On expanding my horizons

In 2015, besides horror, I tried to pick a few other areas where my reading has been… lacking. Most obviously, those genres were poetry and romance. Still are. Probably forever — I don’t have a passion for either, but I will continue to look for small corners to enjoy.

Poetry

This is sad. I am not impressed with myself. I thought to myself, you know what I don’t do now that I’m not in school? Read poetry. I should read poetry! And then, what did I do last year?

Read one book of poetry.

RaptureRapture by Carol Ann Duffy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don’t know how to rate poetry. I don’t know how to review it. I barely know how to read it, except to take each word, each line, as it comes. I liked some of the poems in this collection, and a good lot of the lines and phrases. That’s all I can say.

View all my reviews

It was fine! I enjoyed some of the poems a lot! I chose it by a very scientific method: I saw in in the basement at Harvard Bookstore and liked the cover, and also had heard of Carol Anne Duffy before in my life. Verrrrry scientific. So I guess what I’m saying is someone better at poetry than me should put me through a quiz and then hand me some small books of poetry to read this year. Volunteer applications are open.

Romance

Hhhokay. Okay! I had a few long Twitter conversations with romance-reading friends, and always read Mindy Hung’s writing about romance at The Toast, and listened carefully to the Pop Culture Happy Hour episode on romance while taking notes, so I barreled into this genre armed with knowledge and recommendations. I’m certain that helped!

On the other hand, of the 4 romance books I logged on Goodreads, one was probably my Worst Book Of The Year, and another was one of my few Official DNF books. Oh, there’s another I haven’t even logged in Goodreads, but I haven’t given up on reading it. However, the fact that it’s been 6 months of trying is probably not the best sign!

So what did I like? Jeannie Lin. I liked Jeannie Lin’s historicals. I read two of them and they were both really fun, and I’m almost certainly going to read more of the Gunpowder Alchemy series.

Oh! And I read a sample of A Bollywood Affair by Sonali Dev, and I look forward to reading it sometime soon.

Here’s the Goodreads shelf with all of them. Sorry, book I hated. Sorry, book I gave up on.

Okay, now you tell me where I went wrong, or give me other recommendations in these genres! Do it! I really want you to.

A year in reading, or, did I do anything besides read?

It’s clear I’m not going to finish another book this year — I’m only about halfway through Dune, and everything else can go hang in the meantime. (Spoiler: Dune is great!) Per my Goodreads tracking, I finished 76 books this year, which is a personal record in my GR history. This doesn’t count books I abandoned, even if I rated them, and it doesn’t count every re-read. But 76! Gosh! I have no idea how that happened.

Another day I’ll do a post about some horizons I tried to expand, and other notable things like favorites. For now, I just wanted to throw stats down before the year expired. Fun! Statistics!!

Oldest book: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M. R. James (published 1904)
2016 resolution: Even more ghost stories. I read this one in an accidental batch with some other ghostie stories, haunted mansions, possession, the like. It was a good run, even if it was in May, not October.

Longest book (by Goodreads page count): Sabriel by Garth Nix.
Really? This didn’t seem long. It seemed very short. I wish I had wordcount. I bet other things were a lot longer, since this was mass market format, and YA. It was long overdue to read, though, and I really enjoyed it.

Average rating: 3.8 stars
This is higher than I expected. I guess I’m pretty liberal with 4 stars. I’m curious, though…

Rating distribution:

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 = 16
🌟🌟🌟🌟 = 37
🌟🌟🌟 = 19
🌟🌟 = 1
🌟 = 1

Huh. Yep, liberal with those 4-star ratings. But that’s a lot of 5-star ratings for me, too! I’m super stingy with them, historically. Look, 5 stars is 100%, perfect, A++. If I give 5 stars, it probably means I’m blind to the faults of the book (even if I’m aware of them, I don’t care) or I truly think it’s a Peak Book. I guess there was a lot of the former this year? Or I’m going soft.

Largest divergence from average rating: In other words, these are some the books that I liked a whole lot more than most people. I’m not going to note the ones I liked a whole lot less, because that feels unnecessarily mean.

