#reading 2024

[starrynightsxo]

books, books & more books...

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

""That's right, pal," says Number Seven. "And take it in these shops. If they'd even teach a guy a trade - make him learn a trade you wouldn't mind. Then a guy would have something to fall back on if he felt like hitting the straight and narrow. But what do they do? They put you to work making automobile plates, or something that's only done in prisons; stuff you couldn't get a job at outside if you wanted to; and the machinery is all twenty years out of date; and the instructors don't know anything about up-to-date methods; and the materials you get to work with are so lousy that you can't learn to do decent work even if you want to. Here I am. I've been working in the shoeshop for five years. What good will that do me? In the first place, the work I'm doing is done by women and children outside; it don't pay any- thing; and if I tried to get away with the lousy kind of work I've been taught to do, I wouldn't last two hours in an outside shop. The print shop is the only shop in here where a guy could learn a decent trade; but Christ, there's only room for forty guys in that shop, and you have to be a high-school graduate to get in there. That don't do the rest of us any good. There's a thousand men here, and only room for forty or so over in the print shop. And not only that, but So-and-So was always threatening to close the print shop because it didn't show enough profits. That's all they think about here. They damn about us learning a trade; all they is having the industries show a profit!"

"And take a guy when he gets out of here," says Number Ten. "Times are lousy outside. Even guys who know their trades, guys that can get swell references, can't get a job nowadays. And if they can't get work, how in the name of Christ are we going to get it even if we want it? And the jobs you can get don't pay anything - not enough to live on. A guy might better be in here than out there starving to death. How the hell is a guy going to live on twenty-five or thirty bucks a week, especially if he's married?"

- Victor F. Nelson, Prison Days and Nights. Second edition. With an introduction by Abraham Myerson, M.D. Garden City: Garden City Publishing Co., 1936. p. 213-214.

[mollfie]

I am a quarter of the way through Homeland and I had a few messages warning me that the books are old and might not hold up and ... what are you talking about, this is so good??? I've read old fantasy books from the same era that are way worse. It's fun and a bit camp but that's exactly how a D&D book should be.

I'm not here for literary fiction. I'm here to have a good time. I don't want to read anything else which is kind of bad because I should be reading a book for work...

[lightthewaybackhome]

I'm 100 pages into the Empty Grave when Lockwood takes Lucy to see his parents and sister's graves, and the space waiting for him. This is how the chapter ended. My gut clenched. Lockwood's waiting grave had better be empty by the end of this book.

(This is just so perfectly written and laid out with the title and the last words on the page so close together.)

[aristocraticelegance]

Reading for February 2024. This was a Tanith Lee heavy month, because as I try to make my way through my backlog of books purchased at secondhand book stores I have been forced to confront the fact that I own far more Tanith Lee than I've actually read. This is because I don't come across her books that often, so when I do I buy them all and hoard them.

The Secret Books of Paradys I & II, Tanith Lee, 1988. I started reading this several years ago, because the first half is 2 novellas, so I would read one and then go do other things, and then come back. The second part is a novel, but it is organized in such a way that it reads similarly to a collection of novellas, but more clearly interconnected. The thing about Tanith Lee's writing is that she presents you with any number of fantastic, horrible, or fantastically horrble things and doesn't blink once. In one story a character is buried alive and then comes back a different gender. Another one starts off with sexual assault AND THEN SOMEHOW GETS WORSE. There were regularly parts throughout this collection where I had no idea where it was going next, but it was great. If a collection of horror-fantasy stories set between ancient Roman and 1920's pseudo-Paris sound like a good time to you, it's worth reading.

Cordelia's Honor, Lois McMaster Bujold, 1986-1996. Technically this is two books, Shards of Honor and Barrayar, but I had already read the first one and while I thought it was fine, I wasn't really interested in reading more. However, I've heard enough good things about the rest of the series that I decided to read the second half, and I'm glad I did. Technically sci-fi, but set on a planet that's late 18-early 1900s coded, it's an interesting look at pregnancy and motherhood through that specific lens. There's not a lot of pregnancy in sci-fi; you'd kind of think there'd be more by now. Still not my favorite of McMaster Bujold's (the Chalion books are great), but I feel motivated to read more of this series now.

