jstpst (@jstpst.net.web.brid.gy)

thoughts on a few books I read this year I try and compile my thoughts when I read books and figured I may as well just post some of my notes I might try and do this for some of my other reads this year. I had meant to do this last year, but took so long writing up the things I never got around to it. So I'm trying to keep things shorter and feel comfortable not covering Every Thought I am trying to focus on some of the less well-known books. I read slaughterhouse v this year but you don't need me to tell you it's good lol. I might ramble about Germinal sometime though. any zolaheads out there. Possible spoilers for these titles? I don't really go into much detail but I am poor at understanding where the line is drawn * * * ## **A Month in the Country** **J.L. Carr** Read this on a whim, because I was going through some stress and needed to read something less bleak. I did not expect it to hit me as much as it did. Maybe it was just due to extenuating circumstances, but it made me cry. It’s about a WW1 veteran who is hired to restore a mural in an old church. There’s almost no real conflict or plot. I am generally quite suspicious of idyllic, pastoralist fantasies, and the book heavily emphasizes pretty rural vistas and a quaint, welcoming town. But Carr repeatedly disrupts this fantasy. We see time and time again how this happiness cannot hold. There is a deep melancholy to it all, yet it was exactly that melancholy that made me believe in the more upbeat elements. Sometimes in life you have these moments where you're just so happy and content, though you know they just can't last. This felt like such a beautiful exploration of that feeling. I remember years ago, when I my now-partner and I were getting closer (and after I experienced some Bad Events), we'd hike these long beautiful isolated trails. there was this one path which took us to this empty pasture on a hill overlooking the valley we lived in. there was dogwood and spicebush and wildflowers abound and all these flitting birds. the wind was so strong I was constantly choking on my own hair and we were laughing about it. It was chilly but the sun was warm and it all balanced out so nicely. and the days we did this kind of blend together, but I remember so distinctly the feeling of "this can't last." and of course it didn't. we live far away now and there's not so much nature here. yeah anyway. A Month in the Country made me feel those feelings anew It’s a short read. I’d recommend giving it a look if you are in the mood for something uplifting. * * * ## Metal From Heaven **August Clarke** I have a very hard time with a lot of contemporary fantasy books. I do not generally love the current milieu in spec fiction. Metal From Heaven won me over by virtue of being incoherent and insane. It’s about Marney Honeycutt, born to Fantasy Material factory workers. She is afflicted with a strange, psychiatric/magical disease* tied to her work in this factory as a child. She has a frothing-at-the-mouth need to kill the man who owned this factory, due to the various atrocities the workers were subjected to. Somehow this involves a lot of lesbian sex. It’s a very close first-person PoV, with the prose stylings heavily — and effectively — emphasizing her fractured mental state and the hallucinatory episodes she experiences around Ominous Fantasy Material. The descriptions during such moments are beautiful feverdreams. I really appreciated the author really emphasizing the actual words in a book. Maybe that sounds ridiculous but a lot of stuff I have tried to read felt like it desperately wanted to be television or something and the words were an obstacle. Clarke plays with words, thank god. I do have many problems with the book. There are insane worldbuilding infodumps that are totally unnecessary to the story. The gang/polycule of queer fantasy communists is far too stable for being a gang of queer fantasy communists. these people need to be trying to kill each other for the dumbest possible reasons. the third act felt really strange and unfitting of the rest of the story to me — we get into some noble politicking and romance??, and the transition felt hard to believe for me. But overall I couldn’t help but kind of love it. Marney is such a good character and fun to follow. In particular I like that her lesbian identity is actually like. Important to her, and grounded in material reality, and was obviously written by someone whose experience of queerness is not entirely based on the internet. I also loved that the protag was both (within the fiction of the setting, terms differ, I am shorthanding) butch and stone. rare to see in fantasy, and I feel there’s an aversion to masculinity in a lot of queer circles so it was nice to see. Also this book is so full of sex scenes I was not kidding. the really good ones combine it with that feverdreamy narration I mentioned. They’re also made more interesting by Marney being stone — idk I was just charmed to see something very common irl that I rarely ever see in fiction, and for it not to be a particularly big deal or whatever. I am not usually big on the importance of Representation or whatnot (it’s nice! just like. none is better than bad sometimes lol. and it won't solve material problems), but I do think there’s something nice about seeing fiction written about queer people that doesn’t feel insanely out of touch and/or chronically online. there’s def a twinge of the latter, but I appreciated how genuine the portrayals felt. Like I think you would struggle to write something like this if you did not actually interact with other queer people IRL. Overall I am just so happy to have a fantasy novel that is flawed in ways I’d consider unique to itself. I have a real soft spot for this one. * * * ## Dehiscent **Ashley Deng** The story centers on a family living on an island in the post-apocalyptic South China Sea. Their village is barely scraping by. Horrific weather patterns bring sweltering heat and sudden freezes. Scarce food-stocks are imported by an unnamed and apparently equally desperate Facility. The people live under constant famine. Except the Zhu family. They live far out of town in an old house on the edge of a seaside cliff. The Zhu family does not hunger. The house is overgrown inside. Fishes bubble up from the bathtub. Too-moist wood does not mold; it sprouts shiitake and king oysters. Grandmother cultivates strawberries and other sweets that sprout from the walls. Nobody else is allowed to know. The story centers around Yi, the 12 year old daughter of the family (though she read as even younger than this, to me). This is where my problems begin. Much of the story is about her desire to fit in with the village children and so on. Her perspective is at times interesting, and at best allows for a few harrowing moments, but largely I found her quite dull and out of place with the rest of the setting. Maybe that was partly intentional? But for me it really weakened my interest. Overall, I think I’d best describe my issues as the story being afraid of its own premise. It goes to a very disquieting place, and one I’m intrigued by. It feels like it comes just short of being some really sharp horror playing on the “cozy fiction” trend. But once it shows its hand, it doesn’t really do anything with it? I think an ambiguous ending could work, but I was wanting one that embraced the disquiet a little more. It feels like everything uncomfortable gets swept under the rug because of the power of Personal Responsibility, which does not at all feel in keeping with the undertones of climate horror. It’s a cool novella, though. I enjoyed reading it. The prose was at times very effective (at others out of place and droning), the premise was great, and the setting was well-rendered. I am glad I read it. Dehiscent didn’t realize all of its ideas how I’d have liked, but it had some conceptual meat on its bones. I think that is worth something. Perhaps the fear of really engaging with the complicity of the wealthy (I include myself and virtually all other first-worlders in this) in the horrors to come, sends quite a message in and of itself. * * * thankyou for reading. and merry justpost https://jstpst.net/f/just_post/14300