The Sheer Pleasure of Reading Insane Books

Usually, I try to stick to a 'currently reading' count of two or three books. One main book that might be challenging or beefy, and a second option for rebelling from the first. This will often be a dense read paired with a lighter one, but not always. Sometimes you just need a fresh book, and two books usually serves this purpose well. And then there's the third, which could be anything from chunky reference book to read in small bursts over a long time period, or some sort of big fart from a dog's ass that feels exhilarating to read despite, or because of, its dog's ass qualities.

Reading by Lamplight (1859) by James McNeill Whistler, via NGA.

I tend not to go beyond three simultaneous reads, if only for the reason that Goodreads stops displaying those suckers all at once on its main page when you go over that number. But sometimes, some crazy days, I am reading four books. Dear reader, let me explain to you: my current four.

 

THE CULPRITS

Here they are in all their glory, and you might already be saying, "oh no". Well... let's go over them.

 

World English Bible

You might know this one. It's the bible. This is a public domain translation from some guy who took it upon himself to make one for the world wide web - I'm reading this version because it's the most prominent version available in the Steam game called 'The Bible', which is where I'm reading that bible.

It was really Margery Kempe's doing - I read about her and wanted to understand more about what she's all about, to really get as far into dear Margery's head as possible. And the only way to do that is to read the bible.

It's fascinating. I keep opening up Wikipedia tabs and blog posts about different aspects as I read, and one of the things that's so striking is its incredible sense of place. The level of real history it conveys (if esoterically) is quite astonishing. So I've really been thrust into a great historical rabbit hole here through Margery Kempe and her medieval life, into the bible and its accounts of Babylonian, Judean, Egyptian society between 800BC and 5BC and beyond. To think of people making little golden calves 2800 years ago and beefing over whether to worship Asheroth or Yahweh is so moving.

 

Hunting Adeline by H. D. Carlton

This one is a TikTok notorious self-published rape fantasy book. It's the second in a duology, and it's gotten some attention recently after the author announced that she was making a movie adaptation of the first book - people are scandalised about the idea of translating this story into film, given the extreme nature of some scenes - and so I decided to read it myself and try to understand some of the appeal and fully experience the horrors.

It's a very weird, quite immature series (the sexy guy within has ONE WHITE EYE AND ONE BLACK EYE - whoa!), and it's interesting to parse its treatment of sexual assault. Essentially, the bad boy main character is given special licence to perform his own special rapes that are, ultimately, actually wanted. There's a fantasy reflected there of the "safe" rape, but there's also a lot of fantasy about recovering from/dealing with different sexual assaults that are positioned as unequivocally bad. It offers an intriguing, messy, bombastic, and on-its-face contradictory justification for itself. Very interesting to think about. And super nasty.

Central to the plot is a Qanon-based scenario where senators partake in blood sacrifice within their paedophile rings, and our beefy male main character sadistically punishes them. There's a lot going on here. They are truly unpleasant, awful books, but nevertheless I find myself morbidly entertained.

 

The Most Dangerous Games by MrBeast and James Patterson

Okay, I just knew when this was announced that I had to read it. A 'MrBeast' novel? Say no more. I will read it. And it certainly meets my expectations.

There is an incredibly dull and bland feel to the writing which makes the book strangely hard to pay attention to. I find myself drifting away easily. It makes one yearn for the cheesy descriptive prose of H. D. Carlton. There are so many examples of extremely sloppy writing here. There's an insane overuse of "what feels like" and almost every sentence feels intensely clunky. The characters are all personality-less blobs, hard to keep track of. But it is, I have to admit, funny as hell.

My favourite thing so far is that Jimmy MrBeast is indeed a prominent character in the book. He's in his own book, and he's always dropping composed, confident, yet humble one liners. It's great. I hate it.

 

1001 Games You Must Play Before You Die by Tony Mott

Finally, this is my video game tome. I'm almost at the end of it now, but I've been reading it for most of the year, just a few games at a time, and I've found it so fun. Because it's a 2011 publication, it gives a great sense of what was going on in games at that time. It's like opening up a time capsule. There's a huge focus on iPhone and PSP games in this thing, and I love that. 

I bookmark games that particularly intrigue me, and I've liked sort of treating it like it's a newspaper. Every day this man can tell me about a few more games.

