This week’s reading is another slightly ridiculous pairing on paper: Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung and The Plantagenets by Dan Jones. Surreal short fiction translated from Korean on one side; several centuries of medieval English monarchy on the other.
Honestly, this is exactly the sort of reading week I enjoy.
Cursed Bunny has been hovering around my TBR for a while and will fill a handful of prompts over multiple reading challenges. It’s a collection of stories that moves between horror, fantasy, science fiction and satire, with the promise of things getting deeply strange along the way. I’m particularly curious about the way Chung uses the grotesque and uncanny to explore very human systems and behaviours. Sometimes the most effective way to make something familiar look horrifying is simply to tilt it slightly sideways.
And then there’s The Plantagenets, which could hardly be more firmly in my wheelhouse.
The British monarchy is a subject I can happily disappear into, and the Plantagenets give you so much to work with: power struggles, succession crises, war, family relationships imploding on an international scale, and generations of people discovering that combining immense political power with unresolved family issues tends not to end brilliantly.
Coming back to The Plantagenets is a different experience from encountering it for the first time. I already know where Jones is taking the narrative – and, of course, I know the history – so this time I’m interested in the details I notice along the way: which figures and episodes grab my attention now, what I’d forgotten since my last read, and where I find myself agreeing (or arguing) with the way Jones chooses to tell the story. There’s something particularly satisfying about returning to a familiar history through a familiar book and discovering that neither feels quite the same as it did the last time.
The more I think about this week’s books, though, the less bizarre the pairing becomes.
Both are interested in power and its consequences. Both contain violence, cruelty and people trapped within systems larger than themselves. And both, I suspect, are going to spend quite a lot of time demonstrating humanity’s remarkable ability to make an already bad situation considerably worse.
One approaches that through surrealism and horror; the other has the advantage of several centuries of documentary evidence.
This week’s vibe: curses, crowns, and people making spectacularly bad decisions
Which, now I think about it, could describe an alarming amount of my reading.
I tend to enjoy reading multiple books at once more when they are different, personally, so I don’t see this as an odd mix. When I read multiple books together (or too close in sequence) I get them mixed up. Not much chance of that with a pairing like this!