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juushikaTitle: The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained
Author: Colin Dickey
Published: Viking, 2020
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 320
Total Page Count: 347,145
Text Number: 1253
Read Because: reading the author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: I enjoyed Dickey's previous book and its compelling thesis that ghosts are expressions of cultural anxieties. This is about the fascination with the unknown—cryptids, UFOs, etc.—as a search for the liminal in the face of modern religious and scientific institutions, and it's a convincing argument. Dickey's relationship with belief and believers is compassionate, diverse, but necessarily cynical: he values skepticism, but what couches itself in incredulity is more often a dangerous credulity, a search for different but ultimately easier answers. So it boggles me that fake news/right wing conspiracy theories come up only in passing. It would be a nightmare to cover and less fun to read about than the book's primary subject matter, but it should at least be in the conclusion as the modern and widespread version of this impulse. The oversight is glaring in a 2020 release, and without it the book's second half is repetitive and its conclusion is hollow.
Title: Beowulf
Author: Unknown
Translator: Seamus Heaney
Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000 (~975)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 115
Total Page Count: 347,260
Text Number: 1254
Read Because: personal enjoyment; I own a physical copy but then checked it out of the library to read digitally, because of course I did
Review: It's difficult enough to review classics; harder to pretend to have anything of interest to say about a thousand year old text. But! I'm glad to've read it. The Heaney translation is a great entry point, melodic but unstrained, accessible, with a touch of hyperspecific regional language to evoke the text's history. The first and second battles are evocative, particularly the loose sketches of the antagonists, and I see why they've spawned retellings from the monsters' perspectives. I let the historical asides breeze past me, but they come back again in the final battle, where the larger political landscape gives consequence to Beowulf's death. It's a fascinating subversion of the hero-worship/great man elements, and I wasn't familiar with it via cultural osmosis, so that alone makes it worth the read. Not a new favorite, I don't anticipate doing a deep dive into other translations, but: glad to've read it.
Title: Goblin Market
Author: Christina Rossetti
Published: 1862
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 40
Total Page Count: 347,300
Text Number: 1255
Read Because: personal enjoyment, read through Project Gutenberg
Review: Sometimes I read a thing and think "I can see queerness in anything"; sometimes I read a thing and think "y'all are seeing this too, right, it's for-actual queer?" Cultural osmosis hadn't informed me of that element of the text, but of course it's essential. The premise is captivating, evocative, dangerous—this is the sense of wonder that I thirst for in fairytales. The themes are intensely conflicted; obtrusive moralizing shares breath with salvation via barely-veiled sapphic intimacy. And in every line it's profoundly sensual. It makes for a flawed work, but they're telling flaws which are in themselves compelling.
Author: Colin Dickey
Published: Viking, 2020
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 320
Total Page Count: 347,145
Text Number: 1253
Read Because: reading the author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: I enjoyed Dickey's previous book and its compelling thesis that ghosts are expressions of cultural anxieties. This is about the fascination with the unknown—cryptids, UFOs, etc.—as a search for the liminal in the face of modern religious and scientific institutions, and it's a convincing argument. Dickey's relationship with belief and believers is compassionate, diverse, but necessarily cynical: he values skepticism, but what couches itself in incredulity is more often a dangerous credulity, a search for different but ultimately easier answers. So it boggles me that fake news/right wing conspiracy theories come up only in passing. It would be a nightmare to cover and less fun to read about than the book's primary subject matter, but it should at least be in the conclusion as the modern and widespread version of this impulse. The oversight is glaring in a 2020 release, and without it the book's second half is repetitive and its conclusion is hollow.
Title: Beowulf
Author: Unknown
Translator: Seamus Heaney
Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000 (~975)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 115
Total Page Count: 347,260
Text Number: 1254
Read Because: personal enjoyment; I own a physical copy but then checked it out of the library to read digitally, because of course I did
Review: It's difficult enough to review classics; harder to pretend to have anything of interest to say about a thousand year old text. But! I'm glad to've read it. The Heaney translation is a great entry point, melodic but unstrained, accessible, with a touch of hyperspecific regional language to evoke the text's history. The first and second battles are evocative, particularly the loose sketches of the antagonists, and I see why they've spawned retellings from the monsters' perspectives. I let the historical asides breeze past me, but they come back again in the final battle, where the larger political landscape gives consequence to Beowulf's death. It's a fascinating subversion of the hero-worship/great man elements, and I wasn't familiar with it via cultural osmosis, so that alone makes it worth the read. Not a new favorite, I don't anticipate doing a deep dive into other translations, but: glad to've read it.
Title: Goblin Market
Author: Christina Rossetti
Published: 1862
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 40
Total Page Count: 347,300
Text Number: 1255
Read Because: personal enjoyment, read through Project Gutenberg
Review: Sometimes I read a thing and think "I can see queerness in anything"; sometimes I read a thing and think "y'all are seeing this too, right, it's for-actual queer?" Cultural osmosis hadn't informed me of that element of the text, but of course it's essential. The premise is captivating, evocative, dangerous—this is the sense of wonder that I thirst for in fairytales. The themes are intensely conflicted; obtrusive moralizing shares breath with salvation via barely-veiled sapphic intimacy. And in every line it's profoundly sensual. It makes for a flawed work, but they're telling flaws which are in themselves compelling.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-30 09:33 pm (UTC)