hadassahintheshell

There has been too much happening in my life in general I guess so maybe I'm trying to slow down and unplug a bit, with limited success. I've been learning how to play more card games (mostly forms of solitaire), and have been generally trying to read more instead of reaching for social media immediately as well. I think it might be helping my mental health a little bit? I don't know. Reading an article about someone who rereads books a lot and going through my own reread of Harrow The Ninth because I feel like I missed all of what happened the first time around is making me wonder what I have been missing by trying to do things quickly. And also aside from a weekend away in August I don't really have anything planned, and I felt very disheartened about hearing about publishing at my last convention so... maybe I should just plan to do less, and get comfortable with my own company a bit, and try to limit internet stuff a bit. I don't know.

I am continuing to work on my website and am wondering if I should compress the formatting more. I wonder if it is getting hard to read. Lots of things to think about with that, and maybe I will have more time to do those sorts of things, though I guess I wonder if a lot of the stuff I do is just kind of worthless.

Two books today, because I'm no good at getting these comments posted in time.

I think I was probably more disappointed by The House by the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune than I should have been because it was listed, for some reason, on a thread about fans of The Locked Tomb series looking for something m/m and this book has essentially no similarities and should not be mentioned in the same sentence as any Locked Tomb book, which isn't this book's fault.

It's a very cozy book with little sense of stakes, which is fine if you're into that kind of thing, but also I feel like it is kind of a prime example of books for adults feeling "fanfiction"-y. A lot of fanfiction is low-stakes because the source material is often high-stakes so the fanfiction fills in holes of the source material, I think, so what many people think of as fanfiction-y overlaps heavily with "cozy."

But I think probably my disappointment was more not necessarily this book’s fault, but more that like Asako Yuzuki's Butter, it refused to “go there” — I honestly for some reason though that Arthur would be revealed to be an incubus or something, which would explain his affinity for working with Lucy, why he thought the best idea to keep the house open was to charm Linus, and Linus could be concerned that he was being seduced, should a sex demon even be in charge of caring for children in the first place or would it be a problem considering their inherent nature — but instead, we got a ‘phoenix’, a creature which doesn’t really seem to have a lot of meaning besides a symbol and flame based power, boring. I think if I want a book to “go there” unlike The House on the Cerulean Sea and Butter, I might just have to do it myself.

Anyway, given all these frustrations, I went ahead and borrowed Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu from the library, you know, one of the first vampire books that predates Dracula by about 25 years. I guess it’s more of a novella, not a novel, considering it’s very short, but I’m going ahead and counting it here. Anyway, this book delivered exactly what I expected. Gothic, spooky castle, old-fashioned sapphic-sploitation for tittillating purposes, etc. No real notes. If this is the sort of thing you’re interested in reading it, you can get a free copy at Project Gutenberg.