The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
“That’s not that bad,” you might be thinking. “Didn’t you say yesterday that your unread shelf was going to be unprecedented and absolutely ridiculous?”
Yes, I said that. Look closer.
“I mean, it’s interesting that those are all hardbacks. And it’s weird that they’re all the same size. But a bunch of them are new … wait.”
Sigh.
I’m never getting caught up.
I think we all knew this already, but it’s official: I can be manipulated. Rather easily, in fact.
I don’t know if you live a lifestyle that allows you to not have heard of the above book. If you do, I envy you, because it has been everywhere on my everything for two solid weeks. I first became aware of it several months ago, and actually had it preordered for a while, a preorder I cancelled when the word Dramione first entered my vocabulary.
So why do I own it now, snagging it from my local Barnes and Noble for a surprisingly reasonable $21 and change?
Because the reviews this damn book has been getting have been ludicrously good, and while I don’t really think it’s going to be all that good, and I’ve been burned by BookTok fads approximately fourteen thousand times before, if this book is half as good as people have been claiming it’s going to be something I need to read. And the reviews don’t seem quite as dominated by young women as one might expect; TikTok is the world’s epicenter for the “book girly,” a category that I think is supposed to exclude grizzled and ancient penis-havers such as myself, but I’ve seen guys talking about it too, if perhaps not quite as glowingly.
It’s a thousand fucking pages long. I have far too many thousand-page books on my TBR, and seriously, y’all are never going to stop laughing when you see the state of my shelf tomorrow. I will get to it when I get to it, God damn it, and if I don’t love it I’m never trusting another TikTok book of the moment again.(*)
That was a lie, sadly. I knew it was a lie when I was typing it, and it’s a lie now.
The fucking book doesn’t even have pretty edges. I’m trying to save for a down payment on a car, damn it, what the hell am I doing?
(*) What am I reading right now? Book five of Dungeon Crawler Fucking Carl. Which is so much better than it has any right to be that there should be some kind of law that it’s breaking.
I three-starred this. But keep reading.
Every so often, when you are in the habit of reviewing things, you encounter something that sort of breaks your review system. Most of the books I read get rated four or five stars, because I have been reading books for my entire life and I have gotten pretty good at picking books that I am going to like. Five stars is a book I really enjoyed and will recommend to people. Four stars is a book that I enjoyed but had some flaws or for whatever reason I feel less likely to talk about. Three stars is a book that was just kind of there; two stars, a lot of the time, was a DNF, and one star was a book I actively loathed and wish to punish.
You tell me: how do I star-rate a book that I personally really did not enjoy reading, but nonetheless recognize as a well-written book that may very well be appealing to other people? Because I have no damn idea, really. You Weren’t Meant to be Human is body horror. It’s about a trans man who gets pregnant. That’s already a body horror situation well before we get to the variety of mental issues that the protagonist, Crane, has. And to avoid being misunderstood, by “mental issues,” I do not mean the fact that Crane is autistic and very nearly nonverbal. No, I’m talking about the rape fantasies (as in fantasizing about being raped) and the degrading sex and the self-mutilation. If you’ve ever needed to read trigger warnings, go nowhere near this book. There are warnings at the beginning of the book, and they are extensive.
It floated through my head at one point that this is the book that TJ Klune would write if TJ Klune was KM Szpara, but I’m not convinced that makes any sense.
In addition to … all that, see those worms on the cover? Crane is part of (kidnapped and forcibly inducted into? Maybe.) a cult that worships, or at least … cares for? this possibly-alien hive mind intelligence that exists in our world mostly as a horrifying conglomeration of bugs and flies and worms and other grotesqueries. Crane knows who the (other) father of his baby is, but at the same time he spends most of the book convinced that he’s about to give birth to a giant slug or perhaps just a giant knot of maggots. The cult does a lot of murdering so that the hive has stuff to eat, and for most of the book Crane is protected/guarded/imprisoned by what is effectively a Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together from the people they’ve fed to the thing. The Frankenstein is named Stagger. Crane occasionally fantasizes about fucking it and there’s at least one sequence where he at least comes close. I’m not going to go back and reread to clarify my memory here.
Y’all, I’m okay with it if I never read another body horror again. I’m good. I’m happy with naming this book the pinnacle of the genre and then never touching it again. This is one of the most brutal and harrowing books I’ve ever read and has one of the most shocking and grotesque endings I’ve ever seen (which, now that I think about it, did get a bit of foreshadowing) and I did not enjoy one single second of reading it.
I’m not sure this book is supposed to be “enjoyed,” is the thing, which is why I’m not comfortable with panning it and why I more or less devoured the fucking thing in one sitting rather than putting it in the freezer and forgetting I ever saw it. A lot of the reviews I’m seeing for it are positively rapturous and the thing is I don’t necessarily disagree with them. I just …
*shiver*
Yeah. No more, thank you. That’s enough of that. But if you feel like you might be into this? I’m not mad about it.
