Recent Reading: Private Rites
Oct. 22nd, 2025 09:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
Last night I wrapped up another Julia Armfield novel, Private Rites. This novel is about three estranged sisters who are pushed back together when their father dies.
Very sorry I can't give this one a higher rating (I gave it a 3.25 on StoryGraph), because I loved the last Armfield novel I read, Our Wives Under the Sea, and this book shares a lot of similarities with that one. Our Wives Under the Sea was a meditative, slow-paced exploration of an evolving grief which hit me quite hard, but Private Rites comes off, if I can be excused for phrasing it this way, like it's trying too hard. Private Rites obviously really wants the reader to think it's Deep and Thoughtful and Literary, and it shows this desire too clearly for it to work, for me.
What does succeed in Private Rites is the frustrating and heart-breaking portrayal of three estranged sisters struggling with the legacy of a complicated and toxic father. Isla, Irene, and Agnes are not particularly likeable people, and even they muse over whether this can be tied to their strange and un-childlike childhood, or if it's just natural to them. Armfield so captures the feeling of being trapped at a certain age around family, the notion that they are locked into their view of you at ten or thirteen or seventeen and never update that view to reflect who you are as an adult and how you may subconciously regress to fit that view around them. She also catches the frustrating feeling of knowing you are reacting irrationally to a sibling and not being able to stop yourself and how much emotional history undergirds these seemingly outsized responses.
The slow apocalypse happening in the background of the story feels like it ties in well with the emotional state of the three protagonists; a drowning of the world that takes place a little at a time over many years until things become unlivable.
However, as mentioned above, the book ultimately does not succeed to me at being engaging. It is incredibly introspective in a way that comes off as navel-gazing. The "City" portions of the chapters felt especially like Armfield begging us to find the novel artistic and creative, which was unnecessary, because there's plenty here to stand on its own.
The ending also felt like a complete non-sequitur. The seeds for it were sown throughout the book, but not prominently enough that I cared when it came about. Instead, I felt cheated out of an emotional denouement among the three sisters, which is cast off in a coup by this last-minute, poorly-explained plot point.
I also felt like Isla gets an unfair share of grief, and it wasn't clear why she among the three of them was singled out to be exclusively miserable.
Do love the queer representation here; Armfield continues to excel in that.
On the whole, there is a lot of good meat here and it approaches grief from a completely different angle from Our Wives Under the Sea so that it doesn't feel at all repetitive if you've read that one, but it also drags more and I found the ending unsatisfying.
Very sorry I can't give this one a higher rating (I gave it a 3.25 on StoryGraph), because I loved the last Armfield novel I read, Our Wives Under the Sea, and this book shares a lot of similarities with that one. Our Wives Under the Sea was a meditative, slow-paced exploration of an evolving grief which hit me quite hard, but Private Rites comes off, if I can be excused for phrasing it this way, like it's trying too hard. Private Rites obviously really wants the reader to think it's Deep and Thoughtful and Literary, and it shows this desire too clearly for it to work, for me.
What does succeed in Private Rites is the frustrating and heart-breaking portrayal of three estranged sisters struggling with the legacy of a complicated and toxic father. Isla, Irene, and Agnes are not particularly likeable people, and even they muse over whether this can be tied to their strange and un-childlike childhood, or if it's just natural to them. Armfield so captures the feeling of being trapped at a certain age around family, the notion that they are locked into their view of you at ten or thirteen or seventeen and never update that view to reflect who you are as an adult and how you may subconciously regress to fit that view around them. She also catches the frustrating feeling of knowing you are reacting irrationally to a sibling and not being able to stop yourself and how much emotional history undergirds these seemingly outsized responses.
The slow apocalypse happening in the background of the story feels like it ties in well with the emotional state of the three protagonists; a drowning of the world that takes place a little at a time over many years until things become unlivable.
However, as mentioned above, the book ultimately does not succeed to me at being engaging. It is incredibly introspective in a way that comes off as navel-gazing. The "City" portions of the chapters felt especially like Armfield begging us to find the novel artistic and creative, which was unnecessary, because there's plenty here to stand on its own.
The ending also felt like a complete non-sequitur. The seeds for it were sown throughout the book, but not prominently enough that I cared when it came about. Instead, I felt cheated out of an emotional denouement among the three sisters, which is cast off in a coup by this last-minute, poorly-explained plot point.
I also felt like Isla gets an unfair share of grief, and it wasn't clear why she among the three of them was singled out to be exclusively miserable.
Do love the queer representation here; Armfield continues to excel in that.
On the whole, there is a lot of good meat here and it approaches grief from a completely different angle from Our Wives Under the Sea so that it doesn't feel at all repetitive if you've read that one, but it also drags more and I found the ending unsatisfying.
AWS outage
Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.
Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.
Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.
Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.
Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.
Review: Fall Baking
Oct. 14th, 2025 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
Taste of Home Fall Baking: 275+ Breads, Pies, Cookies and More!
