I got an email from Becky Chambers' mailing list (Author of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit) with a little blurb from the intro of her new book A Spaceborn Few.
Consequences aren't really a thing in the Harry Potter universe
Which greatly annoys me. Especially when around Book 5 or 6 it was revealed that even large numbers of the non-magical population were being affected. Not to mention how in Book 7 there really ought to be no need for the new government to hide their existence from the non-magical population. Hell I'd think they'd be flaunting it. But nothing seems to come of any of it.
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
I got an email from Becky Chambers' mailing list (Author of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit) with a little blurb from the intro of her new book A Spaceborn Few.
Consequences aren't really a thing in the Harry Potter universe
not for institutions, anyway
which is like...arguably a commentary on how frustratingly resilient corrupt institutions are, but I would argue there comes a time when representing that in your work starts to become endorsement
I wish there was a physical bookstore nearby so I could just wander among the YA shelves and get a feel for titles. Browsing online just isn't the same.
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
I wish there was a physical bookstore nearby so I could just wander among the YA shelves and get a feel for titles. Browsing online just isn't the same.
I wish there was a physical bookstore nearby so I could just wander among the YA shelves and get a feel for titles. Browsing online just isn't the same.
Have you visited your local library?
The YA section of my local library is a tiny alcove comprised of 75% manga last I looked. Used to love that place but YA section just kept getting smaller and smaller.
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
Goddammit, are you employed by my library system? We just had a whole managers meeting last week about how people think one of our branches has bedbugs.
Bedbugs hate libraries. They only feed on humans sitting in one place for hours at a time, preferably at night. Even if someone brings in bedbugs in a book and we don't notice, we got ovens to cook our chairs and we ban anyone who brings in infested material unless we get proof of extermination.
Now German cockroaches, they love libraries. They can live of off book glue more or less forever. Fortunately, they are way more susceptible to pesticides and baits.
it has become increasingly clear that JK rowling, personally, is kinda shitty
Is she kinda shitty or will she just give the license to anyone who asks? Did I miss something?
It's at least partly based on her attempts to push the franchise into North America, which is a goddamn minefield alone.
So in writing the backstories to Wizarding in North America she:
- Appropriated creatures from the religion/mythology of many different First Nations
- Gives no real agency or acknowledgement to First Nations peoples
- Doesn't include any of the people from the cultures she's appropriating from in the discussion of how they're going to be used in the stories.
- Just straight up apparently ignores Native American history or agency.
- Millions dead? Trail of Tears? Racism against non-whites? Slavery? No apparent impact on the Wizarding world.
- Made it so that it's an English witch who teaches how to do Wizarding to the First Nations. Literally "teaching to the natives" about the creatures from their own cultures.
and she's kept up with this shit after people have very politely and patiently pointed out that this is the kind of bullshit that is demonstrably harmful to native folk
she has no excuse anymore, she just can't handle being criticized
Oh. That stuff is all bad, and too bad. I haven't interacted with anything Potter since the seventh book came out, I'm disappointed that she went that way with things.
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Tossrocktoo weird to livetoo rare to dieRegistered Userregular
it has become increasingly clear that JK rowling, personally, is kinda shitty
Is she kinda shitty or will she just give the license to anyone who asks? Did I miss something?
It's at least partly based on her attempts to push the franchise into North America, which is a goddamn minefield alone.
So in writing the backstories to Wizarding in North America she:
- Appropriated creatures from the religion/mythology of many different First Nations
- Gives no real agency or acknowledgement to First Nations peoples
- Doesn't include any of the people from the cultures she's appropriating from in the discussion of how they're going to be used in the stories.
- Just straight up apparently ignores Native American history or agency.
- Millions dead? Trail of Tears? Racism against non-whites? Slavery? No apparent impact on the Wizarding world.
- Made it so that it's an English witch who teaches how to do Wizarding to the First Nations. Literally "teaching to the natives" about the creatures from their own cultures.
and she's kept up with this shit after people have very politely and patiently pointed out that this is the kind of bullshit that is demonstrably harmful to native folk
she has no excuse anymore, she just can't handle being criticized
Oh. That stuff is all bad, and too bad. I haven't interacted with anything Potter since the seventh book came out, I'm disappointed that she went that way with things.
it has become increasingly clear that JK rowling, personally, is kinda shitty
Is she kinda shitty or will she just give the license to anyone who asks? Did I miss something?
It's at least partly based on her attempts to push the franchise into North America, which is a goddamn minefield alone.
