Reading Update

[jaggedwolf]

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Like. What do I even say. This entire book was wild from start to finish. I kept sending excerpts of it to my friends to go ??? over.

I am not an aficionado of horror movies, but reading this memoir made me think this is what people must feel when they watch a character move into a haunted house, experience the horrors, and then still continue to live in the haunted house.

I’m not even really referring to the bad shenanigans Facebook/Meta was involved in (embedded folks in the Trump campaign, targeted advertising by beauty companies to teenage girls who just deleted their selfies, etc.), but to the interpersonal experiences the author was having. Which were uh. A lot? I can abstractly understand suffering a bad time if one believes and sees that it is for a purpose one endorses. On the flip side, I can understand letting one’s skills be used for horrendous purposes if it gets one a nice enjoyable time out of it. The worst of both worlds here is sufficiently bewildering, though I suppose the author kept thinking of the good purpose being closer at hand than it ever was.

At the start of the memoir the author tells the story of how when she was a young teenager, she got bit by a shark, got stitches and then almost died anyway as her parents ignored her repeated statements of how much pain she was still in, because oops, turns out a ton of internal bleeding was still happening in there! (And then that becomes a family injoke, which would personally would drive me insane.) You might go, why on earth is this story included in this book, is it just because it is that wild an anecdote. Well, yes, but perhaps another reason was that while reading about her time at Facebook I was going, I feel like this lady’s parents set her standards for acceptable ways to be treated at an extremely low level. Like sure, maybe I’m literally replying to emails while giving birth or getting sexually harassed by my boss but it’s no dying of a shark bite. This is not a comparison explicitly drawn in the book but I could not help but think it.

It was all very fascinating on an anthropological level, if bewildering.

I’d like someone smarter and more knowledgeable than me to compare and contrast this memoir with The Education of An Idealist by Samantha Power, though perhaps that is a niche interest. My shorter commentary there is that Power’s motivations for risking safety and sanity are much more comprehensible to me than Wynn-Williams’, even though the former literally flings herself into a war zone.

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

Previous Arthur Miller knowledge: That episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (4x22 Restless) where Willow gets stuck in Death of A Salesman, CTRL-Fing through All My Sons for the Researcher’s First Murder puzzle and....incorrectly thinking Evelyn Miller in Red Dead Redemption 2 was a reference to him until this very moment when I’ve googled and learned that he’s actually a Thoreau reference and yeah, that makes way more sense timeline-wise.

None of that is relevant to this play, which I read the Saturday before I watched John Proctor Is The Villain because I love giving myself homework.

It was enjoyable enough a read, though I felt no great compulsion to watch a production afterwards. The most compelling scenes were where John Proctor and his wife are tricked into condemning each other while trying to protect each other, and that very end of the play where he decides not to lie. Though a part of me still went damn bro just stay alive and provide for your pregnant wife, wtf is she supposed to do now.

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

A weaker read than the original trilogy and the Snow book, but still a fun time. And look, I gotta respect the author for going yes, you will read the entirety of a long-ass Poe poem in my epilogue as we catch up Haymitch all the way through the lonely years ahead of him.

There’s two things that make Haymitch’s tale less appealing to me than Katniss’s or Snow’s. First is the PoV. I like Haymitch. He’s fine. The point of him is that he is a regular teenage dude. But for me the appeal of Katniss and Snow is the specific ways they’re deranged, the ways they feel utterly alien to their societies even as they are stuck being a part of them, and how they are often blind to even their own motivations. Haymitch is...well, I’d have a drink with him over the other two, but I wasn’t as hooked by him.

I did like the moment where he completely freezes when faced with gamekeepers. Good character note.

The second problem is that the mechanics of the worldbuilding, particularly how the Capitol operates, felt more cartoonish usual. I don’t mean Snow dragging Haymitch in so that he can dump and rage his feelings about Covey girls. That was perfect and amazing and I have zero complaints. Love Snow throwing a tantrum. Or the Lou Lou replacement. That was a good bit of horror. I mean the plan that Haymitch signs onto, and the roles Beetee and Ampere play there. I needed a bit more to buy that Beetee was so valuable to the Capitol that he’d get punished by his only child being thrown into the Games, because wouldn’t you just be concerned about Beetee doing even more sabotage in his undescribed very valuable work? Similarly with the consequences of the failed water tank explosion being Ampere getting torn to bits, not Haymitch, or that any of the mentors involved are still alive after that failed plan.

I saw complaints about how thinly drawn a character Lenore was — which is fair, when Maysilee’s hint is revealed to just be that Lenore paints anti-Capitol graffiti I was like uh no shit — but it was fine given her purpose in the story. Prim had no more detail than that in the first book because Prim’s not really the point of it (Sorry Prim). Very much enjoyed Maysilee, because of course I did, and I will wonder about AUs where she’s the lone victor.

I do like the idea that Haymitch’s games get re-edited into something incomprehensible to his actual experience of the games, much like many a reality show today. It keeps us on our toes, and it’s devastating for him to realize at the end. The execution didn’t quite work. Wonder if the movie will improve that any, because so far all of the adaptations freely shake things up in the details. Could work, I’ll give it a watch.