TTT: 10 Books on My Winter TBR list

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Top Ten Tuesday is hosted on That Artsy Reader Girl. Be sure to check out her blog for other takes on this week’s topic!

If fall is the season for all things cozy, for me winter is a time of reflection and stillness. This is the time of year I most enjoy reading in depth nonfiction like biographies and books about nature. Winter means long books for me–stories you can really sink your teeth into. And of course, it means reading a lot of poetry. Here are ten books on my to-read list that I’m hoping to spend some time with this season.

Fantasy

Throne of Glass Series by Sarah J. Maas (656 + 689 + 664 + 992 for a total of 3001 pages)

This is a great time of year to binge read (or in this case, binge finish, a series). Plus who doesn’t love to escape the winter weather into a world of magic and dragons? The books are long, but they so far have just flown by–perfect for gloomy winter weekends.

Fairy Tale by Stephen King (599 pages)

The cover for this book is just genius–and I really like King’s writing when it isn’t scary. His science fiction for example is really great. And even the horror still haunts me to this day, so you know he’s doing something right. This seems like a no brainer for my winter list.

Nonfiction

African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals by David Hackett Fisher (800 pages)

I love, love, love cultural and material histories that highlight marginalized communities. There is so much we take for granted about where our US American culture comes from, and this book aims at stripping that thick layer of ambivalent mayonnaise from our cultural history. I am here for it.

Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World by Victoria Finlay (512 pages)

Material history? Check. Fashion and fabric have been traditionally looked down upon as topics because of their close association with women but what we wear says a lot about us and how we interact with each other and the world. Historical dress and fabric fascinates me. This will not be the first history of fabric I’ve read and I dare say it will not be the last.

Poetry

All of these are longer books that have been sitting on my bookshelf

The Poetry of Rilke, translated by Edward Snow (663 pages)

Rilke is a poet made for the winter–lonely, romantic, meditative. And this translation is supposed to be the best.

Selected Poems by Jorge Luis Borges (481 pages)

This volume has side by side English and Spanish pairings, so I can attempt to read the Spanish and then read the translation and start matching them together. I’ve only read a few things by Borges, mostly short stories, but I’m hoping to rectify that a little this coming year.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, ed. J.D. McClatchy (592 pages)

This is one of two major 20th century poetry anthologies in my collection (the other one is from Penguin) and these primers are always a great introduction to major movements. Their size is a little intimidating, but I’m hoping to read both this year and see whether it’s worth keeping both or choosing my favorite as a reference.

A Little Book on Form by Robert Hass (429 pages)

This book cracks me up because its title is clearly ironic. Except that form could be talked about in volumes and volumes I suppose so perhaps it’s a fitting title after all. Anyway this is less poetry than poetics (though this has a host of other names) basically its nonfiction about poetry.

Historical Fiction

The Good Wife of Bath by Karen Brooks (560 pages)

A feminist reimagining of one Chaucer’s most interesting characters from The Canterbury Tales? You need say nothing more.

Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang (546 pages)

I don’t know if there’s any genre I can categorically say I love more than revisionist historical fantasy. I bought the audiobook of this and I can’t wait to listen to it on my way to and from the library. Or while doing dishes. Or doing anything really.

Are you planning on settling in with a long book this winter? Let me know which one in the comments.

Reading Through the Stacks: 14. John Brown’s Body by Stephen Vincent Benet – A Civil War epic – Part 1

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It took me a solid month (off and on) to finish this book. Normally I can read a book of poetry in a day because they’re usually only about a hundred pages, but this epic novel in verse weighs in at 385 pages. And I know you’re thinking, but Allie, if you can finish one hundred pages a day–then shouldn’t you have been able to finish this in under a week?

The answer to that is yes–except I really hate reading about the Civil War. And this was really dense narrative poetry that babbled on about battles. If you enjoy novels in verse, you might really enjoy Stephen Vincent Benét’s epic poem, John Brown’s Body. It really has a lot going for it and a lot going on in it. It’s complex, but although it’s told from multiple points of view and uses different meters, it’s linear and it tells a familiar story. Plus it was published in 1928, so it’s not like jumping into Shakespeare even though both authors mostly use blank verse. So if you enjoy reading about the Civil War you’ll probably enjoy this book.

That said, I have mixed feelings about the book, mostly due to the subject matter and how the Civil War is presented. This is not Benét’s fault–you can see this kind of treatment of history in oodles of history books, films, fiction, and popular narratives. I just don’t like it. There are some fantastic lines in this book, the women who are depicted are relatively complex and interesting, and while Benét spends a lot of time describing battles and army life–that’s not the sole focus of the book. Hardship in general is not the sole focus, and this gives the verse a lot of life and energy and kept me more engaged than I could have hoped for.

Since it took so long to read this book, I figure we’ll give it its due and split this into multiple posts. That way we can hit the most interesting bits, and I can rant about why I don’t like the Civil War time period (despite the hoop skirts).

