In “The Dark Forrest” I legitimately thought the guy’s secret plan was going to be to >!teach everyone how to make psychic waifus like him, so that we all happily die out in a generation, before the aliens arrive!<. I was not correct.

I have a copy of “Ghost” by John Ringo, which has the dark distinction of being the only book that was ever “too much” for me.

I bought it with the intention of turning “Oh John Ringo, No!” into a drinking game. But no amount of liquor could get me through the sheer grossness of that book.

I grew up in a really religious place that censored all our movies for spicy, political, or religiously unapproved scenes. Their edit of The Matrix famously gave us a MUCH better ending (spoilers for the fake ending of a decades old movie):

Neo’s body dies, but being The One he is able to live on as a program. He is going to free humanity, but can never escape, himself. He is a god in the Matrix, but cannot leave, and has nobly decided to liberate everyone else, freeing them and dooming himself.

That’s how you know it’s a gothic novel, countenances all around.

I guess the counter argument is that not all art needs to be static. It can be multiple snapshots over time, as part of a continuous process of engagement.

One of the things I like about classical lit, for instance, is that the same text can have different meanings, and be understood or consumed in different ways, throughout history. I don’t HAVE to listen to The Iliad in fragmented ancient poetry, I can read it in English (and compare translations!) or enjoy one of many adaptations it. I don’t HAVE to take the ancient view of Hektor as a second rate hero, maybe I prefer the more modern reading where he fits out current standards of “honor”. Half the fun is seeing how the snapshots differ over the ages.

Ok here me out on this: Andrea Dworkin and Valerie Solanas. Both suffered lifelong sexual abuse, were college-educated survival-sex-workers, who considered their manuscripts to be their life’s passion. If you read “The SCUM Manifesto” and “Up Your Ass!”, it’s basically the lifestyle outlines in Dworkin’s semi-autobiographical novel “Ice and Fire”. Both were driven by a fire to see their work published that was often thwarted. But whereas Solanas was self-serving in her pursuit of notoriety and more than a bit hampered by mental illness, Dworkin was fixated on helping other women.

Just thought it was interesting to see how Dworkin can live the same life of an artist and survival-sex-worker, obsessed with writing about capitalism and the patriarchy, and be such a different person. Solanas is like Dworkin through a scary fun house mirror. She is, however, a lot funnier.

James Tiptree Jr. and Suzette Haden Elgin.

Both were early feminist/proto-feminists with academic backgrounds, who thought about how humans would perceive aliens.

Tiptree was a self-identified xenophile who did psych research on the desire for novel stimulation. She imagined that aliens would be so overwhelmingly NOVEL that we’d be irresistibly drawn to them. “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” is the best example, but it’s present in “With Delicate Mad Hands” and “The Women Men Don’t See” as well.

Hadin Elgin was a linguist who worked with the Sapir-Word hypothesis, the idea that language impacts what we perceive. SHE thought aliens would be SO novel that we’d be unable to relate to them in any way, and would instinctively isolate as much as possible. So in her Native Tongue trilogy, people generally want to avoid aliens if they don’t have the right linguistic training.

I pick books where I want to know what’s in them, even if the experience of reading them isn’t fun. I want the information contained in them, so I power through.

Also don’t feel bad about using “support literature”. If you aren’t understanding the themes of a book, look up what people say are the important themes, read some analysis by experts. Other people have already broken the path, make use of it.

They’re clearly a prep.

I had a professor who LOATHED Salt: A World History, said it was bad writing. I don’t know if she had academic complaints, but I can confirm it’s boring, in spite of being a cool topic.

That’s a good point, I don’t tend to read series that take more than 3-4 books.

I collect lesbian separatist sci fi.

Most of the books in the genre aren’t conventionally ‘good’. But there’s often a rawness to them that I love. Good authors can control how much of themselves they show to the reader, less experienced authors just put it all on the table.

Plus I had a weird upbringing that made FLDS people look like hippies, so seeing harsh gender divides through a lens of female empowerment is interesting to me. Like bizzaro-world.

Honestly, not to beat a dead horse, but the A Song of Ice and Fire debacle kind of soured me on reading books that don’t have sequels out yet. I wait until all the books are published, then I read the complete series.

Yes, all the time!

I try to pick a topic I want to become familiar with, or a genre I want to learn more about, and try to explore it. So I often end up buying a lot of primary sources that are a bit beyond me, and it takes a bit of background research before I can get anything out of them.

For instance, I read “Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen” by Liliʻuokalani (because how can you pass up that title?). I got so little out of it, because I didn’t understand Hawai’ian history. OK, so I go out and read the history book “Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands” by Gavan Daws. OK, I understand the political situation it took place in, but am 99% sure I’m missing out on a lot of cultural contexts and Daws is too. So I read “Kamehameha and His Warrior Kekūhaupiʻo” by Stephen Desha, which is a serialized account of the rise of the Hawai’ian monarchy meant to educate Hawai’ian people on their history but it’s a bit TOO Hawai’ian for me, so I have to get Nānā I Ke Kumu, Helu ʻEkahi/Look To The Source Volume I, which helps with interpretation of cultural context. And NOW I feel like I’m maybe prepared enough to loop back around and read Liliʻuokalani’s diaries, which cover the same time period as “Hawaii’s Story By Hawaii’s Queen” but give behind-the-scenes details.

The first time around is to figure out the plot, the second time around is to admire the construction.

I sometimes enjoy reading in genres where spoilers aren’t an issue, it helps with the re-reading mindset. You are expected to go into “The Iliad” already knowing the plot and every character’s backstory. It’s actually built into the text- Patrokles isn’t even referred to by name at first, you’re expected to recognize his dad’s name. There aren’t supposed to be any surprises, that’s not the focus of reading/listening to the story. Instead, you’re looking at the seams- asking “why is this passage here, why make that artistic choice?”

It’s not “books good, TV bad”, it’s more “complex, engaging art good, short-engagement art bad”. His wife DOESN’T watch the kind of complex TV shows you describe, she watches the equivalent of tiktok videos.

“Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry” ed David Ly and Daniel Zomparelli.

I normally like gay short stories, I normally like horror short stories, but I’m just not vibing with these. They’re leaning too heavily into the “monsters as an allegory for queerness” angle, but I just want to be spooked.

I just have The Iliad going on loop, I’m doing the Lattimore translation with a guide-book right now.

I sort by genre, because it helps me notice patterns in my reading, that I can then get really into. I just recently noticed I’ve read a higher than average number of books on lesbian nuns, so now I’m specifically looking for lesbian nun books.

I’m not gonna lie, printing errors give them a special allure to me.

Robert Heinlein, author of “Starship Troopers” was a Navy officer who served between WWI and WWII. Joe Haldeman, author of “The Forever War” was written by a Vietnam draftee. It’s apparent. Also the director of the movie “Starship Troopers”, Paul Verhoeven, was a child in Nazi-occupied Holland, and I feel makes a great followup viewing.

Naomi Alderman, author of “The Power” was Margaret Atwood’s protege. The book plays with it’s relationship to “The Handmaids Tale”. >!The smug, sexist academic as a framing device, for instance!<. I honestly consider “The Power” to be a better sequel than “The Testaments”.