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strange_complex) wrote2025-01-07 09:21 pm
strange_complex) wrote2025-01-07 09:21 pm
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Books read 2024
I appreciate that I've basically stopped posting here other than WIDAWTW posts, but this is one small thing I can manage to keep up. A list of the books I read for leisure in 2024 and pictures of most of them. (Some were read on Kindle or returned to their owners before I got round to taking a picture.)
1. Tanya Kirk, ed. (2022), Haunters at the Hearth - Christmas ghost stories in the British Library Tales of the Weird series.
2. Simon Raven (1960), Doctors Wear Scarlet - the basis of the film, Incense for the Damned.
3. Matthew Lewis (1796), The Monk - a real page-turner, brilliantly arch and knowing, read on Kindle.
4. Susan Hill (1983), The Woman in Black - the novel, having read the play c. 25 years ago.
5. Bram Stoker, Dacre Stoker and Samantha Lee Howe (2022), Dracula: 125th Anniversary Edition - skim-read, mainly to pick out the textual variants between the original type-script and the published novel, as I haven't had the opportunity to 'read' the type-script before.
6. Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817), History of a Six Weeks' Tour - read online along with the relevant parts of Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont's journals, borrowed from the University library.
7. Florence Marryat (1897), Blood of the Vampire - vampirism as a racial curse.
8. Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston (1927), Dracula: the vampire play in three acts - 1960 performance edition published by Samuel French
9. Elizabeth Hand (2007), The Bride of Frankenstein: Pandora's Bride - first-person account of the Bride's experiences after escaping from the fire at the end of the film.
10. Terry Pratchett (2007), Making Money - read mainly so that I could finally give it back to the person who lent it to me without taking into consideration the question of whether I actually wanted to read it.
11. Hamilton Deane, John L. Balderston and David J. Skal (1993), Dracula: The Ultimate, Illustrated Edition of the World-Famous Vampire Play - I skipped the 1927 edition of the play in this, as I'd already read it separately only a couple of months earlier.
12. Thomas Love Peacock (1818), Nightmare Abbey - I know it's meant to be satire, but the extended scenes of people trying to out-clever each other in drawing-rooms are just unbearable. The source of the phrase "ruinous and full of owls".
13. Adam Wood (2021), The Watchmaker's Revenge - about the husband of the woman whose jet mourning brooch I inherited from my uncle, who shot her and five other people (none fatally) and spend most of the rest of his life in jail for it.
14. Charlotte Dacre (1806), Zofloya or The Moor - written in the vein of The Monk but with a female central character who has no interest in even trying to behave morally from the start.
15. Jane Mainley-Piddock, ed. (2023), Casting the Runes: the letters of M.R James - this review was fair, but there are a few gems in there nonetheless.
16. Mike Ashley (2020), Queens of the Abyss - short macabre stories by female authors in the British Library Tales of the Weird series.
17. Simon Stern (2018), The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories, Volume Three - borrowed from Joel and finished on the last day of the year.
1. Tanya Kirk, ed. (2022), Haunters at the Hearth - Christmas ghost stories in the British Library Tales of the Weird series.
2. Simon Raven (1960), Doctors Wear Scarlet - the basis of the film, Incense for the Damned.
3. Matthew Lewis (1796), The Monk - a real page-turner, brilliantly arch and knowing, read on Kindle.
4. Susan Hill (1983), The Woman in Black - the novel, having read the play c. 25 years ago.
5. Bram Stoker, Dacre Stoker and Samantha Lee Howe (2022), Dracula: 125th Anniversary Edition - skim-read, mainly to pick out the textual variants between the original type-script and the published novel, as I haven't had the opportunity to 'read' the type-script before.
6. Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817), History of a Six Weeks' Tour - read online along with the relevant parts of Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont's journals, borrowed from the University library.
7. Florence Marryat (1897), Blood of the Vampire - vampirism as a racial curse.
8. Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston (1927), Dracula: the vampire play in three acts - 1960 performance edition published by Samuel French
9. Elizabeth Hand (2007), The Bride of Frankenstein: Pandora's Bride - first-person account of the Bride's experiences after escaping from the fire at the end of the film.