In this post, we’ll just give a little context: I’ll tell you about the author, the format, the characters, and basically introduce you to the book. Then in later posts we’ll talk about:

  • how race is depicted in JBB (John Brown’s Body–I’m going to make free use of this acronym) and how white writers use race to bend our perceptions of the Civil War
  • how gender is depicted
  • the performance of this poem as a play at San Quentin
Photograph of Stephen Vincent Benet. Young white man with glasses wearing a suit.
Sourced from Poetry Foundation: Yale University Manuscripts & Archives Digital Images Database

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943) was super famous during his lifetime–bigger than T.S. Eliot or Robert Frost during the years he was alive. He was that mythical being–that unicorn of unicorns: a bestselling 20th century poet (selling in the tens of thousands). Finding this out really surprised me because I’d never heard of him. But some of his works are still in print and this epic novel in verse still graces the shelves of the Oakland Public Library.

He’s well known for romantic, heroic poetry that was his way of showing a patriotic spirit. He was admitted to the military at the end of WWI, but dismissed 3 days later for poor eyesight. Although he never served in the military, he makes great use of all kinds of sources to write movingly about war.

“Benét’s genius was for intelligent, affirmative, easily accessible, somewhat sentimental American portraiture of the sort that popular fiction and the movies sometimes exploited.”

Poetry Foundation

So really, it was no wonder he was so popular. While his contemporary poets were busy perfecting rhyme and meter (like Frost), considering the wonderous nature of the everyday (like William Carlos Williams) or pushing the envelope in terms of subject and form (like T.S. Eliot), Benét was creating American myths in the western myth tradition. In this sense, he reminds me a lot of L. Frank Baum in his creation of a distinctly US American fairy tale.

He applied and received a $2500 grant from the Guggenheim Foundation in 1925 to complete the epic verse on the Civil War, and they moved to the much cheaper Paris so that the family could live off of the money for as long as it took to complete the manuscript (Poetry Foundation). Benet created the work much sooner than he expected–15,000 lines in only about 2 years. And it was marvelously successful both critically and financially, outdoing Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha (and it is much better than that particularly epic poem–that I can tell you) (Poetry Foundation).

The poem is divided into 10 sections, an invocation to the muse (which sets up the genre as epic poetry in the Greek tradition), a portion set on a slave ship (the horrors of which are really hard to read), and then the rest of the story moves through 8 books or episodes. Book 6 is probably my favorite as it has the most female characters and the least amount of battles.

So what is the epic poem about? It’s sort of a panorama, an almost cinematic take on the Civil War featuring characters on both sides of the war, battles and ballrooms, enslaved people and generals. Although it is very much a product of its time and has the white cultural superiority lens you might expect, it is also extremely well put together and more sympathetic than I would have expected, especially towards its female characters (although it never reaches towards empathetic, which is a failing in my opinion). It moves through different years and different scenes with a sense of drama, which is why it totally makes sense that it was performed as a play. I’m looking forward to seeing the San Quentin performance, and I’ll give you my thoughts on that in an upcoming post.

But to end today’s post, I thought we’d just talk a little about John Brown, in case you were wondering about the title.

“John Brown’s Body” was a Union song during the Civil War. It’s pretty rousing honestly, and you’ll probably recognize the tune even if you’ve never heard the words because the poet Julia Ward Howe turned the tune (changing the words) into the Battle Hymn of the Republic. You can read more about the history in this PBS article.

And who is heaven looking down on kindly while his body is a mouldering in the grave? That would be the abolitionist John Brown. He believed that all slaves should be set free immediately, and was willing to fight in order to do so. Many of his sons also joined him in this quest, which he believed was a holy mission. He was… kind of out there honestly. He was arrested after holding Harper’s Ferry for a few days and executed, but he became something of a Union and abolitionist martyr. If you’re interested in reading more about John Brown, but from an African American perspective, I would highly recommend reading The Good Lord Bird by James McBride, which follows a young, recently freed Black boy who joins (not so willingly) John Brown’s crusade for freedom. It is satirical and challenging, but so well written. Honestly one of my favorite books I’ve ever written in this time period.

We could go on about this book, but I think that’s a good place to end this first section. We’ll get into more detail in the next installment and actually look at some lines from the piece!

How do you feel about the Civil War time period? About epic poetry? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

TTT: 10 Books with Birds on the Cover

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Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. Be sure to check out different takes on this week’s freebie topic on her site!

* * *

“Gee, I wish I were outside.” – Gizmo

We are currently bird sitting for one of my partner’s coworkers. Gizmo is an adorable green-cheeked conure, but goodness birds are so much work! We’ve learned a lot about her though in the time we’ve spent together. She loves sunflower seeds and grapes, makes the cutest noise when she finds a tunnel, and is generally too smart for her own good. Although my partner was hoping he’d bond with the bird more, the bird has definitely glommed onto me. So needless to say, I haven’t gotten all that much done except entertain this little lady and birds have been on my brain. Since this week is a freebie, I thought we could do 10 books with birds on the cover.

I went through my to-read list on Story Graph, and there were 36 books with birds featured prominently on the cover. So to make this list a little more interesting (and to narrow it down, quite frankly). Here’s 10 books each featuring a different bird/s. Let me know if any of these covers intrigue you to read more–which is the greatest compliment you can give to a cover in my opinion.

The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li

I think this cover is quite stunning.

The angles of the birds heads are unusual (though not totally unnatural) and intriguing.

The detailed birds contrast so beautifully with the stark orange semi-circle representing the sun. And that handwritten font is just perfect.

genre: fiction

mood: dark and fairy tale-esque

Parakeet by Marie-Helene Bertino

Don’t you love the way they did the typography on this cover? Like a bird’s screech, the title grows larger, impossible to ignore. I also really like the plain background and the bird impossibly sitting atop and upside down elevator button.