So in writing the backstories to Wizarding in North America she:
- Appropriated creatures from the religion/mythology of many different First Nations
- Gives no real agency or acknowledgement to First Nations peoples
- Doesn't include any of the people from the cultures she's appropriating from in the discussion of how they're going to be used in the stories.
- Just straight up apparently ignores Native American history or agency.
- Millions dead? Trail of Tears? Racism against non-whites? Slavery? No apparent impact on the Wizarding world.
- Made it so that it's an English witch who teaches how to do Wizarding to the First Nations. Literally "teaching to the natives" about the creatures from their own cultures.
and she's kept up with this shit after people have very politely and patiently pointed out that this is the kind of bullshit that is demonstrably harmful to native folk
she has no excuse anymore, she just can't handle being criticized
Oh. That stuff is all bad, and too bad. I haven't interacted with anything Potter since the seventh book came out, I'm disappointed that she went that way with things.
It's really more of what she's always been doing, but a lot of ancient myths and creatures come from either dead cultures or cultures so thoroughly changed from what they were when they created those myths that they no longer take ownership of them. Like, there ain't a lot of Greeks who are going to be pissed if you use a centaur in a story, or Romans who are going to be pissed if you use a hippogryph, and the Babylonians aren't exactly around to tell you not to use a Lamassu.
it has become increasingly clear that JK rowling, personally, is kinda shitty
Is she kinda shitty or will she just give the license to anyone who asks? Did I miss something?
It's at least partly based on her attempts to push the franchise into North America, which is a goddamn minefield alone.
So in writing the backstories to Wizarding in North America she:
- Appropriated creatures from the religion/mythology of many different First Nations
- Gives no real agency or acknowledgement to First Nations peoples
- Doesn't include any of the people from the cultures she's appropriating from in the discussion of how they're going to be used in the stories.
- Just straight up apparently ignores Native American history or agency.
- Millions dead? Trail of Tears? Racism against non-whites? Slavery? No apparent impact on the Wizarding world.
- Made it so that it's an English witch who teaches how to do Wizarding to the First Nations. Literally "teaching to the natives" about the creatures from their own cultures.
and she's kept up with this shit after people have very politely and patiently pointed out that this is the kind of bullshit that is demonstrably harmful to native folk
she has no excuse anymore, she just can't handle being criticized
Oh. That stuff is all bad, and too bad. I haven't interacted with anything Potter since the seventh book came out, I'm disappointed that she went that way with things.
It's really more of what she's always been doing, but a lot of ancient myths and creatures come from either dead cultures or cultures so thoroughly changed from what they were when they created those myths that they no longer take ownership of them. Like, there ain't a lot of Greeks who are going to be pissed if you use a centaur in a story, or Romans who are going to be pissed if you use a hippogryph, and the Babylonians aren't exactly around to tell you not to use a Lamassu.
I keep sayin' it and I'll keep on sayin' it, but no writers from outside America should ever try to even touch indigenous Americans.
The disconnect is just too wide.
Like, indigenous people are less than 1% of the current American population. But indigenous people feature prominently in a lot of American pop culture, for a lot of complicated reasons. So this weird, stupid thing happened* where, because America has so much global cultural cachet, a LOT of people think they learned about indigenous people. But they actually learned what a dominant culture feels about a drastically-outnumbered minority, and mistook that for fact.
People who live here fuck up indigenous representation on the reg, and they at least have the thin possibility of meeting some actual Indians. People abroad don't stand a chance.
*I place a huuuuuge amount of blame on Buffalo Bill's Wild West.
I love the Harry Potter series, and I'll fiercely defend it as a quintessentially British narrative and setting designed to tear into contemporary British culture at the time it was written. It also got millions of kids to read with their family, and that's a good thing.
But the Native American stuff is just terrible and lacking any sense of sensitivity. That needs to stop, and makes me ashamed to be a HP fan tbh.
JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
edited October 2017
Probably because ebooks are significantly more expensive for libraries to acquire than print books.
It's hard for publishers to screw libraries on print books, because there are centuries of robust legal precedent which give libraries the ability to buy physical books from whatever source they want, and then lend them out freely however they want. Most of the big publishers hate this, but there's not much they can do about it.
However, so far emedia has resisted the First Sale Doctrine, because you're paying for a licensing agreement rather than the book itself. Essentially, the courts treat a print book as the property of the purchaser, while emedia tends to fall under the body of law that regulates software. The fact that it's impossible to use an ebook without in some sense copying it gives the publisher much more control over who can buy it and how they can use it.