Paperback – September 13, 2022
by Taste of Home (Editor)
( Read more... )
Paperback – September 13, 2022
by Taste of Home (Editor)
( Read more... )
Sanders' High School Reader
Oct. 12th, 2025 11:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
Sanders' High School Reader by Charles Walton Sanders
The final reading program with more elocution exercises. The standards by which the choices were made are laid out in the preface.
So again the interesting thing to the modern reader is probably the choices. Scientific, religious, political, historical -- poems, speeches, essays --
The religious is sometimes generically theistic, sometimes Christian, sometimes specifically Protestant (in a passage where it is explicitly stated that the contemplative vocation is non-existent).
The final reading program with more elocution exercises. The standards by which the choices were made are laid out in the preface.
So again the interesting thing to the modern reader is probably the choices. Scientific, religious, political, historical -- poems, speeches, essays --
The religious is sometimes generically theistic, sometimes Christian, sometimes specifically Protestant (in a passage where it is explicitly stated that the contemplative vocation is non-existent).
Recent Reading: The Originalism Trap
Oct. 12th, 2025 05:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
This one is not likely to be of much interest to non-Americans. This weekend I blew through The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People can Take it Back by Madiba K. Dennie. This book delves into the originalism theory of constitutional interpretation, why it's far more ahistorical than its adherents want you to believe, and some tracks we could take to counter it.
If you aren't familiar, "originalism" is a theory of constitutional interpretation that says in order to understand the Constitution, we must interpret it as closely as we can to how the original writers would have interpreted it. It posits itself as the most true-to-history and unbiased way to interpret the Constitution. It was also a fringe theory for decades, until relatively recent political winds brought it to the forefront.
Originalism traps us in the mindset of 18th century wealthy white men and refuses to let us progress any further. Originalism says if we didn't have the right then, we can't have it now. Originalism cherry-picks its history to conveniently arrive at a conservative goalpost no matter what the real story is. I wrote an essay in grad school on why originalism is horseshit, so this book was of particular interest to me.
Dennie does a great job making this book accessible to everyone. I would strongly recommend this as a read for any one in the legal or legal-adjacent professions, but I think anyone can read and pick up what Dennie is laying down here. She summarizes the history of originalism as well as deep-diving into its most recent developments (this book was published in 2024, so it's quite recent).
Originalism has a way of making itself seem inevitable, but Dennie reveals with researched ease how untrue that is; she shows the hypocrisy and insincerity of the theory over and over.
Dennie doesn't stop at "here's what's wrong" either--she has proposal and suggestions for how to counter the outsized influence of this once-disfavored theory and what we as citizens can do to push back against it. On the whole, while there is obviously anger and frustration in this book--feelings I share!--there is also a lot of hope and optimism. Dennie calls herself an optimist at heart, and it shows. This is not a doom-and-gloom book foreseeing an indefinite miserable political future for liberals and anyone who wants to expand rather than contract the depth and breadth of our rights. It is a justified call-out to political opportunists seeking to dress their partisanship up as rationalism, but it is also an essay on how it doesn't have to be this way.
At a brief 218 pages (plus bibliography), The Originalism Trap is easy to recommend to any fellow Americans, both as a way to understand where we're at, and a way forward, hopefully out of this extremist quagmire. Dennie can occasionally be irreverent in a way I feel detracts rather than adds to her argument, but she is also dealing with incredibly dry material that the average reader will probably struggle to stay engaged with, so I can forgive it. Very glad I picked this one up and I left feeling hopeful that there is an achievable alternative to where we are now.
If you aren't familiar, "originalism" is a theory of constitutional interpretation that says in order to understand the Constitution, we must interpret it as closely as we can to how the original writers would have interpreted it. It posits itself as the most true-to-history and unbiased way to interpret the Constitution. It was also a fringe theory for decades, until relatively recent political winds brought it to the forefront.
Originalism traps us in the mindset of 18th century wealthy white men and refuses to let us progress any further. Originalism says if we didn't have the right then, we can't have it now. Originalism cherry-picks its history to conveniently arrive at a conservative goalpost no matter what the real story is. I wrote an essay in grad school on why originalism is horseshit, so this book was of particular interest to me.
Dennie does a great job making this book accessible to everyone. I would strongly recommend this as a read for any one in the legal or legal-adjacent professions, but I think anyone can read and pick up what Dennie is laying down here. She summarizes the history of originalism as well as deep-diving into its most recent developments (this book was published in 2024, so it's quite recent).
Originalism has a way of making itself seem inevitable, but Dennie reveals with researched ease how untrue that is; she shows the hypocrisy and insincerity of the theory over and over.
Dennie doesn't stop at "here's what's wrong" either--she has proposal and suggestions for how to counter the outsized influence of this once-disfavored theory and what we as citizens can do to push back against it. On the whole, while there is obviously anger and frustration in this book--feelings I share!--there is also a lot of hope and optimism. Dennie calls herself an optimist at heart, and it shows. This is not a doom-and-gloom book foreseeing an indefinite miserable political future for liberals and anyone who wants to expand rather than contract the depth and breadth of our rights. It is a justified call-out to political opportunists seeking to dress their partisanship up as rationalism, but it is also an essay on how it doesn't have to be this way.