In the book, a young woman is about to be married and is visited by the spirit of her dead grandmother in the form of a parakeet. In my family, we say we’re being visited by departed family members whenever we see a hummingbird–so this feels like a really intriguing take on that idea.

genre: fiction

mood: funny, heart-warming, offbeat

The Wild Hunt by Emma Seckel

I don’t know if it’s just because I read so many fantasy books or if ravens and crows are just popular books for covers, but there were sooooooo many corvids to choose from. I really liked this cover, which showcases the beautiful iridescent feathers–just enough to clue you in on what bird it is, but still showcasing the beautiful abstract patterning.

Also that ‘H’? Gorgeous. And I love the way the wing partially obscures the title just like the way the bird is obscured. You can tell from the cover that this book is going to look at things a little differently.

genre: historical fiction

mood: mysterious & transporting

The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan

A deceptively simple cover– a white, textured silhouette of a bird on an ombre backdrop. But don’t you love how the feathers look like drips?

I really like the way the typography fits within the silhouette and looks hand drawn. It feels very playful and artisitic.

genre: young adult (YA)

mood: emotional (first love)

The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman

I didn’t choose a lot of nonfiction books about birds for this list, but this one has such a beautiful scrub jay on the cover that I couldn’t resist. The detailed Audobon-like rendering of the scrub jay is so lifelike, but then you have the sketched perch underneath, which makes the cover feel more self-aware and interesting.

genre: nonfiction

mood: informative, lyrical

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

I’m not sure what type of feather this is (if anyone knows you should definitely leave it in the comments), but I love the way it dissolves into the birds who fly off onto the cover). It’s an especially appropriate cover for a protagonist named Bird and which takes inspiration from Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers” poem.

genre: literary fiction

mood: reflective, family drama

Other Birds by Sarah Addison Allen

A lot of books with magical elements use a raven on the cover, often intertwined with other gothic elements, so it’s nice to see a treatment of birds on a cover in such a bright blue. I like the midair flight layered on top of the bird cage and the way the typography echoes the colors. Very simple and elegant.

genre: magical realism

mood: whimsical, mysterious

When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo

What’s better than one bird on the cover? Lots! And they blend so beautifully into this foliage–you have to hunt for them. Then you have the typography and the silhouettes intermixed…I just think this one is gorgeous.

genre: literary fiction, magical realism

mood: emotional, mysterious

Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett

I think this spring green and hot pink combination is really striking. Maybe I’m just partial to it because I threw my aunt a baby shower in these colors. The title creates an interesting little puzzle for the viewer. If the things in the novel are mostly dead–does that mean the flamingo is alive or dead. Is it taxidermy on the cover?

Also I think there’s always something fantastical about a flamingo. They make me think of Alice in Wonderland. I like the fluid, bendy bird contrasted with the rough, all caps, poster like lettering.

genre: fiction

mood: dark comedy

Owls: Our Most Charming Birds by Matt Sewell

Not a groundbreaking cover, I’ll admit. But the owl illustrations are just too stinking cute. Plus I love owls. They’re the cutest little sky killers. If you like adorable bird illustrations, I think Sewell actually has several books. This would probably make a lovely little holiday gift for someone who enjoys owls. Which is probably almost everyone.

genre: nature, nonfiction

mood: informative

The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson

Okay–so I couldn’t narrow it down to 10. But I think 11 is pretty good! Here’s another feather close-up. The museum-y label is the most distinctive thing about the cover, but feathers themselves have so much color and texture that it doesn’t matter. The type is simple, but I like how it’s woven around the featherrs.

I like true crime books most especially when they’re about thefts and heists, and this one seems like it’ll have all the thriller aspects you could ask for.

genre: nonfiction, true crime

mood: adventurous, mysterious

Did any of these covers catch your eye? Have you read any of these books? Share about books or bird stories in the comments!

Reading Through the Stacks: 13. Let there be plot!

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Let’s read through Oakland Public Library’s poetry collection.

Taking a break from the 20th century, we’re going to chat about a poetry collection from a famous author, who’s asking a very interesting question within her poems:

How many words does it take to tell a story?

Margaret Atwood (1939-) is a prolific writer in nearly every genre. She really doesn’t need me to give her an introduction. But if you haven’t read a book by Margaret Atwood, you could do worse than to start with her poetry. She started publishing poetry in the 1960s–and her first two books were award winners. She writes about the nature of dualities, about women and their treatment by society, and about grief. Her writing is pretty lean and very easy to read. She uses questions effectively throughout her poems and encourages readers to engage with difficult ideas. Dearly is her first new collection in over a decade, and uses fairy tales and songs to look at life, aging, and our connection with each other and the planet.

And if you are new to poetry–this is a great collection to start with–especially since it Atwood has enough bestselling weight to make an audiobook of her collection. It’s available on Libby from the San Francisco Public Library, and likely from your local library too. The audiobook is read by Atwood.

Plot abounds throughout these poems. Sometimes this is absolutely explicit such as in the pronouncement at the end of “The Tin Woodsman Gets a Massage”: “Let there be plot.” I think this commitment to plot, which is not always a common poetry element, makes Atwood’s work more approachable to readers who are used to reading fiction. There are narratives and stories woven into the poems.

