#i've been saying that for months but the new excerpt is just like. ok this is the autism part

[franzmasc]

nona is going to be the autism book

[thundercrack]

ok joining the club... February reading report! I'm mostly just mouthing off... Read at your own risk!

Dune by Frank Herbert

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

Look, I'm a sucker for a classic. I'd been vaguely meaning to read this since I saw the Timmy Chalemet movie...and I generally have a tolerance for fairly long scifi/fantasy. I enjoyed the first maybe third of this book...and then I got bored (needless to say I will not be reading the next four Dune books although I did finish). Don't get me wrong -- I'm glad I read it. In many ways, Dune still culturally relevant, both within the world of genre fiction, and (especially because of the new film) in debates about orientalism, the Cold War, humanity, etc, etc. I found Herbert's explorations on this future version of Islam and future version of Arabic pretty interesting, but by the end of the book, I was really annoyed by the main character. There's a lot of really interesting discussion and criticism around this book, so I'm glad to be able to understand a little more of those conversations as well. Also, now I retrospectively sort of know what was happening in the movie!

I was too young to read this book. It was good; it was not for me. Revisit in thirty-five years.

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

Lincoln In The Bardo by George Saunders

Why did I read this? I've never read any other David Mitchell. This book was an exercise in 1960s musical fantasy, where nothing goes wrong and the truest joy is from celebrity encounters, powered by the author's love for the era, rather than having anything to say. This was a book about a rock band going straight to the top, without any real interrogation into the cultural forces and pitfalls of the 1960s, weak characterization, random tie-ins with his larger universe, and next to no tension. I'll probably still read Cloud Atlas at some point, but this one is a hard pass.

This was one of my old roommates favorite books that I gave another go after DNFing in maybe, 2018? Again, I think this might be a book I'd like more if I were older. I thought the structure and format was well-done (I especially liked the history excerpts, of course); the story itself, I was maybe luke-warm on. I thought the prose was good (especially the dialogue) and the characters were interesting. I'm not entirely sure what's making me luke-warm on it, but I liked it enough to be glad I read it.

Human Acts by Han Kang (trans. Deborah Smith)

This was the best book I read this month, hands down. Maybe this year as well. Kang masterfully weaves together a number of stories around the Gwangju massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators. This book was at times, extremely brutal to read (and I would say I have a fairly high tolerance in text). It was clearly well-researched, well-lived, and well-considered. The topics it tackled were both grains of sand and the meaning of humanity itself. I really, really, enjoyed this book; I highly recommend it, and I definitely look forward to reading The Vegetarian in the future. Bonus reading: Han Kang and the Complexity of Translation

All The President's Men by Woodward and Bernstein

I constantly get this one mixed up with All The Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren (also good). One of my college friends had just read this and sent me a number of random updates throughout their reading, mostly focused on Woodward and Bernstein's....tense relationship. Like most Americans, I've been vaguely aware of Watergate my whole life (I even saw that movie The Post!), and I think this book really did a good job laying out the reveal of the story as well as sort of the in-house tensions that were going on. My copy (from the library) was the original 1974 edition, and I sort of wish that I had a more recent version with a little bit more distance on the events, but it's kind of fun to have been "right in there." I generally do like this style of expanded-reportage book (see Ronan Farrow's books, or in another genre, Jon Krakauer), and Watergate still looms so large in the American political imagination, so I'm glad I read this one too.

Beyond Babylon by Igiaba Scego (trans. Aaron Robertson)

This is a book I would have really liked to enjoy. I didn't. I kept saying to myself -- well, maybe it's just the translation that didn't work for me (the whole book was a bit clunky to read). There are a lot of really interesting themes in this novel (fluid identity, colonization, language, coincidence, politics, choice and nature, etc), interesting characters, play with language, a sweep of history that could have been fascinating. However, in practice, it didn't work for me. The different storylines sometimes were confusing, the plot at times eluding me, seemingly unnecessary tangents taking me nowhere. It was a slow read. There was just a lot here (and maybe it's just through my background that I was missing pieces)...and none of it quite fit together.

