WWW Wednesday 11.16.22

This weekly meme is hosted by Sam at Taking on a World of Words and all you need to do to participate is answer the following three questions:

What are you currently reading?

I started reading The Silence of the Girls with my IRL bookclub and I’m 40% through. We meet again after Thanksgiving so I will pick this up again closer to us meeting so I don’t forget anything. I’m surprised to say that I’m not really enjoying it. So far it is reminding me of A Little Life in regards to trauma porn and I hope that there is a point to it. Life can be brutal but I don’t equate constant brutality with great writing.

The Moonstone is on my list of books I wanted to read this year and it is also my first Wilkie Collins. It is a very slow start to a mystery but I adore classics for the slice of life aspect so that’s not bothering me too much. I am looking forward to getting deeper into the story and getting fully sucked in. I’m 17% through and it has been a struggle for me to read this. Mostly because of some fatigue I’ve been dealing with this week but I’ve also been listening while reading along and I think the narrators voice is lulling me to sleep!

What have you recently finished?

It took me awhile to get invested in You’re Invited and when I finally did I flew through the book in two sittings. Unfortunately, it ended up just being an ok (3 star) read for me. I think it would have served the book better if it had been formatted differently. As in split into two parts. I think Jayatissa had a unique idea for a book but it landed flat. This book also deals with hard topics so I recommend looking up content warnings. There is also on page self harm a few different times throughout the story.

I really enjoyed Ariadne but the last fifty or so pages felt so rushed compared to the rest of the book.

And for the best book that I have read this year (or ever). Bunny. Why did I put off reading this for so long!?! I was instantly hooked on the Awad’s writing and I already knew I was going to give this book five stars early on purely based on her writing. And then the story. WOW. Last month I told my brother that I have a love of weird stories and this book cemented that love. I genuinely love everything about this story. I had an idea of what one reveal was going to be but it was twisted into a deliciously shocking way that left me stunned in the best way. And the scene this book ends on was impeccable. I already can’t wait to reread this book.

This group of books are all short stories or novellas that I’ve listened to over the past week. I usually listen to podcasts when I’m doing stuff around my house but I decided to listen to some spooky reads that I didn’t get a chance to during October.

I didn’t rate the Six Creepy Tales by Poe because I think I would get more out of it by physically reading them since they are so atmospheric. I heard Bernice and The Black Cat for the first time and I really enjoyed both of those.

Black Phone and Giving Up the Ghost were both three star reads. I’ve already watched the movie version of Black Phone and I think that hampered my enjoyment of this story. Giving Up the Ghost had an insufferable narrator who is the embodiment of every protagonist in a scary movie making the dumbest choice.

The Clown Brigade is a Scribd exclusive novella from Stephen Graham Jones. This is a psychological horror that is firmly entrenched in the mind of Kyle and his unraveling. The reason this only got four stars is that I’m not convinced the clown aspect was needed.

What do you think you’ll read next?

We are halfway through the month and I haven’t read any nonfiction yet so this will definitely be my next book. I’m hoping to read it over the weekend before The Final Book Support Group readathon starts on Monday.

Synopsis:

A riveting, lucid memoir of a young woman’s struggle to regain her sense of self after trauma, and the efforts by a powerful New England boarding school to silence her–at any cost

When the elite St. Paul’s School recently came under state investigation after extensive reports of sexual abuse on campus, Lacy Crawford thought she’d put behind her the assault she’d suffered at St. Paul’s decades before, when she was fifteen. Still, when detectives asked for victims to come forward, she sent a note.

Her criminal case file reopened, she saw for the first time evidence that corroborated her memories. Here were depictions of the naïve, hard-working girl she’d been, a chorister and debater, the daughter of a priest; of the two senior athletes who assaulted her and were allowed to graduate with awards; and of the faculty, doctors, and priests who had known about Crawford’s assault and gone to great lengths to bury it.

Now a wife, mother, and writer living on the other side of the country, Crawford learned that police had uncovered astonishing proof of an institutional silencing years before, and that unnamed powers were still trying to block her case. The slander, innuendo, and lack of adult concern that Crawford had experienced as a student hadn’t been imagined as the effects of trauma, after all: these were the actions of a school that prized its reputation above anything, even a child.

This revelation launched Crawford on an extraordinary inquiry into the ways gender, privilege, and power shaped her experience as a girl at the gates of America’s elite. Her investigation looks beyond the sprawling playing fields and soaring chapel towers of crucibles of power like St. Paul’s, whose reckoning is still to come. And it runs deep into the channels of shame and guilt, witness and silencing, that dictate who can speak and who is heard in American society.

An insightful, mature, beautifully written memoir, Notes on a Silencing is an arresting coming-of-age story that wrestles with an essential question for our time: what telling of a survivor’s story will finally force a remedy?