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Tag: Matthew Gregory Lewis

Nonfiction November: Book Pairing!

Every November, four wonderful bloggers (Kim and Leslie and Katie and Rebecca) team up to bring us the marvelous Nonfiction November. The theme of this week is book pairings, in which we pair our fiction reads with a nonfictional counterpart. Earlier in the year, I had the inestimable privilege of participating in Alice (of Reading Rambo)’s readalong of Matthew Gregory Lewis’s book The Monk. It was…deeply stupid. HOWEVER. As I was scouring my reading spreadsheets for nonfiction books to highlight in this book pairing, I remembered that I read a book earlier this year in which every insane thing done…

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MONKALONG! (the end at last)

So it’s the last week of Monkalong, and also the week in which I knew Antonia was going to get raped, because it’s not like we’re getting out of this book without that happening. I admit I dragged my feet on reading this section. I had to really force myself to do it, using the inducement of your wonderful comments and the other marvelous Monkalong posts. (Oh, I forgot to tell you, I’m only using Crimson Peak gifs this week, because it’s the greatest movie of our time, yet could not have existed without this garbage fire of a book.)…

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MONKALONG!, part 4

This book is so stupid. It’s good we’re reading it in chunks, because I’m pretty sure if you read it all in one go, its overwhelmingly stupidity would cause you to go blind. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve said “Oh fuck off” out loud to this book. But let’s get in on this. So in the first chapter of the third volume, it seems that Agnes is not only merely dead, she’s really most sincerely dead. Alphonso (the world’s most boring storyteller) takes to his bed in his grief, while Lorenzo believes everything a nun tells him,…

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MONKALONG, part 3

I have never been so excited to get back to a monastery. The next section of the Monkalong (hosted by the fabulous Alice of Reading Rambo!) returns us to the titular character, THE MONK, who experiences brief but intense postcoital regret, which Matilda quickly talks him out of. Using wiles. Quote: “Ambrosio rioted in delights till then unknown to him.” Ahahahahahahahahahaha. I would read three more chapters about Ambrosio discovering sex. Ambrosio discovers hand jobs! Ambrosio discovers oral! Ambrosio buys a butt plug! Okay, but then, because THE MONK is a garbage human being and he always was, he starts…

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Monkalong, Part 2

Y’all, I was mad at this section of the readalong, but can I confess something real quick? The person I was really mad at . . . was me. When I wrote my post for Monkalong Part 1, I didn’t say anything about Lorenzo’s sister Agnes, who got pregnant WHILE A NUN. In my defense, so many goddamn things happened in the first two chapters that it was really hard to figure out where to focus my attention, and THE MONK was just more interesting than poor old Agnes, as well as being, you know, the eponymous character. Obviously Matthew…

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MONKALONG!, Part 1

That’s right, folks, we badgered Alice into hosting another readalong! And I confidently anticipate that we will badger her into more in 2016, but for now let’s focus on Matthew Gregory Lewis’s Gothic classic The Monk, because the Monkalong has officially begun! The titular MONK (an official readalong style guide has not yet been released, but I have to assume that it will stipulate the word MONK must appear in all caps when referring to the eponymous one) is Ambrosio, a man of mysterious background and flawless morals who is basically the One Direction of eighteenth-century Madrid, except he uses…

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