Laurel M. Stevens's Blog, page 3

31 Days of Dark Academia: Day 7

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde is mentioned quite often in Dark Academia, but Laura Steven’s Every Exquisite Thing is one of the first novels to use it as the primary inspiration.

This book follows Penny Paxton, the daughter of an icon, as she starts her own journey at a prestigious acting school. Penny happily makes a deal and follows in the shady footsteps of some of the school’s most illustrious alumni – and then a murder occurs. Everything she thought she had control of rapidly begins to prove otherwise and she begins to realize that beauty isn’t everything she thought it was.

“Girls don’t want beauty. Girls want power. And sometimes beauty is the closest substitute.”

31 Days of Dark Academia: Day 6

Unfortunately for US readers, Day 6 is a book that has only been officially published in the UK. You can still get your hands on it in the US, but it might not be at your usual bookstore.

Slow, creeping, gothic, and filled to the brim with internal narration, The Other Lives of Miss Emily White by A.J. Elwood follows Ivy who has been sent away to a boarding school for ladies by her grandparents. However, as someone with working class roots she finds herself an outsider until a new teacher, Miss Emily White, arrives.

Set in 1864, what women should learn to do acts as a stifling cage for Ivy as she struggles with determining what is really versus what she believes. The other girls at the school are not impressed with Miss White, quickly falling in behind the popular Sophia who points at Miss White and cries that she is foul and potentially magical. A fascinating look at doppelgängers, reality, and what it means to be haunted both literally and metaphorically.

31 Days of Dark Academia: Day 5

The Devil Makes Three by Tori Bovalino has possessed books, a smattering of adults of varying competence, and two main characters trying to figure themselves and the world out.

I’m also a sucker for a well-done library setting, but this was truly a fascinating look at love, research, and letting go.

“Unlike the internet, information on paper wasn’t forever. It could be burned, consumed, never seen again. Love letters could be forgotten. Secrets could be destroyed. Stains could be scrubbed away. Ink was not forever.”

31 Days of Dark Academia: Day 4

“The mere existence of Julian‘s vulnerability was an immense and terrible secret, and keeping it was as much a burden as a privilege.”

Obsession is the name of the game in These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever. Julian and Paul meet while attending university in Pittsburgh in the 1970s. Their lives could not appear more different, but the two young men quickly become enmeshed in each other’s lives. Accelerating with startling intensity, this book shines when it comes to the internal narrative of its characters.

31 Days of Dark Academia: Day 3

Hangsaman is strange and a type of real that makes it scary in and of itself, a fictional world containing a disturbing inner reality. Jackson’s writings are known for being elegant yet unsettling and this fits that pattern.

Natalie Waites is 17 and leaving her home for college. However, Natalie’s own narration quickly takes a turn towards the unsettling as her life begins to unspool.

“I suppose any mind like mine, which is so close, actually, to the irrational and so tempted by it, is able easily to pass the dividing line between rational and irrational and communicate with someone drunk, or insane, or asleep.“

31 Days of Dark Academia: Day 2

For Day 2 we are going to jump back 30 years, to the 1994 release, Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand.

This is one that I would never have stumbled across myself it weren’t for Dr. Sturgis’s (and Signum University’s) class on Dark Academia. Which makes no sense, because it reads like a cocktail of everything that seems to be popular with Dark Academia. You have murderous women, a goddess cult, a gothic and mysterious college that contains unusually pretty and mysterious people. It manages to fit quite a lot in as well, as it covers not only college but the consequences of those college decisions years after the fact.

“It wasn’t exactly like I’d sold out on my life and dreams and all that other bullshit, because the truth was I’d never actually had anything to sell. It was more like I slowly froze in place, inside my little office at the museum; more like some part of me just fell asleep one day and never woke up.”

31 Days of Dark Academia: Day 1

For each day of October, you get a Dark Academia book this year.

Day 1 is a 2024 release called The Practice, The Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar, and it is a novella, and a dystopian science fiction one at that.

“The cruelty of this realization. The desolation of it. To know that the ferries to the other Ships, which had always glittered for her with adventure and romance, were carrying, in addition to merry vacationers with their cocktails, this other and terrible freight, the people shunted to and fro like stones.”

