bare as shit blog

Title: Our Wives Under The Sea Author: Julia Armfield

In which a woman thought she'd lost her wife to water, but she's been back, and the water with her.

I've been doing a horrible job of not buying more books til I make a dent in my piles, but this one can't be much of a regret. Oh, sure, I bought it, yeah, but it was such a delight, and quite a quick read.

Absolutely banging read. I love unsettling horror. I love the sea, especially deep sea. Oh, I know I'm not the only one. Deep sea is our current Frontier Of The Known World. It's where research is making strides and uncovering baffling, beautiful, scary things. I do love the impact on the art that we make.

So thank you deep sea explorers for being part of the butterfly effect that gets us Our Wives Under The Sea. And then, thank you body horror for being such a trendy trope. I love being on trend, for once.

I found it striking, and beautiful. I only wished we had gotten more sea. More Leah, more dreams of fish. But, maybe it wasn't what this book wanted to be. Maybe it's just what I want to do. Dream of fish. Dream of night-swimming, lurking monsters that latch tendrils onto human vessels and displace them on the unrecognizable sea floor. Maybe I am just dreaming of Iron Lung, the game, and should get into Iron Lung, the movie, to continue in my ocean phase.

Great writing. Water is everywhere. You should read this under the shower. I'm kidding. But water everywhere. It's completely enmeshed in Miri's thoughts and language, which is no surprise, seeing how it has soaked her life and experience. Everything is her grief.

Title: The Catcher in the Rye Author: J. D. Salinger

In which an adolescent boy is not doing so well.

Glad I read it, you know, as a matter of improving my knowledge of literature written in English. It's definitely a classic I felt I should have read. It kind of just showed up in my life -- I was feeling burnt out (my default this year, as you probably know) and reading-blocked, rain was soaking Paris and i was too early to a museum date so i just got into the Devil's Lair (bookshop) and found it in the foreign language section. That one edition and all. Because I'll often see a book looking one way and remember it as is, but not actually find the same look here. I watch Americans most of all. It could happen to anyone. Anyway, this cover is so iconic, I'm glad I have it. And the horse makes it worth it, especially at the end of it all.

As a read, it's medium good. It's, like, okay. I mostly enjoyed it, and mostly as a distraction in passing. As literature, it's a hell of a character study, this adolescent boy and his feeling that he knows it all, that's he's got it all figured out, he can just tell how fake and devoid of magic and pure kindness life is. How broken or illusionary it all is. It's so completely uncharming to follow his cynical mindset for pages and pages, but completely well done. At some point, I started noticing the language -- and it is so purely adolescent, I couldn't not admire the skill of it. Not in the vocab, of course -- I mean, it's probably old adolescent vocabulary, but not any recent one i could recognize. But, but! The rhythm of it is very true to life. He has some lexical bright sparks, words and turns of phrase that are quite good, but not so much that he has variety. So he's using like 20 words/phrases as part of a rotation of language tools he uses to describe the world around him. He's in turn very self-assured and completely unconfident, often about the same situation. He severely lacks emotional intelligence, and struggles deeply with introspection. If you remember your teenage years, or if you're ever around teenagers, you'll recognize it. This is exactly how a sad, pedantic, vulnerable rich boy would describe his manic day of running away from his problems and struggling to put his feelings into words.