Staying at home is the norm... What are you reading?

[Johnny Novgorod]

Finished The Bell Jar. It's not quite the misery porn I thought I was going to get from woman-in-1950s-asylum. Sylvia gets thrown into the loony bin about 100 pages before the finish line, and before that there's this whole other half to the novel that's dark and depressing but also kinda funny and whimsical. But it's all leading to the loony bin, and of course we know how that worked out for her, so there's that particular cloud hanging over the whole thing. It's honestly kinda fascinating to follow the roadmap of the character's suicidal ideation knowing you're probably looking at Sylvia's actual train of thought. And there's a particularly nasty character named Buddy Willard who I've decided is basically just Ted Hughes. Buddy's Esther's on-and-off thing who used to date this other frenemy of Esther's who offs herself after Esther tries to do the same. In a moment of self-pity Buddy asks Esther if she thinks he's the one driving women into suicide... which is probably how it went between Ted and Sylvia. A few years later, his second wife killer herself (and her daughter). And then Sylvia's kid did the same. Stay far and away from Ted!

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Finished A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean.

The story is framed as a distant memory, recollecting the last few fishing trips the author, Norman, ever took with his brother, Paul. The setting is the Pacific Northwest of the 1930s. If you ever had cable you saw the movie: Paul was eventually found beaten to death in an alley one night, and the murder was never solved or explained. Maclean recounts their fishing trips marveling at his brother but also kinda trying, and failing, to make sense of him. The story is quiet and contemplative, built on top of a sense of longing and emptiness. The time, the setting, the stillness, the theming, the offhanded mentions of war and thinly-veiled turbulence all make for a very Hemingway-esque read (Big Two-Hearted River especially). It's a beautiful but sad read.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Finished The Boats of the "Glen Carrig", by William Hope Hodgson.

Not quite as good as The House on the Borderland. The first half is the best part of the book, as the nature of the crew's plight keeps unraveling and going from typical survivalist fare to the unholiness of sea monsters passive-aggressively trying to get a bite in. Some passages escalate wonderfully and have this familiar eeriness to them, like waiting for the catch on something too good to be true. But then the second half stagnates (literally, on a rock surrounded by foul seaweed) and the text goes on lengthy seafaring tosh about hawsers and jibbooms and relatively mundane or technical problem-solving. A whole chapter is devoted to the design and make of a giant ballista that ultimately doesn't work. Another full chapter to the construction of something that I had to look up because it proved impossible to visualize.

So the story has some wonderfully evocative set pieces and truly unnerving monsters and worse-than-death stuff, but in the second half the pacing and focus are something if a moodkiller.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Reading The Venus Hunters, by James Ballard. Science fiction anthology, very grimly funny. There's a story that's basically proto Death Note; another one that's like a more hellish version of Groundhog Day (the time loop takes shorter time to restart with every cycle, and when it does it's a minute later than the previous cycle, effectively trapping the person in a shortening span). I'm enjoying it a lot.

EDIT: Finished it!

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Reading Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck.

This is, or used to be, a typical highschool read. It wasn't the case in my school so I never got around it, although I know pretty much everything you need to know via cultural osmosis and doubt I'll be bringing any hot takes to this one.