There is a fleet of spaceships here with clear classist structures that, of course, try to convince everyone living in them that they aren’t truly classist structures. I said that this takes place on spaceships, but this novella isn’t really about space at all. It speaks to the idea of control, humanity, elitism, labor, meaning, and connection although through the lens of education and university power structures. The prose is lyrical and somehow manages to keep you interested despite the main character never being named. Reading this novella is An Experience.

I was trying to decide how to categorize this in terms of genre and it is like smashing together science fiction, philosophy, and dark academia (or at least, that’s the best approximation I’ve come up with). If you are one for Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” or dystopias and opaque, lyrical prose I cannot recommend this to you fast enough.

10 Books to Get to Know Me

I find it near impossible to pick favorite books, so instead we’re looking at 10 books that I would recommend to someone looking to read about what I love instead. The temptation to just go back to my book ratings and find all the 5 star reviews was tempting, but in the end I think this effort was worth a bit more of my time than that. Sometimes it is difficult to put into words why a book is important to me, but this is my stab at doing just that.

Book One: This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This book is an example of ‘perfect time, perfect place’ for me. I stumbled over this in 2019 just as I was getting burnt out with genre fiction and the fantasy and sci-fi I was picking up felt formulaic and predictable. This was a small book so I could read it fast, and it had a gorgeous cover so I snagged it on a whim as I wasn’t quite ready to abandon sci-fi and fantasy.

I did not blow through it like I expected. Instead I ended up sitting at an abandoned children’s park while I literally sobbed about a third of the way through the book because it was gorgeous and painful. (This list will give you the impression that I often cry over books, but I promise that it isn’t the usual and this list just weights itself towards those rare few).

I took about 5 days to read this 198 page epistolary novella, and then I returned it to the library, purchased my own copy, and read it again. This book is responsible for diving back into reading at a time where I wasn’t sure the hobby I grew up with would be the hobby I lived with. I don’t know if there will ever be a reading experience that lives up to the first time I read this novella.

It is a tricky book to recommend as well. It has gorgeous writing – thinking poetry as prose – but it also ephemeral and lacking many of the concrete plot points people expect from sci-fi. It follows Red and Blue, two rival agents from wildly different warring agencies that end up unlikely pen-pals. However, despite their own changing feelings they are still at war – and war always has a winner, right? There’s an intimacy to this book that makes it feel poignant to me, even amongst the spiraling narrative and complex time travel hops.

Book Two: My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman, translated by Henning Koch

Have you ever had someone recommend you a book that really doesn’t sound like your cup of tea so you push it off and push it off? Yeah, that was this book for me.

A coworker, whom, I need to clarify does have good taste in books just often different from my own, recommended this to me. They recommended it to many people after they read it. The word ‘charming’ kept being used to describe the book, and my tastes tend to run more towards dark and adventurous. A goof literary fiction book came around once and awhile, but it wasn’t a genre I picked from often. Not to mention that the romanticism of grandmothers in fiction often left me feeling scraped raw and prickly.

Since the book made it to this list, it is safe to say that my assumptions about it where erroneous. It was the kind of book that hollowed me out and then filled me back-up in the best of ways. It is indeed ‘charming’, but not in the trite definition of the word. It is charming because it has you believe in the magical of mundanity and family again.

Comparing book int he style of, ‘if you like this one you will like that one’ is a time honored method for book recommendations. The closest books I can get to, if you like these ones you will also like this one (My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry) are: The Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson, A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, or The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Despite those comparisons, this isn’t a children’s book.

I was blown away by it. It has story-telling within story-telling, a precocious and slightly obtuse protagonist, and concerns itself not with the legacy of an ideal, but the legacy of care and the imperfection of humanity.

Book Three: The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu

Short story collections are so hard to choose because there’s always some pattern of hit and miss with so many stories in one book. Or at least, that had always been my experience until I picked up The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. It wasn’t a book I selected for myself, but one that I ended up reading due to a book club.

There are fifteen short stories in the book, although I would argue that “All the Flavors” could be considered a novelette at the very least due to its length. Each story is its own amalgamation of sci-fi, fantasy, folklore, and history. From robots, surveillance, and space travel to the invention of language, railroads, and demon hunters, Liu managed to pack in both information and emotion to an intense degree.

