Portable Repository
Currently reading:
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver by Mary Oliver [ongoing]
Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972 by Alejandra Pizarnik [ongoing]
Books finished this week: 2
(and one DNF——sorry to Sarah Gailey, but Just Like Home was not doing it for me.)
★★☆☆☆
Where this book came from: Kew & Willow, during a birthday stop earlier this year
Why this book: Lady serial killer, righting wrongs? YEP.
Thoughts: That was not what this book is about, my dudes. The supposed premise basically disintegrated in the first quarter of the book. Personally, I found it repetitive and slow, and I found it tough to continue reading once I finally worked myself up to get started.
Terrible photo taken at the Nitehawk Williamsburg bar, waiting to see my first two movies of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.
★★☆☆☆
Where this book came from: I genuinely cannot remember and I’m too lazy to keep looking back through old blog posts. But I do know it ended up on my radar because a friend of Tess’ (hi, Tess!) showed it to me when I was in the Twin Cities last March.
Why this book: Anything Dracula-related, I will devour it.
Thoughts: No. Just no. Two stars because it is an intriguing story, but the issue is that this reads to me more like a long summary, rather than a novel. I would have loved to see more of the moments told in-scene, rather than summarized, and it would have been helpful to get more detail on the setting. There are so many rich times and places touched upon throughout the book, but it basically just felt like a listing of European capitals in a vacuum. I didn’t see the “lush” prose so many other reader reviews called out. And though I understand this is a presentation of Dracula’s clearly abusive and controlling relationships with his brides, seeing more dialogue and moments playing out in-scene would have helped drive that point home, rather than having the narrator tell us repeatedly that “my lord” was not a good person.
Library updates:
I can’t lie, so far my Hallo-reads have been kind of a letdown. I didn’t enjoy the two I finished this week (so much so that I, admittedly, skimmed bits and pieces to move things along) and DNF’d my third attempt of the week from the TBR pile. Maybe it’s me; maybe I’m picking the wrong books to read at the wrong time; maybe I never should’ve bought these books in the first place. But there has been a distinct lack of the spooky in my chosen books for October. Hoping to remedy that in the final week of the month.
On a less frightening-focused note, I’ve taken to carrying around my Little Nights/Big Weekend notebook with me pretty much everywhere I go. It’s part journal, part scratch pad, part sketchbook. It came in especially handy last Saturday, when I found myself on the way to a friend’s place and rapidly running out of time to draft an NYC Midnight submission. I brought the notebook along because I knew I wasn’t going to have time to sit down and do real laptop work before being social. Frankly, I also just didn’t feel like carrying my laptop to Brooklyn. But it felt great to stand on the train platform and then sit on the train and just write——some full sentences and paragraphs, but also just some ideas to guide me later. Most of it had to be cut back once I finally typed everything up——the submission could only be 500 words maximum and I think my rough draft was 3000+ and could have easily been longer——but I appreciated having a portable place to start the work.
I still use the notes app on my phone to jot down interesting ideas or characters to expand upon, but I also like having a physical space to record whatever comes to mind. I feel free to use this notebook for minutiae. The stories don’t have to be complete; the journaling can be a feeling, an image, even just a word. Nothing has to be complete or even incredibly meaningful. It’s a depository for everything and anything, and it’s easy to keep it with me at all times.
I want to collect the little moments: Moneypenny sprawled on my bed in the gray light of dawn; how it feels when fall finally sets in after an unwelcome return of summer; entrances and invitations.
Closing thoughts:
Collect the good, the mundane, the interesting to you, so you can carry it with you always.
Total books read from the Moratorium Library: 109
(Total books added to the Moratorium Library: 210)
I was feeling a little down on Friday, so I went for a walk in the neighborhood and, well . . . I ended up at Kew & Willow.
