The Male Hysteric

Yes I have been reading, no I have not been very good at recording them. So I’m only going to post some short things about each of these.

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir was a reread for me, and a part of why it took me so damn long was because I was taking notes. I was also going to go through all the backmatter, but I got distracted, and now I figure that all of this has been delayed enough that I will talk about it anyway. What can I say? It was way better the second time around because I actually knew what was going on. I feel like The Locked Tomb books are the types of books that get better on reread and you might just have to go on vibes through the first read, which may be a flaw or strength, depending on how you read. I’m still going through the GTN read on Frontline Fifth and am going to try to reread Harrow before getting through their HTN read, though I’m unsure if I will do notes on that one, even though it probably needs it more.

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik was interesting, but also a book that felt like it went on for too long for what it was, though a part of the problem was probably that I borrowed it from the library as an ebook so the return time was very strict. But if you actually pick it up at a library, it’s a very fat volume! I did enjoy it, though. One thing it did was that it was very direct about the casual terror of being a Jew in the old country which is just… when you have the fantasy fairy stories based in Europe is always absent? Reading it was very familiar, like, yes, yes, the horrors, we know the horrors, and then it dawned on me that no, the vast majority of the writers and readers of these kinds of books (maybe not this one, but fairy stories in general) do not. And that realization was kind of upsetting. But this isn’t Novik’s fault.

Dr. No by Percival Everett was… a very silly book. I picked it up at a bookstore because it was on the counter along with the promotional materials for James, which is having a moment right now but I didn’t think was my kind of thing but Dr. No from the summary absolutely did seem like my kind of thing, or at least I was kind of obligated to read it because I’m also writing about people studying math getting into trouble. I guess I had kind of assumed that James was a serious book, and therefore this would be a different book, it was very goofy, and not exactly in a way I was into (I don't read enough spy thrillers to be into a parody of them I think), but it was still a quick read which isn’t something I can say of a lot of the other books I’ve read lately. I’m left wondering if James is also a goofy book. I mean I guess Twain was considered a humorist but I never found him that funny.

First book of 2025 read! My challenge for this year is 12 novels in 2025, and I’m making progress on that, so at least one good thing happening. I started this book late last year as one of my writing buddies suggested it to me as a possible “comp” for a book I needed comparisons for and it really, I think, is a good comparison, in many ways, except I find Ishiguro to be pretty humorless in this book and my novel is… not like that. However, keeping this in mind, my reading of this book was probably poisoned in that I was looking at it for a certain purpose so that purpose was always in the back of my head and I may not have such a good idea of it on its own. It’s not a book that I would have picked up on its own.

The Buried Giant is a book about an elderly couple traveling in post-Arthurian England to meet their son, who lives in another village, while the country is shrouded with a mysterious mist that causes people to forget things. It might be a small thing and more indicative of what I read but I appreciated the main characters being elderly. This may be less true of literary fiction but… there aren’t terribly many elderly protagonists out there, at least in comparison to more youthful ones. I think in general most writers tend to write ages they’ve already experienced. The friend who recommended it to me also talked about how they hated the way Ishiguro writes dialogue and honestly I did not notice it. Or, well, it’s less that I did not notice it, but noticed that it did not seem bad read out loud by the narrator, in the same way Shakespeare is better read out loud by someone who actually knows what they’re doing rather than awkwardly stumbled over by a first-time reader. Not that I think Ishiguro is that brilliant, but there’s something to his dialogue that probably would not come through in the strictly written text, or the reader David Horovitch is very talented. But considering The Buried Giant is a novel, this would probably be considered a flaw.

It's been a while since I posted about a book I've read, hasn't it? And I suppose I'm still on track to get my 10 by the end of the year.

And finally one that I just unabashedly really liked.

So, I got a kobo for my birthday, a Libra Color, and I thought that probably what I would end up mostly doing is reading library books and possibly downloaded fanfiction on it. While I was at my brother's house I was mostly doing proof-of-concept with the Kobo's nice ability to browse Libby catalogues natively and I came across the book Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis and the cover intrigued me and the blurb was off the wall and there was no waitlist unlike many of the other books I had been looking at, so I grabbed it and... well.

Sometimes there are books that are made for you and you find them. It's a bizarre concept -- a 19th century Prussian scientist laying the groundwork to build perfect soldiers from dogs, and those dogs finally being created in the modern day, rebelling against their masters and joining high society in New York -- yet the outcome feels more honest than many books given its handling of ambivalence in a way that is not overwrought, which feels rare these days. It's hard to describe, I think, or maybe I'm not good at writing books. But you should read it.

I have still been reading, just not writing much about what I've been reading. I really don't have too much to say about these books and they were mostly research for the novel I am not writing.

The Lady Has A Past by Amanda Quick is a romance novel set in the 1930s with supernatural elements, and neither of these were clear to me at the outset, which I think would have improved the experience. I guess my main thing is that I did not like the love interest and he did not improve over time, which is a massive flaw in a romance book, but I'm sure he would be to someone else's taste.

Hawthorn & Child by Keith Ridgeway could not be more different. It's a recent book about cops and criminals in Ireland and it's... well, I was recommended it because it did not have a plot, and that was exactly as advertised, it did not have a plot going through. It felt more like reading a collection of loosely-connected short stories, some of which were better than others, and every time I actually liked a character I got to be full of dread because I had the feeling something awful was going to happen to them because, in the book, a lot of awful things happen to a lot of people. It wasn't terrible but I'm not sure who I would even begin to recommend it to.

