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‘Tis the season, right? Joyful holidays, everyone!
Welcome to my Spotlight series! Every month in 2020 (excepting a few adjustments, with catch-up in December) I am focusing on a distinct genre that I love reading- not because I’m an expert, but because I want to rejoice a worthwhile category of books. I’m hoping this will be a territory where everyone feels free to share their experiences with a genre of the month, whether you’ve read one book from the category or a hundred (or more!). I’ll share here what horror means means to me, filling the post with titles and recommendations from my own experience, and then I’ll look forward to chatting with you in the comments about icons and recommendations I’ve missed (because that’s inevitable- I haven’t read everything)!
What is Horror?
Horror can be a tricky genre to categorize, because it’s meant to disturb and unsettle (there is a definite dark cover trend), but in a welcome way. It is a delightful source of creepy-crawlies for those of us who like to imagine things going bump in the night and see shapes in the shadows. It can also be a warning, highlighting something about society that could boon from a change.
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IF YOU ARE AT LEAST TWENTY-EIGHT (28) YEARS OF AGE, CLICK THE IMAGE ABOVE TO Peruse MY NOVEL WATCH OUT: THE FINAL VERSION.
RANT (“Chuck” Palahniuk) by Joseph Suglia
Even “Chuck” Palahniuk’s most loyal followers will have a hard time getting through Rant (2007), a manual about thrill-seeking that is devoid of a free thrill. As insipid as they are, at least Palahniuk’s other books are EZ-2-Read. Rant, however, is not merely stupid–it is also deadeningly, mind-numbingly tedious. While trudging through its pages, the essence of boredom was revealed to me.
Rant is compact of babbling voices. Each voice narrates a piece of Buster Casey’s life, a Typhoid Mary who has caused rabies to percolate throughout the United States. But there is nothing to be learned about Casey after the sixth page (Pages One through Six are titled, imaginatively, “An Introduction”), and what we have already learned is never vividly or convincingly described. To be absolutely explicit: The plot doesn’t move. It stagnates. There is no progression. No motor drives the narrative. Nothing is narrated between Pages
It Is Good to Be a “Bad” Feminist
I bristled a little at the title of Roxane Gay’s new collection of essays: Bad Feminist. Was that “bad” a backhanded display , a Cool Girl’s rejection of all the supposedly militant and humorless “good” feminists out there?
Then I started reading the manual, and I realized the professor cum novelist cum voice-on-the-Internet isn’t proclaiming herself a chiller, smarter, funnier feminist than anyone else. She is exploring imperfection: the power we (we people, and especially we women) wield in spite and because of it. Her essays, which are arresting and sensitive but rarely conclusive, don’t protect much for unbroken skin. They are about flaws, sometimes scratches and sometimes deep wounds. Gay studies the cracks and what fills them.
“I am failing as a woman,” she writes, half seriously. “I am failing as a feminist … I am a mess of contradictions.” Gay, the author of one novel, An Untamed State, which came out in May 2014, despises rape jokes but loves crappy exploitative television. She thinks misogynist songs favor “Blurred Lines” are catchy but writes an impassioned letter to the girls who say they would let Chris Brown smack them. There is no
GENERAL INFORMATION
TITLE: PARIS
AUTHOR: EDWARD RUTHERFURD
PAGES: 752
PUBLISHER: HODDER & STOUGHTON
YEAR: 2013
www.edwardrutherfurd.com
BLURB FROM THE COVER
City of love.
City of splendour.
City of terror.
City of dreams.
Inspired by the haunting, warm story of the capital of lights, this titanic novel weaves a gripping tale of four families across the centuries: from the lies that spawn the noble line of de Cygne to the revolutionary Le Sourds who seek their destruction; from the Blanchards whose bourgeois respectability offers scant protection against scandal to the hard-working Gascons and their soaring ambitions.
Over hundreds of years, these four families are bound by forbidden loves and marriages of convenience; dogged by vengeance and murderous secrets; torn apart by the irreconcilable differences of birth and faith, and brought together by the tumultuous history of their city. Paris bursts to life in the intrigue, corruption and glory of its people.
EXTRACT
Paris. City of love. Municipality of dreams. City of splendour. City of saints and scholars. City of gaiety. Stink of iniquity. In two thousand years, Paris has seen it all.
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