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Amanda (Zelda is the cat)

@readwithzelda

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Lover of all things literary. Library hauls and secondhand bookshop love 🧡🤍🩷
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Like so many things John Darnielle has done, this book feels just slightly ahead of its time. (Pub 2014) I feel like it could enjoy a little renaissance with the current renewed interest in D&D and analog media.

This is a powerful story of the gift of retreating into imagination and games during times of pain, but also of the dangers of escape when it’s taken too far.

The story is one of a horribly disfigured main character, Sean, who lives a hermetic existence and creates mail-order rpgs. Subscribers to his games send self-addressed stamped envelopes to him along with their next moves and he sends them the next scene and choices. One of his games Trace Italian, has a cult-like following which leads to a mysterious and haunting death of one of its players.

Sean himself is a tragic figure, and as the book unrolls backwards we slowly learn his story. But as he says “I don’t believe in happy endings or even in endings at all, but I am as susceptible to moments of indulgent fantasy as anybody else” His games have no end either and the book itself remains true to this conceit. If you’re expecting a neatly tied bow, Darnielle gives us instead something much more real, human and raw.

An incredible book, as the pain is interspersed with a warm nostalgia for pre-internet days, when life was slower and more mysterious. When a lack of distraction led us into the recesses of our own imagination, for better or worse. by @readwithzelda

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3 days ago

Absolute CAMP! This book is very gruesome but fully hilarious. I ate it up in one day. What starts as a “be careful what you wish for” kind of story, turns into a “but if you want it bad enough, you’ll do anything to get it” kind of story.

The premise is that Martha, a trans woman who is living life completely under the radar, is living the ideal LA Pilates mom life; the handsome loving straight husband, the stepdaughter, the mom friends. And one day she gets the ultimate prize, a real, honest to gosh pregnancy. Is she a medical marvel or is it a demon spawn sent to destroy her life?

And truly, isn’t that the question every mother asks herself at some point?

Thank you to @netgalley and @putnambooks for the advanced copy! by @readwithzelda

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6 days ago

This has got to be one of the more fascinating books I’ve read in a while. The author, when interviewed, said that she wanted to make a puzzle of a book, a book that is about the internet without ever mentioning the internet, and I think that she really succeeded. The story is full of symbolism, but not obvious or cliche in any way.
We have a gothic and crumbling University, overrun by vegetation that is tended by a mysterious flock of druid-like gardeners. The setting feels both like a dystopian future, and the middle-ages. The when and where of the story is vague and clouded.
Our main character is no different, the book narrated as if from a journal entry, and at one point she states it is a confession, enhancing the already ominous tone. The story centers around her and her reactions to her family, a political argument on campus and her dark opinions of the world at large. This book is a whole vibe, and a tricky one to capture in a review, because I’ve never really read anything like it.
But, if you love a moody setting, shapeshifting and incomplete world-building and a narrator who is hard to like, and even harder to trust, this could be for you. But enter at your own risk!

#bookerprize #thevivisectors #gothicnovels by @readwithzelda

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11 days ago

My reaction reading the last chapter of this book:
Wait... wait - flips back and reads the last chapter again
ohhhhhhh, is it? Yeah, it is. It is!
laughs in female revenge - then questions my delight

I’ve been thinking about this book for days! It’s gotten pretty mixed reviews, but I absolutely loved it. I may even put it up there as one of my favorites this year. It’s so unique.

Told in six Acts, we start with Act 1, Man. A professor who has been canceled by the women in his department, we hear his defensive posture and attempts to make the audience sympathetic to his plight. I wasn’t.

He travels out to the “middle of nowhere” to get away from it all. Here we meet Realtor, who monologues with energy, spinning many tales. She tells him of larger-than-life Helen, original owner of the home. But Realtor is shifty, we never really know how much she knows or if what she is saying is truth.