This is a collection where if I had to list my favorite I would have to list most of the book. Some confused me, some terrified me, some made my cry (again), and others simply left me stunned. You can tell that Liu thinks deeply about how he has to come to be in the world and where the world is going.

I’ve been lucky enough to hear him speak in public and to my book club as well (and he responds swiftly to emails!), and I have to say that when he publishes a short story I read it. He single-handedly changed my ambivalence regarding short-stories into a finely honed interest in the form. If you have never read a short story collection or you are only going to give one a try I will shamelessly press you to try this one.

Book Four: Beautiful Malady: Poems by Ennis Rook Bashe

Beautiful Malady only recently came out in June of 2023. I’ve read poetry for years, and I have found several collections that I would recommend to fellow poetry readers at the drop of a hat (Nothing More to Lose by Najwan Darwish is a particular favorite). There are few that I would recommend to someone who doesn’t already read poetry. This is one of them.

The poetry collection is short, even for poetry collections, at 55 pages. I had never heard of this poet before, and I also have yet to read any of their other work. However, I found this collection stunning and rough in an unusual way.

There’s a vitality to this poetry that makes it hard to remember that what you are reading is poetry, but at the same time, what else could it be but poetry? Bashe takes monsters, disability, medical trauma, and Dungeons and Dragons and smashes them all together to get a raw account of living life the best that you can with the tools at hand. Some poetry collections aim to tell an overarching story, but this one is an invitation to share an experience.

One of my favorite excerpts: “I want to be dying for, not dying of.”

Poetry may not be everyone’s jam, but this is the closest I’ve found to poetry that I love and also poetry that I would love to share with anyone. It covers a life experience that I don’t often see expressed through the books I read.

Book Five: How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo OR Read Dangerously by Azar Nafisi

Picking two books here is not cheating because I love these two books for the exact same reason. If you’re looking to get a snapshot of why I enjoy talking about reading so much either of these two books will serve you well.

Nafisi is best known for her book Reading Lolita in Tehran, and I had read a few of her articles prior to picking this book up. I expected to enjoy it. I did not expect to adore it. Nafisi writes in such a way that I want to just read her writing all day. It feels like an intimate conversation. Her epistolary writing style in here works beautifully for me, although if you are unused to epistolary writing it might feel repetitive or trite on occasion. It is obvious that Nafisi’s conversations regarding literature with her friends and father shape her thoughts and life to this day, and I found how deeply she thought on reading humbling. I love reading books, and stories have played a large role in my life, but Nafisi’s thoughts on reading and what it means to consume and produce stories outpaces me by leagues.

And speaking of being outpaced – How to Read Now by Castillo tackles thorny questions regarding publishing as industry as well as reading as consumption and enjoyment (a varied discussion in and of itself!). Castillo engages with long-held assumptions on reading, and her writing comes across as earnest and fiery. I am not in complete agreement with the entirety of this book, but it is a book that makes want to think – and it is written in a way that I feel free to be in disagreement with sections because it is an open discourse with demands but also questions. There is a deep analysis of how Castillo has read throughout her life. How she has encountered the many mediums of story, how she was expected to interact with those stories, and how that differed from how she actually did. If you’ve read Morrison’s Playing in the Dark then I would put this on your list.

Book Six: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

…picking a series for an entry on the other hand may definitely be cheating, but it’s my list so I’m doing it anyways. The Murderbot Diaries currently consists of two short stories, one novel, five novellas, and one work that straddles the novella/novel line pretty hard. This series I have happily shoved at many a friend. It has sass, self-determination, and a main character that only admits to emotion when dragged there kicking and screaming (oh, and a slight dystopian world with all-powerful corporations).

A well-developed character gets my attention like few other things, and Murderbot’s character is unique. You get a non-human character with forcible character growth and a colorful supporting cast that covers a wide range of representation. I have re-read this series, and I will read it again. Every time I see a new one is coming out I get excited. The series brings me joy even when it tackles larger issues of identity, consent, propaganda, and pain.

