Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite (now Billy Martin) fits the bill.
That is a gloriously depraved fucking book, largely forgotten (no one mentions it in the Reddit thread). It’s worth reading but it’s dark, it’s beyond weird and it is perverse like only early 1990s literature was allowed to be. No sensitivity readers then.
What’s even sadder than the “any age gap is rape” and “full-grown women have no agency” pseudofeminists is the men performatively declaring that to them, Sophie Thatcher or Jenna Ortega looks like a mere child. Why, they might not even be women these monk-like men are so very unattracted to them.
Bro, trust me, it’s ok to find some of the most attractive women in the world attractive. Jesus fucking Christ, fucking losers.
My advice is to not get involved in women’s intrasexual competition. It’s not actually aimed at you and only makes you look like a damn idiot.
I read Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods recently.
This won’t be a complete review, but will try to offer enough of an appraisal to know if you, dear reader, would like to devote your time to this fairly long book.
My main thought is that I wish it had been better. The work starts off so well and had so much potential, which is why I kept reading it. The characters are interesting, the beginning is a banger, and the mystery is compelling. But it begins to suffer as it spends more and more time with viewpoint characters who offer little to the story. Too much of the action happens off the page — it’s like Moore has no idea what to do with anything more than people talking, so God of the Woods has no substantive propulsive action scenes at all even when they are core components of her own story. Nearly everything important occurs outside of the reader’s observation. While this can work — see No Country For Old Men for an example — you have to be Cormac McCarthy or the Coen Brothers to pull something like that off.
And Moore is neither of those things.
As the book becomes increasingly meandering and the characters do little to advance the story, I began to hope the ending would be the banger that the first 30-40 pages were. No such luck. The denouement is unbelievable, unsatisfying and borderline insulting to the reader.
There was a good novel in there somewhere. A decent editor probably could’ve located it for Moore, who clearly has some writing talent. But like many of the characters in the story, that editor was nowhere to be found.
I don’t have a Goodreads account, but if I did I’d rate The God of the Woods 2 out of 5 stars. However, I’d rate the first 100 pages a 4.5/5 and the last 100 a 1/5. By the by, Yun’s review is better than mine and more thorough — and is essentially what I think, but she is more charitable to the book than I am.
Does anyone read more than 1 book at a time?
Usually 7-10 at a time, though I have had as many as 34 going at once. That’s a bit much, even for my big-ass brain.
Why ‘My Brilliant Friend’ Resonates Beyond Italy.
The TV show is good, but the books are great (in either English or Italian).
I think it’s one of the few works I’ve ever experienced that gets female intrasexual competition exactly right and does not flinch away from how it actually works in the real world.
The execrable book Gödel, Escher, Bach has done more to make stupid people feel smart than any other literary or philosophical scourge ever unleashed.
That turd makes me irrationally angry any time I see it or think about it.
Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed that book. But it didn’t seem all that weird to me. I guess that’s because my brain works like that 24/7. When you’re constantly thinking about how you know what you know, what it’d be like to experience another consciousness, what a self-censoring idea would look and feel like, and the limits of knowability, computability and intelligibility, a book about similar things just seems like another day.
Recommended, though.
Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series would’ve been vastly better if it’d resembled in novel form Lingua Ignota’s “Faithful Servant Friend of Christ.”
Now that I coulda worked with.
Now that I can competently read books in the original French, some of the translations into English are…uhhh, rather creative. Like, that’s really not what the book said.
But I guess that’s true of all translations, though I can only read well enough in French and Spanish to really get the feel and make any determination. Working on German and Italian still. Subtitles are that way, too. I guess it’s the peril of translation.
The was some sf book I read where a Sydney Sweeney-like starlet gets chosen for some publicity space mission, but a disaster happens so she does scary space stuff and people are surprised she’s brave and not a complete prat? What fucking book was that?
Goddamn I’ve read too many books. I think the book would be 10-15 years old now.
There’s been a spate of “empowering” novels recently about older women having affairs and dalliances with younger men. And I have no problem with this. I put “empowering” in quotes because why is it empowerment when a woman does it, but not when a man does?
It should be equally empowering if you assume that adult women are not children. Mainly I am just tired of prudery and the relationship police. Equality means exactly that. Let’s have women above the age of majority be treated as adults at all times, not exclusively only when it benefits them. That’ll make for a better world for all.
My next “smart” book: Space Vehicle Maneuvering, Propulsion, Dynamics and Control: A Textbook for Engineers by Ranjan Vepa.
That’s gonna be a hard one.
Given the abject failure of Gideon the Ninth and presumably the entirety of The Locked Tomb series, I really wish there were a good series with lesbian space necromancers.
Because that could be so much fun. Alas, and such.
By the by, if you want to read a good book about lighting, Motion Picture & Video Lighting for Cinematographers, Gaffers & Lighting Technicians by Blain Brown is very approachable and has great examples.
And her body was like the chrysolite.
Gideon the Ninth is such an incredibly terrible book. It’s one of the books I could only get 30 or so pages in before not continuing.
Obviously I cannot judge the entire work and never will be able to do so, but it was like if you took YA and dumbed it so very far down it was intended only for six-year-olds. And then for some reasons had necromancers talking like TikTok tweens.
It’s utter trash. Just a profoundly fetid piece of shit.