In Act 3 we meet Helen, an apparition, channeled by Realtor, brought on by a drug trip, or a ghost. Helen appears to help Man dissolve his ego. (It’s worth knowing a little background about Helen Nearing that Goodman shared was an inspiration)

Helen is not entirely the wise and noble person Realtor describes. In fact, maybe she’s just as egotistical as Man? She has him imagine all the women in his life boarding a bus and dying in a firey crash. Her comfort seems sinister.

Only now do we hear from Wife. While we yearn for her to fill us in on what “really” happened, she doesn’t. Her section is repetitive, like she’s trying to work something out.

(I found it fascinating that in all of the long-form reviews I’ve read of this book, only one mentioned the Wife.)

Act 6 is Man and Wife. The chapter where most readers find catharsis. From the Guardian; “The extent to which his fate is a highly ironic comeuppance or a beautiful kind of salvation very much depends on the reader’s own sensibilities”

I vacillate between the two, I can see Goodman’s care for the fate of Man, and feel her sympathy for his plight. I feel it’s less a punishment, and more the touch of a benevolent power. What better way to lose your ego than to become a creature purely devoted to its owner. by @readwithzelda

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21 days ago

Campus novels are one of my favorite genre - and in honor of both Sapphic September and back to school season, I thought I’d do a roundup of sapphic campus novels 🖤

I kept my list to only adult books (there are a lot of YA in this theme!) and no real fantasy, although the horror section crosses into magical realism.

Have you read any of these? And are there any good ones I’m missing? This might be my new favorite genre 🖤🖤🖤
The List:
📚When We Were Silent by Fiona McPhillips
✏️They Never Learn by Layne Fargo
📚The World Cannot Give by Tara Isabella Burton
✒️The Belles by Lacey N Dunham
📎My Education by Susan Choi
📖 The Adult by Bronwyn Fischer
✏️Strange Girls by Sarvat Hasin
📚Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeger
📎Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue
✒️sirens and Muses by Antonia Andres’s
📚Voice Like a Hyacinth by Mallory Pearson
📖 Catherine House by Elizabeth Thomas
✒️Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M Danforth

#sapphicseptember #bookrecs #lgbtqbooks #queerbooks #sapphiccampus by @readwithzelda

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a month ago

The Living Realm
By Jordan Tannahill
Published in US last week

A haunting story of a man faced with his own mortality reliving his days with lost lovers. A story of a summer spent at an ancient lake, a place in Berlin where men cruise and find lust and love in the sultry summer afternoons. The narrator begins to see his dead lovers in and amongst the nude sunbathers. Is it psychosis? Are they ghostly visitors? He contemplates life and death while reminiscing about the ways that he had both connected and failed them.

This book is lyrical and beautifully queer. It feels like a daydream had while lying on a blanket in the sun beside a lake. It’s vivid and unique. An excellent late summer read. Read it as the days are shortening but the ghosts of summer are still in view.

I absolutely loved the way this author captured the mysterious and beautiful lake that anchors the book. I grew up on a lake and have included some of my favorite shots of it 💚

Thank you to @netgalley and @fsgbooks for the advanced copy!

#arcreview #bookreview by @readwithzelda

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a month ago

My neighborhood indie bookstore @carmichaelsbookstore hosted a kitten adoption day! What do you think, does Zelda need a little brother?

#booksandcats #caturday #indiebookstore #catsandbooks #kittensgram by @readwithzelda

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a month ago

Holy Cow!

This book was so gripping, I couldn’t put it down. We open with our MC Natalie who very relatably doesn’t want to work, and would really prefer a life of leisure thank you very much. Only problem, she’s broke, has no dental insurance and needs work.

She stumbles into what appears to be a dream job; all housing, meals and clothing included, plus an obscene amount of money… to birth babies.

But the catch is that she has to keep it all a secret because she’s part of a pilot program for a big tach company, a program to help the female C-suite “have it all”

This book takes a wild and unexpected turn about halfway through, and ends up going down a path I could not have predicted.

Without giving too much away, let’s just say that it pits the idea of “having it all” against another idealized version of the motherhood dream and pokes holes in all of them.