Murder by the Book by Claire Harman

Totally random book I picked up at the library. It's not really a topic or like...an era (the metropolitan center of Victorian Britain??) that I care about, but I was like, hey, cool cover, I want an easy read this week, etc. I thought it was well written and well researched, and I definitely learned some stuff about the literary scene of the era. It was also amusing how some of the debates around "base literature" are...pretty much the same today as they were in the 1830s.

Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim

Look, you ever read a book and you can just tell it was written by a Harvard/Yale/Princeton grad? Well, this was one. This book was extremely readable. It's got decent characters who are fairly easy to get invested in and a structure that pulls you through the text, all while set across a complex, divided, and rapidly changing backdrop of early 20th-c Korea. However, the narrative itself rung flat, and the book's promised complexity disappeared before I got through the second chapter -- it's almost a completely sanitized view of two very complex worlds: that of high-class courtesans, and that of orphans/gangs who become politically involved. Narratively things go wrong, but it's almost never because the characters make bad decisions -- except perhaps in love -- which collapses the once-promising characters. Also, it jumps from 1945 to 1964 at the end...not very successfully (the opening/closing of the book was extremely trite and not terribly well-done). This book was almost disappointing because it promised more than it could deliver, falling straight into the chasm of mediocre novels by diverse graduates of elite institutions. I didn't do it any favors by reading it so soon after Human Acts either, although they're very different novels.

The Thousand Crimes of Ming by Tsu Tom Lin

The advertising around this book does it poorly (do not go in expecting anything Cormac McCarthy-like LOL). Don't get me wrong, I liked this book -- I do enjoy a modern Western and I think Lin does a great job highlighting the role of Chinese workers on the expansion of the railroad, as well as the curiosities of the era through a fantastical magic troupe. The NPR review of this book highlights how each character plays with genre, which was true and definitely one interesting part of the novel. Thematically, I thought this book was interesting if a bit restrained, and the characters were neat. Unfortunately, though I enjoyed giving this one a read, at the end of the day, it's all a bit forgettable.

Dumb Luck by Vu Trong Phung (trans. Nyuyen Nguyet Cam and Peter Zinoman)

Tumblr bookclub read! Like I said to A and Rhu, I found the introduction "Vu Trong Phung's Dumb Luck and the Nature of Vietnamese Modernism" by Peter Zinoman more interesting than the text itself, but overall, I'm glad I read the book. It's always really interesting to read these sort of big, foundational texts -- even in fairly recent translation. I haven't read a lot of satire and really don't know that much about Vietnam before American involvement, but the thrust of the text was definitely quite interesting (and brutal -- one review described all the characters as antagonists) even if I didn't fully understand all the conversations, it was taking part in.

Heart of Darkness (3rd Norton Critical Edition) by Joseph Conrad (ed. Robert Kimbrough)

Confession: I think I'd read this before and almost entirely forgotten it. I didn't particularly enjoy the book and literarily, I'm not sure that I got what quality elevates it to a "great novel." I especially enjoyed the back-and-forth among several scholars (especially around Achebe) about its relationship to colonialism, inclusion in the canon, and European self-definition against Africa as a "primitive other." I'm glad I read it mostly because I feel like it gives me a better sense of the larger conversation around Leopold in the Congo and the literary/related discourses around the scramble for Africa. So, thematically, glad I read it; literarily, whatever.

The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden

The end :) maybe I'll do this again someday!

Another confession: I pick a lot of books by wandering around the library and just grabbing one that looked interesting. I did read Heart of Darkness before this for a reason. I quite liked reading this one -- I thought the narration was really interesting and the narrator's complicity in the brutality of Idi Amin's rule was neat. Certain scenes were very brutal (and the book was certainly well-researched). I felt like at times, the time-skips didn't quite work, but the general disconnect between Garrigan, his identity, and what was happening around him was interesting. I think I had to watch the film that was a loose adaptation of the book in class in high school. I think I could probably have some more interesting thematic and political comments on this one if I sat on it a little longer, but I'm kind of getting tired of writing this and also I finished it like, twelve and a half hours ago or something.

