Reading post
Jan. 10th, 2026 08:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonsterNew year, new reading icon! It may or not be my permanent choice - all my icons are due for a refresh, and there are so many to choose from, it's overwhelming.
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson: Man, I hate it when a certified Good Book(TM) that my friends all love and recommend doesn't land with me. This was fine! Enjoyable, even! I think if it had come less hyped - if I hadn't seen it blurbed all over the place as the definitive haunted house novel - then I'd probably have come away more impressed. I did enjoy the descriptions of the "vile" house, especially the carved children's faces whose gaze met on that malevolent cold spot. I wish (personal preference wish, not objective criticism wish) there had been more supernatural horror and less "is Eleanor just losing it" horror. The moments where the house's malevolence shone through - the stomps and banging in the night, the scrabbling fingers at the door - were the most electrifying parts of the novel for me, but there weren't very many of them. I liked the relationship between Eleanor and Theodora but I found that the fever-dream quality of the narration numbed a lot of its emotional impact.
IDK. For me this one is all like, no love; I just didn't find it as scary as I wanted to. It's going on the "good read, don't regret it, don't need to own a copy, probably won't revisit" shelf in my mind.
Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay: This one very much did scare me! Decades ago, the narrator starred as the monster in a horror movie that went tragically wrong during filming and was never released, but that achieved cult favourite status after the script and a handful of scenes got posted online. Today, Hollywood is clamouring to reboot the film, stirring up the memory of old horrors in the process.
The narrator was (intentionally) not a very charismatic personality and it took me a couple of chapters to get into the flow of things, but I enjoyed the slow-building dread and the trickle of reveals about what really happened on set. The intense psychology of the three main characters - the reckless director too caught up in her artistic ambitions to care about safety, the suicidal scriptwriter using a cast of live actors to play out her own self-destructive horror geek fantasy, and the spineless wallflower dude willing to lose himself completely in his first ever chance at importance - felt painfully real, and the horrible dramatic irony of the actual suicide scene...fuck, it genuinely hurt to read, in the best way. I did think the final "twist" at the end was cheap, unnecessary and honestly a bit silly. In my head the final chapter doesn't exist, and it's a book about a group of young creatives getting lost in their own story in a way that's terrifying because it's so mundane. But I guess no fondly genre-savvy riff on this kind of low-budget horror would be complete without a grisly on-screen murder and an ambiguously supernatural monster transformation.
Happy Place by Emily Henry: Harriet and Wyn broke off their engagement months ago because they wanted to live in different states and couldn't see a way around it, but their mutual friend group is having one last special-occasion reunion so they have to pretend they're still together. The trouble is, they're not over each other. 400 pages of nostalgic pining ensue. It's genre romance, so you guys already know how it ends.
You know how sometimes you'll read a book and be like, 'This has some interesting themes that the author has clearly put a lot of thought into!' And then you read another book by the same author and you're like 'Oh, maybe these are actually the only thing this author thinks about?' If you and the author happen to be on the same wavelength, that can be a good thing. But if you're not...yeah, this just wasn't for me. I already read one Emily Henry book about a couple who value their personal goals and careers over their relationship and who are ready to walk away from each other until they serendipitously discover a solution that lets them have everything they want with no compromise; I didn't really need another. I also just didn't think this version of the story was as well executed as Book Lovers. It was too long. Scenes that had the potential to be fun and/or poignant - everyone doing weed gummies together, the heroine practising her pottery hobby, the best friends all reminiscing about their university flatshare - dragged on and on for what felt like forever. The conflict behind the breakup could have been easily resolved at the outset with communication and a small amount of mutual flexibility, but the narrative is anti-compromise to a surprisingly strident degree. I can't tell whether the whole "we're soulmates who can't/won't be together because of ~our careers~" thing is a values statement or a just scenario the author finds iddy enough to be worth doing twice, but either way, it's not one that particularly tugs my personal heartstrings. It probably doesn't help that I listened to the novel as an audiobook, and the narrator insisted on pronouncing every. single. line. with this breathy, wistful, wow-so-profound intonation that was wearing thin by the end the first chapter. Still, I liked it enough to keep listening to the end, and that's not nothing. I nope out of audiobooks even more freely than regular books, but this one had enough charm and chemistry to keep me going despite being bored half the time and not actually liking or agreeing with the premise. I guess there's a reason Emily Henry writes nothing but bestsellers.