Book covers for the four books I rated far higher than the average Goodreads user.
Someone psychoanalyze me and figure out why I’m an outlier in loving these books.
  • Baba Yaga’s Assistant by Marika McCoola (I’m a sucker for Emily Carroll.)
  • Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future by A.S. King (The audiobook helped, I think? Also, this was the first King I read.)
  • What Did Miss Darrington See? an anthology of feminist supernatural fiction (In part, probably, because it’s not rated by that many people. You should read it and rate it.)
  • The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne (I get it. I really do. It’s not for most people and it’s spiky and weird. But I loved it.)

Anyway, here’s the Goodreads year in books for me. More later.

Inside my heart beats like a girl

Did you know No Cities to Love, the new album by Sleater-Kinney, came out this year? Because I swear it’s been running in my veins for a decade.

Just thinking about the fact that Sleater-Kinney came back together for an album and a tour after nine years apart turns up the little pilot light inside of me. I can’t believe I got to see them in February, in between giant blizzards. I can’t believe how good the album is. All of their albums. They’re all on fire, sizzling, aching, desperate, strong. So as the year ends, I really want to say something more about them. About the album. About what it means to me, and how important it’s been. But I don’t know how.

I want an anthem
A singular anthem
An answer and a force
To feel rhythm in silence
A weapon not violence
A power, power source

Okay. Forget my past. Forget when and where and how I discovered Sleater-Kinney. Forget the electricity every time I listened to “Words and Guitar,” the utter shock when The Woods came out like a freight train, different and exactly right. Forget how I want parts of “One Beat” tattooed on my stone heart. Forget all of that, and remember that they broke up in 2006 and I never saw them. Remember that they went on to do other things, and I thought, that’s good. Portlandia is fun. The Corin Tucker Project is great. Wild Flag is a racehorse.

The weird thing is, if you had asked me my top five favorite bands a year before S-K came back, I might not have thought to mention them. I never stopped listening to them, but I would’ve answered with something else, and maybe when I thought about it a while I’d say “Oh yeah, and I still like Sleater-Kinney.” But the second there was hint of new life, new growth, new shoots furiously springing up from a plot I’d been walking by every day, well, it was like some secret dream had come true.

No Cities to Love made Sleater-Kinney essential to me again. Essential to me being conscious, to understanding some inarticulate part of me that is never satisfied.

A while back I read Girls to the Front which is a sort of history of riot grrrl, then I saw The Punk Singer, which is about Kathleen Hanna, and then to culminate it all came No Cities to Love. Like the world was reminding me how important all this was to me when I was a teenager, angry without understanding why, dissatisfied and yearning. It all came back as I’ve grown up, growing somewhat steadier, finding kindness and some contentment, and it came back to remind me that I’m still not satisfied. Some things may be better than they were, both in the world and just for me personally. But it’s not good enough. There are still things that make me angry and dissatisfied, keep me yearning for tomorrow to be better, only now, maybe, I can articulate some of it.

My baby loves me, I’m so angry
Anger makes me a modern girl
Took my money, I couldn’t buy nothin’
I’m sick of this brave new world

I’m not saying these feelings are good and useful. They’re desperate and hard to manage. They’re rough on you, inside. Sometimes you feel useless and powerless, no matter how many ways you think you might be able to do something — something else in life gets in the way, or you act and nothing changes, or you act and see something else, and it’s never-ending, you’re always wanting more, you’re always wanting better, but. But the world is the world. There’s always something. You will always have this feeling. What it needs is a sound, a voice, another person claiming it with you.

I close my eyes and think hard enough and I can still see and hear and feel the way Corin clung to the mic and sang-screamed-wailed “gimme love” near the close of the concert; I can feel the beat of the drums and the throb of guitars and the way Carrie eats the line “leave them nothing to devour”; I am transported back and singing along to “Modern Girl” with everyone else all of us feeling every damn word. I’m not one for Group Experiences, but this is my tribe, this and #spacewitches.

I feel so much stronger now that you’re here
We’ve got so much to do, let me make that clear

The videos below are from my concert, but a video can never ever capture the live concert experience, especially for a band like Sleater-Kinney. But for what it’s worth, I was a little farther back than the first video, but on the other side, in front of Carrie.

Y’all, I love Sleater-Kinney a lot. Just wait until I get my hands on Carrie’s memoir.