Seeing Double
Currently reading:
After the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn
Coolest American Stories 2025, edited by Mark Wish and Elizabeth Coffey
The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas
Books finished this week: 1
Wait, what’s that in the darkness . . . ?
★★★☆☆
Where this book came from: McNally Jackson at Rockefeller Center, before seeing Swept Away (RIP) back in December.
Why this book: If you know me, you know I love horror.
Thoughts: This was a truly incredible overview of horror in America. It covered historical and current events, movies, shows, podcasts, books, short stories, sermons, trends, pop cultures——everything that could be called “horror” or adjacent to the genre and what we as Americans find scary. I’m pretty well-versed in American horror, especially from the ’70s to the present day, so the historical chapters provided some interesting context, though I did feel a lot of words were used there to make pretty concise points: early Americans were afraid of women who were different (hello, witch trials), Native Americans, and Black and brown people. As the book went on——especially in the final chapter that covered the last two decades of horror——the book felt less like an analysis of American culture and trends and more like a list of all the media the author consumed as research. I would have preferred, and was hoping for, some more focus on specific pieces of media and topics, so that the book wouldn’t feel quite as disjointed as it sometimes did, leaping from topic to topic. After finishing the book, I added some books to my TBR and movies to my to-watch list, but I’m not sure I learned a ton of new information.
Library updates:
I’m a sleepy gal this week, and I haven’t been reading or writing very much. I do commute to the office a couple days a week, but my commute isn’t very long to start with (brag) and in the mornings, I usually just stare out the window and listen to a podcast (Distractible right now, mostly). I’m also still adjusting to having to get up and function at a specific time, thus the sleepiness. But once I settle in a bit more to the job and get a better handle on my schedule, I’m hoping to figure out how to squeeze in more chances to read and to get back to doing at least twenty-ish minutes of writing every day.
Anyhow, work! At the moment, my job is emails and meetings, but I really don’t mind it. It’s been fun to reconnect with literary agents I worked with at previous jobs and to meet new people. Is this introvert rapidly approaching her social limit with all these emails and meetings? Yes. But am I figuring out what the hell I’m looking for? Slowly but surely! And at least the conversations are all about books and genre fiction and publishing——in a word, they’re fun.
Sorry to be a little boring, but work is really the shiniest and most exciting thing I’ve got going for me right now! I am really enjoying After the Golden Age——the sequel is already in my ThriftBooks shopping cart, because I am ungovernable——and hope to be able to review that one sooner rather than later! So . . . more soon? I hope?
Closing thoughts:
Build new routines and be kind with yourself as you adjust to them. (Like, say, waking up around 6:15 every morning to go to work for eight-plus hours, after spending months lounging around whenever you felt like it.)
Total books read from the Moratorium Library: 169
(Total books added to the Moratorium Library: 335)
So, I made a whoopsie last week, which I realized when I got home from Cold Spring and saw the copy of V. E. Schwab’s Vicious already sitting on my shelf. What makes this doubly ridiculous is that I also bought that first copy of Vicious at Split Rock. I’m knocking off one added book to fix that.
Left: June 2024. Right: Literally one week ago.
(Unrelated to anything at all, anyone want a free copy of Vicious by V. E. Schwab??)
Meanwhile, all those books I mentioned not counting last week are counted here now. I went a little bonkers on ThriftBooks with the superhero fiction, but I’m super excited to use this as comp/market research.
And here’s part one of the second ThriftBooks haul. So many people have recommended this book to me in the last week and a half and it’s basically research for my job, so hush!!!!
And finally, I also placed a Bookshop order when I realized Martha Wells had a fantasy series out. (And, no, that’s not a duplicate copy of Phantasma behind it that I accidentally purchased from Bookshop after already ordering it on ThriftBooks because I apparently have the memory of a goldfish, no way!!)
(Also unrelated, anyone want a free copy of Phantasma by Kaylie Smith??)