Book Seven: The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold

Not getting to a fantasy book until spot seven feels a little odd in retrospect. Fantasy still makes up the bulk of my reading, and it is the genre that defined my reading as I grew up. There are many fantasy series I love and that have impacted my life (*couch*Tolkien*cough*), but trying to find fantasy books that tackled themes I thought would help someone who doesn’t read lots of fantasy understand me? A little trickier.

Now, if you do follow my reading you might be wondering why this isn’t Bujold’s Penric and Desdemona series. And yes, that is my favorite series of hers by far, but The Curse of Chalion wins for standalone fantasy books.

The main character in this book is tired. He is middle-aged. He is disabled. He is one of the singularly most relate-able characters I have ever read in my life. Putting aside the fascinating world building with gods, visions, and politics this book is worth it simply for the characters.

There is crying (in the book this time). There is humility. There are people with varied motivations. There is mythical theology that somehow does not feel like sanctimonious preaching.

At its hear this is a book about finding purpose and determination, and it manages to play out at the fringes of a larger scale event. The way that this book makes you confront the concept of living with intention makes me shiver to think about.

If you read fantasy I would love to know what you think of this book. I could spend weeks talking about this book. If you don’t read fantasy, this is a book I would be tempted to recommend you regardless. And yes, I’m slowly working my way through her other works. I haven’t found a Bujold book I haven’t enjoyed yet.

Book Eight: Voice of the Fish by Lars Horn

We’re back to nonfiction. If you’re asking why this entry isn’t this Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches the answer is that they were tied and then I reread parts and the lyricism in Horn’s writing made it the winner. Younger me was obsessed with the ocean and everything creepy, vicious, and shiny that lived in it. I was the precocious second grader telling everyone that I would be an ichthyologist and my personal hero was the Shark Lady, Eugenie Clark. I did not become an ichthyologist, but I still lover everything creepy, vicious, and shiny in the deep, dark blue.

Voice of the Fish does have the lovely things from the ocean, but it also covers topics that didn’t even enter my sphere of thought until I was an adult. Child me would be confused by this book, if perhaps intrigued by the beauty of the language. Adult me adores it all.

Part memoir, part essay, and all poetic writing the entire work takes slices of Horn’s life. Some are more stream of thought and others are exact happenings. All are definitely queer and weird. Weird in the way of my family vacations that no one ever believes until they meet my parents. Feeling seen while reading someone else’s life story will never not be weird, but in this instance it was the good type of uncomfortable.

Horn manages to write intimately on deeply odd topics in a way that left me breathless with admiration. The fact that the allusions and metaphors in here were near exclusively regarding the ocean and aquatic life was simply icing on the cake for me. Long to short: give me the ocean creepy crawlies with beautiful gender thought pasta.

Book Nine: Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell

I am an anxious person who attempts to be optimistic. This novella embodies that. If you want to get a taste of this book it grew out of the short story “An Important Failure” published in Clarkesworld in 2020.

This novella weaves together several short stories on how community survives climate change. The different perspectives and time jumping manages to make this short volume feel like an entire saga despite its brevity.

The concerns and cares, from the nitty-gritty details to the entire world design, were stunning and had me wondering how has Campbell excavated parts of my brain to put on the page? She manages to respond to many of the what-ifs we are asking regarding adaptation to climate change in creative ways that still feel within the realm of possibility.

This is another book that resulted in me crying . . . again. Elegy is a strong term, and an old term, but one that I think encompasses this work beautifully.

That press that published this novella, Stelliform Press, is pretty rad. They are a small Canadian press that prioritizes climate stories from marginalized voices, and I have loved many of their works. This one absolutely takes the cake though, and took the top spot of all the books I read in 2023.

Book Ten: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The book that has been on this list the longest (errr…except when this list had Patricia C. Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles on it) because I read this book in high-school. I’ve reread it almost every year since. This year I’m giving the audiobook version a try because I am a notoriously poor listener of audiobooks.

If someone tells me that a book is magical this is the book it has to live up to. The first time I read it the circus enchanted me. The second time the characters began growing on me.The third and I couldn’t get enough of the descriptions – trying to paint all of the beautiful things being described into my mind. The atmosphere is delicious, and I personally enjoy a novel that plays around with narrative a bit. The second person narration startled me at first, but starting the book with it has resulted in it only endearing the book to me more.

