juushika

Title: Wuthering Heights
Author: Emily Brontë
Published: 1847
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 400
Total Page Count: 580,705
Text Number: 2197
Read Because: rerereread, after talking about it with a friend; I own the Norton edition but grabbed the Standard Ebooks version because if I can read on my ereader, I will
Review:
A lifelong favorite, although it's been some years since I last read it. This reread doesn't disappoint. I'd forgotten how gossipy it is, the toll of that hand-me-down narration and how moments of revelation that still break through. I'd forgotten, also, how much of the narrative concerns the next generation; it effectively condemns and deromanticizes Heathcliff, even as—

Just, no wonder that I imprinted on this early and never let it go. I don't believe in ghosts or any afterlife, but I do believe in whatever the hell Heathcliff has going with Cathy, particularly after her death: a relationship defined by absences, by gestures towards which are uncommonly consummated, sustained instead by spite. Profoundly toxic, unforgiven, love as generational curse; that's my catnip.

Title: The Buddha and the Borderline
Author: Kiera Van Gelder
Published: New Harbinger Publications, 2010
Rating: N/A
Page Count: 250
Total Page Count: 578,160
Text Number: 2186
Read Because: more research reading (for a supporting character, this time), ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: As a first-person account of BPD, this obviously isn't a generic introductory text but has the energy of a lived experience, organic if chaotic in the way it jumps between definitions, treatment programs, and the digressions and frustrations of personal life. Useful, then, as insight; but I couldn't say if it's good, because I get so grumpy about (jealous of, frustrated with) mental health recovery narratives, memoir or fiction, that I sabotage my own reading experience. Thus, no rating.


Title: In the Fullness of Time: Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder
Author: Mary C. Zanarini
Published: Oxford University Press, 2018
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 230
Total Page Count: 579,950
Text Number: 2195
Read Because: more writing research, hardback from Timberland Public Library via ILL
Review:
Is there any faster way to radicalize oneself towards antipsychiatry than reading rather too much about Borderline Personality Disorder? I can't even fault this text specifically, which offers what it says on the tin: an understanding of the longterm prognosis for BPD (capping at 16 years). But the circa DSM-III categorization, constant & useless use of other Axis II disorders as a control, and gentle reminders from practitioner to practitioner that maybe, just maybe!, treating BPD patients as people rather than problems might be good sometimes combine to make this an infuriating read which already feels dated despite its focus on follow-up interviews and the changing definitions/understanding of BPD.

Title: The Forest of a Thousand Eyes
Author: Frances Hardinge
Illustrator: Emily Gravett
Published: Two Hoots, 2024
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 130
Total Page Count: 579,415
Text Number: 2193
Read Because: fan of both author and artist, hardback from Timberland Regional Library
Review:
Our protagonist is launched into a journey across the broken wall that stands the only sanctuary from the strange and hungry expanse of the forest below. This author/illustrator combo ought to be a dream come true. I don't love a MG fantasy travelogue, but this is better than most, with some great atmospheric touches like the lapses into alternative PoVs and the chapter that spans the dark. Still, the structure vaguely bores me, there's not enough of the creepy forest, and the accent color over graphite badly wants color variation from dappled chartreuse to dark forest green to bring what there is for the forest out; despite all that's promising, this feels flat.

Title: The Catholic Imagination
Author: Andrew M. Greeley
Published: University of California Press, 2000
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 215
Total Page Count: 579,070
Text Number: 2191
Read Because: writing research, but no tag for you!*; hardback via interlibrary loan, borrowed from Timberland Regional Library but shipped from Multnomah County Library, which tickles me
Review:
Floating by on vibes, this posits that the primary motivating force within the Catholic sensibility is found in on the low (as opposed to high) church: enculturated by family and local community, rich with narrative, it identifies a universal beauty and grace as evidence of God in all things. Interesting! And optimistic and unjustified; the greater the effort at proof, in burst of statistics or allusions to the author's other books, the more obvious it is that the opinion is educated but subjective—particularly in the chapter on sex. As an outsider, wanting to explore exactly this overlap of Catholicism and sensibility, I found this barely better than nothing, and comically slight compared to the more evidential reading I did on non-denominational evangelical Christianity earlier this year. It looked so promising! but the other mixed reviews on Goodreads are on the money.


*I took two (2) notes. Here's the good one:

The Catholic sensibility, I suggest, finds grace in limitation, fragility, mortality. It comes up against the wall of perplexity which surrounds our condition and backs away, sad but hopeful because it strongly suspects there is something beyond that wall.

