I just reread Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, which I hadn’t read for over 30 years. If you haven’t read it, it’s a classic staple of Gothic lit-pulp. I was craving some good Gothic, and it is indeed 20 pounds of Gothic in a 10 pound bag.
And like many books that I loved when I was young, on rereading it it gave me fits. I wanted to kick the MC in the teeth, she was such an insipid, vapid, passive idiot. And the brooding, damaged love interest? What a total tool. Ugh. But Rebecca is a class A ghost, the kind of ghost that really exists and that really does haunt us. And Mrs. Danvers is just a deliciously awful antagonist. It is worth reading for its absolute commitment to the genre.
I’ve been reading (and watching) horror stories, especially stuff around haunted houses.
Halfway through The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. Pretty good modern Gothic story set in post-war UK so far, using the haunted house setting to explore how the aristocracy is declining, the rise of the National Health Service, and some more. The way nostalgia is interrogated makes me appreciate how Waters is tackling social classes and conservatism.
I need to read more modern stuff instead of Penguin/Oxford World Classics forever. This is good stuff.
I finished White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi yesterday (I’d meant to read it for Halloween, but I’m a year-round horror fan and it’s a year-round kind of horror anyway). Just started The Vegetarian by Han Kang and it’s pretty propulsive so far.
Humanity has reached for the stars. A struggle for power in the depths of the galaxy. Many characters with their own agendas, factions with their own objectives. All centered around the space station orbiting Pell’s World, one of the few habitable worlds.
I finished Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh, whom I had never heard of despite her winning the 1984 Hugo Award.
Fantastic handling of deep-space expansion. There’s no “bubble” of explored space enlarging around Earth and Sol, instead humans have chosen a promising direction and struck out a two-way route for exploration, mining, and trade. Only at the farthest reaches of this one branch does it spread out, becoming the territory of Earth’s space-based rival, the Union.
In my reading, I didn’t discern any one main character, rather a varied cast of important people who have roles of about equal importance in the story, each influencing the circumstances of the others.
Here are the books I’m currently mainly reading on my Kindle. Shortly to start on Eerie East Anglia and The Thrie Estaitis. Tricky to get a screenshot off the new Kindle Paperwhite. 2024 Kindle models don’t mount on Macs like older ones. But still easier than me building an infographic of my own.
Screenshot from a Kindle Paperwhite showing 6 book covers in black and white: (1) Orbital by Samantha Harvey; (2) An Academy for Liars by Alexis Henderson; (3) The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; (4) Don’t Touch My Hair by Emma Dabiri; (5) Eerie East Anglia: Fearful Tales of Field and Fen; and (6) Ane Satyre of The Thrie Estaitis by Sir David Lyndsay. All the books are well underway apart from the last two, which are about to be properly started.
Haha! I am very easily distracted, and flit about like mad. Some nights before bed I’ll feel like reading a long novel, another time a non fiction book, or a short story. I find having loads on the go works for me. I know it’s very different from many other folks
I wish I still could, but with my progressive neurological disease I can no longer manage conventional print. Only with an utterly gigantic font setting on an ebook can I still read.
I did a PhD on historic Scottish reading habits while I was already very ill from my disease. I was phenomenally envious of the historic readers I studied, and the amount of print books they could read. I really related to those who could no longer read due to age or disability …
Here is a visual demonstration of how big my font goes on the Kindle so I can read. The image on the left shows the default setting (I was setting up a new replacement Kindle the other day). In a 7 inch Kindle Paperwhite there are 18 lines of text for the ebook shown. The image on the right shows my adjusted version. With just 9 huge spaced out lines. This way I can still gobble up books and read.
I’m a book historian. I love old books. But I can’t read print books any more. And people who can are very fortunate.
Screenshots side by side of two Kindles reading the same Sherlock Holmes novel. With the default font size on the left, and my large customised version on the right. As described above.
Pondering what Christmas book or books to read shortly. And though I’ve read it before, several times, I think “The Dark is Rising” by Susan Cooper has to go on the list. A festive delight of old magic, good versus evil, and adventures across time. Definitely worth another look this festive season.
Alt text below the picture.
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The cover of The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. This version features a snowy scene, with a dark rider on a horse, waiting in the snow, between trees running towards the distance. The palette is a mix of faint white/blue snow, green tree trunks, and the dark rider and horse.