***

So those are my current four. I very much look forward to finishing them. And then I'll have to read another strange and frightening book. What will be next? Will MrBeast 'write' another book?

 

The Bride! (2026) Stinks

As you may remember if you are diligently following the personal promises I make to myself (and I know that you are), I said at least twice on this blog in the past that I would be diving into Jessie Buckley's filmography, cannonball style. Big splash. Well, I recently ticked off another Big Buckle (this is what I shall be calling all Buckley movies henceforth), and it has shaken me to my core.

Me in the club. They're playing Caramelldansen.

The Bride (2026) is a movie about the messed up, crazy, wacky bride of Frankenstein, and reader, I hated it with a passion.

Not ten seconds into this unsubtle assault on the senses, we hear from the wordsmith herself, Mary Shelley, played by Buckley in a dark room in a sort of ghostly drunken stupor. THIS Mary Shelley is nasty. This Mary Shelley says 'fuck' and 'cunt' and stuff like that. Whoa. This Mary Shelley cackles madly and speaks in a disoriented jumble like she's reading from randomised loose pages of a thesaurus. And all of this is performed with such a total lack of subtlety that I felt myself reach my maximum cringe level within about ten seconds of this movie's start.

From there, we meet the 1920s stinker also played by Buckley who will be simultaneously re-animated and half-possessed by the spirit of Shelley. I'm not totally sure what the throughline is on this - the movie concerns itself with a really on-the-nose and oddly empty feminist-ish commentary, and clearly has some interest in the warping of a woman's life (and work) post-death, when she can no longer speak or have any impact on her own image.

Mary Shelley is freakishly combined with a contemporaneous woman brought back to life in service of her own creative entity (the monster, played by Christian Bale), and so this body is inhabited in a dream-like, crazed oscillation between lucidity and anger and raving lunacy. Where does the original woman, and Mary Shelley, and the strange combined product made of their combination begin and end?

Within this story that seems on its face to want to cast a murky negative light on the use and reconstitution of women both in actual violent terms and in rhetorical and historical terms, we treat the monster himself as a sort of dim, kind soul. He has been created to need, and how cruel is that? And yet, he must replicate himself, and isn't that worse?

The movie seems to have one foot in the idea of characterising the monster as a continuation of a broad patriarchal reconstitution of women into whatever convenient form men see fit, and the other firmly planted in a freaky monster Bonny and Clyde fun romp.

Each undermines the other.

#CoupleGoals

To some extent I enjoyed the visuals. There's some cool shots, and I especially enjoyed the black and white scenes for the irritating interstitial moments where Mary Shelley speaks directly to the audience but has nothing of interest to say. I did, however, find the flashiness a bit grating.

Where Yorgos Lanthimos can really excel at the use of some quite jarring aspect ratio and colour grading changes (I'm thinking of Bugonia, where it was so perfectly done, very considered and unintrusive, extremely effective, and even shocking), the visual assault here felt fatiguing. I felt like I was the wall, and the movie's scenes were spaghetti being thrown at me.

Stop it. No more. Don't go to the club and dance crazy to the strobe light. I'm begging you.

For some reason there's an extremely thin and lightly explored detective story going on in this movie, too. Penélope Cruz is here, and she's trying to do detective stuff. But, oh my God, she's a woman. Women can't do detective type stuff, can they? This is just so tiresome. I don't know why it's here. It feels like something out of a cartoon.

The commentary on women and women's literature, and whatever analogues there are between the 1920s and now, and on the concept of stuffing a woman into a mould to serve as counterpart to a man, etc, just all felt so flat and nonsensical. I usually love to see a woman going apeshit and screaming and attacking men and spitting or whatever. I mean, I liked Men (2022). But this was painful. It was like if they took Joker 2 and hammered it down into a less incisive, less creatively bold movie.

At least there, even if the movie botched it in the last thirty minutes (do not get me started), the constant re-framing of Arthur Dent/Joker's image, the way he's seen by different people and different groups, the way he comes to represent certain agendas and fantasies and convenient images, and his own struggle to cope with, adhere to, and use those to his own advantage, is explored quite vigorously and profoundly.

Whatever. I'll stop glazing Joker 2 now. I hated this movie deeply. Thanks for hearing me out.

One Christian Bale head staple out of five. 

★☆☆☆☆