I am still reading, though the new book is taking a while. I got a lot of reading done over my vacation, but that was two weeks ago by now and it's hard to insert back in the feeling of having nothing else to do at a cabin on the North Shore besides sit on a chilly beach and read into one's normal every day life. My partner manages to read much more than me but he's... motivated, I guess is the word. And even with how much he reads he still acquires them faster than he can read them so it's not like that problem ever actually goes away if you read faster.

Anyway, it's only June. I am still on track to get my 10 books read, I think.

So I started reading a web serial novel that has since finished and I was thinking, oh, what if I put out my novel as a web serial, and sent out chapters once a week through one of those newsletter sites? Wouldn't that be fun?

Then I remembered that to make that worthwhile, I would already need a decent base to start from, and then I further remembered that I had the chance to read this web novel as it was happening and decided not to start it until long after it finished, so maybe if I'm not even the right audience for such a thing, it's not a great idea. I dunno.

Novel #2 I finished like a week ago, and it was another novel I had started last year and not finished, The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach.

It’s a book that I don’t think people would get unless they’re very tuned into Jewish culture, especially American Jewish culture, especially New York American Jewish culture. I was pretty lukewarm on the book, but I’m not sure if that’s really why —- I think it’s more that it’s a book that was extremely “of-the-moment” and it’s very clear that the moment has passed, so it’s a bit surreal looking at that moment frozen in amber. It might be less weird further in the future, or perhaps it will become even more strange. The past is a foreign country, after all.

As I'm going to be unemployed for the next month at least, I think what I'm going to do (aside from apply to jobs) is go hard into writing the novel. I've been transcribing at least 1k a day, and writing a lot, and now I have a lot of time during the day to get into doing it. And probably reading will also be a part of this writing thing... I should read more. I need to read more.

I guess the worst part of all of this is that as I transcribe and do all this work, I am still realizing... the novel is not very good.

And... it's not my fic!

Somebody from tumblr wrote a drabble based on a post I had made on Frankenstein that has gotten a decent amount of circulation:




Anyway, the fic is to India! Procrastinating by summerstudie on Ao3. It's very short... because if this had happened, there would be no Frankenstein, lol.

 Note: this is partially from a Tumblr post yesterday that I’ve since added to.

Hello, I know it's been an eternity since I've posted. I tried to get onto tumblr because I was realizing twitter was bad for my mental health (just before Musk started fucking around with buying twitter prompting a potential exodus -- no seriously I was doing it before it was cool!!). Tumblr is actually a very fun site. I used it a lot from about 18-24 -- when Homestuck was The Thing, if that's any indication of what my experience was like -- left because my dashboard was out of control with content I didn't like (before the porn ban -- again, BEFORE IT WAS COOL!!), and now I've returned maybe a bit more mature and able to curate my feed better, though that's obviously not something I've been able to do with twitter so the big advantage I've had is "starting fresh." I've seen some basic-level craziness with the pro/antishipping stuff but for the most part my experience hasn't been too bad? The crowd seems to skew a bit young for me, though.

I do think some of the reason I've been able to miss some of the crazy is because I've mostly been blogging about Frankenstein literary analysis (with a little Dracula, now that Dracula Daily is the thing). When you're looking at a book as old with as much analysis already existing as Frankenstein it does a little to weed out some of the immature reactionary stuff, but there are still some number of people who can't separate text from blorboism, for lack of a better term.

I'm brain-depositary there if you're interested, btw.

Anyway, this is a really long preamble to the fact that I need a static site to store this stuff. I've been posting essentially fully-functional essays on my tumblr and tumblr is a really, REALLY bad place to store essays. I've been thinking of having a static or mostly-static site with maybe a guestbook for a while, to store an index of resources and some of my writing like media analysis essays or tutorials that need a stable web address for access. I have a LOT of complaints about how the internet functions now, that corralling people into a limited number of social media sites, algorithmic searching, putting everything on video, etc. has made it essentially impossible to FIND and KEEP resources stable online. They used to say that when you posted anything on the internet it's there forever but our corporate overlords have found that it's more profitable to make nothing last and force us to create endless 'content' for them to keep making inaccessible as their combines churn.

Anyway, possibly out of nostalgia's sake, I picked up my old Neocities site, cleared out what was essentially an art project/html practice site, and was looking to start building there. I spent a lot of time in elementary school building a static geocities site to host pixel art dolls I'd made and was reaching deep into these reserves when trying to build anything on neocities and kept remembering how I did things, thinking naively, with all my code experience as a mature adult that this could not possibly be the best way to manually build static sites, and then trying to look up what I was trying to do, and learning that, dear reader, it was -- I'm mostly discussing the lack of includes to make pages consistent, etc. This got me looking at static site generators like Hugo, making me wonder if I really wanted to go that route because I would really be learning something completely new here or if I should just do... something else, considering what I want to do, or to just go really retro in my site building and not even bother with stuff like real sidebar navigation on neocities.

So friends, if anyone is indeed reading my posts, I am asking for advice on what to do here. Do I continue on neocities and go full 1999 on this static site that I want to build, considering it's the equivalent of an online bomb-shelter anyway, or do I go find another site builder and host that can make it a bit more modern? I don't have my own domain name and would rather not have to subscribe to anything for now, but being able to download my site locally as a backup is definitely a plus. If you think there's anything else I should consider for this site, I'd be much obliged if you told me about that as well. Thanks.