#on reading

i absolutely adore reading and chatting about books. here's a little post about what i'm currently reading and loving ♡

Boy do I ever! These ones tickled my fancy as of late, not the “ultimate list” but in the last year or two:

Fantasy:

- Tress of the Emerald Seas

- This Is How You Lose the Time War

- A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

Romantasy:

- Bridge Kingdom series

- The Wolf King series

- The Kindred’s Curse Saga

- Alchemised (don’t come for me I’m a glutton for yearning)

- Direbound

- Shield of Sparrows

The last book I read: Just finished rereading Piranesi by Susanna Clarke! As gorgeous as I remembered it. Non-reread: A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0 by Bill Bryson. Haven't been finishing much books recently... (<-reading manga and fics and webnovels)

A book I'd recommend: Moby Dick by Herman Melville... It's fun!! Don't be intimidated!! (Thinking of reading Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation too, since it popped up when I was looking for books similar to Piranesi)

A book I couldn't put down: Riyria Revelations by Michael J. Sullivan as well. I adore Going Postal from Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld series too <3

A book I've read twice or more: I've read The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch three times I think. And thinking of a third read of The Bone Ships by RJ Barker! Incredibly fun world to get lost in.

A book on my TBR: The Poet Empress by Shen Tao, and The Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson. Also the rest of Discworld...

A book I've put down: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde... I'm too much of a hopeless romantic to avoid getting overwhelmed but one day I'll finish it before it murders me 👍

A book on my wish list: Dante's Divine Comedy and Homer's The Odyssey... I want to understand references...

A favourite book from childhood: I was besotted with Alex Rider ^///^ Cute boy doing cool stuff has always been my favourite genre(?) (<-shounen anime enjoyer) A lot of the books I read as a kid was from the school library so I might have forgotten some of them, but I was really invested in Philip Pullman's The Subtle Knife

A book I'd give to a friend: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke as well. Also Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None because I need everyone I like to experience reading it for the first time

A book of poetry or lyrics that I own: I don't own any,,

A non-fiction book that I own: A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0 as mentioned above, and the History and Literature books in the Big Ideas Simply Explained series.

What I'm currently reading: Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer and The City Stained Red by Sam Sykes

What I'm planning on reading next: I'm halfway through too many books to be thinking about that but maybe Annihilation (The Bone Ships is a really fun fantasy about pirates and dragons; I've only read the first book but I think there's political intrigue in here too)

surface reading is incredible when that's what you want. i'm sorry, i do not want to sit and look at all the deep themes in a romance novel that i only want to spend 30 minutes reading. i want the option to not think that way while i'm reading it.

deep reading is incredible, don't get me wrong. understanding character, theme, motif, trope, or in media - lighting, cinematography, framing, dialogue, etc. can add so much richness to an experience, and so much understanding to how you react to that experience.

but there are times you are just going to want to plug in a romcom or horror without spending hours thinking about the monstrous feminine or misogyny and the patriarchy.

so actually, knowing how to surface engage with a text is a vital skill and one that many folks who studied literary or film analysis at university forget how to do. some of those folks no longer can watch their favourite films or 'light TV' or enjoy their light reads anymore. therefore, it's pretty obvious that surface reading is not just "not reading very well" - it's a type of reading that is valid, but that on its own, is not always very satisfying. it's the chicken nuggets of reading a text. some people only want chicken nuggets for the rest of their life. other people want to learn what a five course meal is like, and don't realise the answer to that is to engage their own brains re: the text, and some of those folks who previously loved chicken nuggets will never be able to look at them again.

imho, the trick is learning how to love all the layers, and not just prioritise the deeper ones over the shallower ones. deep analytical reading is not better by default, it's just another way of doing things, and it's important to veer away from elitism in the drive to want people to educate themselves more about how to engage in film and literature.

Just thinking about this cuz I finished a book that I loved, but when I was reading other people’s reviews on StoryGraph so many gave it low ratings and then said something along the lines of “I quit reading halfway through when the MC/narrator started doing some really shitty stuff and I didn’t like him anymore.” And I went??? He’s fictional! Would I want to hang out with him if he existed IRL? No. But I do find him fascinating to read about.

I don’t know, I think some of it stems from the thing where people need characters to be relatable to them (whereas I don’t care if I relate to a character to find them compelling). And on top of that, they won’t let themselves relate to a morally ambiguous (or straight up evil) character, or even just a regular person who does some shitty stuff, because then they’d have to recognize that they might have the capacity for some of those things, too, if they were in a similar situation to the character.

Book by Window, 1959 - On Reading