BIRTHDAY BOOKS!

Jun. 16 2012

#books!

“If the rest of the fae were as casual about cannibalism as the elf, Claude couldn’t come back soon enough to suit me.”

—

Deadlocked, Charlaine Harris

it has been so long since i’ve read a sookie stackhouse novel and i almost forgot how dumb my girl CH is

come on if they are elves and fairies it isn’t CANNIBALISM to eat a human child, especially not if it’s the human child from fqn 2.5 men

May. 26 2012

#OBVIOUSLY #charlaine harris #sookie stackhouse #southern vampire series #deadlocked #books! #true blood #cannibalism #i've used my cannibalism tag twice in one week something good is happening here

4 notes

here be books i have recently obtained

May. 7 2012

#books! #super excited about bruce campbell #i've been wanting to read that for ages! #and finally a copy has turned up at my super cheap thrift store #i love getting piles and piles of books for $2

4 notes

i’m reading howard dully’s memoir, my lobotomy, and it turns out he’s super right wing and generally awful, which really puts a damper on my giving a shit about him

like okay no what happened to him is undoubtedly fucked up and i am super judging this person for being such a careless asshole but UGH.

no

still no

shut up

tell me that isn’t racist

and fuck you

I’M OUT

May. 4 2012

#books!

which one should i read???

May. 3 2012

#books!

2 notes

“Over the succeeding decade, more than three dozen criminals were put to death in New York by the new, presumably more humane, mode of execution. All were men. That particular gender barrier was broken in March 1899, when a hard-bitten housewife named Martha Place became the first female to be killed in the chair. In the weeks leading up to her electrocution, her case became a cause célèbre. Even while reveling in the lurid details of her crime (Mrs. Place had smothered her seventeen-year-old stepdaughter after flinging sulfuric acid in the girl’s face), the New York Journal—William Randolph Hearst’s wildly sensationalistic “yellow” paper—crusaded for clemency on the grounds of her sex. The effort proved unavailing. Governor Theodore Roosevelt refused to commute her sentence, declaring that, when it came to punishment, female criminals deserved equality with men. On the morning of March 20, 1899, clutching a psalm book and muttering “Lord, save me, Lord, save me,” Mrs. Place was led to the death chair, becoming a pioneer of sorts in the women’s rights movement.”

—

The Devil’s Gentleman: Privilege, Poison, and the Trial That Ushered in the Twentieth Century, Harold Schechter

hahahahah i love this

Apr. 24 2012

#books! #feminism: home 2 murderers and executed criminals #4 LYF

so i just finished a book on serial killers, and it was boring and crappy, but its last line was

These stories are better than fiction, so let’s hope for some real-life sequels.

what?!?!?! let’s hope for more serial killers to systematically target and attack, rape, and murder primarily women and children so we have some new fun stuff to read? REALLY? way to end your already boring book on such an inexplicably sour note, lady.

Apr. 20 2012

#wtf #books! #serial killers #should i add a tw on this? #idk #lmk

4 notes

i went to the library book sale and met @borken who was super sweet and has a head of really fabulous hair

seriously gurel your hair is amaaaazing

Apr. 13 2012

#books! #i swear this cat hears the shutter and thinks OH IS IT TIME FOR YOU TO TAKE PICTURES OF ME #I'M GONNA GET IN EVERY SHOT #MIAOW

5 notes

“Funeral directors lived with grief, but many others working within the industry, and especially those involved in manufacturing embalming chemicals, were writing about the crucial importance of embalming and a pleasing last look at the deceased in both artistic and psychological terms early on in the century. Indeed, the cosmetic dimension of embalming, concentrated on bringing the facial features of the deceased to life, came to be called a “restorative art.” This dimension did not lead to a denial of death based on fear, as critics charged, but rather to a safe, humane confrontation with death’s undeniable reality. Embalming allowed survivors an opportunity to look death square in the face and, in its still silence, recognize life’s finality without experiencing the destabilizing terror and dread typically associated with corpses and the processes of dying. One early writer casually made the connection between visual imagery of the deceased and consolation for survivors: “Humanity, being socially and sentimentally minded, derives a great deal of mental satisfaction from mental images. The last view of a departed one may bring consolation if evidences of disease and suffering have been eradicated.” Commenting on the artistic elements of embalming, and how embalmers aspire to what many artists strive to achieve—an idealized representation of a reality no longer present, in this case a living person now dead—a well-known educator in the field writes: “The rebuilding of features is really a work of art. It all is the work of an artist and requires the technic of an artist to fully perform this feat… . In every human face there are certain points that are essential and that we must bring out if we would produce a face that is in any degree natural… . We must not see the face before us, but the face we would have before us.”

— Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth Century America, Gary Laderman

Apr. 6 2012

#death #art #books! #gary laderman

1 note

Apr. 2 2012

#favorite things #shirley jackson #my queen #books!

6 notes

ever since iq84 i’ve been somewhat turned off by the idea of returning to any murakami. what if i had only tricked myself into thinking his earlier works were good when he wrote something so fucking abysmal?

thus far, a wild sheep chase isn’t bad in the way iq84 is bad, but i still feel like i only imaged the magic & success of dance dance dance or the wind-up bird chronicle. i’m still pretty early in the book to make any legit commentary but, unfortunately, it has yet to ~capture~ me.

ps: wtf is with murakami’s fascination with ears? i didn’t realize it extended all the way back to the ’80s. ears are not sexy vaginas, dude.

Apr. 1 2012

#books! #haruki murakami

2 notes

“I had made sure of what to say to him before I came to the table. “The Amanita phalloides,” I said to him, “holds three different poisons. There is amanitin, which works slowly and is most potent. There is phalloidin, which acts at once, and there is phallin, which dissolves red corpuscles, although it is the least potent. The first symptoms do not appear until seven to twelve hours after eating, in some cases not before twenty four or even forty hours. The symptoms begin with violent stomach pains, cold sweat, vomiting –“
“Listen,” Charles said. He put down his chicken. “You stop that,” he said.
Constance was laughing. “Oh, Merricat,” she said, laughing through the words, “you are silly. I taught her,” she told Charles, “there are mushrooms by the creek and in the fields and I made her learn the deadly ones. Oh, Merricat.
“Death occurs between five and ten days after eating,” I said.
“I don’t think that’s very funny,” Charles said. “Silly Merricat,” Constance said.”

— We Have Always Lived in the Castle, 1962, Shirley Jackson

Mar. 31 2012

#shirley jackson #books! #favorite things #we have always lived in the castle

2 notes

Mar. 31 2012

Via witch-ling

#shirley jackson #books! #ugh ugh ugh why is this so perfect #i'm rereading everything before i touch hangsaman because i want to prolong the feeling #we have always lived in the castle

81 notes

“It was a grisly place, that spacious room. There were thirty-six corpses of adults in sight, stretched on their backs on slightly slanted boards, in three long rows—all of them wax-white, rigid faces, and all of them wrapped in white shrouds. Along the sides of the room were deep alcoves, like bay windows; and in each of these lay several marble-visaged babes, utterly hidden and buried under banks of fresh flowers, all but their faces and crossed hands. Around a finger of each of these fifty still forms, both great and small, was a ring; and from the ring a wire led to the ceiling, and thence to a bell in a watch-room yonder, where, day and night, a watchman sits always alert and ready to spring to the aid of any of that pallid company who, waking out of death, shall make a movement—for any, even the slightest, movement will twitch the wire and ring that fearful bell. I imagined myself a death-sentinel drowsing there alone, far in the dragging watches of some wailing, gusty night, and having in a twinkling all my body stricken to quivering jelly by the sudden clamor of that awful summons!”

— Mark Twain on Germany’s waiting mortuaries, “hospitals” for the dead constructed to ensure one wouldn’t be buried alive. you can read a little more here or pick up Jan Bondeson’s Buried Alive

Mar. 29 2012

#currently reading #books! #mark twain #death #jan bondeson #buried alive #waiting mortuary #obscura #oddities

3 notes

death at sea—she's hooked.

so i just finished a book on serial killers, and it was boring and crappy, but its last line was

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