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May. 31st, 2009 07:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darchildreWarning! Disjointed rambling ahead!
I have decided that I have a reading goal for the summer and it is this: I am going to actually finish books that I read. Because I don't do that so much, any more. I honestly can't remember the last thing I finished reading that wasn't either fanfic or a novella or shorter and I find that irritating. The problem is that all the reading I do is for fun, which is not in itself a problem but means that, since there are no consequences for me not finishing a book, I am easily distracted by new and shiny things and don't go back to earlier shiny things that have now been eclipsed.
So! I am laying down summer ground rules. This summer, I am not going to read more than two books simultaneously. Also, I am not going to have any library books that I am not currently reading because they will hang over my head being shiny and tempting. I am not going to place holds on things that look shiny unless it looks like I will be finished with a current book by the time it comes in. Instead, it will go in the book queue, which I am totally going to write down, possibly in a locked forward-dated post on this journal. I am, of course, still allowed to stop reading books if they bore me or I hate them but not reading them because I have no attention span is no longer an acceptable excuse. And then! When I have finished a book, I am going to write down that I read it and what I thought of it, so that I can remember stuff that I have read.
Also! In other book related news - Oh man, you guys, The Historian. So, I feel a little silly gushing about this book now after I have refused to read it for so long but it is just so rich and lush that I feel like I have to tell people. I am in love with this book a little bit, I think. To the point where I am wholly selfish and almost wish that no one else knew about it, that it was only mine, my secret treasure, to gobble up alone and lick the juices from my fingers and keep my own for always.
I am a little dragonish, occasionally.
And I had thinky thoughts about how it is odd to go from reading so much Lovecraft (because that has been the majority of my horror consumption for the past several months) to reading Dracula and The Historian, if only just because of the difference in morality systems (vampires being immoral while Cthulhu et al are amoral). The horror of them hits in different places, almost as though I feel it in different parts of my body. Lovecraftian horror, for me, is mostly mental - the angles don't work and the trees move without wind and the stars are cold and hard. (Though, of course, the viscera are also involved and man, I can never read the word "flabby" without thinking of porcine fungoid monsters.) Dracula - vampires in general - hit straight in the chest, emotionally. Vampires are a human evil and I think that's what makes the difference. I could be a vampire but I couldn't be an Elder God.* Neither kind of horror is necessarily better or worse, of course. I just like noting the difference.
The other difference is one of religion, in which rereading Dracula and other vampire stories in comparison really brings home how profoundly atheistic the Lovecraftian universe is.** Oddly, I think it's the only explicitly atheistic fictional universe that I've ever really felt comfortable in.***
And those are my thoughts of today.
*Well, I suppose I could be a Deep One, given the right circumstances. I'd honestly kind of like to see "Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei".
**So, one time, I was reading one of those early Mythos fanfic stories, I think by Clark Aston Smith, and it had a Necronomicon-using Satanist in it. I was oddly taken aback, to the point of actually talking to the book. I believe I said something along the lines of "But Satan is too small for a Mythos story!" Yeah, I don't know.
***Note to self: stop trying to watch SG-1.
I have decided that I have a reading goal for the summer and it is this: I am going to actually finish books that I read. Because I don't do that so much, any more. I honestly can't remember the last thing I finished reading that wasn't either fanfic or a novella or shorter and I find that irritating. The problem is that all the reading I do is for fun, which is not in itself a problem but means that, since there are no consequences for me not finishing a book, I am easily distracted by new and shiny things and don't go back to earlier shiny things that have now been eclipsed.
So! I am laying down summer ground rules. This summer, I am not going to read more than two books simultaneously. Also, I am not going to have any library books that I am not currently reading because they will hang over my head being shiny and tempting. I am not going to place holds on things that look shiny unless it looks like I will be finished with a current book by the time it comes in. Instead, it will go in the book queue, which I am totally going to write down, possibly in a locked forward-dated post on this journal. I am, of course, still allowed to stop reading books if they bore me or I hate them but not reading them because I have no attention span is no longer an acceptable excuse. And then! When I have finished a book, I am going to write down that I read it and what I thought of it, so that I can remember stuff that I have read.
Also! In other book related news - Oh man, you guys, The Historian. So, I feel a little silly gushing about this book now after I have refused to read it for so long but it is just so rich and lush that I feel like I have to tell people. I am in love with this book a little bit, I think. To the point where I am wholly selfish and almost wish that no one else knew about it, that it was only mine, my secret treasure, to gobble up alone and lick the juices from my fingers and keep my own for always.
I am a little dragonish, occasionally.
And I had thinky thoughts about how it is odd to go from reading so much Lovecraft (because that has been the majority of my horror consumption for the past several months) to reading Dracula and The Historian, if only just because of the difference in morality systems (vampires being immoral while Cthulhu et al are amoral). The horror of them hits in different places, almost as though I feel it in different parts of my body. Lovecraftian horror, for me, is mostly mental - the angles don't work and the trees move without wind and the stars are cold and hard. (Though, of course, the viscera are also involved and man, I can never read the word "flabby" without thinking of porcine fungoid monsters.) Dracula - vampires in general - hit straight in the chest, emotionally. Vampires are a human evil and I think that's what makes the difference. I could be a vampire but I couldn't be an Elder God.* Neither kind of horror is necessarily better or worse, of course. I just like noting the difference.
The other difference is one of religion, in which rereading Dracula and other vampire stories in comparison really brings home how profoundly atheistic the Lovecraftian universe is.** Oddly, I think it's the only explicitly atheistic fictional universe that I've ever really felt comfortable in.***
And those are my thoughts of today.
*Well, I suppose I could be a Deep One, given the right circumstances. I'd honestly kind of like to see "Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei".
**So, one time, I was reading one of those early Mythos fanfic stories, I think by Clark Aston Smith, and it had a Necronomicon-using Satanist in it. I was oddly taken aback, to the point of actually talking to the book. I believe I said something along the lines of "But Satan is too small for a Mythos story!" Yeah, I don't know.
***Note to self: stop trying to watch SG-1.
