It's a stark vision of how far we have come in the last 70 years - and how far we haven't.
Book commentary, out of context notes on my own writing, maybe even local events. He/him
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It's a stark vision of how far we have come in the last 70 years - and how far we haven't.
(Land back, always)
It treats the natural world as a terra nullis, unclaimed until the united states governments handed out deeds. In truth there is no "legitimate" use of the land in this case, and who has rights to use is less a matter of paperwork and more a matter of broken treaties and injustice.
-but then one stops and remembers that this is still a conflict between two settlers.
It talks about how natural resources should belong to everyone in a way that would not be out of place in a modern socialist text.
Reading a book published in 1950 is a strange experience. It has flashes of being strangely modern - the story frames itself around a conflict between a developer and a farmer, and is very explicit about the damage clear cut logging would do to the environment.
at risk of a cheap metaphor - just long enough to register the bullet before it hits.
Goodness, this man makes his descriptions *count*. Every time I read one of his works I'm struck by the economy and precision of his descriptions. Never stopping the action for long, just long enough to make the reader notice. Just long enough for an inhaled breath.
Guns of the Timberlands by Louis L'amour. #booksky #bookcommentary 🧵
Oh no, they've been gal pal'ed
'39
I'm proud of you ♡
It is unusual for the owners of a house to be in the house photos
They are trying so hard
The worst kind, sincerely. Bad books will bore me. interesting ideas trapped in bad writing? I'll be ranting about that for *years*
Cold war nonsense is so delightfully whacky, if you ignore the threat of global destruction
The fact that nick Clegg has a career bewilders me. The fact that it's with Facebook does not.
But it does matter, and the repercussions linger - that's the entire theme of this book, after all. And what are ghost stories about if not unresolved trauma and old wounds?
There's value in making sure this history is not forgotten and showing how it echoes through time. White america, after all, would be perfectly happy to pretend these things never happened, and if they did happen it was such a long time ago and we're better now and none of that matters now.
This book deals with the history of racism, and how the history is very present even now.
(Which is why the end of the book involves Setting Boundaries - just because someone means well doesn't mean you have to do everything they say)
A fun little jaunt, perfectly written for the intended age range. I enjoy a ghost story with a morally ambiguous ghost - one that perhaps means well, but has questionable methods.
The Girl in the Lake by India Hill Brown @booksandbighair.bsky.social #booksky #bookcommentary 🧵
Nonetheless, in the traditon of my people
Shit, I always said I'd get sloppy drunk when he died, but I have work today....
Shared this with an nyc friend and they immediately started judging him for the brand of chips he used
That's so bullshit, I'm sorry that happened to you (and happens often enough that you find it boring)
That's kinda like one of the ways to manage intrusive thoughts? To just be like "well, that sure is a thought I'm having" and move on. Not over analyze or freak out and pretend it didn't happen. It is... annoying how much of healing involves letting go of control and chilling the fuck out😅
We've got 2 weeks to raise the ~1000 we need to cover rent and other expenses for this month. Can you help us with a donation and/or a re-post? We're 3 humans & 2 cats dealing with multiple health issues, car repairs, disability, and prolonged unemployment. #MutualAid 💕💸 gofund.me/6e51c52e
I always think that the moral arc will bend towards justice, so long as enough people grab hold and pull
Actual internal monolog from tonight: Me: okay what's something i can do to improve my situation Me a moment later: ...i can sit down and chill for the night, that's what
Orifice.
Cute!!! I don't know which one i like more
I've been going with "rolling anxiety attack"
You'd think these big orgs would at least send you a check occasionally
God, been there. Some days, its like yes i wrote. Was it any of the things i intended to write? Of course not.
Homophobic nonsense into queer art
Sticker is impending, will send you one when they print
....i know someone who makes stickers if you'd like that in sticker form. (I would like it in sticker form)
Sure is a race to the bottom
I can talk about my editing process if you'd like?
It was a fascinating read! I kinda want to read a bunch of analyses of it, I feel like one could pick out a lot of different angles to look at it through.
"The nazis were ridiculous and incompetent" was a fun history fact that stopped being fun about June 2016
This summer has been brutal
Help my friends if you can
Me when a fictional child murders her family: I'm willing to believe they had it coming
There are any number of angles to analyze this book. There are a lot of threads tucked into this slim little volume. The class dynamics could fill any number of theses, and the codependency. That's part of what makes it a classic, I suppose, the fact that one can just keep digging.
Again, I may be too sympathetic. She is controlling and manipulative, arrogant at times and resentful. Though hardly more than most of the other people in the story - Cousin Charles, for example.