So from the beginning, the most common stance of the Big Six publishers toward selling ebooks to libraries is "Dream on, fuckos." They have nightmares about selling one copy of an ebook to a library who then lends it to thousands of people. Which is, to be fair, exactly what a library would do if we were allowed to. It's kind of our thing.
We've successfully nagged them into actually allowing us to purchase their product over the past decade or so (because people tend to like libraries more than giant corporations, and the optics were getting worse and worse) but the prices are still ridiculous.
On average, a library can expect to pay $8 more for an ebook over a print book, even if we can only circulate it for a certain number of times or for a certain length of time before it "expires" and we have to buy a new one. For a permanent copy, they can essentially set monopoly prices on bestsellers, and there's nothing we can do about it. Famously, Random House sold millions of 50 Shades of Grey ebooks to libraries for $80 per copy.
So unless your library has over a million items in circulation or is part of a digital coalition, they probably don't have the clout to bully publishers into selling them ebooks for a fair price. (Note that bullying Overdrive will do you no good. They're also paying inflated prices, so they've got very little wiggle room if they don't want to take a loss on a sale.)
I half remember watching a documentary in college about, ah, issues of Native American identity and who gets to call themselves Native American and how they engage with that culture, whether it's legit or in good faith or just because they want an identity that they think is "cool", things like that
But at some point they devoted a lot of time to, like, Germans? A lot of Germans SUPER LOVE pretending they're Native American and it was very weird
Probably because ebooks are significantly more expensive for libraries to acquire than print books.
It's hard for publishers to screw libraries on print books, because there are centuries of robust legal precedent which give libraries the ability to buy physical books from whatever source they want, and then lend them out freely however they want. Most of the big publishers hate this, but there's not much they can do about it.
However, so far emedia has resisted the First Sale Doctrine, because you're paying for a licensing agreement rather than the book itself. Essentially, the courts treat a print book as the property of the purchaser, while emedia tends to fall under the body of law that regulates software. The fact that it's impossible to use an ebook without in some sense copying it gives the publisher much more control over who can buy it and how they can use it.
So from the beginning, the most common stance of the Big Six publishers toward selling ebooks to libraries is "Dream on, fuckos." They have nightmares about selling one copy of an ebook to a library who then lends it to thousands of people. Which is, to be fair, exactly what a library would do if we were allowed to. It's kind of our thing.
We've successfully nagged them into actually allowing us to purchase their product over the past decade or so (because people tend to like libraries more than giant corporations, and the optics were getting worse and worse) but the prices are still ridiculous.
On average, a library can expect to pay $8 more for an ebook over a print book, even if we can only circulate it for a certain number of times or for a certain length of time before it "expires" and we have to buy a new one. For a permanent copy, they can essentially set monopoly prices on bestsellers, and there's nothing we can do about it. Famously, Random House sold millions of 50 Shades of Grey ebooks to libraries for $80 per copy.
So unless your library has over a million items in circulation or is part of a digital coalition, they probably don't have the clout to bully publishers into selling them ebooks for a fair price. (Note that bullying Overdrive will do you no good. They're also paying inflated prices, so they've got very little wiggle room if they don't want to take a loss on a sale.)
Thanks. This is what I figured, more or less.
It also seems like they don't have much backlog, except for public domain stuff. Most everything is since 2008 or so. I assume this is because of what you said about limited lends. Essentially a library rents an ebook? And after that term is up it's not worth it to re-rent it.
On the subject of Can You Not, White People, has anyone here read Killers of the Flower Moon?
It's an astonishing (and horrifying) account of what happened to the Osage, who became tremendously wealthy when oil was found under their land, only for many of them to meet suspicious deaths.
It's gut-wrenching.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I did not care for Come Closer. It felt like it might be a book that went somewhere, but it never did. It was just a boring and rote demonic possession story.
A Head Full of Ghosts is of course fantastic, and I never stop recommending that one. Probably one of the best possession narratives I've encountered, and as a delightful side note, includes some really good criticism of The Exorcist along the way.
I actually just finished reading My Best Friend's Exorcism. I kind of regard it as a good Stranger Things, because I can't phrase my media recommendations in a way that isn't pretentious and dismissive of things that other people like. It leans into that eighties nostalgia real hard, which I have no real fondness for, but it also is a really good (if occasionally hokey) story about friendship, specifically amongst high school girls. Also it has some legitimately horrifying scenes once it gets towards the climax that actually play into one of my specific fears/fascinations.