It’s more common in poetry for narrative to be used as allusion. “The Tin Woodsman Gets a Massage” is a clear example of this–we’re expected to understand the reference so that the poet doesn’t have to explain the narrative but can instead allude to it and draw new comparisons and conclusions. Older poets (and Atwood herself) frequently draw on mythological or biblical stories to do this, more modern poets often reach to fairy tales, popular culture, and other stories. But the point is still the same–to use a comparatively well known reference to illuminate something personal. Atwood often uses these devices to make familiar things less familiar. Her speakers are extremely skeptical of appearances:

“The world that we think we see
is only our best guess.”

from “Walking in the Madman’s Wood”

One of the things I absolutely love about this collection is how much Atwood can communicate in three lines–an entire film as it turns out:

“The aliens arrive.
They are smarter than us, and carnivorous.
You know the rest.”

from “The Aliens Arrive: Nine Late Night Movies”


She also makes great use of repetition, as in the poem “Souvenirs” the repetition of “remember” works really interestingly in this quote. It brings its own rhythm to the poem, but to me it also suggests an accompanying fear–that of forgetting. As if saying the word over and over again becomes a kind of spell or charm:

“But who is to remember what?
It’s a cute cat hat, but you’ve never been there.
I can remember buying it
and you can remember that I once
remembered: I remembered
something for you.”

from “Souvenirs”

Also, can we take a second to appreciate the hard ka sound of “cute” and “cat” and then the sing-song rhyme of “cat” and “hat”?

Atwood’s poetry asks a lot of questions, and its generally really well done, but I think this example might be a rare overuse. What are your thoughts? Do we need all 3 questions here? All four lines? I think I would have stopped at two.

“Do we have goodwill?
To all mankind?
Not any more.
Did we ever?”

from “The Twilight of the Gods”

I love the use of song language throughout the poems as well. But I think I’ve gushed enough. Margaret Atwood definitely doesn’t need me to plug her work, but I’ll do it anyway. Go and read Dearly!

TTT: 10 Series I Can’t Wait to Finish and/or Start

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Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.

Are you the type of person that can finish a series? I am….not generally that person. There are a few series that I love–that I’ve read multiple times, but to be honest those are mostly books that I started as a kid or young adult. And even then, some series I didn’t finish until I was older like A Series of Unfortunate Events. And by the time I did, well the window where I was going to love that book had sort of passed me by. Although I really enjoyed the Netflix show.

I was obsessed with the Harry Potter books and read them all multiple (multiple) times, but there’s not a lot of other series I can say that about. I’m a serial series starter. I have a really hard time when not all the books are published or published in a reasonable timeframe (ahem GoT and The Kingkiller Chronicles) because I hate waiting for a new book to come out. I also don’t have a lot of patience for series of more than 10 books. I do okay with trilogies (especially when I’m reading them for a book club or something), but on the whole I mostly read standalone books.

But like all (arbitrary) rules, there’s always exceptions. Most of the series are ones I’d like to finish, and just two I’d like to start. But of course, I start series all the time so this list is always changing.

Series I’d Like to Finish:

Thursday Next by Jasper Fforde (finished 2/7 books)

Do you like books about books? How about saving the world through a combination of bureaucracy and butt-kicking? If you answered yes to both these questions, you’ll probably enjoy Thursday Next, who lives in an alternate world where books are of great importance–in fact they might even save the day. The first book, The Eyre Affair, follows Thursday, a veteran from the never-ending war, in her job in Special Ops, and her division deals with book crimes. She gets pulled into a plot that involves evil corporations, evil geniuses, and lots of literary references. If you are a fan of Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett, I think you’ll probably enjoy these books a lot.

Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas (finished 4/8 books, first 3 and the prequel)

My friend recommended these books to me and they are so much fun. Who doesn’t love an assassin protagonist with a love of fancy clothes who is secretly… but we won’t go there. And love triangles? That’s so simple. We deal with complexity. Why not love pentagons? love octagons? I would have had 5 of them read, but I had to turn the book in when we moved and I haven’t gotten it out at the library again. I wish the library had the whole series as audiobooks.

Flavia de Luce by Alan Bradley (finished 2/11 and counting)

Okay so I read the first two of the Flavia de Luce series featuring a precocious preteen detective with a love of all things grisly and a knack for chemistry. It’s like someone shook up A Series of Unfortunate Events and We Have Always Lived in the Castle with a whole lot of mystery. The reason I’ve held off is that the series isn’t finished yet. But maybe this will be less of a problem once I get a few more books under my belt.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (finished 1/5 books)

I really, really enjoyed the first one, and I’d like to just get them all out from the library at the same time, including the first one, and binge read them all the way through.

Great Cities by N.K. Jemisin (finished 1/2?)

I loved The World We Make, and honestly I think the first book stood on its own, but it was also so good that I think it’s worth reading the sequel. I don’t know if this series will have more than two books, but the fact that the second one came out so quickly (Jemisin seems like an author who actually finishes her series) makes me feel a little more confident about picking this one up.

Shades of Magic by V.E. Schwab (1/3 books)

There’s only 3 books. The first one was really good. Series should really not be this hard to finish–that’s what I keep telling myself.

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (1/3 books)

How have I only read one of these? I honestly don’t know.

