Corey Deogracias Reader Blog

      I don't have any real structured book club experience myself. I enjoy reading and enjoy writing about what I've read. I like reading about what other people write about what they've read. I'm just not much of a conversationalist, and so I haven't ever really sought out a group to participate in book clubbing with.     Occasionally, if a book passage is sitting particularly heavy in my mind for whatever reason, I'll make a post about it on socials like Reddit, mostly just to have somewhere to write my thoughts and have a little feedback. It usually isn't exactly the most fulfilling, obviously, a lot of internet dialogue tends to be polarized and not very nuanced. Comments either boil down to "it was good" or "it sucked".     I find that to be a problem with a lot of online or published review or discussion media in the digital space. "The pacing dragged but that felt purposeful for the mood the author was intending, and the drab...

 I chose to write my special topic paper on a genre I am greatly familiar with: the graphic novel. As I state in the full paper, I believe that lumping all graphic novels together into one umbrella does a disservice to the depth of what the form has to offer. I framed the paper as an introductory guide for librarians to understand the far reaching potential of graphic novels, and provide some appeals that exist within the form that readers from other genres of written-word novels may latch onto. I began by acknowledging that yes, the American superhero genre is the most represented among graphic novel offerings. Even so, however, there is an advantage to the fact that these characters have had decades worth of stories and creators working on their canons. While action adventure is the most representative of the superhero genre, readers may be surprised how much page space is dedicated to crime procedurals, westerns, high science fiction, even relationship and romances. Further, the...

 My next annotation, Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi , is up now! This is a relationship fiction novel, following the inner thoughts and actions of the main character, Antara, while she processes the trauma put upon her by her difficult and sometimes abusive mother, Tara. Tara feels equally resentful and spiteful of Antara, whom she has had in her singular care ever since abandoning her own arranged marriage, escaping to live in an ashram, then become homeless and dependent on her estranged husband and in-laws.  If I was desperate for any respite after the difficult read of The Wasp Factory , I found none here. Unlike Factory, however, I was enthralled by this book. I can't say I enjoyed my time with it, the novel is miserable and trauma-dumpy and I wanted to find my loved ones and give them a hug, but the way the constant internal and external conflicts are equally traumatic, empathetic, brutally honest, and sometimes humorous, was very compelling. I feel equally compressed and cl...

 One of the prominent book controversies in my memory came in the early 2000's with the release of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code . I was in a Catholic-based elementary school at the time, and the novel's premise of Jesus Christ marrying Mary Magdalene and their subsequent lineage of children was causing a fervor. At least that's what it seemed like from the news broadcasts I remember hearing in the morning, and from a few cheeky references made by the priest during homilies. There certainly was some amount of public outcry and boycott against the novel, and especially against the author, who stubbornly insisted in interviews that although his characters were fiction, the mystery they were engaging with was based in fact (which have been heavily disputed by religious and historical scholars). He was not the first to submit such claims, but the pop culture status of his novel elevated the conversation to a global talking point. What I remember though, is that that anger a...

 There are a myriad of new interesting ways that horror is being crafted in the digital space and the realm of the internet. Of course there are viral sensations like Five Nights at Freddy's stemming from video games, but there are also ARGs (alternate reality games) that can span across all manner of platforms like social media and Youtube in text and video form, hidden text in coding files, copypastas, video edits, all kinds of things creative people across the world are taking advantage of. I think the library has an opportunity to promote horror reading by embracing these things. Collaboration with the digital media department in teaching video editing skills, coding, or having viewing parties or discussion groups about multimedia indie horror projects I think can really drum up interest in horror at the library location. From here, librarian's can make reading suggestions to those attending based on the genres and references that the projects are taking. We would be givin...

 My next annotation, The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks, is live here ! In more colorful words than the annotation, I thought this book was bad. I found nothing striking, subversive or even interesting about the main narrator character. Nothing about the circumstances of Frank’s life made me understand or empathize with the cruel violence and psychopathy toward animals and children. A lot of this book is sold on shock value, but I didn’t find myself ever so repulsed as to come around again to being allured, like a macabre carnival sideshow. And I like shock value. I like John Waters and Pink Flamingos . In Factory I found nothing to latch onto. There’s no je ne sais quoi. I mostly just wanted these characters to get the hell away from me. It’s bad punk rock, like the Pistols wearing swastikas.

  Criticism is perspective, and each individual perspective provides its own cache of information to the reader. How much that reader values that information and perspective is variable. The amount of trust that reader has in the institution, or even the commenter within, informs them of how much they will value that perspective. And that can change given the context the reader finds themselves in. No, I don’t fully trust a lot of Amazon reviews, knowing that many bot accounts and algorithms exist to write out reviews for products. The one-star “SUCKS!!!” review doesn’t give me much to go on. But if I’m just looking to buy a new phone charger cable, “it works fine” on the first review I read would be enough for me to click “Buy”. And often times these reviews from the people may be fairly entertaining. Reviews from an establishment are a bit more polished, coming from the perspective of writers who provide draft after draft of their work to editors before being published. These...