Week 39
September feels like it’s rapidly drawing to a close, and that’s just…unaccountably strange to me. I do not understand it, the passage of time is lost to me, yada yada yada.
On the bright side, I see, like, a light? For the first time in a year and a half at least? So that’s fun.
#61) A LESSON IN VENGEANCE by Victoria Lee
Oh, so that’s what “dark academia” means.
Felicity is a rich student at ultra-elite Dalloway School, a school with a history of witchcraft and mystery. She herself returns, haunted metaphorically (and perhaps literally) by the death of her girlfriend, trying to untangle her own mental health from her perhaps maladaptive belief in witchcraft. This is complicated by the arrival of Ellis, a new student, whose own research into the school’s dark history might drag her back down.
Overall, I was really into this book. The prose is gorgeous, the characters are fascinating and well-depicted, and the way that the mystery and the tension build is excellent. I loved the exploration of character dynamics as the book progressed, as well as the hints and bits of witchcraft and murder and CULTS all that good stuff.
I also really enjoyed the thematic elements of this, and their more meta elements. It does not pass me by, Lee, that the characters spend an extraordinary amount of time discussing madness and femininity and witchcraft…in a novel where the main character’s own mental illness is related complexly to her belief in and practice of magic.
Lee pulls this all off, in my opinion, really fantastically. In someone’s else’s hands, a lot of the elements of this book might come off as trite or even harmful; Felicity suffers from psychotic depression, and Lee balances this with the question of supernatural goings-on really well, in a way that doesn’t actually seem to dismiss either aspect. The handling of mental health itself is done, for the most part, very compassionately.
I do have a couple of gripes/nitpicks about elements of the story. In some regards, it feels a little too short, like the ending comes upon the reader abruptly and without fully wrapping up all its threads. Furthermore, as I perhaps alluded to above, there’s some aspects of the depiction of mental illness that could get a little squirrelly, perhaps.
Also, it does that thing where it keeps information from the reader despite being in first person, and while some of this is done well, there’s one plot twist that’s reveal, in my opinion, doesn’t entirely make sense.
All in all, though, I loved this book quite a lot. Also, in case it wasn’t clear, this book has at its core a complicated sapphic relationship and listen, I am deeply weak to that kind of thing, okay.
#62) IN THE REALM OF HUNGRY GHOSTS by Gabor Maté
Yep, looks like we’re officially branching into non-fiction, because hey, I read a lot of non-fiction, and this straight up makes sticking to my goals on here a lot easier.
I read this from a clinical standpoint, to gain more insight into working with addiction. I’ve read and enjoyed Maté’s books in the past, and this was no change from that; I continue to appreciate his approach, his writing style, and the combination of science and anecdote, which grounds the book in research while also helping people to connect with the stories depicted.
Furthermore, I enjoyed that Maté put so much of himself in this book; himself as a practitioner, and his own addictive habits. I don’t see him as creating a 1:1 comparison between himself and his patients, only attempting to broaden our understanding of addiction and how it plays out in people, even in behaviours that we don’t always conceptualize as being part of that cycle.
Even if you aren’t someone who has experiences with addiction, or a clinician looking to work with addiction, I would recommend this book to people. It’s a fairly accessible read, and it doesn’t shy away from being political, actively advocating for harm reduction programs and against police involvement. Which, really, seems like the only moral path forward.