At a brief 218 pages (plus bibliography), The Originalism Trap is easy to recommend to any fellow Americans, both as a way to understand where we're at, and a way forward, hopefully out of this extremist quagmire. Dennie can occasionally be irreverent in a way I feel detracts rather than adds to her argument, but she is also dealing with incredibly dry material that the average reader will probably struggle to stay engaged with, so I can forgive it. Very glad I picked this one up and I left feeling hopeful that there is an achievable alternative to where we are now.
The Perks of Being an S-Class Heroine, Vol. 5
Oct. 11th, 2025 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
The Perks of Being an S-Class Heroine, Vol. 5 by Grrr
Spoilers ahead for the earlier volumes.
( Read more... )
Spoilers ahead for the earlier volumes.
( Read more... )
Recent Reading: Sharp Objects
Oct. 10th, 2025 02:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
I picked this out of the free book box and October seemed like a good time to buckle down with a gruesome murder mystery, so I started into Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (if you recognize her name, it's probably because she also wrote Gone Girl). This book is about a newspaper reporter, Camille, who returns to her tiny, rural Midwest hometown of Wind Gap to investigate a missing girl.
What to say about this one? I'm struggling. It wasn't great, it wasn't terrible. I was engaged enough to finish it, but I also dropped it back in the free book box right after finishing it. I don't feel like I wasted my time, but I also don't feel inspired to read more of Flynn's work.
The book definitely goes hard on portraying women with capital I Issues, as well as the effects of generational trauma, be it from bad parenting, mental health problems, or misogyny. The toxicity of life in a small town is also a strong element, and the claustrophobia the protagonist Camille feels being back there, seeing all these teenage girls who seem doomed to follow the same dour, unhappy paths their predecessors did. The misery that these unhappy girls and women inflict on each other, perhaps in absence of a healthier outlet, also features prominently and heartbreakingly.
Camille herself I didn't care for. She's aggravatingly passive for most of the book and her own emotional distance (as well as perhaps the writing) keep the reader at arms' length from everything that's happening. Hated her love interest too; exactly the kind of arrogant, presumptuous type I can't stand. I kept hoping she'd tell him to fuck off, but regrettably she found him charming.
Flynn's writing style was fine, although I didn't always love her choppy sentences.
The crimes in the book are quite dark, but held up against the smaller instances of violence, physical and emotional, being perpetrated in this small town day after day, the reader is left to wonder how much difference there really is between them.
Flynn shows well how the toxicity of Wind Gap impacted Camille, but I felt that not enough attention was paid to Amma, and why she alone among the family turned to such glee over violence and cruelty as an outlet for her trauma. This is one colossally fucked-up 13-year-old and I think the narrative would have benefited from more time in her head.
On the whole: idk. It was fine? Flynn obviously had things to say about life as a girl in a small town, and I think she said a lot of that effectively, but as for the enjoyability of the book? Eh.
What to say about this one? I'm struggling. It wasn't great, it wasn't terrible. I was engaged enough to finish it, but I also dropped it back in the free book box right after finishing it. I don't feel like I wasted my time, but I also don't feel inspired to read more of Flynn's work.
The book definitely goes hard on portraying women with capital I Issues, as well as the effects of generational trauma, be it from bad parenting, mental health problems, or misogyny. The toxicity of life in a small town is also a strong element, and the claustrophobia the protagonist Camille feels being back there, seeing all these teenage girls who seem doomed to follow the same dour, unhappy paths their predecessors did. The misery that these unhappy girls and women inflict on each other, perhaps in absence of a healthier outlet, also features prominently and heartbreakingly.
Camille herself I didn't care for. She's aggravatingly passive for most of the book and her own emotional distance (as well as perhaps the writing) keep the reader at arms' length from everything that's happening. Hated her love interest too; exactly the kind of arrogant, presumptuous type I can't stand. I kept hoping she'd tell him to fuck off, but regrettably she found him charming.
Flynn's writing style was fine, although I didn't always love her choppy sentences.
The crimes in the book are quite dark, but held up against the smaller instances of violence, physical and emotional, being perpetrated in this small town day after day, the reader is left to wonder how much difference there really is between them.
Flynn shows well how the toxicity of Wind Gap impacted Camille, but I felt that not enough attention was paid to Amma, and why she alone among the family turned to such glee over violence and cruelty as an outlet for her trauma. This is one colossally fucked-up 13-year-old and I think the narrative would have benefited from more time in her head.
On the whole: idk. It was fine? Flynn obviously had things to say about life as a girl in a small town, and I think she said a lot of that effectively, but as for the enjoyability of the book? Eh.
The Perks of Being an S-Class Heroine, Vol. 4
Oct. 9th, 2025 10:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
The Perks of Being an S-Class Heroine, Vol. 4 by Grrr
Spoilers ahead for the earlier volumes.
( Read more... )
Spoilers ahead for the earlier volumes.
( Read more... )