The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss (1/3? books)

I refuse to read the second one until the final one comes out. This is silly. I have principles. The first one was so good, but it was clearly not meant as a standalone experience and they are dense so I only want to reread the first one.

Series I’d Like to Start:

Discworld by Terry Pratchett (41(ish?) books. Gulp.)

My first introduction to Terry Pratchett was through Good Omens, and I know deep, deep in my bones that I’m going to love these books. But–there are so many! I think I will read them in sub-series order because then I can break up the larger world into smaller, more manageable series. That seems more doable.

The Wilderwood by Hannah Whitten (2 books, so far?)

These look like some good, dark fairy tale adaptions, which are generally my preferred reading material.

Have you read any of these series? Do you have a favorite book series? Let me know in the comments!

Reading Through the Stacks: 12. Modern Rhymes and Meter

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Join me on a tour through the Oakland Public Library’s poetry collection.

Today we’re talking about a semi-modern master, Elizabeth Bishop. Since The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 is, well, complete, I didn’t pick up any other collections of her work. And I’ll be doing that throughout this challenge–reading the most complete book where possible.

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was a relatively unknown poet during her lifetime, only publishing about 100 poems. She liked to tinker and perfect her works instead of moving onto new ones. Even with a small set of poems (the collection is less than 300 pages), she’s considered to be one of the most important 20th century poets. She’s referenced a lot in books about poetry, and she won a Pulitzer as well as a National Book Award.

Many of her poems use older forms–she has a flair for iambic meter and rhyme, but she often doesn’t feel beholden to making strict use of these forms. She frequently varies meter and uses off rhyme within her poems, so though her work is really structured, it feels much more modern and contemporary than I would have expected. Bishop also painted, and her images are crystal clear, nuanced, and clever.

I am not the biggest fan of rhyme when it comes to poetry (probably because it’s really not my strong suit), so I have to admit that while I loved a lot of lines out of Bishop’s poems, I loved fewer of her full poems. But still lines like this inspired me to add them to my collection:

“sluggish fireflies
the jellyfish of the air”

from “Manuelzinho”

She just has such a gift for image. With just a few words she manages to convey mood, movement, and another place, another world.

I also like the way the speaker in Bishop’s poems doesn’t just declare, she thinks and feel. This gives her poems a lighter touch, as if you are taken on a journey with the speaker to find the right words to convey the experience:

The great light cage has broken up in the air,
freeing, I think, about a million birds
whose wild ascending shadows will not be back,
and all the wires come falling down.

from “Four Poems: II / Rain Towards Morning

Freed birds out a giant birdcage is an unusual metaphor for rain, but the insertion of ‘I think’ really struck me since there’s nothing concrete to be uncertain about. Instead it communicates not that the metaphor is not uncertain for the speaker, but that the scale is uncertain.

Some of the poems in the book are definitely a product of their time. If not quite racist, they certainly bring up uncomfortable aspects of United States culture towards race and white superiority:

the unassertive colors of soap, or postage stamps–
wasting away like the former, slipping the way the latter
do when we mail the letters we wrote on the boat,
either because the glue here is very inferior
or because of the heat. We leave Santos at once; 
we are driving to the interior.

from “Arrival at Santos”

I would say on the whole, the poem from which this is taken is critical about the tourist’s expectations and viewpoints, but not quite critical enough to assume that in a different country things were going to be not just different than what the speaker is used to but worse. This is a pretty tame example, but it illustrates subtle attitudes in a handful of her poems. Granted, inferior/interior is a good rhyme but has a lot of colonialist undertones.

Reading this book at the same time as I was reading a book on formal poetics (rhyme and meter and such) was very interesting because Bishop plays with form a lot and was referenced in the book several times. Overall her work is little formal for my taste, but she’s definitely a pretty approachable poet who rewards readers with really lovely sounding lines and excellent alliteration.

Hidden, oh hidden
in the high fog
the house we live in,
beneath the magnetic rock,
rain-, rainbow-ridden,
where blood-black
bromelias, lichens,
owls, and the lint
of the waterfalls cling,
familiar, unbidden.

from “Song for the Rainy Season”

Visit the Poetry Foundation’s site to read some of Bishop’s best known work in full such as “The Moose” and “One Art.”

TTT: My 10 Favorite Fictional Unlikable Characters

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Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.

For me, reading is all about the characters. I want them to be interesting. I want them to have chutzpah and gumption and a *teensy* bit of common sense. They need to develop, have interesting viewpoints, be flawed. So actually, I really like the normally “unlikable” characters. I think villains are interesting. They have goals, ambition, flaws, a story arc. My actual least favorite characters are not bad–they’re one dimensional. I have (and will continue to) stop reading a book if the main character

1) delights in violence and evil “just because”

2) they are wishy washy and let everyone walk over them with nary a peep of protest

3) don’t let anything change them over the course of the story

4) don’t have interesting flaws/motivation/back story

5) are continually whining

6) they have no self-awareness

Strong characters have flaws. And sometimes those flaws are formidable, horrible, and gut wrenching. But if they’re interesting, I’ll enjoy the book not despite, but because of the complexity.

