![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
juushikaTitle: The Witches: Salem, 1692
Author: Stacy Schiff
Narrator: Eliza Foss
Published: Little, Brown Company, 2015
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 500
Total Page Count: 481,610
Text Number: 1704
Read Because: reviewed by Katherine Addison, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The thorough account of the Salem witch trials, pulling exhaustively from the historical record and utterly uninterested in positing a novel explanation for what occurred. The explanation that emerges instead is that the events in Salem are remarkable primarily for timescale, occurring later than other witch trials and over a shorter period of time, but are otherwise similar to other precipitating events and witch trials on record.
The tone is ... interesting. It leans into a number of modern-day associations with the trials: a guilty sort of girl power; a guilty sort of spookiness. It's wry, and it's gossipy in a way that echoes the important role Salem society played on the witchcraft trials. The approach is occasionally annoying, but I appreciate that it counterbalances what might otherwise be a dry text.
Title: The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
Author: Elaine Scarry
Narrator: Joyce Bean
Published: Tantor Audio, 2021 (1985)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 400
Total Page Count: 482,010
Text Number: 1705
Read Because: haha actually this got namedropped in the author's notes of a Hannigram-fiic-turned-self-published-novel, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: An analysis of physical pain that places it in social context: the ramifications of intentional, institutionalized forms of physical harm on society-building. There's a lot in here that I'm still thinking about. Scarry writes eloquently about the wordless nature of pain, and I'm entirely convinced by how she frames the dynamic between the injured and injured: the former is embodied and socially disempowered, the latter disembodied and socially empowered. Scarry's voice is weirdly hypnotic - at times obnoxious, the looping rhythm and repetitive structure also aids the flow of what could be a dry text.
But this falls apart of me as it goes on. I just don't think the Bible/Marixism final third works. There's interesting close readings here, but Scarry's overarching thesis begins to crumble and, rather than reflecting the complexity of her subject, it just feels incoherent. Furthermore, I can't move past the current of Antisemitism that runs through her analysis of "Judeo-Christianity." This is still well worth it for the first two sections, but the third is a sour end note.
Title: House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films
Author: Kier-la Janisse
Published: FAB Press, 2012
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 450
Total Page Count: 483,810
Text Number: 1711
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: I like this as a premise: media consumption and analysis as a framework for memoir is highkey relatable, and the author's obsession with a specific subset of horror/exploitation film is distinctive and introduced me to a wealth of new material, approximately none of which I plan to follow up on. But the way that memoir and criticism enmesh is ... fine: certainly readable, but the halves rarely enrich the experience of the other. Further, Janisse rarely looks at "psychotic" &c outside of their forms as tropes. Sometimes that's fine - these tropes are often so far divorced from real-world mental illness that they may be most meaningful when viewed symbolically. But it still feels like a gaping hole in the text, one only made more obvious on the rare exception (self-injury, mainly) when mental health research does pop up. An interesting attempt, approachable and raw, but in retrospect not especially successful.
Author: Stacy Schiff
Narrator: Eliza Foss
Published: Little, Brown Company, 2015
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 500
Total Page Count: 481,610
Text Number: 1704
Read Because: reviewed by Katherine Addison, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The thorough account of the Salem witch trials, pulling exhaustively from the historical record and utterly uninterested in positing a novel explanation for what occurred. The explanation that emerges instead is that the events in Salem are remarkable primarily for timescale, occurring later than other witch trials and over a shorter period of time, but are otherwise similar to other precipitating events and witch trials on record.
The tone is ... interesting. It leans into a number of modern-day associations with the trials: a guilty sort of girl power; a guilty sort of spookiness. It's wry, and it's gossipy in a way that echoes the important role Salem society played on the witchcraft trials. The approach is occasionally annoying, but I appreciate that it counterbalances what might otherwise be a dry text.
Title: The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
Author: Elaine Scarry
Narrator: Joyce Bean
Published: Tantor Audio, 2021 (1985)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 400
Total Page Count: 482,010
Text Number: 1705
Read Because: haha actually this got namedropped in the author's notes of a Hannigram-fiic-turned-self-published-novel, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: An analysis of physical pain that places it in social context: the ramifications of intentional, institutionalized forms of physical harm on society-building. There's a lot in here that I'm still thinking about. Scarry writes eloquently about the wordless nature of pain, and I'm entirely convinced by how she frames the dynamic between the injured and injured: the former is embodied and socially disempowered, the latter disembodied and socially empowered. Scarry's voice is weirdly hypnotic - at times obnoxious, the looping rhythm and repetitive structure also aids the flow of what could be a dry text.
But this falls apart of me as it goes on. I just don't think the Bible/Marixism final third works. There's interesting close readings here, but Scarry's overarching thesis begins to crumble and, rather than reflecting the complexity of her subject, it just feels incoherent. Furthermore, I can't move past the current of Antisemitism that runs through her analysis of "Judeo-Christianity." This is still well worth it for the first two sections, but the third is a sour end note.
Title: House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films
Author: Kier-la Janisse
Published: FAB Press, 2012
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 450
Total Page Count: 483,810
Text Number: 1711
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: I like this as a premise: media consumption and analysis as a framework for memoir is highkey relatable, and the author's obsession with a specific subset of horror/exploitation film is distinctive and introduced me to a wealth of new material, approximately none of which I plan to follow up on. But the way that memoir and criticism enmesh is ... fine: certainly readable, but the halves rarely enrich the experience of the other. Further, Janisse rarely looks at "psychotic" &c outside of their forms as tropes. Sometimes that's fine - these tropes are often so far divorced from real-world mental illness that they may be most meaningful when viewed symbolically. But it still feels like a gaping hole in the text, one only made more obvious on the rare exception (self-injury, mainly) when mental health research does pop up. An interesting attempt, approachable and raw, but in retrospect not especially successful.