The premise is the classic trope of the dueling magicians, but taken a step further and with a focus on consequences and bystander impact. Not to mention the entire book is spent building a home, and this home is then entrusted to another person to help it grown and thrive. To me it always reads as a lesson in ambition, comfort, care, and ramifications.

Thank you for reading.

The End.

So Many Books! August 2023

Aside from the fact that I can barely believe it is August soon, I also have a hard time wrapping my head around the sheer number of books coming out in August that I am excited to see hit shelves.

August 1st: Wild Spaces by S. L. Coney

This is a debut novel, but it promises to take toxic relatives to the same levels as H.P. Lovecraft’s eldritch abominations so I am, by default, fully invested in seeing reactions to this work. I love the direction Lovecraftian literature has been leaning these last few years, and I am optimistic that this will be another feather in the growing cap of accolades for bringing a new bent to Lovecaftian works.

August 8th: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

Historical and literary fiction releases usually are not on my radar, but the title for this one caught my eye. Then I read the summary and it takes place in Pennsylvania. A skeleton is found while digging the foundation for a new development so I was sold. It doesn’t hurt that I’ve heard some pretty high praise for some of McBride’s previous work.

August 8th: Masters of Death by Olivie Blake

This year has had me shifting some long-held opinions on books I like since I’ve discovered both horror and romance books that I’ve enjoyed (which was a first). So I’ve been branching out even further, and this sounds like a hilarious romance with plenty of supernatural elements. A vampire real estate agent, a ghost haunting a house, and Death’s godson all get tangled up in shenanigans that I can’t wait to dive into!

August 15th: Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

I was lucky enough to have received an advance reading copy of Thornhedge, and I enjoyed the alternate perspective and setting of this Sleeping Beauty retelling. It’s always a good book when I’m rethinking my idea of monstrosity not even part way through – extra impressive when it’s a novella. Kingfisher has crafted another odd and sweet tale here that I recommend to all lovers of fairy tales retold.

August 22nd: He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan

This one is a sequel. She Who Became the Sun came out in June of 2021 and got book-internet famous for being part of the yellow jacketed sapphic trifecta. I enjoyed the supernatural take on what felt like a historical fiction novel of 1300’s China, and I want to read the next one because I have to know how disastrously all of the main character’s decision making goes. I have to know. I need to know.

August 22nd: The Water Outlwas by S. L. Huang

This title wins for my longest awaited 2023 release. It’s been on my radar since the author made a Twitter announcement about it and mentioned that it was a take on the Chinese classic The Water Margin. I adore martial novels, especially ones with legendary masters and the jianghu. So hearing that a talented author was taking on the task to reimagine a cornerstone classic of the genre has me so pumped.

August 22nd: The Art of Libromancy by Josh Cook

If you’re reading this blog it is no surprise to you that I love books. I also love books about books, and having handsold books to random strangers because they happen to be looking at a book I love means that I absolutely want to read a book by an actual bookseller on selling books. Explain the complicated and multifaceted magic of this to me Mr. Cook!

August 29th: Guardian by priest

Background context time! One of my younger siblings visits me and shows me TV shows that they think I will like. They’re always right. One visit, much like many other, the show they put on the TV was the c-drama Guardian. The CGI was painfully awful, and I binged the whole thing because I couldn’t turn away from the characters on screen and then my heart was ripped out and shredded. After shrieking ‘WHY!’ into the pillow I asked where on earth they found this show and they pointed me to Chinese web novels. My reading world got weirder, and I love it.

Several years later and I am lucky enough that Chinese web novels are popular and are being licensed for official English translations. I know that the c-drama Guardian had to change dramatically from the source material to get past censors so that it could air, but I can’t wait to dive into the source material for the show I couldn’t stop watching. After all, even with large-scale changes, a supernatural murder investigation squad and an unassuming professor crossing paths as circumstances around an unusual murder get weirder sounds like a good time to me.

Hats off the August for bringing me a great host of books!

The HarperCollins Strike is over!

The HarperCollins Union has a contract! So I am now going through all of the book reviews I've held back on for HarperCollins imprints - expect to see those popping up now :-)