#Also she do be breasting boobily in this top and I love it

[blackbirdffxiv]

[dreamsatdusk]

bookish asks: 📕 📑 📙 !

📕 What book has had the biggest impact on your life, and why?

Oh, that's tough. Many different things have had different impacts for different reasons. But for this, I'll go with a book that has left me with happy, cozy feelings for a long time. The Adventures of Mabel, by Harry Thurston Peck. I think my grandmother read chapters of it to every grandchild of hers over the years. It was originally published in 1897 and her copy of it was very old and maybe a first edition? I am the grandchild who wound up with it (I asked her for it and I guess no one else had?) It's a series of stories about the adventures of a little girl named Mabel who at the start of matters, saved a lizard's life and it turns out the lizard was the king of the animal kingdom. In return, he teaches her a way to communicate with other animals, which comes in handy when she encounters a big grey wolf not long after and he becomes her buddy. I loved the sound of my grandmother's voice reading those stories in the evenings when we visited her and the book thus has lots of memories of being cozy and feeling loved. Also, hey, as a teeny girl myself at the time, it was lots of fun hearing about another teeny girl befriending wolves and going on adventures, meeting giants, exploring the brownie kingdom (the fey, not the food!), and so on.

📑 Hardcover, paperback, ebook, or audiobook? Which format do you prefer?

I like hardcovers for the sturdiness and, if I really enjoy a book, I like having a nice hardcover copy if possible. That said, I have loads of paperbacks being as they are of course cheaper. I do have ebooks as well, though I only got into them when I started traveling a fair bit for work years back and I quickly got tired of toting 3 or 4 books along in my bag. (If I'm on planes and in hotels a lot, a lot of reading is going to happen even in a single week.) These days I use Libby to check a lot of ebooks out of the library, so that's handy.

I'm not too in to audiobooks; I get distracted easily when listening to them. I used to listen to non-fiction books more, but it was when I was driving more and now that I'm not nearly so much, I've probably only listened to one in the past few years. I admit I struggle with many of the fiction books I've heard, as some of the character voices just made me snicker too much to pay attention.

📙What’s your favorite genre to read, and do you have any recommendations within that genre?

I read sci fi and fantasy the most when it comes to fiction. For sci fi, I know of course that you have already read Machineries of Empire given you're the reason I even knew about it! ;) But it is has been my top rec in the genre for a while now.

For fantasy, hmm. I really enjoyed The Traitor Son Cycle by Miles Cameron. It's a bit of an endeavour as there are five big books to it and the author is a Medieval reenactor and sometimes goes off into extended descriptions of a lot of minor details of things, but I tend to love that sort of stuff. I also like to give a bit of a warning that some characters' initial appearances in the story may be rather...off-putting? But that they turn out to be far more complex than it may seem at first. The biggest example of this I can think of in the first book is Queen Desiderata, who's intro smacked of the "she breasted boobily down the stairs" cliche such that I had my doubts about things. But then she proved to be quite an complicated character and possibly has the most powerful will of anyone in the series.

Anyway, what begins in book 1 as the tale of a little mercenary band hired to defend an abbey from a monster problem snowballs into an epic tale of saving existence. And there's a lot of fun trope subversion along the way.

I also really enjoy Glen Cook's fantasy and sci fi books, but would also put a warning there too that a lot of it was written in the 80s or so and so it shows in many ways. Also, he just generally doesn't write about very nice people.

Thank you!

[kittenfemme27]

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

I don’t know about you, reader, but it’s been actual years since I was able to properly sit down and finish a book. My last one was Lovecraft Country in 2018, and many, many years before that. Reading used to be a big passion of mine, I loved to get lost in the worlds. I loved the movie that played out in my head as I read, as if it was projecting itself into my mind more-so than i was actually reading the words themselves. For a kid who didn’t always grow up with the internet or video games available, Books from my local library were a great escape.

So, having found myself getting more and more into horror around 2019 in all forms of media I consumed, I was more than happy to bookmark a tweet from a horror artist I follow on Twitter who had a list of all the horror books he’d read that year. This would be my chance to get back into reading, finally!

Cue.. 2 years later, and I’ve finally started on that list. The top of that list, “The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires“, was something I found immediately intriguing from the title and cover alone. I’m now regretting that decision so much that I’m not sure I’ll bother with the rest of the list.

(CW: R*pe, Gore, Racism)

“The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires” is an awful book. The only compliment I feel I could accurately give it is that it’s not written incompetently enough, from a purely technical standpoint, as to be unreadable.

The story stars Patricia Campbell, a housewife in the 1980′s-1990′s that is more apology than character, and her rag-tag group of similarly middle-aged, middle-income southern white wine sipping housewives who do, and I cannot stress this enough, almost nothing but test each other’s and the readers patience for nigh on 310 out of 357 pages. They bicker, they fight, they treat Patricia as crazy when she repeatedly shows them evidence that children around them are dying, and most of all they refuse to do absolutely anything, leaning more into pure disbelief until the problem has literally violated one of them. The book club women don’t lead interesting lives, either. They’ve got husbands who are not in love with them, children who hate them, and friendships with each other that can be broken by what feels tantamount to bringing the wrong wine to a meeting. Throughout the story, Patricia is accosted by the resident Vampire-like creature, more akin to a human mosquito than any sort of real “Vampire”, that moves in after his aunt dies. A man named James Harris. He smoothly worms his way into everyone’s lives in the charismatic way a vampire does and convinces everyone that Patricia is more or less insane for ever suspecting him of being a vampire after she watches him feed on a child. This leads to her attempting suicide after being pushed into a corner by her doctor husband who seems to have been ripped straight from the 1950′s and thinks women should be Seen and not Heard. She gives up and more or less goes comatose as a character for roughly 3 years until finally she snaps to her senses after seeing a ghost of her dead mother in law who knew the Vampire when she was a small child, who leads her to one of the bodies he’s got stored in his attic, and convinces everyone else in her book club, who has routine abandoned her at this point, to help her kill James. They do, chopping his body to bits while it taunts them and then throwing the bits into a fire. Patricia divorces her husband at the end and somehow that makes her children lover her, happy-ever-after ending.