Title: My Death
Author: Lisa Tuttle
Published: New York Review Books, 2023 (2004)
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 105
Total Page Count: 578,640
Text Number: 2189
Read Because: mentioned by chthonic_cassandra and September broke with overcast skies to invite the autumn reading season; ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review:
In this sparse, reflexive novella, an author turned biographer discovers echoes between her subject's life and her own. At a distance and in the moment, both, I like this—the ambiguity of memory, the sense that everything exists just outside reality. But something is missing in the space between reading experience and hindsight; maybe just that the reveal feels a long time coming and therefore anticlimactic. This is another for the "more interesting than successful" pile.

Title: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Author: Muriel Spark
Published: Open Roads Media, 2012 (1961)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 150
Total Page Count: 578,310
Text Number: 2187
Read Because: I think I first discovered this via starshipfox, also reading more of the author; ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review:
I love a book about an insular group, its disintegration and sublimated desires; I've never seen it done quite like this. An iconoclastic school teacher, in her 30s in 1930s Edinburgh, mentors her eponymous set from age 11 onward until, years later, one betrays her. The mobile, wry omniscient third person, stereotyping and then complicating its large cast; moving through time to smugly spoil its ending while holding back the more interesting question of motive—this had a slow start for me (I imagine that'll improve on reread), finding the flow and setting expectations, but thematically it's just my vibe and by the second half I was well won-over.

Title: The Man Who Folded Himself
Author: David Gerrold
Published: BenBella Books, 2003 (1973)
Rating: 4.5 of 5
Page Count: 130
Total Page Count: 577,260
Text Number: 2184
Read Because: promotes homosexuality and narcissism, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review:

"But why should you have to be alone?" He'd started to answer my question before I finished asking it. "You'll never have to be alone again. You'll always have me. I'll always have you. It makes more sense this way. I don't like being alone either. This way I can share things I like with somebody I know who likes them to. I don't have to try and impress you, you don't have to try to impress me. There's perfect understanding between us. They'll never be any of those destructive little games that people play on each other because there can't be. I like me, Danny; that's why I like you. You'll feel the same way, you'll see. And I guarantee, there are no two people in this world who understand each other as well as we do."

A young man inherits a time travel device; shenanigans, as they're wont, ensue. It's big-concept scifi with a distinctly personal, introspective focus, indicative of the lingering touch of Golden Age on New Wave. Practically speaking, that means canonical selfcest, and well it should: a ranging, thoughtful approach to time travel with a surprisingly convincing metaphor of drawning in ink, but returning infinitely to self-knowledge, -love, -criticism, and -acceptance versus the arbitrariness of and distance from any other persepctive—even, occasionally, one's own.

"Dan," he said; his tone was intense, as intense as before. His eyes fixed on me with a penetrating look. "We're going to be more than just identical twins. We can't help it. We're closer than brothers."

I met his gaze, but the thought still frightened me.

I'm not sure I know how to be that close to anybody. Even myself.

Title: The Devil You Know: Encounters in Forensic Psychiatry
Author: Gwen Adshead, Eileen Horne
Published: Scribner, 2021
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 320
Total Page Count: 576,870
Text Number: 2182
Read Because: research read but not useful enough to justify the tag, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review:
2.5 stars. I don't struggle to apply compassion and understanding to violent offenders; if I ever did, other books did, for me, the work that Adshead is attempting here. (I credit Brottman's Couple Found Slain, Junger's A Death in Belmont, and even Rule's The Stranger Beside Me, but that's just the luck of what I've read.) In lieu of that purpose, this doesn't do much. The composites feel ungrounded, manufactured; and I can read composites, I'm thinking specifically of Annie G. Rogers, but the difference is cogency and conviction: I need stronger-articulated and deeper dives than this scattershot approach, united only by the passing glimpse into Adshead's own growth and touchstone metaphors. There's some value. I saved a few quotes. And I was frustrated by other sections (the repetitive structure of therapy breakthroughs; the knee-jerk reactions to pornography). But the fundamental value is the simple question "violent offenders: have you considered that they're people?" If yes, skip.

Title: The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma
Author: Annie G. Rogers
Published: Random House, 2006
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 320
Total Page Count: 576,290
Text Number: 2180
Read Because: reading the author & mentioned here by chthonic_cassandra & functionally research-reading, hardback borrowed from ILL via the Timberland Regional Library
Review:
Rogers writes beautifully, and approaches her subjects with an astute, layered, thoughtful compassion. I'm not sure that I gained much from the final section on Lacan, either from the man himself or her attempted explanation. Does this lapse undermine the focus on language, on association and wordplay and reference, which already feels strained when details have, presumably, been altered? I don't know, but I'm not hung up on it. This remains a holistic method of listening, mutual and receptive, which finds that "...trauma follows a different logic, a condensed psychological logic that is associative, layered, nonlinear, and highly metaphoric," and that trauma has ubiquitous consequence, recurring and represented in various facets of life experience. An engaging follow-up to A Shining Affliction, an unmitigated pleasure to read her writing again, and it lingers in my thoughts.

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