This week for Nonfiction November, we’re talking about nonfiction that comes in different and exciting forms, not just your standard academic monograph or zippy book from Norton about Satanists or whatever. Pop by Rebecca’s blog to see what everyone else has to say about this! Nontraditional Nonfiction: This week we will be focusing on the nontraditional side of reading nonfiction. Nonfiction comes in many forms. There are the traditional hardcover or paperback print books, of course, but then you also have e-books, audiobooks, illustrated and graphic nonfiction, oversized folios, miniatures, internet publishing, and enhanced books complete with artifacts. So many…
13 CommentsCategory: Misc.
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…
23 CommentsSo I read Christian Kracht’s much-praised satirical novel Imperium, and for once, I enjoyed satirical writing for the length of a full book. Typically after a chapter or two, satirical novels become too arch for me to enjoy, but no, Kracht keeps it up pretty good. Me and this book could have been friends, I think, if it hadn’t kept making me sigh. Have you had books like that? Where they’re not so ideologically maddening that you want to write a post denouncing them and all that they stand for, but there’s just a couple of things about them that…
21 CommentsThe marvelous Kiese Laymon on Confederate flags and SEC football. On competing for the one single diversity spot in the writers’ room: Aisha Harris writes about the unbearable whiteness of TV writers’ rooms. Nobody could be more excited about the new Star Wars trailer than stars John Boyega and Daisy Ridley. Recovering the history of years in slavery, and the story of a forgotten forced deportation: An article that opens with an oddly upsetting anecdote. New details emerge about that Harry Potter play! (It’s not a prequel, it’s a sequel! Joke’s on you, prequel-wanters! You’ll never ever learn more about…
7 CommentsSo 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.)…
14 CommentsThis 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,…
19 CommentsI 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…
11 CommentsY’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…
12 Comments