Then and Now #20 (2/13/22 - 2/20/22)

Happy Sunday! The Sunday Post is a blog news meme hosted @ Caffeinated Reviewer. See rules here: Sunday Post Meme. Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came in their mailbox during the last week.  It is hosted weekly over at Mailbox Monday and every Friday they do a round-up of some of their favourite, shared reads!

Last Week

If you're in northern Europe, I hope Storm Eunice was kind to you! We had some insane wind here and there are branches and trash everywhere, but aside from that we survived pretty well. I've had a quiet week, mainly trying to rest but also get underway on a few projects and things. Also, a quick thank you for all your kind words last week about my COVID news, it really helped me feel a bit more accepting of the situation.

My quarantine ends today so thankfully I'll be able to attend an important work thing tomorrow and hopefully, fingers crossed, I can hop on the train and go to Germany next week as well. Get a little bit of quiet time in, some self care, and some undisturbed work time. 

What I posted:

• Review: The Violent Delights by Chloe Gong
• Review: The Young Woman and the Sea by Catherine Meurisse
• Review: They: A Sequence of Unease by Kay Dick, Introduction by Carmen Maria Machado
• Friday Friyay: The Unbroken (Magic of the Lost #1) by C.L. Clark

Recommendation

Slightly nonsensical, but this song has been on my mind for days now, so please enjoy it with me!

Mailbox Monday

House of a Thousand Lies by Cody Luke Davis (Crooked Lane Books; 8/9/2022)

How far will some families go to protect their legacy?
 
Diana Wolf likes to think she has it all: a rock god husband, an empty nest, a wine cellar, and a dream home in the woods. Life is good. It has to be. But when she hires a cartographer, Kerry Perkins, to survey and map her estate in rural Tennessee, she pulls back a frayed corner of the lie that is her fairytale life. On his first night at Wolf Hollow, Kerry stumbles across a young girl's skeleton buried in the woods. But what really scares Diana is a familiar symbol carved into the girl’s skull: two wolves.
 
A week later, the cops are digging in her backyard. Diana begins to question how good her life really is. How good of a man is her husband and how good a father? She’s not the only one with questions. Kerry Perkins can’t shake what he saw in the woods that night. He suspects that Diana recognized that symbol, that she lied to the police; that someone is watching him, and that whoever it is, they desperately want him to keep his mouth shut.
 
His search for answers leads him to Pink, a deeply disturbed man obsessed with the Wolfs’ celebrity. Pink knows the family better than they know themselves—and he knows that the more he and Kerry dig, the more bones they will find.
 
Told through the eyes of multiple narrators, none reliable, this is a story about parents, the lies they tell their children, and the lies they tell themselves.

I love the sound of this book but I must admit it was the cover that really first drew me in. So dark, so mysterious.

Woman: The American History of an Idea by Lillian Faderman (Yale University Press; 3/15/2022)

What does it mean to be a “woman” in America? Award-winning gender and sexuality scholar Lillian Faderman traces the evolution of the meaning from Puritan ideas of God’s plan for women to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and its reversals to the impact of such recent events as #metoo, the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, the election of Kamala Harris as vice president, and the transgender movement.
 
This wide-ranging 400-year history chronicles conflicts, retreats, defeats, and hard-won victories in both the private and the public sectors and shines a light on the often-overlooked battles of enslaved women and women leaders in tribal nations. Noting that every attempt to cement a particular definition of “woman” has been met with resistance, Faderman also shows that successful challenges to the status quo are often short-lived. As she underlines, the idea of womanhood in America continues to be contested.

Another brilliant cover, but also a very intriguing premise. It is giving me The Second Sex-vibes, in the sense that we're looking at what shapes our idea of "woman", what we allow to fall into that categroy and what we don't. 

Asian Ghost Short Stories by Various (Flame Tree Press; 4/12/2022)

Another deluxe edition of new writing and neglected perspectives. Asian ghosts – from India to Sri Lanka, China to Korea, Japan to the Philippines – can be both terrifying and comforting. Underpinned by strong cultural beliefs in the cycles of life and ancestor worship, the nature of Asian spirits differs from that of their counterparts in other areas of the world. The possibility is more instinctually accepted that ghosts remain with us, as part of the world, whether we can see them or not. Featured here are all kinds of stories from across the region: classic weird tales by the likes of Pu Songling, Rabindranath Tagore, S Mukerji, Im Bang and Yi Ruk, Lafcadio Hearn and Yei Theodora Ozaki, are complemented by stories by Asian writers of today. An egui (the Chinese version of a 'hungry ghost') is exorcised, a vicious jiangshi (Chinese zombie-like revenant) is encountered in the night, a Bengali shakchunni (the ghost of an unsatisfied bride) poignantly seeks love with devastating effect, a family is haunted by vengeful Korean gwishin, and the iconic Japanese tragedies of Oiwa and O-Kiku are revisited.

The Flame Tree Gothic Fantasy, Classic Stories and Epic Tales collections bring together the entire range of myth, folklore and modern short fiction. Highlighting the roots of suspense, supernatural, science fiction and mystery stories, the books in Flame Tree Collections series are beautifully presented, perfect as a gift and offer a lifetime of reading pleasure.

Despite its kind of bland title, I am very excited to dig into this collection of ghost stories. It also looks super intriguing from the cover and I can't wait to see how these authors bring Asian mythology into their scary stories!

So that's me for today! What's new for you?