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It took a few plays to grow on me, but now Vienna Teng's Level Up seems like a fantastic anthem. I need to keep in mind! (It also made a great Pacific Rim vid.)
Charles Palliser, Rustication: This compelling novel is set in 1863, in the English countryside, with the kind of intense focus on marriage and proper behavior that I associate with historical romances, but to a very different end. This is a Gillian Flynn novel in a historical setting: the narrator is a callow youth who’s been sent home from university for misdeeds about which we learn increasingly more as the narrative continues; his unthinking sexism and classism are not atypical, but they’re really awful (the part where he gets mad at a young girl for enjoying sex, instead of doing it as a favor for him, is a true low). His mother and sister, and the neighbors, are mostly also terrible people in their various ways, even filtered through a healthy distrust for the narrator. The reason I kept reading is that, like Flynn, Palliser begins with a bang—here a later curator’s note that a violent threat that introduces the volume was in fact carried out—and creates such over-the-top situations that I just had to find out what happened. Sexual abuse of many kinds, along with animal harm and other cruelties. I devoured it a day but can’t say I’ll go out of my way to read another Palliser novel.
Charles Palliser, Rustication: This compelling novel is set in 1863, in the English countryside, with the kind of intense focus on marriage and proper behavior that I associate with historical romances, but to a very different end. This is a Gillian Flynn novel in a historical setting: the narrator is a callow youth who’s been sent home from university for misdeeds about which we learn increasingly more as the narrative continues; his unthinking sexism and classism are not atypical, but they’re really awful (the part where he gets mad at a young girl for enjoying sex, instead of doing it as a favor for him, is a true low). His mother and sister, and the neighbors, are mostly also terrible people in their various ways, even filtered through a healthy distrust for the narrator. The reason I kept reading is that, like Flynn, Palliser begins with a bang—here a later curator’s note that a violent threat that introduces the volume was in fact carried out—and creates such over-the-top situations that I just had to find out what happened. Sexual abuse of many kinds, along with animal harm and other cruelties. I devoured it a day but can’t say I’ll go out of my way to read another Palliser novel.
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