(Yes, she killed her family. And then stepped back into her fantasy world, where no one was ever hurt, and only named what she had done at the end of a traumatic night where the village had destroyed so much of what she felt kept her safe.)
A child who grows up wild and only half present, who knows how to hide and builds elaborate spells to keep herself safe, dreaming of people who praised her - well, it reads very differently to me, with my experiences, than it might have then.
This book was published in 1961. Child abuse and neglect were still specters, ghosts barely named.
So perhaps I am more sympathetic to Mary Katherine than most. Perhaps even more than the author intended. But I can't help but read in some of my own history, reading in causes from the results I recognize.
And the logic, the rules, the patterns. The symbolic logic, the spellwork. It's all familiar. The author had agoraphobia, which is also seen in the story.
However, what struck me most was familiarity. I have OCD, and with it, a strong component of magical thinking. I spent much of my childhood in one fantasy world or another. Even now, it is not unfamiliar.
The afterword talked about gender, which is definitely present, though I don't think it's the main focus. It may simply be that the book is aware of gender in a way so many are not.
Of course, that is a part of the point. Building a little world out of place and out of time, cut off and untouchable. Exactly what Merricat would want; her own little gothic fantasy world on the moon.
Lovely little gothic tale. I kept being caught off guard by references to things like flashlights - it felt so much like a 1800's tale that any glint of modernity felt strange and foreign.
Took a break from my current book to read Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived In The Castle. #booksky #bookreview 🧵
Yeah, I love my online peeps, but I've really been missing an irl community lately. Have fun at the group!
I'm drunk and watching the shittiest slop monster movies i can find
I appreciate you making the distinction
That dog might be smarter than me
Aww
Linked it in my reading group; this looks interesting as fuck
A friend watched it over the weekend and we spent the rest of the night speculating which fictional couples would go through the process intentionally and who would trick their partner into it.
...i mean.
I always describe it as "brain scrubbed with steel wool"
You deserve a Treat ♡
I paid off my car last month!
It's definitely an enjoyable read, though it does leave me with the same feeling podcasts often do - I want to know more. But it's a place for further research to start
Queerness is a social construct - action or identity or category of humanity, all at different points in history. (It's also about who gets termed "bad". That's a social construct too.)
This book is about that complexity but also about gayness in the context of power. Who gets to be protected by the system and who gets punished for it. And crucially about the messiness of trying to define "gay" in a historical context. You can't apply a modern understanding and project back.
(In truth, I picked up the book to learn more about Ernst Rohm without having to dig through a mountain of Pink Swastika nonsense.)
It's a little tug of complexity to topics that are all too often flattened down to simplicity. And that complexity compels me.
People often want it all to be simple, to know who they can trust and who's on 'their side'. And sometimes that can go along demongraphic lines, with people who share experiences. And sometimes it very much does not. Humans have infinite possibilities, after all.
I'm always fascinated by these people - queer people who support queer oppression, anti-feminist women. My mother was one of those; a college educated woman who insisted wives should submit to their husbands and was eternally frustrated that her husband wasn't interested in her submission.
My current book is Bad Gays: a Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller of @badgayspod.bsky.social #booksky #queer 🧵
Congratulations! You absolutely deserve it
Man, talk about using an mlk quote for the most insignificant thing.... sure, break out mlk for Church Camp, that's totally an appropriately weighty topic....
Oof that's all entirely too relatable
.....that image hurts me
Happy birthday♡♡♡
"No, we're Getting Back To Real Christianity, unlike Those Other Churches."says literally every church
I do kinda love how smart spiders are
I've known multiple trans masc people with joint pain from hypermobility whose pain has been greatly decreased by going on T, but it's only anecdotes right now so we don't know why
One of my favorite pieces I've done was first drafted in a grocery store, notebook propped up on the handle of the shopping cart.
That's such gross behavior, im so sorry
But there were definitely very earnest discussions with my best friend at summer camp that no, bring me to life is about Jesus, definitely!
I mostly used it as an excuse to get my religious mother to allow me to listen to it
Oh man, "evanescence is secretly a Christian band" is such a specific memory
I am one of nature's button smashers.
That's what I was gonna say!
The catch-22 of Godly Femininity is fascinating sometimes
People hit what they can reach, sometimes.
Real example from my life: I am clinging to a sense of control over my life with white knuckles. A friend proposes something i can do to help myself! My brain sees this as a threat to my autonomy like a terrified Yorkie with food aggression. That fight took three weeks and a therapist to sort out.
I feel like we have this story every couple of years
Being remade each time it's told, a little different each time
And stress makes things worse
I look forward to reading more of your work! (Less thoughtful reactions included, for the record, "i think my eyes are melting" and "i kinda want to claw my intestines out (positive)")