From least to most favorite character (not necessarily book):

the narrator from My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

This is one of those books that people either love or hate. The main character is vain, petty, and totally willing to do what it takes to escape from her life in the form of keeping herself drugged. Like if Sleeping Beauty chose her curse. But although I couldn’t relate to the narrator I found this scenario so insanely outside my realm of understanding, I just had to keep reading. I wanted to understand this character even though I didn’t like her at all. That never happened. But it was still a great book in my opinion. An unapologetically unlikable figure.

pretty much everyone in The Secret History by Donna Tartt

I don’t have a favorite unfavorite character from this book. I love/hated them all equally. Like Moshfegh, Tartt is really skilled with unlikable characters. I would never want to inhabit their world, but I liked the peek through the window.

also pretty much everyone, but especially Behemoth in The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

I really love this book, where the Devil comes to Moscow, creates a witch, and then puts on a party. Behemoth is a monstrous (in size but also in behavior) black cat who also has a human form. I think he’s actually more unlikable than the Devil but he’s so much fun and creates so much mischief. Now I want to reread it.

Dorian Gray from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Oh Dorian, so vain and dumb to think that life wouldn’t eventually catch up with you… but it’s fun while it lasts.

Zenia from The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

She’s manipulative, gorgeous, and even her friends love to hate her. But you can’t really hate all that glamor and poise. At least I can’t. I think she also makes an appearance in several of Atwood’s short stories.

Olympia/Oly from Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

Oly is kind of entitled to be unlikable. She’s dealt with a lot of traumatic crap in her life such as her parents purposefully trying to get their children to have “interesting” birth defects for their circus act….

the wizard from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

I think the Witch of the West is pretty one dimensional in the original book–she’s much more complex in the Wicked books, but ultimately not unlikable, which negates her for this list. No, my favorite unlikable character from the first book is definitely the wizard. Oh that lovable humbug. He’s just such an American villain—faking it till he makes it. He becomes more likable in subsequent books in the series–leaning into his role as inventor, showman, and tinkerer honestly.

Hugo from The Epicure’s Lament by Kate Christensen

Hugo is so grumpy. He has so many hot takes. But this novel is complex and philosophical and I just really like him in spite of his grouchy behavior. Don’t attempt the sauce recipe he makes through. Blech. I did–and I’m telling you now–save yourself.

The Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Off with her head! I mean–almost everyone in these two books is unlikable. I don’t really like Alice all the time. Especially the Disney version where she comes off as a little insipid. But the book is so playful, so absurd and delightful, and no one embodies this quite as much as the Queen of Hearts and her bloodthirsty whims.

Lady Bracknell from The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

I’m actually not sure if Lady Bracknell is supposed to be unlikable. But since she tries to thwart the lovers–I’m counting it. I absolutely love this character and how snobby she is. This is a play where the writing is much more lovable than any of the characters to be honest, but it’s one of my absolute favorite…book is not the right word. Pieces of fiction? She’s a very complex character as well–probably the most complex in the play. She actually changes her mind rather than the circumstances changing to suit her. Although pretty much everything she says runs counter to my own beliefs, she just says it so decisively and with so much wit.

“I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like delicate exotic fruit; tough it and the bloom is gone.”

Lady Bracknell, Act One

Who is your favorite unlikable character? Let me know in the comments.

TTT: 10 Slightly Creepy But Not Horrifying Halloween Movies

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Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.

This week’s prompt was a freebie related to Halloween. I love Halloween. The dress up and magic and witches and candy and caramel apples….so fantastic. One of my favorite things to do around this time of year is watch Halloween appropriate movies. But I’m not a fan of horror. I don’t particularly like to be scared. I do like things that are a little dark, unexplained, morbid, and/or creepy–just nothing with a ton of gore and violence and jump scares and menacing music so that I have to sleep with the lights on for a week.

So I went through my list on Kanopy. Kanopy is a streaming service that your library might subscribe to–every month you get a certain number of views of mostly indie, classic, international, and documentary films. I picked some films off of my watchlist that aren’t horror but are certainly appropriate for this time of year that always feels closer to pumpkins, warm drinks, and walks at twilight. Scroll down to find lots of Halloween appropriate documentaries, foreign films, and fairy tales.

If you don’t have Kanopy, you can rent these on your favorite rental streaming site or probably pick them up as DVDs from your library. If they’re streaming on a different site, I’ve noted that. These are in the order that I viewed them.

Stuffed (2019)

How do you feel about taxidermy? It’s a little creepy to me in that it brings up uncanny valley feelings–the best taxidermy is beautiful and still, it is pretty clearly not alive. I thought this documentary was great–they interview a ton of different taxidermy artists. Some have a very scientific approach because they work in museums, others use taxidermy to create stories. It’s a good amount of creepy, but what I appreciated was the care and respect for animals as well as for the artform and fellow practitioners. Also, if you’d asked me before how taxidermy was done I would have had no idea, so in that sense this documentary is fairly educational as well. It’s well shot and compelling.

Burke & Hare (2010)

If Sweeney Todd was not a musical and was laugh out loud funny (when it wasn’t gasp inducing), it would pretty much be this film. It is, in a word, ludicrous in all the best ways. It’s set in 1828, and the famous anatomists in Edinburgh need bodies to dissect so Burke & Hare bravely step up to fulfill this need. Every character is mocking each other, but rarely themselves, and the cast is fantastic. Everyone is talking in a Scottish accent. There’s murder and an all-female production of Macbeth. I mean–what more can you ask for?

also available on Roku, Sling TV, and Amazon prime with premium subscriptions.

