it's sarablog

bookpost jan-may 2026

oaguh ok this is really late and i wrote like no notes for it because i'm #thestruggler in like all of winter. and then i kept delaying it because i wanted to write about lotr and i forgot how to read and write for a while. and then i didn't even write a lot about lotr in the end.

i sexually identify as an attack helicopter, by isabel fall

bleak. (2020)
I read this and apparently liked it. That's all I can give you really. I should revisit it,


the hobbit, by j. r. r. tolkien

lovely children's adventure about this thing called the arkenstone (1937)

Happy Lord of the Year! Ranged Touch are doing a year-long podcast look at the Lord of the Rings, located here, and although I haven't listened much to Shelved by Genre specifically, I think the hosts are generally smart and cool people from their various of poast's and pod's. It's been a good excuse to read Tolkien for the first time.

My LOTR priors right now are:

I'm operating at 'cultural osmosis' levels of knowledge. I can name characters..!? So, I was pleasantly surprised by how nice The Hobbit was. Lord of the Rings is like, a scary capital-l Lore series nowadays, especially as it feels like big corpo keeps trying to dredge up its lesser-known bits and bobs to ensure the brand endures, leading to shit like the Gollum game. But this is a funny bedtime story about a grumpy English bloke being dragged on an adventure.

It's got a few anachronistic jokes and a deft understanding of when and how to deploy minimal setting detail to encourage imagination that frees it from LOTR's slightly stuffier reputation. It's silly! There's five hundred named Dwarves because it's funny that there's so many of them and they have singsong names and they eat all of Bilbo's food. It's funny that there's trolls who speak like they've been down the pub. It's funny that the elves are sprightly fey creatures who communicate mostly in song. It's funny that Bilbo gets the ring by kind of just pranking Gollum. There's a golf joke in it, which surely redditors and their predecessors have been arguing about for decades.
I've not read many of Tolkien's primary influences like Beowulf myself (although a recently-acquired copy of such sits on my bedside table) but recent-ish forays into Irish mythology and a tiny amount of Arthuriana did allow me to notice Tolkien's medievalist flourishes, which I found most apparent in reader asides, the way he condenses travelling, the constant verse, and a little in the way the showdown with Gollum is a verbal spar.

Bilbo's a fascinating protagonist. He's 50 years old, which is maybe equivalent to a human 20? Older than most children's novel protagonists in a way that's hard to tell how any given child will respond to him - and he's already tired. He's torn between his comfortable and oddly genetic desire to Adventure, doesn't forge any lifelong bonds with anyone, and repeatedly hides important information from people for seemingly no good reason. This is pre-One Ring, so his magic ring is just a magic ring. He comes off a bit distrustful and jealous, overprotective of his newly discovered USP in response to Gandalf lying on his CV for him and his party's dismissal of his ability and relevance.


spring snow, by yukio mishima

sea of fertility tetralogy #1 / worst guy you know gets laid (1969)

Third Mishima! Confessions of a Mask is insane and gay, and his short stories are very varied, so I wasn't sure what I was going to make of Mishima's long-form het romance. It's pretty good, although I'm not sure I quite have the background knowledge of... Buddhism, early Taisho-era aristocracy? to squeeze more meaning out of it. It's got a beautiful tone and a wry humour and Kiyoaki sucks supremely. He's so... so teenage. He's incredibly realised and complex and insufferable. A lot of it is in his head, and he has this like, intellectual virgin chuuni introvert quality to him, which crashes headfirst into a first love written by a gay man, resulting in a distant and self-obsessed romance. I loved the maidservant gossipy blackmaily drama stuff, the political and class manoeuvring, made me wonder if I'd like things like Austen and the Brontes (my favourite indie rock group)


ivanov, by anton chekhov

you lot heard about this guy's gun (pub 2004, tl peter carson)

Book is actually a collection of plays, contents:

YES I'm reading Russian plays because of Pathologic DON'T talk to me. But yes, for £2 secondhand I figured I'd fill in some knowledge gaps. My Russian lit knowledge is zero... I'll Dostoevsky someday... I'll Nabokov someday... Tolstoy... Pushkin... maybe Gorky, Bulgakov... Maybe I'll actually fucking read Goncharov even if his name makes me laugh because of Online.
Not really got any play-reading experience, nor do I regularly go to the theatre, but Ivanov was smooth going aside from having to learn Russian diminutives. Turns out everyone in Russia has about 15 names and I long for the simplicity of Japanese honorifics. Relatedly, I wonder if reading scripts is easier than I thought because I've read VNs? It was great honestly, if a terrible idea for someone with currently quite aggressive brain problems to read a play about a guy who looks straight at the audience and delivers a searing monologue about being the most depressed man in the world about 20 pages before Chekhov's Famous Gun is in his mouth.

