The Book Thread Book • Page 143

Reviewed @Garrett poetry collection!

spoiler alert!! it’s great!!
I read this in one sitting. There were high and low emotions but *chefs kiss*; a natural read that is both thought-provoking and intriguing.

 

It's my novella's half-birthday this week so I'm dropping the price to celebrate. Also it'll be part of a book tour, so I'll be sharing a bunch of new reviews and spotlights covering it. I won't be posting them here but will on my IG story. Feel free to msg me if you're interested in a signed copy, or order at tinyURL.com/Below-Torrential-Hill.

 

I also reviewed @OotyPa 's poetry collection. We have some talented writer's here !

 

Barnes and Noble has a buy one hardcover get 50% off the second sale going on rn but I can't think of any horror novels I want lol

 

Thanks again for this such a great write-up.

 

You're very welcome. Thank you for giving me the opportunity. Genuinely can't wait to read the novel!

 

I just finished Mieko Kawakami's All The Lovers In The Night. She's probably my favorite writer at the moment.

 

So it turns out I’m a fan of @OotyPa and everyone else who’s so thankfully given me the opportunity to read their work and be completely mesmerised.

 

you rule. thank you so very much for this!

 

Anyone read Hawk Mountain by Connor Habib?

 

Been reading My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell.

It’s fantastic but this an extremely challenging book for me as it deals with a young high school student having a sexual relationship with her teacher and the trauma which follows.

Just to quickly vent why:
My best friend suffered through this with our high school teacher. He was 15 at the start. She was in her 50’s and married with a daughter. It went on for years and has truly left real trauma to this day a decade later.

It was truly horrific at the end as it led to the obvious grooming/trauma but also her husband caught them and threatened to literally physically harm him (and tried to). I was the first and really only person my friend told while it was happening.

It all ended with myself SCREAMING over the phone to her and the husband to end it and it eventually worked. There’s been more stories like these in my same town and every time I feel so much anger and hatred.

 

What a wild story, sorry you had to go through that. Hope your friend is doing alright

 

Thanks! I know it still affects him and his relationships. I think he has some form of PTSD from it. I knew I wanted to challenge myself and read this book in the hopes it just helps me understand literally anything more I can about this gross and horrible situation.

 

Recently finished Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon and loved it. Decided to dive more into this author and am reading Mine.

I’ve seen Stephen King comparisons but I will say the opening scene of this book was pretty damn gruesome. So I’m all in now!

 

I’ve got Boy’s Life on my shelf. Glad to hear it was great! My first by him was Swan Song, which is in the vein of The Stand.

 

He's got some really great stuff (and also a few that were misses for me). After I'd read all of Stephen King's books he was one of the first authors I moved to and I've read all of his work, excluding a few in his historical fiction series.

Boy's Life is one of the good ones. Others off the top of my head are Stinger and Mystery Walk. As Garrett mentioned, Swan Song is very similar to the stand and pretty widely loved, but it's not my personal favorite.

 

Oh hell yeah this is cool to know! What would you put as your favorite from him?

 

Either Usher's Passing (if your a Poe fan this is a must read) or maybe The Five. The ones already mentioned aren't far off either.

(Looking at his bibliography Swan Song and the Matthew Corbett series are probably the only ones I didn't love. For some reason I thought there were more. And even then, I liked those enough.)

 

I remember loving the first 75% of Swan Song and not loving how it resolved. But it’s been well over 10 years.

 

I think I went through something similar. Also this was right off of non stop Stephen King for years, so I think it was unfairly judged. I also didn't like the first Peter Straub book I read (Floating Dragon) but looking back, everything about it was pretty solid.

 

Quick thoughts on my most recent reads:

Earthlings is a book I would never recommend or probably even talk about outside of the internet, but I really loved it. The first half is incredibly upsetting to the point where I would literally go back and forth between nearly crying and being genuinely angry about the deceptively cute cover art and the quote about the book being hilarious. Still, once I got used to the shock of the subject matter, I fell in love with the Hausu-level chaos and weirdness of it, and the last quarter or so IS hilarious and also one of the wildest things I’ve read in recent memory. It is the kind of book you should not go into blindly because it could be deeply triggering.

Ironically - and coincidentally - the book I read next was by the author whose quote on the cover of Earthlings felt so cruelly misleading: The Idiot by Elif Batuman. I didn’t even realize how much of a cult following this book seems to have until I had already started it, but it wasn’t hard to see why. Selin is a really funny narrator, and while a lot of the book dragged for me and some parts were beyond my level of comprehension, when I finally finished it, I felt like I had gotten to know an entire person. Unlike a lot of reviews I’ve read, I actually preferred the second half.

Well, what do you know? Next, I decided to read the Earthlings’ author previous book, Convenient Store Woman! Thankfully, it wasn’t as fucked up, and this one was much funnier while tackling very similar themes. Still, I found it low key depressing and relatable in unexpected ways. I think I really love Sayaka Murata, and I’m looking forward to reading her collection of short stories soon.

And in keeping with the back and forth pattern I have apparently found myself in, I’m now reading Elif’s sequel to The Idiot, Either/Or. I’m only about 60 pages into it but it seems like more of the same, and I’m enjoying it.

Next up will either be Bad Brains by Kathe Koja or The Devil Comes Home by Gabino Iglesias. The latter sounds absolutely incredible (although having read The Cipher this year, I am just as excited about Bad Brains) but I’m not sure I want to break the trend of female authored books yet because after spending the majority of last year reading Stephen King, it has been refreshing to get away from that kind of perspective.

 

I’ve just read The House of the Spirits because I found a beat-up 80s copy in a box. It’s really good.

 

Probably an unpopular opinion, but so far I am enjoying Batuman’s Either/Or far more than The Idiot, which I liked. Among other things, I think it is much funnier.

 

Currently deep into Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, in preparation for my trip to Portugal later this winter. So many moments I am blown away by his capacity for language and ability to describe solitude and the artistic pursuit. For a book about nothing in particular (and nothingness as a concept), every sentence feels inspired, simultaneously raw and layered with depth.

 

I loved both of these though I think maybe I prefer The Idiot