[night-unfurls-its-splendour]

🌤️ 🌩️ ☔

🌤️Share your favorite piece of dialogue from your WIP.

Published or unpublished? Because have so much favorite dialogue from all of the published chapters. And not much to choose from for Ch. 8. So I guess I'll do one of each.

The first is from Chapter 5, where Erik has just played her an excerpt from his new composition and Christine is feeling quite inferior to him, as an artist. She says that she has no genius of her own. Which Erik is of course very offended by:

"You must never forget that skilled as I am, though I say it myself, I am not so powerful as to be able to imbue talent where there was none before. I am only able to foster what nature has already gifted you. Do you understand me? And please say that you do, Christine, for you must know—know—that it is not in my nature to lie about music to spare anyone's feelings; even yours."

And then I don't have much dialogue at all written for Ch. 8, but this kind of connects to the above incident:

"Father always said he wasn't really talented," she sobbed quietly. "He said he simply practiced well. When he would tell me of the Angel of Music, I asked if he'd ever heard the Angel, and he shook his head and told me that he'd never been so blessed."

And Erik connects this with the fact that Christine did the exact same thing earlier in the evening.

🌩️ Share something funny/cracky from your WIP.

OK its not terribly funny, per se. I've been forced to confront today that I just don't do a lot of comedy in my writing. Except perhaps for the passage in chapter 5 where Erik mentally calls Carlotta a "contemptible cow" and then considers making her "moo" instead the next time.

But this is a scrap I have written for a future chapter:

Only Meg Giry had made any effort in those first few months to befriend her, and that had been an exercise in understanding when Christine required her solitude. That must have been quite an effort for little Meg, curious and nosy as she was. More than once he'd had to hold closed some hatch or panel which Meg had sniffed out to prevent her from confirming her discovery. She was a chronic pebble in his shoe.

☔Is there a fic concept you have that you'd like to just explain and share because you're not sure you'll ever write it? If so, what is it?

Ah okay this is actually excellent. Yes.

So I've been reading Driven by the wonderful and lovely TryingNotToLoveYou, where each chapter is named after and accompanied by lyrics from a different Depeche Mode song. Now I LOVE Depeche Mode. Every fic (published or WIP) that I've ever thought of for poto has a title taken from a DM song. It's just such PotO music.

One song in particular has always stood out to me: A Question of Time, in which the narrator expresses his fear and concern for a young girl and how it won't be long before "They" (this can be interpreted to mean men specifically or society in general) start to take advantage of her. He says "I've got to get to you first, before they do". The song also contains the lyrics "I'll take you under my wing; somebody should" which of course brings to mind "The Angel of Music has her under his wing".

This song was released in 1985 and my idea is for a movie based 1985 AU where a young Christine is an aspiring singer who gets signed to Erik’s record label.

I would love to write this fic. The problem is, its more of a vibe, an atmosphere, than an actual story in my head. I don't think I could write a story for any time period after 1918 to be perfectly honest.

In some ways I feel like I have a better understanding of life-patterns older periods. And the 80's would be particularly tough for me because its kind of in the middle as far as history goes. Its not far enough back to feel like fantasy-land but just far enough back that I wasn't alive yet and I don't even have a firm enough grasp of life in the 90's to fall back on (I was born in 95). So even though I'm probably the most familiar with the 80's out of any period in the mid-20th century pop-culturally, I still feel unqualified. And as for plot? Beyond this starting point, I have no idea where I would even start. I can't imagine writing any kind of long-fic, especially a modern!AU one. When the Longing Returns is actually just a short fic that has been stretched out by my excessive wordiness 😅😂