I haven't read the other two books, but I'm suspicious of anything with Robert Kirkman's name on it. I'll check out the other one though, it sounds interesting enough.
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knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
I half remember watching a documentary in college about, ah, issues of Native American identity and who gets to call themselves Native American and how they engage with that culture, whether it's legit or in good faith or just because they want an identity that they think is "cool", things like that
But at some point they devoted a lot of time to, like, Germans? A lot of Germans SUPER LOVE pretending they're Native American and it was very weird
German author Karl May wrote a fictional series around the end of the 19th century about a Native American named Winnetou. The books were very popular in Germany. They're even referenced in Inglourious Basterds.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I half remember watching a documentary in college about, ah, issues of Native American identity and who gets to call themselves Native American and how they engage with that culture, whether it's legit or in good faith or just because they want an identity that they think is "cool", things like that
But at some point they devoted a lot of time to, like, Germans? A lot of Germans SUPER LOVE pretending they're Native American and it was very weird
German author Karl May wrote a fictional series around the end of the 19th century about a Native American named Winnetou. The books were very popular in Germany. They're even referenced in Inglourious Basterds.
I saw it a few years back, and it made me cry. A bunch!
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
Hey, read Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero. In it, a group of teen detectives spend their holidays foiling incompetent crooks in rubber masks, until they stumble into a Lovecraftian apocalypse cult. Years later, the three surviving members of the Blyton Summer Detective Club reunite as broken adults to reopen their last case.
It's funny, scary, and there are some good bits with a dog in it.
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Lost Salientblink twiceif you'd like me to mercy kill youRegistered Userregular
I finished Evicted while I was in Melbourne.
I can't really recommend it enough; it is very thoroughly researched and cited, with meticulous data to back up the accounts of the individuals he follows.
It will also make you feel absolutely destroyed. So yeah. Read it. And get pissed about the situation we as a nation (the U.S.) have created for low-income citizens - particularly those who are minorities and even more particularly single-parent minority women - who suffer from incredibly high eviction rates, and the criminal records, job loss, lack of food security, health problems and deep trauma/shame that accompany lack of secure, stable shelter.
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
I am listening to Horns by Joe Hill for book club next weekend, and it is making me very unhappy. It is so grimy and unpleasant and focused on creepy sexual violence, and it's approximately four times longer than the subject matter merits. It's like one part Stephen King to two parts Chuck Palahniuk, and I am more or less done with both of those authors.
I really wish the short story collection that was recommended to me earlier in the thread was not checked out at my local library, because Joe Hill seems like the kind of guy who is good at coming up with creepy ideas that work well for short stories, but turn into gross shitty slogs when stretched out to novel length.
I am doing it... Finally gonna reread Wheel of Time series and finally read the last 3-4 books and finish that series. Currently am listening to the audiobook of book 2 (The Great Hunt) even though I haven't finished rereading book 1 (Eye of the World) yet. The dang books are so long in audiobook format (25 hours+) and needing to put in a hold in Libby for them that I gotta start listening to them once I get them checked out if I want to finish them before they are due (and renewal not a given thing since the holds on them). Hopefully I can finish The Great Hunt and have a window before The Dragon Reborn audiobook comes off hold to finish Eye of the World.
Incindium on
Nintendo ID: Incindium
PSN: IncindiumX
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knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
It's kind of strange what we remember from books. I've read a lot of Stephen King and if I think about it there's a lot of sexual assault in his books, but I have to actively think about it to remember that fact.
And it's not just Stephen King. There's been a few times where I've been taken aback by someone mentioning that a certain book has those elements, until I think back and remember "oh yeah, I guess that was in there."
So how do I more actively consider this kind of thing when I'm recommending books? I do know it's easier with books I've read recently, because they're fresher in my head and the details haven't had time to fade away.
It's just that I don't want to recommend things to people and inadvertently trigger them because I forgot there was a sexual assault or something else triggering in the book.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
It's kind of strange what we remember from books. I've read a lot of Stephen King and if I think about it there's a lot of sexual assault in his books, but I have to actively think about it to remember that fact.
And it's not just Stephen King. There's been a few times where I've been taken aback by someone mentioning that a certain book has those elements, until I think back and remember "oh yeah, I guess that was in there."
