meghan rose allen

I read:

Thoughts:

• A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket: Tesfa and I are continuing to enjoy these. Perhaps me enjoying them a bit more than Tesfa, but still, I think they’re pretty clever. Plus I learned the difference between nervous and anxious, so I’m expanding my mind.
• The Waking Dead Compendium Two by Robert Kirkman: I think I’m done. I’ve got my fill of male-dominated, zombie adventures where the same thing keeps happening over and over and over and over again. Maybe I’ll just read the synopsis for Compendium Three on wikipedia.
• Save Yourself by Kelly Braffet: Oh my, this is an overly busy book. In three hundred pages we have high school bullying, drunk driving, infidelity, evangelical Christianity, failing family dynamics, class difference, and then because clearly that isn’t keeping enough balls in the air, there’s also a weird pseudo-goth vampire cult.

  I’m not kidding. There is a weird pseudo-goth vampire cult.

  Too many balls in the air.

• The Wanderer by Fanny Burney: There’s a comment on this book’s goodreads page that forms a rather apt description of this book:

  A book filled with good intentions and characters who made me want to climb into the book for the sole purpose of slapping them.

  So 19th century melodramatic filled with enough coincidences and fainting fits to last a lifetime. That said, it was so much more engaging than Pride and Prejudice. So there! I’ve read a 19th century British book about women and marriage and middle and upper-class places in society and I enjoyed it. There is hope for me yet!

• Malarky by Anakana Schofield: Like most experimental novels I read, at first I slogged, forcing myself through. But then, after a little while, when the logic of that, particular, fictional universe start to make sense, and I began to enjoy myself, as much as you can enjoy a novel about a slide into dementia and an unhappy marriage and the way reality can fracture at any second. Double bonuses too for the use of the name Philomena, which I adore. It’s so Catholic sounding, perhaps because the only people I’ve ever met with that name are Irish or Filipino Catholics.

  So, if you start and aren’t sure whether to continue, my opinion is to keep going and try it out. What have you got to lose?

• Such Bright Prospects: Short Stories about Asperger Syndrome, Alcohol, and God by Tessie Regan: Reviewed here.
• Meatspace by Nikesh Shkula: Reviewed here.
• The Unenviable by David G. Mirich, PhD: I got this book to read because I thought it would be good for me, like eating kale. But then I couldn’t put the book down and read it all in two sittings (had to go pick up Tesfa at the bus stop so I had a break).
• My Real Children by Jo Walton: Being released so close to Life After Life and with similarities in plot, one can’t help but compare these two books; unfortunately My Real Children is the one that ends up lacking simply because Jo Walton cannot write as wonderfully as Kate Atkinson. Most people can’t.

  This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy My Real Children; I’d rank it four out of five, but I had the same problem with My Real Children as I did with the other Jo Walton book I read, Among Others: it was close, but not quite.

  I feel kinship with Jo Walton. Like me, she is an above average author (although Jo Walton could likely be classified as far more above average than me, like I am epsilon above average and Jo Walton is some number far larger than epsilon, like when you use $$>>$$ rather than simply $>$ in functional analysis and all that area of mathematics that I don’t like). There are times when the writing is so good. Then there are times when the writing isn’t. Maybe she (and I?) just need a really talented editor to help us out.

  She’s also Welsh and I’m part Welsh so I think we could hang out. She’s probably read Dylan Thomas and How Green Was My Valley though, so maybe we’d talk about non-Welsh things.

• The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms: Reviewed here.
• The Rescue Princesses: The Lost Gold: I’m pretty sure y’all could figure out that this was not so much a Meghan choice as a Tesfa choice. Geoff despises these books but I don’t know – they have POC princesses, the princesses are the protagonists and do things (figuring out solutions as to how to save animals), the princesses (at least in this book) stood up against adults. Sure, these books aren’t going to win any awards for writing, but I’m not going to be too down on a series of books of multiracial girls solving their own problems.
• The Little Stranger: I kept thinking something more was going to happen in this book, that there’d be a big reveal like Endless Night by Agatha Christie, but it didn’t, so the novel sort of flatlined.

  And now, so any of my ultra-literary readers can have a laugh: I first read Endless Night by Agatha Christie when I was in high school. In high school, I also really liked The Doors and their song End of the Night has the lyrics

  Some are born to sweet delight,
  Some are born to endless night.

  And I thought, Wow, Agatha Christie was in her sixties when she wrote Endless Night and here she is quoting The Doors in the book and for the title. What a hip old lady Agatha Christie must have been.