Natalie is such a great character to follow, dreamily and haphazardly getting herself into tough situations, when all she wants to do is watch reality TV and have her snacks. Don’t we all, girl. 💚

Also, these adorable little baby goats were seen at @visitblackacre and they were just the sweetest

Thank you to @fsgbooks and @netgalley for the advanced copy! by @readwithzelda

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a month ago

#Caturday morning reads
Young Mungo for the @loupridekybookclub
Interested to read about the cultural style late-stage capitalism
Some Dolly appreciation by @newyorkermag and
A bushel of Fall book recs by the @nyrbooks

Of course Zelda sees the camera and must make a cameo by @readwithzelda

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2

a month ago

Remembering a long ago and lonely reading life before the internet.

Follow the link in my bio to read the whole essay 💽 by @readwithzelda

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a month ago

Finished out Women in Translation month with the Tryptic series by Eva Baltasar. I read the first one, Permafrost, last year and have been wanting to get to the other two for a while.

Each book is a novella, about 100 pages, and each explores the themes of motherhood and isolation. Baltasar describes the main characters as mirrors of different parts of herself. They are all rebellious, lesbian, and fiercely independent.

But the three protagonists each sound like different voices. Permafrost is young, precocious, and felt the most youthful, Boulder the oldest and most world-weary. Mammoth is venturing into strange territory, and the main character becomes almost feral, and less human as the book goes on.

In each story, the main character is confronted with motherhood. Either by choice, by happenstance, or reluctantly. The characters are queer, but Baltasar says that she didn’t want that to be the main focus of the books, that we are hopefully moving into a time where we can have queer characters exploring things like motherhood from a lens of individuality, rather than focusing on their sexuality.

The depictions of motherhood are not ones that you tend to see portrayed often; ambivalence, hunger, isolation, discovery.

Baltasar presents us with female desires that are dark, gritty and fierce.

I loved them all for different reasons, Boulder maybe being my favorite, but it’s hard to pick!

Caveat: if you are going to read Mammoth, read the reviews first, there are some sensitive topics that may upset some readers.

#sapphicseptember #evabaltasarmamut #evabaltasarboulder #evabaltasarpermafrost #womenintranslation by @readwithzelda

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a month ago

Reading this book was a strange experience and initially, I wasn’t sure that i wanted to finish it. The book begins with a conversation between the author and M, a famous actress. The author asks if they can write her “autobiography” (an odd request). M asks them “would you just make it up.” This can be read either as M requesting that the author just make it all up, or M knowingly asking if the writer will make it all up, because that’s what they do. It’s unclear.

But what follows is a dual POV, that alternates between the perspective of “we” and the life of M. Each of M’s passages begin “it is” and then describes a scene. The descriptions are cold and factual, “It is a meeting room,” “it is a bookstore,” followed by excruciatingly detailed lists of everything in the room.

At first, I found this so tedious and it was what made me want to stop reading, but I tried to consider what exactly Cusk was trying to do here. At some point it hit me that the “it is” sections are almost like the beginnings of a script, where the stage is set. And in each scene M is placed, where she tries to act the part, whatever that is. Her internal thoughts are so distant and sad, I found myself enjoying those parts the most. She’s a fascinating character, barely existing, trying to connect with reality yet falling just short each time,

Then there are the “we” passages, told in a collective voice, They have a completely different tone, languid and sing-songy almost. “We enjoy sunsets in the places to which we travel but we have forgotten that they also happen here, in the place where we live.” I think the assumption is that we refers to the writer and their partner, but I lost that notion after a while, it just didn’t seem to quite fit. For a while I puzzled that maybe the “we” simply represents the public, the audience. M is one that is watched, “we” are the watchers. But as the book went on, “we” took on a distinctly feminine voice, and even at times referred to moments where “we” became disappointed in men. So, I suspect that “we” is either women, or mothers, or the female audience. (Swipe to see rest of review)

This interpretation could make sense given the way that female a by @readwithzelda

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a month ago