So how do I more actively consider this kind of thing when I'm recommending books? I do know it's easier with books I've read recently, because they're fresher in my head and the details haven't had time to fade away.
It's just that I don't want to recommend things to people and inadvertently trigger them because I forgot there was a sexual assault or something else triggering in the book.
I don't do it anymore, but I used to take notes on books after I'd finished them. Write up my own little review, essentially, talk about what I liked and disliked, give a brief summary of the plot, that sort of thing. It was less to show other people though, and more to keep everything in my mind, so if someone asked me about a book later, I'd be able to refer back to my notes and remember a bunch more than I might have if I didn't have access to them.
Posts
The only bad thing about this is that it's for next July.
My issue was how at the very end, when it looked like there might possibly be long-ranging consequences
yeah that was pretty dumb, and also not really out of character for Rowling
Which greatly annoys me. Especially when around Book 5 or 6 it was revealed that even large numbers of the non-magical population were being affected. Not to mention how in Book 7 there really ought to be no need for the new government to hide their existence from the non-magical population. Hell I'd think they'd be flaunting it. But nothing seems to come of any of it.
Becky Chambers writes the very best books with the very best titles.
Hey, everyone. Read or listen to The Long Way To a Small, Angry Planet. Get excited with us, because Becky Chambers is the best.
not for institutions, anyway
which is like...arguably a commentary on how frustratingly resilient corrupt institutions are, but I would argue there comes a time when representing that in your work starts to become endorsement
Have you visited your local library?
https://www.paypal.me/hobnailtaylor
The YA section of my local library is a tiny alcove comprised of 75% manga last I looked. Used to love that place but YA section just kept getting smaller and smaller.
Bedbugs hate libraries. They only feed on humans sitting in one place for hours at a time, preferably at night. Even if someone brings in bedbugs in a book and we don't notice, we got ovens to cook our chairs and we ban anyone who brings in infested material unless we get proof of extermination.
Now German cockroaches, they love libraries. They can live of off book glue more or less forever. Fortunately, they are way more susceptible to pesticides and baits.
https://www.paypal.me/hobnailtaylor
Oh. That stuff is all bad, and too bad. I haven't interacted with anything Potter since the seventh book came out, I'm disappointed that she went that way with things.
It's really more of what she's always been doing, but a lot of ancient myths and creatures come from either dead cultures or cultures so thoroughly changed from what they were when they created those myths that they no longer take ownership of them. Like, there ain't a lot of Greeks who are going to be pissed if you use a centaur in a story, or Romans who are going to be pissed if you use a hippogryph, and the Babylonians aren't exactly around to tell you not to use a Lamassu.
I keep sayin' it and I'll keep on sayin' it, but no writers from outside America should ever try to even touch indigenous Americans.
The disconnect is just too wide.
Like, indigenous people are less than 1% of the current American population. But indigenous people feature prominently in a lot of American pop culture, for a lot of complicated reasons. So this weird, stupid thing happened* where, because America has so much global cultural cachet, a LOT of people think they learned about indigenous people. But they actually learned what a dominant culture feels about a drastically-outnumbered minority, and mistook that for fact.
People who live here fuck up indigenous representation on the reg, and they at least have the thin possibility of meeting some actual Indians. People abroad don't stand a chance.
*I place a huuuuuge amount of blame on Buffalo Bill's Wild West.
But the Native American stuff is just terrible and lacking any sense of sensitivity. That needs to stop, and makes me ashamed to be a HP fan tbh.
It's hard for publishers to screw libraries on print books, because there are centuries of robust legal precedent which give libraries the ability to buy physical books from whatever source they want, and then lend them out freely however they want. Most of the big publishers hate this, but there's not much they can do about it.
However, so far emedia has resisted the First Sale Doctrine, because you're paying for a licensing agreement rather than the book itself. Essentially, the courts treat a print book as the property of the purchaser, while emedia tends to fall under the body of law that regulates software. The fact that it's impossible to use an ebook without in some sense copying it gives the publisher much more control over who can buy it and how they can use it.
So from the beginning, the most common stance of the Big Six publishers toward selling ebooks to libraries is "Dream on, fuckos." They have nightmares about selling one copy of an ebook to a library who then lends it to thousands of people. Which is, to be fair, exactly what a library would do if we were allowed to. It's kind of our thing.
We've successfully nagged them into actually allowing us to purchase their product over the past decade or so (because people tend to like libraries more than giant corporations, and the optics were getting worse and worse) but the prices are still ridiculous.
