The year is already half over? And California's re-opening while vaccination rates are slowing and the Delta variant is spreading and...
breathes
...and I've been fully vaccinated for two months now, but I'm still keeping a low profile, wearing a mask in public, and avoiding crowds as much as possible.
Oh, and reading! Mix of essays and horror and, well, horror hesitates tools? Is that a thing? Because I read one.
As always, the books are in reverse reading order, with the most recent one I plowed through first.
Christine, by Stephen King
Definitely the worst of the King re-reads so far (and also the first one to not be set in Maine, make of that what you will).
I almost put this one down, after the rough opening and dialog that seemed broadcast from a 1940s B-movie. I'm glad I kept going, because the story eventually kicks into King-Dread-Gear and becomes compelling. The dialog never really gets better, and the car scare is just plain weird, but the possession bit was goose-bumps-down-my-neck spooky.
Hood Feminism, by Mikki Kendall
A series of excellently-written, pointed essays that I quickly realized were not aimed at me. Not that everything needs to be, of course!
Still illuminating. Kendall has no trouble stabbing through all the BS we tell ourselves about these issues and calling them out for what they are. Points to a type of feminism concerned less with Leaning In and more with putting food on the table. A critical work on fundamental problems with the way American does and doesn't work for its people.
Body Trauma, by David W Page
This one was slow going for me. I get squeamish around needles, to the point where I get lightheaded whenever I have blood drawn (I've only passed out once, so there). But it was recommended by Tim Waggoner's Writing in the Dark, and in the book I'm writing (and in short stories I'm working on), I need to be able to portray injuries and recovery accurately. So I pushed through.
And I'm glad I did! I'm sure I'll need a few re-reads for everything to sink in, but I've got a much better sense of how serious certain wounds would be, and how they can be used to raise or lower tension in a story.
wow, no thank you, by Samantha Irby
Went into this one with no idea of what I was getting into, other than the essays were supposed to be funny. And they were, in parts -- literally laugh out loud funny, in fact -- but above all they're a master class in writing a revealing, engaging, personal essay. What other writer do you know can make you reflect on your own poverty-filled past while relaying a (funny) story about how they thought their cheap-and-shitty apartment was haunted? Or make you admire them while they constantly put themselves down and refer to themselves as a "trash person"? That's a magic trick played with words, and Irby pulls it off again and again and again.
