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.

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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?