Exhumed: A History of Zombies (2021)

So I am not a big fan of zombies. But I am a huge fan of pop culture histories. And this documentary traces the story of zombies in popular culture all the way to its roots. And by doing so reveals the real horror–racism and enslavement. I learned so much about a genre I typically avoid–if you’re even passingly interested in zombies or how horror elements proliferate in culture, I would highly recommend this short documentary.

Available online through PBS.

Therapy for a Vampire (2014)

Okay so this one is actually a monster movie. But it’s more of a comedy than anything. I mean the vampires sound like roaring lions. If anything, this German film is kind of campy. But I love the premise of a vampire seeking psychoanalysis from Sigmund Freud. It’s delightfully ridiculous and plays with vampire tropes in a really amusing way. It also has really interesting things to say about image and understanding of ourselves.

Also streaming on Tubi.

Mary Shelley (2017)

This biopic starring Elle Fanning wasn’t really horrifying (except for how much I disliked the costumes, maybe), but since Shelley is the author of Frankenstein, it seemed appropriate for this list. It kind of reminds me of Shakespeare in Love in that it traces an author’s work through a love story. This is much sadder though. But it ends fairly well, so you won’t necessarily be reaching for the tissue box.

Also streaming on Tubi.

La Belle et la Bete (1946)

Jean Cocteau’s classic take on Beauty and the Beast has been on my list for a while. And since I tend to watch a lot of fairy tale films this time of year, it seemed appropriate to include. Plus watch this film and tell me that the disembodied arms holding the candelabras and the fireplace heads aren’t all kinds of creepy! The film is really well done, and you can see a lot of inspiration between this film and the Disney version in the early 90s such as the talking objects, the character of Gaston, the way the Beast is drawn, and so on. I loved the costumes in this film. They are so over the top in the best possible way. Also–no I won’t spoil the ending if you haven’t seen it. But it’s a great ending!

Also streaming on HBO max. It was also remade in 2014, and that version, titled Beauty and the Beast is streaming on Amazon Prime, Pluto, Tubi, Peacock.

Tale of Tales (2015)

This is the closest film to actual horror on this list. There are a few pretty horrifying scenes, but I didn’t find it particularly scary. It’s not really dark–all the horror is in the light–and nothing jumps out at you or anything. But the whole thing is masterful. The film explores three adjacent kingdoms and the magical craziness that happens in each one. Each kingdom has a different path, and the tales are interwoven. They seem to draw from a lot of different fairy tales and tropes, so if you’ve got a lot of knowledge of folklore, you’ll definitely recognize certain elements and tales. But the cinematography, the mise en scene, the talented character actors they chose–it’s just captivating. It’s been a long time since I watched a film that was this magical–in the dark, Angela Carter sense.

The Frankenstein Complex (2015)

This documentary introduces you to the people behind the monsters from horror, science fiction, and action films. The documentary moves chronologically from the use of special effects makeup through puppetry, stop motion, animatronics, and finally to CGI effects. Although the people interviewed were really fascinating, I wasn’t a huge fan of how the film was cut together (a lot of scenes from films are referenced but not shown) and the editing was a little off pace. But I loved seeing how some of these props were made and seeing the people who brought some amazing creatures and characters to life.

Blancanieves (2012)

If you watch one movie from this list, I hope it’s this one. This Spanish adaptation of Snow White, told as a silent film about bullfighting was so gorgeous. It’s in black and white, so there’s this amazing attention to texture and detail. And it’s just really beautiful and heartbreaking. I feel like over the years a lot of the feeling has been stripped from this story, but this film really puts heart back into it.

Also streaming on Tubi.

The Witches of Hollywood (2020)

This documentary looks at how witches have been portrayed in films in the United States. This is a pretty narrow focus, but there’s plenty to look at and talk about. I wasn’t a huge fan of the voiceover, but the people they interviewed were interesting, and they showed a lot of film clips. I found a couple films to add to my watchlist. The documentary didn’t go too deeply into film analysis (although there is some of that), instead it focuses on how the witch evolves alongside the progression of culture in United States and responds to the current preoccupations about womanhood. Pretty fascinating, all told.

Any of these films catch your eye? Do you have a favorite movie to watch around this time of year? Let me know in the comments.

TTT: A Dozen of My Favorite Words

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Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.

This week’s prompt is book-adjacent, but a fun prompt for me as a poet. It’s about favorite words. And actually limiting it to ten was extremely difficult, so I have chosen (with much narrowing down) a dozen to share with you.

Have you ever repeated a word so often that it loses all its meaning? All the significance is gone and you just have the sound. You begin to question the spelling–and if you keep going, you question the sound too. Have you been mispronouncing, misunderstanding this word all your life?

The famous Shakespeare line “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” suggests (rightly according to much of literary and linguistic theory) that the word and the thing bear no real relation except the associations that we as speakers make. These associations are deeply held, but we’ve seen throughout history that words can change meaning, take on new meanings, and be invented altogether. Language is fluid and dynamic–it evolves with us and can’t be taken for granted.

All this rambling is to say, I chose these words for the sounds, for how I feel about the sounds and the way they feel in my mouth rather than their meaning alone (but of course meaning creeps in). I also like the way many of these words suggest other words or suggest moods. It’s hard to stop at 10, so here are 12 I really like, deliberately not in alphabetical order but rather the order in which they came to mind.

