I'm tense and nervous and I can't relax..... I did take a short break from social media in general, but I'm back on Tumblr. I could never quit you my horribly awful babygirl website.
(By the way, I changed the site's url because I don't like the idea of people from my other accounts easily being able to search up this website. I know I link my socials at the homepage, but that's a one way system! It's now called Weirdlittlecreatureyapsatyou.org which feels more tonally appropriate anyway.)
While I still haven't been drawing much, I'm reading a lot more than usual. I'm always proud of myself when I'm back on a reading kick, brings me back to primary school. I found a sweet chair on the street and carried it home, and it's literally the perfect thing for sitting and reading in the garden which is sick. I love being outside.
Anyway I finally finished Big Swiss and loved it - funny as hell (sex humour without feeling awkward which is remarkable), a really interesting main cast (it's the kind of book where Everyone is weird), and a pretty tense and investing story. I loved seeing the whole thing unravel by the end but I still feel like Greta got off a *little* too easy for her fucked up actions, and the ending was pretty vague and open ended in a way that sort of left stuff hanging. Maybe that was on purpose but I prefer an ending that wraps things up and has a decent amount of build-up. At times the pacing was pretty slow too. 7/10. It is by far the book I have the least to say about, but I recommend it.
Then I picked up We Have Always Lived In the Castle and liked that one even more. I'd heard very good things about Shirley Jackson but had never read anything from her before, and it was unfortunately the only one my library had available. What a book though! Literally my only complaint is how short it was (less than 150 pages, geez) because I wanted more. First of all, the protagonist. As an autistic little mf I think Merricat is the most relatable book protagonist I've ever read (maybe the most relatable character in any media, rivaled only by Laios from Dungeon Meshi). I mean, she's just like me! Frfr!! Aside from the murdering part but like. It kinda gave me a brain wave to relate so hard to a character written in the early 60s - and in a classic no less, which I always tend to seperate in my mind from other books (a certain level of disconnect, like that between a famous renaissance painting and contemporary art). You often tend to forget that the human experience is universal and has / will always remain static to a certain extent; that people of the past lived lives equally as vivid and complex as yours. In the grand scheme of things that feels pretty silly to say about a book that's only 60 years old, but gimme a break I'm 17! What scheme of things!? Anyway, the other reason I love that about Merricat is that connecting so closely to her made the book an extremely tense read. As in, at one point I stopped to pace in a big loop aroud the library because the events of the book were stressing me out. It really is amazing at conveying the very specific creeping dread of some outside force disrupting the mundane constants of your life that you depend on, irreversibly and inescapably, while nobody takes your fears or reservations seriously because to anybody else the problem seems utterly inconsequential. It's not! Charles is doing the shopping when Merricat always goes to town on tuesdays!! Fuck you Charles!!! I sincerely hope people don't yearn after Charles (tho I know it to be true) bc he's a piece of shit and I hate him and he freaks me out. I can also relate to her being so immature for an 18 year old, because I literally never feel my age. I'm always either a little kid or a grown adult, but never a teen, never the right age. The other thing I love is the writing - simultaneously simple to follow and rich with so much beautiful imagery and symbolism, it really gives you a lot to chew on. An unconventional ending but one I ended up liking a lot. I feel like things progressed a little too quickly but that's just a product of the book's length. 9/10.
So it's funny because when I was returning Castle I was looking around the shelves for Big Swiss (just to see that it's there, I like that knowledge for some reason). Eventually when I did find it, what was literally right next to it? Tender is the Flesh! The book I said I wouldn't read because reviews were so mixed and I didn't like the basic plot outline! I never expected it to be sitting in my local library (I never really see books of that intensity in there), so I wanted to try it out right away - if every critic disagrees on it's quality, who am I to agree with any one of them? That was on saturday, and I finished it today - I think that's the fastest I've read a full-length book in years. As it turns out, it is great! It's fuckin amazing! Okay, part of the reason I was so quick to finish it was because the writing is pretty basic. The chapters are really short which makes it easier to swallow (lol), and it has some great consistent metaphors and really descriptive imagery (for better or for worse), but there's a really noticeable lack of sentence variety and repeating of words. That only bothered me like a tiny bit though, the real highlight is the story and the protagonist. Marcos is an EXTREMELY compelling protagonist. I started out genuinely rooting for him and his 99 problems. I really felt for his cognititive dissonance, his struggle between wanting to go numb and simply learn to accept the horrors around him while knowing that the prospect is infinitely scarier than remaining miserable, his struggle to fully comprehend his grief, let alone cope with it, the horrific descisions he has to make every day just by proxy of living the way he does, GOD!! HE'S SO FUCKING SAD!! I like that in a character. I did slowly start to feel like his narration wasn't reliable, but then, man. Marcos recieves the all time any% speedrun record for how fast a I can lose all respect for a character. (And I'm not talking about That scene, I'm talking about THAT scene. The one a little while before it.) This idiot is no longer complacent in the moral blackness of his actions out of mere obligation, but he's sunk even lower than his fellow man entirely by choice! Point and laugh! You disappoint me Marcos. Even though I stopped rooting for good things to come his way, that's not to say I wasn't still invested in him. It's a really great story. However, again with the ending! When I was reading I was like "these are the last 20 pages and you're introducing new stuff? Where's my ending?", but then the main conflict of the story is over and done with in literally like 5 pages??????? It was very sudden and unsatisfying but I feel like that was on purpose, and in that case I can't really complain. I am surprised people were so shocked by the ending and considered it a shift for Marcos? When all it feels like is the natural progression of his "relationship" with Jasmine. You could see from a kilometre away what he would do to her after she stopped being his baby-carrier; the baby's human after all, bcause it's his, and she's just an animal. (That's what he thinks at least, no matter how he treats her, it's obvious). Anyway raaghakaagalaahahahllghhbllmmmbllmn!!! The worldbuilding of this book is something I really loved. It builds off the pretty wild concept of "sudden mandatory cannibalism" in a way that gets you into the headspace of the people in that world, and shows you in a very simple but effective way how such a societal shift could occur. I wasn't big on the idea that it was all a government conspiracy but in the end I liked that it wasn't confirmed or denied. The virus Could be real, or it Could be a lie, but it doesn't really matter does it? What matters to the story is how people react to it and adjust their lives accordingly. I like that in good dystopias, when things are focused less on political intrigue and rebellion and big schemes or whatever, and more on the effects on ground level and the mundane lives of those under the new system. (I liked that in the Handmaid's Tale too, and in Season 1 of Everything Is Fine.) It feels a lot more realistic. I've totally lost my train of thought because I'm finishing this entry the next day (and not at my usual time), but I give it an 8/10. I recommend all 3 of these books.