#reading log

I really want to try to read more this year and going forward, especially all the comics I’ve stockpiled over the last few years and have access to through DCUI. And lacking a “letterboxd but for comics” option, I just made a Gdoc. :P

Despite naming it “Reading Log 2022,” I’ve also folded in the stuff I managed to read since the start of 2020, which wasn’t a lot because I was mostly playing Animal Crossing, binge watching shows, and having various emotional crises. (”Pandemic Reading Log” just seemed defeatist and depressing.) Prose and manga will also be included.

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Completed:

Shadow of the Batgirl - Sarah Kuhn, Nicole Goux

Black Canary/Oracle: Birds of Prey - Chuck Dixon, Dick Giordano

Showcase ‘96 #3 - Jordan B. Gorfinkel, Jennifer Graves, Rick Burchett

Birds of Prey: Revolution - Chuck Dixon, Stefano Raffaele

Birds of Prey: Manhunt - Chuck Dixon, Matt Haley

Birds of Prey: Wolves - Chuck Dixon, Dick Giordano

Birds of Prey: Batgirl - Chuck Dixon, Greg Land

Batman: The Adventures Continue (Season One) - Paul Dini, Alan Burnett, Ty Templeton

Batman: The Adventures Continue (Season Two) - Paul Dini, Alan Burnett, Ty Templeton

Justice League Infinity - James Tucker, J.M. DeMatteis, Ethen Beavers

Batman: Ego - Darwyn Cooke

Robin & Batman - Jeff Lemire, Dustin Nguyen

Batgirl: Year One - Scott Beatty, Chuck Dixon, Marcos Martin

Naomi - Brian Michael Bendis, David F. Walker, Jamal Campbell

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In Progress:

Batgirls - Becky Cloonan, Michael Conrad, Jorge Corona

Batman: The Imposter - Mattson Tomlin, Andrea Sorrentino

Robin: Year One - Chuck Dixon, Scott Beatty, Javier Pulido, Marcos Martin

Batman: Death and the Maidens - Greg Rucka, Klaus Janson

Batman: Noël - Lee Bermejo

Batman: Urban Legends - Various Writers/Artists

Uzumaki - Junji Ito

if you ever decide to read banana fish do not read the last volume I swear to god you’ll regret it. read up through 18 and just let your imagination take it from there

if you’ll allow me to be a massive edgelord for a sec: survivor by chuck palahniuk. went in thinking no way is it going to be as good as fight club. now not to be dramatic but why does anyone else even bother writing

[…] in Allison’s widely acclaimed novel [Bastard Out of Carolina], Bone appears to be alone with her fantasies, alone in her struggles, her shame, her self-doubt, her rage, her solitary pleasures and pain. Significantly, Bone’s little sister Reese does not appear in the novel as Allison once saw her in “Private Rituals” [the short story that heavily influenced the later novel]. “Private Rituals” is a story in which Bone has a companion, a secret survivor who travels a path that takes a different form than the narrator’s, who nonetheless crosses or intersects with her in highly charged moments. In the novel Bone’s sister Reese’s presence is spare, because she is presented as if she had been spared. Bone has little affinity with her. Reese is the one who “gets away,” while Bone becomes the singular target of her step-father, Daddy Glen’s, raging jealousies and insecurities. In Bastard Out of Carolina, Allison does include a scene in which Bone becomes aware that Reese also masturbates, but she knows little or nothing else of her sister’s private rituals, and the readers must come to the conclusion that Reese has been exempted from the agonizingly pleasurable sexual fantasies that Bone engages in. The novel also shows us little concerning how Bone puts these fantasies into practice.

Such is not the story of “Private Rituals.” Collected in the anthology High Risk, surrounded by other writers whose sexual fantasies challenge normative inscriptions of sexuality, Allison’s narrative “I,” who will later become Bone, not only fantasies about the fire in the haystack, fetishizes the belts that Daddy Glen uses to whip her, and masturbates to the re-membering of the beatings, as she does in the novel. She also acts out her masochistic pleasures in much more graphic detail than in the novel. The games she had dreamed about for so long become her own private reality, her way of bearing the secret of being “different”: she uses scraps of worn belts and her mother’s clotheslines to tie herself down to the bed; she finds a link of broken chain, cleans and polishes it and locks it around her hips, pushing the links inside her; she wears layers of thick cotton panties and sleeps with her arms spread-eagled so that she wouldn’t sin – but it was “a joke on Jesus” as well as herself that she began to have orgasms in that position; she uses screwdrivers, hairbrush handles, rocks, letter openers, and pine cones to replace the test tubes she first discovered in her chemistry set and manipulated into dildos. And, in “Private Rituals,” Allison’s “I” has sex with her beloved Uncle Earle, who gives her dollar bills to let him rub up against her backside. She enjoys it so much that she begins to initiate the sex, until Earle gets frightened and withdraws from his niece’s precocious voluptuousness. 

Allison chose not to risk these details in her novel, knowing that a wider audience might read it and aware that few people outside s/m subcultures can tolerate or fathom these differences from sexual “norms.” The story also tells us much about what can be said and done within a community of similarly-minded writers, compared to the constraints of the novel as a singular form.

Allison’s nascent Bone is already beyond the kind of intervention some readers might desire for her. Furthermore, she has, in her own ways, solved the problem of the horror of her daily existence by construction these fantasies. These private rituals are not “evidence” of an irremediably wounded child. On the contrary, they are her remedy and they exist for her as luxuriously pleasurable. What haunts her in these moments are her feelings of guilt and shame. Not so much because she is doing something that she knows to be somehow “different” but mainly because she feels so alone in this difference. her shame is not caused by the memory of the acts she endured without her consent; rather, it is produced by her isolation. It is the loneliness that makes her pain endure. She thus is incredibly relieved when she makes the simple recognition that her little sister masturbates as well. 

Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism by Lynda Hart (1998, Columbia University Press)

aavara:

what is everyone currently reading