Welcome back to Get Rec’d!
We are rapidly approaching fifty of these things. Wow! As always, thank you for sharing your recommendations with me. This one has some academic texts, a spooky mystery, and an Austen-inspired romance set in Chinatown.
Want to pass along any recommendations? Drop them in the comments below!
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The Burning Girls
Like a mix of mystery and horror, especially as we get close to spooky season? This follows a vicar and her daughter as they relocate to a mysterious English town. A TV series is in the works and I’m looking forward to it.
An unconventional vicar moves to a remote corner of the English countryside, only to discover a community haunted by death and disappearances both past and present–and intent on keeping its dark secrets–in this explosive, unsettling thriller from acclaimed author C. J. Tudor.
Welcome to Chapel Croft. Five hundred years ago, eight protestant martyrs were burned at the stake here. Thirty years ago, two teenage girls disappeared without a trace. And two months ago, the vicar of the local parish killed himself.
Reverend Jack Brooks, a single parent with a fourteen-year-old daughter and a heavy conscience, arrives in the village hoping to make a fresh start and find some peace. Instead, Jack finds a town mired in secrecy and a strange welcome package: an old exorcism kit and a note quoting scripture. “But there is nothing covered up that will not be revealed and hidden that will not be known.”
The more Jack and her daughter Flo get acquainted with the town and its strange denizens, the deeper they are drawn into their rifts, mysteries, and suspicions. And when Flo is troubled by strange sightings in the old chapel, it becomes apparent that there are ghosts here that refuse to be laid to rest.
But uncovering the truth can be deadly in a village where everyone has something to protect, everyone has links with the village’s bloody past, and no one trusts an outsider.
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Good Fortune
I saw my friend reading this one and thought it might be of interest to the Bitchery. It’s a Pride & Prejudice retelling set in New York City’s Chinatown.
A whip-smart and charming debut novel that brilliantly reimagines Pride and Prejudice, set in contemporary Chinatown, exploring contemporary issues of class divides, family ties, cultural identity, and the pleasures and frustrations that come with falling in love.
When Elizabeth Chen’s ever-hustling realtor mother finally sells the beloved if derelict community center down the block, the new owners don’t look like typical New York City buyers. Brendan Lee and Darcy Wong are good Chinese boys with Hong Kong money. Clean-cut and charismatic, they say they are committed to cleaning up the neighborhood. To Elizabeth, that only means one thing: Darcy is looking to give the center an uptown makeover.
Elizabeth is determined to fight for community over profit, even if it means confronting the arrogant, uptight man every chance she gets. But where clever, cynical Elizabeth sees lemons, her mother sees lemonade. Eager to get Elizabeth and her other four daughters ahead in the world (and out of their crammed family apartment), Mrs. Chen takes every opportunity to keep her investors close. Closer than Elizabeth likes.
The more time they spend together, the more conflicted Elizabeth feels…until a shocking betrayal forces her to reconsider everything she thought she knew about love, trust, and the kind of person Darcy Wong really is.
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Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting
I posted Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom Instagram lecture on Bama Rush in this week’s Wednesday Links. This was one of the books she mentioned, especially in relation to how labeling something as “cute” is a way to lessen its power over you.
The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime.
Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute’s involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities.
Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman’s poetry to Ed Ruscha’s photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity’s only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.
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We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting by Sianne Ngai
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Reality Bites Back
Another book mentioned in Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom Instagram lecture on Bama Rush. If you love reading academic texts or just like getting into deep dives on pop culture, check this one out.
Nearly every night on every major network,”unscripted” (but carefully crafted) “reality” TV shows routinely glorify retrograde stereotypes that most people would assume got left behind 35 years ago.
In Reality Bites Back, media critic Jennifer L. Pozner aims a critical, analytical lens at a trend most people dismiss as harmless fluff. She deconstructs reality TV’s twisted fairytales to demonstrate that far from being simple “guilty pleasures,” these programs are actually guilty of fomenting gender-war ideology and significantly affecting the intellectual and political development of this generation’s young viewers. She lays out the cultural biases promoted by reality TV about gender, race, class, sexuality, and consumerism, and explores how those biases shape and reflect our cultural perceptions of who we are, what we’re valued for, and what we should view as “our place” in society.
Smart and informative, Reality Bites Back arms readers with the tools they need to understand and challenge the stereotypes reality TV reinforces and, ultimately, to demand accountability from the corporations responsible for this contemporary cultural attack on three decades of feminist progress.
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As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!Reality Bites Back by Jennifer Pozner
The Burning Girls sounds a bit like Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins series, starting with The Wine of Angels, which I would recommend, though the series got too dark and complicated for me eventually.
@catscatscats: Same thought here and definitely too dark in later books.
Good Fortune sounds really good! But is HC really out here pricing an ebook at $14.99 with a straight face after *waves hands aimlessly* everything??
The latest Merrily Watkins (Fever of the World) was TERRIBLE. Jane is 20 but still acts like an especially dramatic 16-year-old. Merrily still mopes over everything… I might have to move OH NO. There were huge plot holes, and I developed a seething hatred for Walt Whitman. Currently my worst book of 2023.
Trying to decide if I should read Our Aesthetic Categories, or ignore it. I’ve never felt zany to be bound up with my sense of desperation (huh?), and I don’t think I’ve ever felt tenderness and aggression simultaneously in response to cuteness. The puppy on the Wednesday Links page was maximum cuteness (to me) and in addition to tenderness all I felt was GIMME. More concerning, if this period is late capitalism, I wonder with trepidation what comes next.