Oh and the large font issue is also relevant to IF. I can only play IF where I can adjust the font to be enormous. I have Lectrote running in a huge font to play parser games. Ditto any web based games (and I struggle hugely with those I cannot make gigantic font). I have a very different experience from many other IF players. This is why I’m passionately in favour of accessibility, including adjusting font size.
Though this is really a topic for another thread
Here is a screenshot of my Lectrote setup running one of my games. I do sometimes make it bigger. This is on a 14" Mac laptop screen, viewed up close. That laptop screen is also by default set huge font size, including for coding in Inform 7/10 …
Screenshot of Lectrote running on a Mac. In the background is the opening screen of IF game Bad Beer, showing the initial room description. In a large font. In the foreground the Lectrote appearance preferences are visible, including the “zoom in 4” preference that has been set, plus a dark colour theme.
It’s been 12 years since the second round of retinal reattachment surgery that failed to save my vision and I still miss the tactility of the printed word. Sadly, embossed print meant for touch reading is completely and utterly impractical for books, Braille, while leagues better than embossed print is also extremely impractical in the digital age as physical media and my Braille touch reading speed is glacial, and illustrators and printers generally only think visually about the art that sometimes accompanies static text(as far as I know, an embossed or textured picture book only exists as an idea, not something that’s been made at any scale.
Anyways, aside from the usual consumption of fanfiction and following the latest WildBow serial, I recently gave Fireside Al’s Treasury of Christmas Stories an annual listen, which includes the following:
1 Yes Virginia, There is A Santa Claus.flac
2 The Errors of Santa Claus.flac
3 Christmas at Sea.flac
4 To Make a Christmas Cake That Will Keep Until Easter.flac
5 Whodoo McFiggin’s Christmas.flac
6 The Santa Claus Trap.flac
7 The Gift of the Magi.flac
8 The Trapper’s Christmas Eve.flac
9 The First Christmas Tree.flac
Perhaps is also appropriate for the positive thing thread, but perhaps is more OT here:
I’m delighted with the birthday present from the Internet archive:
I was hunting (and sounding…) for years for this missing crucial source for a pet research of mine (mil & Naval historian; being Naval historian imply being also an historian of technology, everyone has seen close a warship understand why) that is, the ENIAC and Harvard I was really needed (spoiler: arrived too late…) for the immense war effort of the real great America. (and also if WW2 hastened the birth of automatic computation, and in what degree)
after the family duties, I passed a pleasant birthday night reading this (and taking notes…)
I’m on the last 200 pages of From Here to Eternity by James Jones, a big novel recounting the goings-on in a US Army base on Hawaii.
I had a bit of trouble getting into it, but looking back, I realise that’s mostly due to my own misaimed expectations. Since the setting and the initial chapters are much like those of 08-15 by Hans Helmut Kirst (which I have written about earlier in this thread), my mind was set for a military picaresque, where the low-ranking protagonist sticks it to his officers in clever and amusing ways.
And yes, there is a fair bit of that. But From Here to Eternity goes much, much deeper than that. The work I’m most inclined to compare it to is Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg. Put your characters in an enclosed setting with its own rules and routines, and have them engage with each other. The confrontations and conversations in James Jones’ novel are no less thought-provoking and encompassing, tackling the big themes of human life, but they differ markedly in tone. The characters being soldiers, their philosophical recitations are punctuated with nasty slurs and comparisons taken from their daily existence. This gives From Here to Eternity a muddy, gritty feel, contrasted to Der Zauberberg's more abstract airy elevation.
I regularly find myself sticking a finger between the pages to remember where I am, and staring off into the distance through the wall for fifteen minutes, letting my brain assimilate and associate and percolate.
My husband Tom has always avoided fat books. He didn’t like holding them while reading. But the Kindle has solved that problem and so he’s been reading lots of big long books, and he’s finally reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (and we just learned there’s a TV adaptation which is next on our list!).
Since that book is very Dickensian, to keep a level vibe in the house I’m reading Our Mutual Friend, which shockingly I’ve never read before. The reason Charles Dickens remains so firmly rooted in the canon is that he was just an angel of a writer. Every time I read or reread a Dickens book, I remember why he’s an all-time great.