That’s the rough synopsis, but it doesn’t really do the grossness of this book any justice. That first child James kills, is a black 9 year old named Destiny who later kills herself as it’s revealed that the Vampire-like creature’s bites feel so good and so sexually pleasurable, that if you are deprived of them after becoming addicted you’re likely to just commit suicide. This is AFTER she’s taken away from her mother by child services because they assume the bite marks are syringe injection marks and that her mother must be a druggie. She’s not the first black child to die this way either. In-fact, by the time Patricia becomes wise to James’ ways, she’s the third. They’re all from a poor black neighborhood that is literally described as shady, dangerous, and being full of “Super Predators” called Six-Mile, which is the de-facto feeding ground of the Vampire for a good 75% of the book, as well as the home of the literally only surviving named black character, Ursula Greene, who herself is nothing more than a “wise old negro” trope along with being a maid to these rich white people who think of her as trash. This is probably the biggest overarching problem in the book. It tries, in the authors words, to explore the relationships between the white, rich women who brag about how their cul-de-sac is so safe and pure that nobody even locks their door, and the poor black characters from Six-Mile. The book thinks its clever, because Mrs. Green constantly points out that the white characters let the black children die callously so that their white children would live, to which they can only reply about how guilty that makes them feel and how they’re sorry. I’m not sure what the author hoped to accomplish by pointing out the institutional racism of the 90′s, but whatever he hoped to accomplish, it fail flat on its face in the most racist way it could.

I wish that was where gross things ended for this book, but its not. At one point, the Vampire-like creature rapes one of the book club members and she is more or less outright stated to be pregnant with a monster from that rape and it is also revealed that the rape gave her an “Auto-Immune Disease” that the characters husband immediately likens to AIDS and that is very quickly killing her. This information causes her to choose to have her body cremated so nothing can spring forth from her corpse when she dies. The implications this has are frankly appalling. The books decision on whether or not a woman who gets pregnant from rape is worthy of life is to resolutely and proudly say no and treat that as if its a feminist answer. That if you’re raped, it’s akin to something like AIDS and life simply isn’t worth living. it’s one of the grossest things I’ve read in a long time.

It’s not even the only shock value the book uses to make it’s events feel real and scary, others include Patricia’s son “Blue” being obsessed with Nazi’s, for genuinely seemingly no reason. He just brings them up to make you, and everyone in the story, uncomfortable. There are constant overwrought descriptions of gore or simply gross scenarios, such as an indepth description of Patricia’s ear-lobe being ripped off, or rats gnawing the flesh off on a old woman, or a cockroach crawling inside someones ear. There is also the repeated child murder or child suicide, which doesn’t really serve a purpose other than to shock the middle-aged mothers this book was meant for, with multiple sentences in which Patricia thinks about how much it would hurt if that were her children, inviting the reader to do the same with their own.

And we couldn’t forget that this book is just unrepentant in its horniness. It’s outright stated that being fed on is the most sexually pleasurable thing one can feel, which makes it all the more awkward when you consider that the Vampire’s first set of victims are children, later Patricia’s teenage daughter who she walks in on in the middle of being fed and who she has to stop from literally masturbating in that moment while attempting to punch the Vampire off of that same teenage daughter. But, of course, it doesn’t end there. It’s a book about almost entirely women written by a Cis Male Author, which means there are constant depiction of female bodies in the nude or in violence. It’s no “She boobed boobily”, thankfully, but it’s not much better than that. Describing pubic hair, breast shape, and even making it so that the Vampire-like creature drinks from a penis-esque proboscis that extends from it’s throat and right into the upper thigh of it’s victim, which is mentioned twice to be right next to the vagina. It even goes so far as to try and sexualize its own rape, aswell as having Patricia tell the rape victim how good it feels with this section between the two. Something I’m including here in its entirety because no amount of words I can write describes how gross this passage is, in context.

   “Grace already... told me,” Slick said, opening her eyes, pulling her mask away from her face to speak. “I made her... give me all the details.”

   “Me too,” Patricia said. “I was out from what he did to me.”

   “How did... it feel?” Slick asked.

   Patricia would never have said this to anyone but Slick. She leaned forward.

   “It felt so good,” she breathed, the immediately remembered what he’d done to Slick and felt selfish and insensitive.

   “Most sin does,” Slick said.

I think the thing that angers me the most about this book is that it’s tricked a lot of people who read it into thinking its a fun, feminist read. All of the main characters are overworked mothers who struggle with being that overworked, and then come out on top anyway because of their motherly intuition and love for their kids. It’s the kind of book that a single struggling mother would read and think “Yeah, I’d do that, that’d be me! I’d save the day!” and it makes them feel good about themselves, and about being a mother, and about how hard it is to make the kids lunches and clean the husbands dirty underwear and make sure the house is clean and dinner is on the table by 6 PM all while looking hashtag fabulous and like a girlboss. A quick trawl through any review site will show roughly the exact type of single mothers this book is written for giving it 5 stars and calling it hilarious and empowering. And y’know, I don’t have a problem inherently with prose written for that demographic. But this book gets away with a ton of racism, sexism, and outright disgusting content by hiding itself under that veneer and I think that’s just awful. It should be held to scrutiny for what it is, for how bad it is, and it clearly never was.

Don’t read this book. It sucks. It sucks so fucking much. I want my night I spent reading it back.