/creative was that to effectively ~persuade~ people, the secret society has been working on categorizing the entire human population into the 200 (i think) personality types they have identified (basically magic market segmentation) which feels kinda prescient/topical (the book was originally published in 2013). i actually enjoyed the "accompanying texts" -- fake articles, forum discussions, chat conversations -- more than the actual story and wished there was more of that haha

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some more king stuff (trigger warning for school shootings)

rage: this one's like... not good. king said he originally wrote it as a teenager (it shows). i'm not sure "my hostages were actually chill with being taken hostage" and "what if my hostages were the real monsters actshually" are such amazing ideas, even if presented from the point of view of an unreliable narrator. i can understand why king pulled it from publication

doctor sleep: i have mixed feelings about this one. i understand and respect the intentions of showing the long term effects of the traumas Danny suffered as a child on the other it's hard not to be upset at his character getting torn down despite him getting back on his feet & redeemed in the end, i guess this comes down to personal preference (do you like your uncomplicatedly good characters you harbor a bit of nostalgia for getting gritty realismed*?).

i admit i had something of a hard time taking the main villain seriously bc the name "Rose the Hat" kept bringing to my mind a jolly cheerful steampunk lady which isnt very threatening

________________

* - i realize how much this sounds like "you're ruining my childhood" which i know is a stupid argument but i mean it more along the lines of "please he has suffered enough already"

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okay so i am a dolt and a numbskull. the "chapelwaite story" is actually a separate short story sk wrote titled jerusalem's lot that was included in the copy of 'salem's lot i read but wasn't part of it. "disjointed and out of place" well yeah. 'cause it wasn't <in> place in the first place