For my own reference: here's a reddit post on play translations. Carson was fine for Ivanov.


the fellowship of the ring, by j. r. r. tolkien

thomas bombadil (1954)

(gestures above) Lord of the Year! Wow I really don't know what to write here. This took me like months to read? I enjoyed it every time I did, but it was harder to drum up motivation for compared to The Hobbit. I understand that Tolkien and many of his appreciators would like to kill me for this, and that this is also a common refrain, but I don't like the songs and poems. My verse allergy...

Mr. Bombadil wasn't anything I had osmosed, so he was very surprising. I liked his portion! Enigmatic and magical and I thought often quite beautiful despite Tom's speech quirk. It's interesting to frontload such mysterious figures as Tom and Goldberry into a story like this. He feels a bit like... if you can read this portion and take it seriously and be comfortable in the inexplicable then you'll be fine with the barrow-wights and elves?
I like the gang, it's well-balanced. Sam's a darling and I love to see him. Legolas is kind of cutieful? He likes to snile and prance. I like his weird offscreen yaoi with Gimli, who is also great. Every time Boromir gets a paragraph it's like And he beamed evil vibes at Frodo, which I always enjoyed. The elves... have been developed since The Hobbit. For the better, I think, although I did still like their flitting about and singsonging there. Their sad alien timelessness and Galadriel's grace and gender is very cool.
I really liked Moria's pitch-black endless hallways. Now that's a Dungeon.


the time machine, by h. g. wells

flower collecting in the year 802701 (1895)

Tested out my lovely new gizmo "Xteink X4" with this because it was short and on Standard Ebooks. Screen's too small to deal with formatting issues, so I figured SE would have good formatting. I liked it! The frame story of the time traveller telling his story to his bemused dinner attendees was great, the imagery of the future world wonderfully rendered, and the future-future dying planet horrific. I feel like a lot of time travel stories lately are, like, historical fix-its or concerned with faux science, paradoxes and butterfly effects and whatnot, so it was almost surprising to read something so straightforward. Guy gets on bike, goes to the future, it's an obvious metaphor for Victorian class relations, keeps going, London has become Carcinised, keeps going, reality is unrecognisable, returns, eats dinner.

I think specifically his innovation in time travel stories is the machine itself? Wells's law, the story has to only contain one impossible assumption. To make the impossible story land he encases it in this inventor story at a time of great technological progress and puts his protagonist in a class of people who can justifiably do this sort of vanity engineering. The machine is fun, described vaguely with a focus on its materials rather than its construction. It's got a lot of quartz in it, like a watch, and we know it has a saddle a detachable lever. The traveller's audience is occasionally cynical, but I didn't find a lot of space in the story to disbelieve him. This approach still works, although as a modern reader bombarded with climate apocalypse timelines, the timescale given is quite cute (tired smile). (And as a person who has failed to learn multiple languages, the idea that the traveler learned the Eloi's language in like an hour is insane. Even if it's really simple,)


the duel, by anton chekhov

if there were two guys in the caucasus (1891, tl constance garnett)

Second Chekhov, but this one's a novella instead of a play. Dude wrote like one novel, five novellas, and about ten thousand short stories. It's set in a tiny Black Sea resort village, and is about a guy who sucks and another guy who sucks, and they get into a fight about it and they kind of suck at the fight. Guy 1, Laevsky, is sort of a directionless and cowardly hedonist who has fallen out of love with his mistress, and Guy 2, von Koren, is a Darwinian zoologist who is fundamentally offended by Laevsky's pitiful existence. There's a kindly, mediatory military general who is upset by each party's inability to get along, and a deacon to bounce their respective philosophies off of, and Laevsky's mistress goes about slagging it up while her mother figure tries to sort her out. It's wry, darkly funny, and I think with a playwright's eye for physicality; character descriptions often contain their idle emotes. Lovely interiority. The eventual duel itself is an incredible mess, walking right up to the edge of farce but not enough that it loses its tension. It's really good! Shoutout to my man Ivan Andreitch 'first man with hysteria' Laevsky.

#2026 #bookpost