As I started to write this week’s recap, I had the thought, “I didn’t read very much this week.” And then I saw that I had finished four books, somehow. Now, every single one of them was a novella and three I had started last week, so I think I’m right both ways. This week I finished a lot of books I wanted to finish, but I also didn’t read much of a volume of books.
And that’s okay.
I had sketched out a tentative plan for accomplishing all of my urban fantasy historical investigations (check out the essay on The Castle of Otranto if you haven’t yet) plus all the other reading I want to do and I’m already off of it, and pretty significantly now that I’ve added Frankenstein and some other works from the 19th century.
So what?
I haven’t really announced any firm schedules or timelines for the UF research other than wanting to get to Anne Rice by April. That was hilariously optimistic. So, my only timeline is this: I’ll get there when I get there. I want to enjoy and seriously analyze the urban fantasy genre and I want to read other things for fun. The only way I can do that and have a full-time job outside of this is doing it a slower pace.
I’m enjoying the pace that I’m reading out and the content that I am creating and if things take a little longer, that’s okay. The only person who needs to be fine with that is me, and I guess this weekly recap has become a bit of a conversation with myself about it. Thanks for indulging me. In return, I offer you this Beyoncé music video.
On Repeat
I’ll admit, for as much of a Beyoncé fan I am, I didn’t immediately fall in love with RENAISSANCE. Maybe it was hearing too much of CUFF IT on TikTok, maybe I wasn’t in the right mental place, it’s hard to say. However, a few months ago, I had the album on in the background while driving and found myself tapping “back” on one song in particular:
Something about VIRGO’S GROOVE unlocked the 1970s grooves with Bey’s magic and it all snapped into place. It was the Rosetta Stone for me. I’m impossibly excited to see her this summer on tour.
Finished This Week
Grievers1 by adrienne maree brown
I mentioned last week that I had about 20 pages left and I finished this novella about an hour after I pushed publish. It was fantastic and hard to imagine Grievers won’t be on my best of list for 2023.
The novella is a love song to Detroit, activism, and community set in an unusual pandemic (it renders Black people catatonic, seemingly stuck in a profound state of grief). I highly recommend it.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
I’m working on the historical investigation essay for A Christmas Carol right now, but if you want to tide yourself over until then, enjoy this TikTok.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the third book in the on-going urban fantasy historical investigation of indeterminate length. I’m absolutely glad that I included it because it already is starting to flesh out themes in the UF historical investigations around establishing reality and then subverting it. It also uses a very common 19th and early 20th century trope of following a “mundane” investigator who recounts their experience with the uncanny which I think will serve as well as we enter the Weird fiction era.
The thing that struck me the hardest was this: Jekyll and Hyde is a proto-werewolf story. The line that made this abundantly clear comes from Doctor Lanyan when he sees the transformation between Jekyll and Hyde, “his face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and alter…. (emphasis mine)” That line could just as easily describe this famous transformation:
More of this in an essay coming soon. As for the book itself: it was okay. I didn’t love it but I also didn’t hate it. The prose doesn’t have the focus of a Dickens nor the magnificence of a Shelley. It gets the job done. The story itself hinges on the twist over a century later it’s impossible not to know it. What does that say about the underlying story? Well, it’s important (important enough to be considered capital-L Literature) but it might not be a lot more than important.
A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow
This was great, not much else to say. I was such a big fan of Harrow’s short story “Mr. Death” (which is heartbreaking and funny and you should read it) and I was pretty convinced that I would like this slender novella and behold: I did. A Sleeping Beauty Spider-verse story could have gone wrong in so many ways and Harrow avoided basically all of them. I’m excited to read the follow up and I’m now wondering if I need to check out some of Harrow’s longer novels.
Oh, and as a lousy Columbus, OH native and fan, I loved that we spend a little time in Riverside Methodist Hospital. I have the facade and the great big cross etched into my memory from innumerable trips back and forth across town on 315 in my youth, my adolescence, and even recently.
Still Reading
Frankenstein: The 1818 Text by Mary Shelley
I added Frankenstein as the next book in the UF historical investigations after some reflection about bias I had in selecting male authors (see more in this TikTok). And I’m very glad that I did. Surprisingly, while I’ve read Dracula several times, this is the first time I’ve read Frankenstein and I can already feel a blind spot being filled in.
So far, I’ve finished the first volume and I can say this: Mary Shelley was emo and metal AF. When Victor reflects on the dead bodies he’s handling, he thinks:
I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain.
Rad.
For those following the historical investigation series here on THOUF, expect A Christmas Carol to come out this coming week, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein sometime the following week (those essays take quite a bit of time to pull together).
Every Which Way but Dead by Kim Harrison
I’m 50 pages into Every Which Way but Dead and it’s already reassuring me that I’ve made the right decision for which UF series to work through end to end. I think Rachel Morgan is a great, flawed protagonist and I really like the world of The Hollows. The continuity book to book is stellar and I think Harrison is already showing signs in book three of shaking off some of the shakiness in plotting that was present in the first two books. I’m excited for this to be both a UF read and a read for fun.
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