A friend of mine from grad school died a couple of days ago, and she’s been on my mind all day but I’m not ready to write about it just yet. I’ll see y’all tomorrow.
It wasn’t necessarily a bad week, mind you; it just feels like it was a thousand years long. There are somehow only two weeks left in the first quarter, which means that in the main this school year is blazing by, but … man. We got a surprise two-hour delay today when dense fog briefly rendered most of northern Indiana impossible to travel in, which was nice; the combination of the delay, Friday, payday, and doughnuts in the staff lounge this morning had most of us speculating that it might somehow be all of our birthdays.
And then I have spent the vast majority of the three and a half hours since getting home with a cat asleep on my lap (awesome) and alternately browsing TikTok (less awesome) or struggling to stay awake. Dinner was a bunch of grapes. It is 8:14 as I’m typing this (on my phone, with a cat in my lap) and being entirely asleep by 9:00 is not at all an unwelcome thought.
I run the weird little gay kids club at my school, right? Which is great. I love my weird little gay kids club. It’s my favorite part of my job. Only, and I don’t know if you know this, I live in Indiana, and Indiana’s … kinda more backwards than a lot of other places, and racing towards the past as fast as we possibly can? So it’s been decided that the advertising for our first meeting can’t say things like “gay.” Or “LGBTQ.”
Which would be a problem, if you weren’t me. Witness my Gem Club posters, or at least the top half of each of them, since the bottom half has things like QR codes to sign up for the club and my real name:
This next one is a little questionable because pop culture is so fractured and it sort of depends on these kids knowing who these people are. The bottom of the poster has Lil Nas X and Freddie Mercury on it; I know damn well they don’t know who Freddie Mercury is but I don’t care and also any of them who do know who Freddie Mercury is should damn well be in my club.
This one is the snarky one:
Not one of them says gay! I follow rules.
I may have made somewhat of a tactical error.
I’ve been actively working to increase my leadership role in my building this year after several years of stepping back from any kind of after-school or committee obligations. I’ve had my weird little gay nerd club and that’s been about it. This year I’ve joined a couple of building committees and I’m chairing another one (this one, excitingly, is actually a paid position) and I’m also starting a Math tutoring group next week.
Hey, have I mentioned that my teaching partner is on indefinite leave? As in, they might be back next week and they might not be back at all, haha don’t bother making any long-term plans about anything because who the hell knows? Because that’s happened, leaving more or less exactly half of our 8th grade students without a math teacher. They’re still writing lesson plans and (presumably?) grading assignments, but … well, I don’t know if you’ve ever written lesson plans before, but writing lesson plans for subs for more than about three days in a row is actually impossible. Not in the sense that you can’t write them, because of course you can, but everyone involved recognizes that you are actively hallucinating if you think that whatever is going to actually happen in your classroom has any real chance of matching whatever you put in your lil’ plans over there. You’re even more doomed if you expect your kids to learn anything while you’re gone, because no one is going to teach them– a shockingly (and yet, not surprisingly) high number of middle school teachers cannot actually manage eighth grade math, much less Algebra 1– and they’re not going to be paying any attention to whatever the sub is teaching anyway.
Written directions? Pfah. Witness, from my Canvas for my Math class:
See that third paragraph? For reasons that aren’t interesting, homeroom isn’t meeting tomorrow, and usually Thursday homeroom is Math IXL time. I’m making my kids do it anyway because I am a heartless bastard.
I am predicting that zero of my over-a-hundred 8th graders notice that paragraph. We’ll see if I’m right.
Anyway, point is, you can’t type a document and then expect these kids to use it to learn anything. It is to laugh. Na Ga Ha Pen.
I emailed all of the kids in my partner’s Algebra class this evening to let them know about the tutoring sessions. We’ll see if I have a roomful of kids I don’t know panicking about their grades on Tuesday afternoon.
Defiantly unraptured, as of yet; we shall see if TikTok Jesus takes me tomorrow, as my understanding is that the end of the world has been rescheduled. Again.
I had one girl show up to school today in what I very well might have called a wedding dress on an older human; I decided not to ask any questions, and by afternoon she was in a cheerleading T-shirt and shorts, so … I still didn’t ask any questions. I don’t know if Jesus having child brides is a thing, or if he’s okay with his child brides going to school on the day he marries them? I have degrees in religion but I’m not as up to date on the fever swamps of evangelical Christianity at the moment, and unless someone starts paying me for it I have no intention of venturing any further than I already have. They are wrong, again; it is the only thing that they have ever been. What an immense surprise.
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