BallroomsOfMars

Sorrowland | Rivers Solomon

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Sorrowland kept showing up in my searches (stories about cults, about queerness), but I never added it to my list. For a moment I forgot why that was, so I borrowed the audiobook from the library and immediately ran into a LOT of a content-warning I try to avoid. But I kept going because the story is so strange, intriguing, surprising, and I'm really glad I did. 1/2

BallroomsOfMars Thematically I don't know how to unpack everything, as a white colonial living on stolen land, except to listen with intent to understand, to accept and sit with the discomforts, to be grateful for the insight and learning that comes from stories shared. 2/2 3d

1 like1 comment

BallroomsOfMars

A Theory of Haunting | Sarah Monette

so-so

If the writing wasn‘t so good, this would be a Pan. Descriptions and sentiments are wonderful, but the story is a mess of extraneous details irrelevant to the plot, too many meaningless background characters, and a useless protagonist. Confusing without being mysterious, ending did not feel earned.

BallroomsOfMars What about the missing pages from the folder! The row of hidden books! Maybe I missed all the important links — I was reading at 3am during a few sleepless nights — but it did seem like a lot of stuff got attention on the page that ended up having no follow-through or consequence. 1w

1 comment

BallroomsOfMars

Piranesi | Susanna Clarke

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I listened to the audiobook a couple of years ago. Re-experiencing the story in words was no less wondrous and surprising: seeing how Piranesi punctuates his text, capitalises every word relating to the House. I love how startling some of the details are (meeting the People), how truly sublime some of the descriptions, how shocking the bleedthrough between worlds is despite manifesting in items as mundane as a white gel-pen, a plastic bowl. 1/2

BallroomsOfMars It‘s a relatively short and simple story, though I think if it was expanded in any way, put under greater scrutiny, the logic of the narrative would fall apart. My sceptical mind was still back there, ready to take issue, but within the bounds of the narrative it never became more than a background hum. A mosquito on the other side of a screened window. 2/2 1w

TrishB Great review 👍🏻 7d

4 likes2 comments

BallroomsOfMars

The Taiga Syndrome | Cristina Rivera Garza

so-so

I‘m glad I read this, for the strangeness of it, the reminder that words are ours for the wielding to shape stories as we wish. Was aware of a theme of distance/observation (fitting for a detective main character I guess) and of recurring motifs, but not perceptive enough to piece together their importance. In that sense, as a reader I was distanced. Separated from the story by its opacity. I looked at words on a page, then closed the cover.

BallroomsOfMars

The Diving Pool | Yoko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder

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These are slow stories that twist the mundane into something unsettled and uncomfortable. Maybe it‘s the relatability of the domestic that renders porous the barrier between what is ordinary and what is horrifying. A terrible kind of horror that is not scraping at doors, howling in the night, but growing inside us like mould. 1/4

BallroomsOfMars I love how the stories give just enough detail to grasp some dimension of character, some sense of context, but what remains untold raises more questions than the words give answers. There are no conclusions, just maybe, maybe, and the reader is made culpable as they imagine what might hide in the narrative gaps. The reader has some agency in how they join the dots, and the horror — the size of it, the muckiness — becomes their responsibility. 2/4 1w

BallroomsOfMars Days after finishing, I keep thinking about the freedoms and dangers of invisibility. How, overlooked and unwitnessed, a person can slowly warp out of shape with the world. They can pass through life as observer only, detached from life like a ghost, their sense of culpability corroding with their sense of self. 3/4 1w

BallroomsOfMars I find myself thinking about why the two sisters are living together despite one being married and pregnant. About grapefruit segments, glistening and skinned. About the slow ooze of honey from a split comb. About whether a body, hollowed by absence, collapses in on itself in the vacuum of loss. 4/4 1w

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