3. The White Serpent, Tanith Lee, 1988. I have no idea how she published all of this in one year. I assume it was not all written in one go. Anyways, in a bold move I chose to read the third book of a trilogy without having read the previous two books. This is because I found this one at Half Price books, saw it was by Tanith Lee, and thought the cover looked cool. This wasn't a huge issue, because this seems to be a series of stories set in different generations in the same world, so events from the previous books are mentioned as historical details. I really liked this one; Lee is great at telling big, sweeping stories in a relatively small space. I also like her approach to rendering deeply sexist societies, simultaneously blunt in the way the characters are confronted with the reality of their situation and nuanced in how they manage to navigate it. Also? She can describe a sunset like no one's business. This is what's wrong with fantasy today: no one describes the sunsets or the trees. I want to know about the trees!! (Also weather plays a weirdly important part in this book. Like a major plot point hinges on some really bad weather). I realize I've said nothing about the plot, and that's because it A. doesn't matter and B. is impossible to summarize. At the core of it is a guy who is a gladiator in a kind of fantasy Rome-type city, but a lot happens before and after that. There are also some white people (literally white) who might be aliens. I'll probably go back and read the first two books, since this one was pretty weird. Modern readers might take issue with the way race is handled (see above RE: bluntness and nuance) but I can't really say much on that front.

4. Black God's Kiss, C. L. Moore, 1930s. A collection of the Jirel of Joiry stort stories from the 30s, which I only learned existed about a month ago. There was a lady protagonist in sword and sorcery! Written by a woman! Amazing. I did generally like these; the titular story was great (except for the very end, which I did not like, but the sequel story kind of made it better). I've seen these stories described as female Conan meets Alice in Wonderland, but the wonderland bits reminded me more of Arthur Machen's work. Some great descriptions overall, even if some parts felt dated in an annoying way. Also, this particular cover is ridiculous, but she is described as running around in a chain mail shirt with her thighs out, for some reason. Presumably because sword & sorcery abhors a pair of pants.

Link to January's books

[f-l-o-r-e-s-c-e-e-r]

Some pages from my book journal for 2024, I've never done one, but I'm very happy!! <3

[cromulentreader]

So this books really starts with Violet's mother telling her to ride or die. Literally.

[immortalsarcasm]

Started today:

[rahmeenreads22]

The first thing you do in any circumstance is try not to resemble a human being!

Crime and punishment by Dostoevsky

[mundomars]

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë

[nerdyheartmoon]

Bingo Reading Challenge 2024

March

10. First Person Narrator

Next Time by Parker Avrile

Unfinished

[starrynightsxo]

"it's literally just a book" okay, and? I don't see your point.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Thus, the declared purpose of modern prison reform, one gathers, is: To make the prison an institution which will reform the criminal.

As I sat in my cell, year after year, reading the articles, books and speeches in which the penologists were enunciating this doctrine, I waited eagerly for some sign of change in the actual administration of the prison. But nothing happened. I waited in vain.

For I am obliged to record the fact that, during the years I spent in the state prisons of New York and Massachusetts, not a single attempt was ever made to reform me, and that I did not see a single attempt officially to reform criminals as an aim of prison administrative policy.

I remember, in this connection, talking one day with the late Thomas Mott Osborne about the prison-reform movement. He said, among other things: "It is so discouraging. People flock to the meetings; they are remarkably sound in their responses; the shocked, moved, indignant at the right moments; they applaud vigorously; they come up to the rostrum after the meeting and offer their money and services; and then they go to their homes and forget all about it. They simply will not do anything."

For a time I was inclined to accept this explanation; that people in the outside world are simply indifferent about prison conditions. But lately I have been persuaded that it is not mere indifference, but actual satisfaction with existing conditions, which is responsible for society's delay in changing the prison "from a human scrap-heap into a human repair-shop." It must be, I have decided, that the majority of people still believe in the ancient doctrine of "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," and regard the prison as the place where the criminal shall expiate his sins.

If, therefore, the real (as it is the declared) object of imprisonment is the reformation of the convict, then, as matters stand at present, the American prison is a most abject failure as a social institution.

It is banal to state that in order to fulfill the reformation purpose the prison environment must be greatly altered. Yet, whenever any attempt is made to do so, there instantly arises a loud and persistent chorus of criticism, mainly from the daily press. The cry of pampered criminals, "men's clubs" arises and feeds the average law-abiding citizen's hatred of the criminal.

This is not to say that the criminal should be pampered and petted, or that the prison should be made a cross between a night club and a health resort. Neither is it to say that the prison should remain a steel-barred stone coffin, as it continues to be in most states. It is simply to say that before the prison can achieve its object many substantial changes must be made; and that it will be well for the arm-chair critics, who create such a disturbance at each attempt to make such changes, to realize that their prejudiced criticisms are of great harm, in the end, to that society of which they themselves are a part. For not until these changes are made will the prison be able to transform the criminal into the citizen."

- Victor F. Nelson, Prison Days and Nights. Second edition. With an introduction by Abraham Myerson, M.D. Garden City: Garden City Publishing Co., 1936. p. 42-45

[mollfie]

I started book two of the Legend of Drizzt, Exile, today. Then I had a nap and dreamed about the Underdark so there's that. Suffice it to say, it's also very good.

[lightthewaybackhome]

[theimpalatales]

Books of March 2024

If you use my links, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org whose fees support independent bookshops.