1. scandalous

Starting off with a three syllable word. Something about it feels luscious or luxurious to me. The first syllable lingers in the mouth so the rest feels like a secret.

2. lounge

So onomatopoeia is when a word for the sound tries to imitate a sound, and I almost feel like lounge does that. Doesn’t it sound like it just wants to lie around all day?

3. close

Say this word out loud. Then tell me if you thought of close as in close the door or as in hold me close. Interesting right?

4. swing

This word has energy, it moves up in pitch when you say it, and I love how it contains the flight of wing. I have my own personal memories attached to this word too–swings and my childhood seem inextricably linked.

5. skip

I mean this word is obviously short, but it’s short when you say it too, has a skid and stop quality, like it’s full of false starts.

6. elusive

I think this word doesn’t really sound all that elusive or hard to grasp, like scandalous it lingers–I like the word because it’s kind of sensual and the syllables are pleasing. But a word like rural seems way more elusive to me in terms of its pronunciation.

7. shade

I love both interpretations of this word, from the dappled sunlight under a tree to throwing shade. Either way, it covers you.

8. moment

Another word I feel is more elusive than elusive. This word wants to hang on, but instead it slips away. It’s soft too, like a whisper or murmur.

9. vine

I think I like v sounds, and -ine is great too. How possessive mine feels or entwine. But vines themselves? I can take them or leave them. Ivy is pretty. And a pretty word too. Too bad I swore I’d stop at 12.

10. spool

I love these sounds. That double oo is just wonderful to read.

11. nimble

This word’s sounds fit the meaning for me, quick and weaving

12. fall

I actually don’t like they way most of the -all words sound, I think the ‘f’ softens it a bit and gives it a less uniform texture, even for a word that’s so short.

bonus words:

I’m a word addict and I can’t help myself!

praline

I have this memory of my cousin ordering pralines and cream at Baskin Robbins when I was a kid. (pray-lean was her pronunciation) and it just sounded so decadent. She was acting in a local troupe at the time and she’s always had a marvelous voice. But in that moment I thought that was the coolest ice cream order anyone had ever made.

wicked

This one is just too much fun. If you’ve listened to the soundtrack for the show, maybe you have also fallen in love with the way Idina Menzel pronounced this word.

Let me know some of your favorite words in the comments!

Reading Through the Stacks: 11. Summer at the Cinema

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The sloth painting on the cover reinforces the purposefully slow, thoughtful pace of the collection.

Join me as I read through the Oakland Public Library poetry collection.

So this week has not quite gone to plan, and this book is going to be a few days overdue. Whoops. But I’m glad that I finished it and didn’t just turn it back in because I so thoroughly enjoyed Troy Jollimore‘s collection, Earthly Delights.

This is another new book from the library’s collection, and it’s Jollimore’s (1971-) fourth book of poetry. Jollimore is also a philosopher and teaches at California State University, Chico. Although I didn’t know that before reading the collection, it doesn’t surprise me. The collection is meditative and playful, especially with themes of leaving and return, such as in the last poem of the collection which is an imagination of Odysseus before he leaves Ithaca. There’s a lot of looking back in the book, but I wouldn’t call it nostalgic. Wistful for the beginnings of things maybe, but not nostalgic in the sense that it believes we can or should return to another time.

The book feels very summery to me. Part of this is the literal mention of summer in several poems, but it’s also a mood, a languid, slow moving rhythm that feels like long summer nights on the porch. It feels ripe, at its peak but also if you pick up some peaches, they may be rotten, such as discussions about our current political state. Here’s a sample of that summery feeling I’m picking up on:

it takes three drinks to make the music
sound the way it’s supposed to sound,
that the taste of the air on summer evenings

is always a little bit bitter,
always a little bit tinged with regret, that this is
your language, your city, and no one but you

can speak it, and no one but you can save it.
—

Troy Jollimore from “Landscape with Ambiguous Symbols”

Jollimore uses a ton of references–the classic ones are here of course–few collections are complete without mentions of Greek mythology, but beyond those references there is so much discussion of cinema. This takes the form of individual movies, such as a long poem on American Beauty and others on cinema classics that he calls screenshots. I don’t know if there’s a work like ekphrastic (poems about visual artwork) for poems about cinema, but it’s not a true ekphrasis in that it’s not really describing what we see so much as capturing some of the mood or a philosophical question the film delves into. For example, Jollimore delves into questions of identity in his poem about the film Being John Malkovich:

Being John Malkovich, John Malkovich
was pretty much the inevitable choice
to play the character ‘John Malkovich.’
Who else could imitate that wheedling voice,

…..

…But know,
the very question that the film itself

forces us to confront is, who am I
when someone else lives through me?…
—

Troy Jollimore, from “Screenshots: Being John Malkovich”

So the philosopher definitely comes through here–the film brings up questions, but the poem does not concern itself with answering the questions. Rather the poems (and this can be said about poetry throughout the book) rephrase the questions in really moving, insightful ways. Because of this the book feels intellectually rather than emotionally moving, and it’s clever without resorting to barbs.

I am excited to pick up a copy of this collection and start making notes in it. There’s so much to pick apart in this book, and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. This is definitely a book to reread.