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson: Man, I hate it when a certified Good Book(TM) that my friends all love and recommend doesn't land with me. This was fine! Enjoyable, even! I think if it had come less hyped - if I hadn't seen it blurbed all over the place as the definitive haunted house novel - then I'd probably have come away more impressed. I did enjoy the descriptions of the "vile" house, especially the carved children's faces whose gaze met on that malevolent cold spot. I wish (personal preference wish, not objective criticism wish) there had been more supernatural horror and less "is Eleanor just losing it" horror. The moments where the house's malevolence shone through - the stomps and banging in the night, the scrabbling fingers at the door - were the most electrifying parts of the novel for me, but there weren't very many of them. I liked the relationship between Eleanor and Theodora but I found that the fever-dream quality of the narration numbed a lot of its emotional impact.
IDK. For me this one is all like, no love; I just didn't find it as scary as I wanted to. It's going on the "good read, don't regret it, don't need to own a copy, probably won't revisit" shelf in my mind.
Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay: This one very much did scare me! Decades ago, the narrator starred as the monster in a horror movie that went tragically wrong during filming and was never released, but that achieved cult favourite status after the script and a handful of scenes got posted online. Today, Hollywood is clamouring to reboot the film, stirring up the memory of old horrors in the process.
The narrator was (intentionally) not a very charismatic personality and it took me a couple of chapters to get into the flow of things, but I enjoyed the slow-building dread and the trickle of reveals about what really happened on set. The intense psychology of the three main characters - the reckless director too caught up in her artistic ambitions to care about safety, the suicidal scriptwriter using a cast of live actors to play out her own self-destructive horror geek fantasy, and the spineless wallflower dude willing to lose himself completely in his first ever chance at importance - felt painfully real, and the horrible dramatic irony of the actual suicide scene...fuck, it genuinely hurt to read, in the best way. I did think the final "twist" at the end was cheap, unnecessary and honestly a bit silly. In my head the final chapter doesn't exist, and it's a book about a group of young creatives getting lost in their own story in a way that's terrifying because it's so mundane. But I guess no fondly genre-savvy riff on this kind of low-budget horror would be complete without a grisly on-screen murder and an ambiguously supernatural monster transformation.
Happy Place by Emily Henry: Harriet and Wyn broke off their engagement months ago because they wanted to live in different states and couldn't see a way around it, but their mutual friend group is having one last special-occasion reunion so they have to pretend they're still together. The trouble is, they're not over each other. 400 pages of nostalgic pining ensue. It's genre romance, so you guys already know how it ends.
You know how sometimes you'll read a book and be like, 'This has some interesting themes that the author has clearly put a lot of thought into!' And then you read another book by the same author and you're like 'Oh, maybe these are actually the only thing this author thinks about?' If you and the author happen to be on the same wavelength, that can be a good thing. But if you're not...yeah, this just wasn't for me. I already read one Emily Henry book about a couple who value their personal goals and careers over their relationship and who are ready to walk away from each other until they serendipitously discover a solution that lets them have everything they want with no compromise; I didn't really need another. I also just didn't think this version of the story was as well executed as Book Lovers. It was too long. Scenes that had the potential to be fun and/or poignant - everyone doing weed gummies together, the heroine practising her pottery hobby, the best friends all reminiscing about their university flatshare - dragged on and on for what felt like forever. The conflict behind the breakup could have been easily resolved at the outset with communication and a small amount of mutual flexibility, but the narrative is anti-compromise to a surprisingly strident degree. I can't tell whether the whole "we're soulmates who can't/won't be together because of ~our careers~" thing is a values statement or a just scenario the author finds iddy enough to be worth doing twice, but either way, it's not one that particularly tugs my personal heartstrings. It probably doesn't help that I listened to the novel as an audiobook, and the narrator insisted on pronouncing every. single. line. with this breathy, wistful, wow-so-profound intonation that was wearing thin by the end the first chapter. Still, I liked it enough to keep listening to the end, and that's not nothing. I nope out of audiobooks even more freely than regular books, but this one had enough charm and chemistry to keep me going despite being bored half the time and not actually liking or agreeing with the premise. I guess there's a reason Emily Henry writes nothing but bestsellers.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-09 10:41 pm (UTC)I wish (personal preference wish, not objective criticism wish) there had been more supernatural horror and less "is Eleanor just losing it" horror.
Ooh that's totally fair but IMO the book goes way harder on 'Eleanor is the horror without realising it' horror than 'is Eleanor losing it' horror! Which, to be fair, is also not strictly supernatural horror, unless you focus in on the mechanics of how Eleanor gets consumed (which Jackson doesn't really). But I've definitely gotten the 'aw, if only it had been less hyped :(' feeling before.