wednesday

[felinejumper]

A whole bunch of book-adjacent bullshit, prompted by #1 on the list:

1. I am sick and the DayQuil wore off, I do not like it.

2. A couple people in my IRL circle have been recommending Rosenberg's Confessions of the Fox to me. I feel complicated about this, because I have reason to believe I won't like it (sea_changed 's commentary from last year, and Bogi Takac's review, among others). I read Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Cycle books under similar circumstances (important and queer to someone I was close with), and I found them adequate, at best, and really hardly even that. I don't feel like I'm good at dealing with that -- "I know you loved this book but I did not care about the things you cared about in it at all." Although, that friend, in retrospect, was really pretty shitty about me not being into Raven Cycle, so maybe that isn't me after all. In any case, it makes me concerned about Fox, and having to generate excuses about why a meaningful-to-trans-people trans narrative is not meaningful to me.

3. That said, my other reading material has been great recently; I'm pulling from the Lambda Literary awards list for quality books to order from the physical library (particularly excited about Disoriental, Négar Djavadi) and a metric ton of romance novels from Libby for "I'm tired" books, and some Tamora Pierce re-reads.

4. I am moving to a new city quite soon (!) and both of my future roommates are queer librarians (!!) with three cats (!!!) and are upsettingly cute (!!!!) (we follow each other on Instagram).

Comments

+1

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

Have fun reading, and hope you feel better soon! Your new life sounds like it's going to be fabulous.

[breathedout]

I have also heard extremely (and to me, intriguingly) mixed reviews of the Rosenberg book, all from people whose taste and thoughtfulness I respect. Even people who disliked it or were medium about it, all disliked it or were medium about it for different reasons! I forget who it was, but someone I know had mixed feelings about it so I asked specifically about the reservations that seachanged brings up in that post you link to above, they were like "Oh, there's an in-text explanation for all that so it didn't bother me at all, but this completely other thing drove me up the wall." I think I'm actually more interested to read it now, having seen all these WILDLY different takes, than I was when I first heard about it.

(Also have Disoriental on my holds list!)

[notasupervillain]

Ahhhhh Yay for moving to cute please link to/post cat pics.

I hate the feeling of "I know you loved this but I didn't". But the other person needs to be not shitty about it? Like, stories are as much about what the Reader brings to them as what the Writer puts on the page. And two people won't read a book the same way.

That said, my friends and I had chats like "I cannot understand why you liked Pacific Rim" "Well I can't understand why you gave no taste" so maybe we were just generally chill with the idea that different people like different things?