On average, a library can expect to pay $8 more for an ebook over a print book, even if we can only circulate it for a certain number of times or for a certain length of time before it "expires" and we have to buy a new one. For a permanent copy, they can essentially set monopoly prices on bestsellers, and there's nothing we can do about it. Famously, Random House sold millions of 50 Shades of Grey ebooks to libraries for $80 per copy.
So unless your library has over a million items in circulation or is part of a digital coalition, they probably don't have the clout to bully publishers into selling them ebooks for a fair price. (Note that bullying Overdrive will do you no good. They're also paying inflated prices, so they've got very little wiggle room if they don't want to take a loss on a sale.)
But at some point they devoted a lot of time to, like, Germans? A lot of Germans SUPER LOVE pretending they're Native American and it was very weird
Thanks. This is what I figured, more or less.
It also seems like they don't have much backlog, except for public domain stuff. Most everything is since 2008 or so. I assume this is because of what you said about limited lends. Essentially a library rents an ebook? And after that term is up it's not worth it to re-rent it.
There were so many times where I just wanted to cover my face and yell CAN YOU NOT, WHITE PEOPLE
Stephen Graham Jones on possession horror, with recommended book/movie pairings.
It's an astonishing (and horrifying) account of what happened to the Osage, who became tremendously wealthy when oil was found under their land, only for many of them to meet suspicious deaths.
It's gut-wrenching.
Hmm... I have thoughts on some of these.
I did not care for Come Closer. It felt like it might be a book that went somewhere, but it never did. It was just a boring and rote demonic possession story.
A Head Full of Ghosts is of course fantastic, and I never stop recommending that one. Probably one of the best possession narratives I've encountered, and as a delightful side note, includes some really good criticism of The Exorcist along the way.
I actually just finished reading My Best Friend's Exorcism. I kind of regard it as a good Stranger Things, because I can't phrase my media recommendations in a way that isn't pretentious and dismissive of things that other people like. It leans into that eighties nostalgia real hard, which I have no real fondness for, but it also is a really good (if occasionally hokey) story about friendship, specifically amongst high school girls. Also it has some legitimately horrifying scenes once it gets towards the climax that actually play into one of my specific fears/fascinations.
I haven't read the other two books, but I'm suspicious of anything with Robert Kirkman's name on it. I'll check out the other one though, it sounds interesting enough.
German author Karl May wrote a fictional series around the end of the 19th century about a Native American named Winnetou. The books were very popular in Germany. They're even referenced in Inglourious Basterds.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
There's a mini-documentary (under fifteen minutes long) about the phenomenon here: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/18/world/europe/germanys-fascination-with-american-old-west-native-american-scalps-human-remains.html
I saw it a few years back, and it made me cry. A bunch!
It's funny, scary, and there are some good bits with a dog in it.
I can't really recommend it enough; it is very thoroughly researched and cited, with meticulous data to back up the accounts of the individuals he follows.
It will also make you feel absolutely destroyed. So yeah. Read it. And get pissed about the situation we as a nation (the U.S.) have created for low-income citizens - particularly those who are minorities and even more particularly single-parent minority women - who suffer from incredibly high eviction rates, and the criminal records, job loss, lack of food security, health problems and deep trauma/shame that accompany lack of secure, stable shelter.
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
I really wish the short story collection that was recommended to me earlier in the thread was not checked out at my local library, because Joe Hill seems like the kind of guy who is good at coming up with creepy ideas that work well for short stories, but turn into gross shitty slogs when stretched out to novel length.
Just like, deeply sad
Should I read Neuromancer?
Nintendo ID: Incindium
PSN: IncindiumX
And it's not just Stephen King. There's been a few times where I've been taken aback by someone mentioning that a certain book has those elements, until I think back and remember "oh yeah, I guess that was in there."
So how do I more actively consider this kind of thing when I'm recommending books? I do know it's easier with books I've read recently, because they're fresher in my head and the details haven't had time to fade away.
It's just that I don't want to recommend things to people and inadvertently trigger them because I forgot there was a sexual assault or something else triggering in the book.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I don't do it anymore, but I used to take notes on books after I'd finished them. Write up my own little review, essentially, talk about what I liked and disliked, give a brief summary of the plot, that sort of thing. It was less to show other people though, and more to keep everything in my mind, so if someone asked me about a book later, I'd be able to refer back to my notes and remember a bunch more than I might have if I didn't have access to them.