  Yeah, both The Doors and Agatha Christie were quoting Auguries of Innocence (1803) by William Blake. I didn’t realize that until I was like 25 years old. I’ll still assume, however, that Agatha Christie was a hip old lady.

• X’ed Out: A unlikable male protagonist stumbles through dream after dream! It’s like Charles Burns put everything I hate into a graphic novel. I need to make a tumblr or something of books that have lengthy dream sequences because I hate dream sequences so much. It’s not as bad as the long, drugged out dream sequence in At Play In The Fields of the Lord but any description of a dream over three words is too long for me. And X’ed Out has pictures of dreams, so that’s just too much for me to handle.
• Otherwise Known as Sheila The Great: Wow. I did not remember (a) how whiny and unlikeable Sheila is, (b) how much fat shaming this book contains, and (c) the liberal use of the word stupid to describe pretty much everything.

Favourite book of the month:

I read this book constantly when I was a kid. I was always so impressed at the chutzpah Willo Davis Roberts had that when Katie, the protagonist in The Girl With The Silver Eyes is talking about what books she likes, she lists The View From The Cherry Tree, another Willo Davis Roberts book. This blew my ten year old mind that authors could self-promote.

I read this book again in my twenties and was disappointed, but now, reading it in my thirties with Tesfa, this book is awesome. I don’t know what was going through my mind when I read it at 24. I must have been stupid that day or something.

Most promising book put on wishlist:

New David Mitchell!

I watched:

Thoughts:

• The Mindy Project: I have now watched every Mindy Project episode probably like three times. I am sort of obsessed with The Mindy Project right now (and The Hunger Games movies, which I think I like better than the books).

  There’s a comment on IMDB about The Mindy Project which, when I read it, realized made so much sense to me as to why I like the show. The link is here and I’ll quote the comment too, even if the spacing ends up weird and thin (ignore please the gender essentialism the commenter throws in):

  There’s two things about The Mindy Project I can’t deny – one, is I can’t stop watching it. I got through season 1 in a week and it makes me laugh and ship characters and hate and love characters and it’s all the experiences you’d expect from any guilty-pleasure TV show. The other one is that it annoys the pants off me. It screams Vanity Project, it’s literally let’s watch Mindy Kaling’s savy-stylish-doctor-in-NYC fantasies, it literally feels like watching the daydreams of a part-time nursing student on a crowded 6am bus. She’s surrounded by impossibly handsome men, most of which she has slept with and/or are in love with her, she’s witty, great at her job, independent super woman who never wears the same outfit twice.

  But then I realised, that’s the reason why I like this show so much. It is the female version of a geeky boy living out his fantasies through Transformers. It is a show where every single male character is defined by their relationship to Mindy, which is the most unsettling and fascinating role reversal I have EVER seen on TV. We are so used to seeing female characters defined by how men see them, we take it for granted. We are so used to having a geeky/loser/relatable MALE main characters, just think of every movie you’ve seen. Peter Parker. William Miller in Almost Famous. Heck, the dude in the Lego Movie. And they’re all surrounded by these invariably gorgeous, invariably flirty women and we just accept that. All Mindy Kaling did was turn that to HER advantage in her TV show. It strikes us as narcissistic, but boy is she catering to the fantasies of gazillions of women besides herself along the way. Including mine. Danny Castellano is the best implementation of the good-hearted grump fantasy I’ve ever seen. No it’s not realistic, but are movies ever? Why does it have to be realistic just because the main character is ‘outside traditional beauty standards’? This series is no political statement, it is a series written to get women hooked and it does just that. And I’m loving it.

• American Horror Story: I’m still not done Season One. I keep getting bored and only watching for ten minutes at a time.
• Bojack Horseman: The show amused me. I can’t really quantify how or why, just that I enjoyed it. Maybe because of Arrested Development associations in my mind.
• Happy Endings: This is my new HIMYM show, in that I watch it and think Why am I watching this? I do know why (because Adam Pally went to The Mindy Project after this and I’m all about The Mindy Project right now) but I need to stop. A lot of internet people told me Happy Endings was a good show. It is a passable show. I’m not going to go any higher than that.
• Parks and Rec: Just rewatching the old episodes on American Netflix. Mindy might be pushing Parks and Rec out of my number one position though right now. Time will tell.

I wrote: At Geoff’s suggestion, I am not working on anything in particular right now. I’m doing writing exercises and plotting the dénouement of my faerie story, trying to get better before I attack some new plans later in the season.