10. Terry Pratchett (2007), Making Money - read mainly so that I could finally give it back to the person who lent it to me without taking into consideration the question of whether I actually wanted to read it.
11. Hamilton Deane, John L. Balderston and David J. Skal (1993), Dracula: The Ultimate, Illustrated Edition of the World-Famous Vampire Play - I skipped the 1927 edition of the play in this, as I'd already read it separately only a couple of months earlier.
12. Thomas Love Peacock (1818), Nightmare Abbey - I know it's meant to be satire, but the extended scenes of people trying to out-clever each other in drawing-rooms are just unbearable. The source of the phrase "ruinous and full of owls".
13. Adam Wood (2021), The Watchmaker's Revenge - about the husband of the woman whose jet mourning brooch I inherited from my uncle, who shot her and five other people (none fatally) and spend most of the rest of his life in jail for it.
14. Charlotte Dacre (1806), Zofloya or The Moor - written in the vein of The Monk but with a female central character who has no interest in even trying to behave morally from the start.
15. Jane Mainley-Piddock, ed. (2023), Casting the Runes: the letters of M.R James - this review was fair, but there are a few gems in there nonetheless.
16. Mike Ashley (2020), Queens of the Abyss - short macabre stories by female authors in the British Library Tales of the Weird series.
17. Simon Stern (2018), The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories, Volume Three - borrowed from Joel and finished on the last day of the year.
no subject
Do you mind if I ask how it was as a novel? I just discovered the author recently, but have not yet branched out to any of his other books.
13. Adam Wood (2021), The Watchmaker's Revenge - about the husband of the woman whose jet mourning brooch I inherited from my uncle, who shot her and five other people (none fatally) and spend most of the rest of his life in jail for it.
Also if it's not rude to ask, was the story in your family along with the brooch?
9. Elizabeth Hand (2007), The Bride of Frankenstein: Pandora's Bride - first-person account of the Bride's experiences after escaping from the fire at the end of the film.
I have such mixed feelings about this novel, but I really appreciate how much Elizabeth Hand loves Dr. Pretorius.
I like the color palette your covers make.
no subject
On the Simon Raven book, it wasn't as much better than the film as I'd hoped. There's obviously huge potential in a story which links queer-coded characters with vampirism and ancient Greek paganism, but the novel didn't really delve into that trio any more than the film. Rather, its main differences from the film are that it supplies more backstory before the narrative shifts to Greece, and spends a lot of time on analysing the psychology of the characters in ways which don't wholly pay off.
The setting is highly homosocial, by the sounds of it like the one you read, as it's set largely in a public school and at Cambridge, or follows characters from those contexts to Greece and (via flashback) to the Second World War. And several of the characters are queer-coded. But there are no clear references to actual queer relationships. Only the narrative voice stating outright that he never had that kind of relationship with Richard Fountain (the one who goes missing in Greece). Maybe we're meant to read it as him protesting too much and understand that in fact they did, but I remember thinking while reading that it seemed more like Raven trying to throw readers off the scent. That doesn't seem entirely in line with what you say about his 1959 novel, but maybe he'd received criticism for that and was trying to avoid a repeat of it?
I don't think you'd regret reading it, apart from some Grade A racism in the Second World War flashbacks, but I wouldn't expect too much from it.
On The Watchmaker's Revenge, yes, it very much was, although many of the details had faded with time. My aunt did a lot of genealogy in the 1980s, and this included conducting and taping an interview with the couple's granddaughter, then in her own 80s. That interview is transcribed and included at the end of the book, and shows that she knew full well that her grandfather had gone to prison for shooting a bunch of people, and kept repeating that one of them had 'had to have his leg off' (which was true!). The author of the book came across the case via contemporary newspaper reports, then traced the surviving family members via his own genealogical research, and was very pleased when he did to find out about the interview, as well as a family Bible handed down from that branch.
As for The Bride of Frankenstein, yeah, having her end up with the Creature after all seemed a bit off, but there was some good stuff along the way. I liked the giant monstrous horse.