(no subject)

[darchildre]

I have been having a rotten week - after thinking I might get through this year with only the mildest seasonal depression, it has suddenly hit me like a truck. On top of that, I just got an email from my manager telling me that she's changing the schedule and I'll have to start working some Saturdays starting in September. (How many? How frequently? These are not things she felt she needed to include in this email.)

Ugh. Everything is awful.

On the plus side, I started listening to an audiobook of HG Wells' The Invisible Man* this week and it is accidentally the perfect book for my current emotional state because:

A) it is very funny, and

B) it is, at the moment, extremely relatable, because it is a book about a dude who

• finds himself suddenly cut off from the rest of humanity
  
• responds to this by becoming extremely short-tempered and irritable
  
• tries to cope by isolating himself and immersing himself in his hyperfixations
  
• and, when he's not allowed to do so, explodes into fits of extremely petty and unproductive (but probably satisfying) violence

I am Griffin and Griffin is me. Except that I am not going around kicking random people or throwing rocks at them (yet) - but god, the idea is appealing.




*A good chunk of my reading since May has been either revisiting the Victorian crime/adventure/scifi/horror stories I read as a kid or reading the ones I never properly got around to before. So far, I've done some Sherlock Holmes (natch), nearly all of Raffles** (I have so many feelings!), The Picture of Dorian Gray (much more interesting than I remembered), The Prisoner of Zenda (new to me and super fun), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (adorable characters, possibly too many fish), and now The Invisible Man. It's been pretty great. I have more Wells, some Wilkie Collins (on my sister's recommendation), and at least one Professor Challenger novel on the list as well. If you have recommendations for other books in this vein I should read, please put them in the comments.

**I am in currently in the middle of Mr Justice Raffles, which is a bit of a slog - Raffles is not meant for novel-length stories and also I'm now reading reluctantly because when I finish it, there won't be any more and I will be terribly bereft.

Comments

[khronos_keeper]

I very much relate to revisiting childhood fiction as a self soother. I tend to reread Dragonlance recently and some other adventure books.

[miscellanium]

that h.g. wells book sounds more relatable than i remember - should check it out soon, lol.

i remember really enjoying the atmosphere of "the mystery of edwin drood", though i can't recall if it was an edition that simply did not have any of the proposed endings or if it collected a few of them. it may have been the one with a preface by a dickens scholar (ackroyd) and an appendix by g.k. chesterton outlining different theories about what dickens might have planned.

[darchildre]

The Invisible Man is very good, turns out - I definitely recommend it.

I've never been a huge Dickens fan, but Edwin Drood is one of the few I've read. I read it in high school as a very weird meta-novel thing that I can't recall the name of - the text of the original book alternated with chapters of a sort of convention of Golden Age detectives (Holmes, Poirot, Father Brown, etc) trying to solve the mystery. I should try to find that thing, both because it would be fun to revisit Edwin Drood and because I'd likely be familiar with more of the convention of detectives now.