#book is penance by Eliza Clark

[melrosing]

reading a novel that’s basically a pastiche of a true crime investigative piece where one of the murderers has a tumblr and the author has helpfully included this footnote….. like you don’t need to tell me eliza I was fucking there

#book is penance by Eliza Clark #I am actually really enjoying it so far lol #I hate true crime and I think there is so much wrong w the genre so this is an interesting mirror held up to it

[mirthofbooks]

Currently reading. Prepared to be thoroughly disturbed.

#Eliza Clark #penance #booklr #currently reading #books

[nemaliwrites]

this is the funniest book i've ever read

#penance #eliza clark #books #bookblr #obsessed with the way that everything had a footnote definition except for ao3 #like yeah that's just public knowledge at this point #and if you don't know what it is then fuck you #eliza i just know you did numbers on tumblr dot com #and i wanna say i love you for that #nemali speaks

[poetlcs]

books I’ve read in 2024 - no. 4

Penance by Eliza Clark

#penance #eliza clark #litedit #booklr #books #read in 2024 #mine

[emmersreads]

My Top 5 Best Books of 2023

Scrolling through bookstagram's endless reels of folks bemoaning the state of readerly types - new publications are disposable crap, everyone else is reading too much, etc - it might seem like 2023 was a terrible year for books. But, of all my longlists, this one was the longest, and the one I had the most trouble cutting down to only six. I read 119 books in 2023 (you can read my round-up of my five worst here), and here are my five favourites. Every single one of these books deserves to top your tbr for 2024.

Read the post on my blog!

Honourable Mention: Yellowface - R. F. Kuang

R.F. Kuang has figured out how to use irony and its a good look on her. Kuang’s political messaging is great — I particularly enjoyed her depiction of the publishing industry’s white fragility as deeply stupid — but we already knew that. I would expect nothing less from the author of Babel. The think that elevates Yellowface in particular is Kuang’s self-awareness in depicting Athena, the Asian writer whose novel the protagonist steals, as a talented literary wunderkind, but also as frustrating and not necessarily innocent in the problem of who is allow to tell ethically-loaded stories. I’m definitely looking forwards to her next project.

Fifth Place: Small Worlds - Caleb Azumah Nelson

This is the diverse romance novel you’ve been looking for. This is the inspiring hopepunk novel you’ve been looking for. This is the insightful and emotional coming-of-age novel you’ve been looking for. Small Worlds is all the more comforting and heart-warming because it is primarily about persistence and joy in the face of crushing personal failure and devastating systemic violence. Caleb Azumh Nelson’s motif of relationships in which both partners must break up in order to become the kind of people who can be in a long-term relationship with each other is a kind of romance arc I unexpectedly love. This entry in particular gets extra credit for its incredibly good audiobook adaptation. The audiobook is narrated by the author, whose southeast London accent and obvious emotional connection to novel make it the ideal way to read.

Fourth Place: Breasts and Eggs - Mieko Kawakami

After a couple of truly miserable memoirs this year I declared that I simply did not want to hear writers talk about motherhood. I spoke too soon because then I read this. Breasts and Eggs is in incredible reflection on being a woman that has something to offer if you love being a woman, if you hate it, or if you feel ambivalent about it. I don’t like children and can’t imagine ever wanting one — to the point that I find the endless angsting about the conflict between writing and motherhood faintly nauseating — but I found that this was the first book about being a mother that had something interesting to say even for people who never want to be mothers. Kawakami’s novel-in-translation has (for the anglophone reader) a sense of strangeness both in form and content. The book’s approach to gender and family is often intimately familiar, but just as often introduces a perspective that is deeply strange to a western reader, provoking us to think about our own assumptions about the importance of family. I particularly liked the scene in which protagonist Natsu visits a bath house and encounters a woman in a relationship with a trans man in the female section of the bath. Natsu struggles through a long thought process of whether she ought to be offended or not. Would she be similarly offended if she encountered cis lesbian PDA?

Third Place: Penance - Eliza Clark

For me, Penance was intensely personal, like looking back on my own teenagerhood. I also grew up as a deeply strange child, something that was immediately recognized by the other children. That feeling of somehow being a different species from other kids, not doing anything right and not understanding how it is wrong, is something that this novel absolutely nails. That might be a strange association for a true crime story about a horrible schoolgirl murder. This is the dramatic extension of what could happen to five people who were once very lonely little girls, and I think reading too much into the ‘how could they do something like this?’ of it all is missing the forest for the trees and playing into the true crime gaze that the book criticizes. Clark is interested both in true crime that dehumanizes its subject matter, and true crime the aspires to humanize and platform them. Is it any more ethical to demand access to someone’s life out of love?

Second Place: He Who Drowned the World - Shelley Parker-Chan

Shelley Parker-Chan’s The Radiant Emperor duology is the best queer fantasy series out there. Period. He Who Drowned the World takes its engagement with gender and sexuality to another level. At least for me, there is something much more meaningful and impactful to the theme of gender as something performed in spite of difficulties, distrust, and lack of acknowledgement. Parker-Chan understands that gender is often unpleasant or even hateful. This isn’t a book for a brave new utopia where every bra fits on the first try, it’s for the present, where the wrong bra gives you a fibrous lump. If She Who Became the Sun was Zhu embracing her gender, the sequel is about Ouyang’s often deeply upsetting ability to accept his. His hatred of any femininity, first and foremost his own, isn’t an easy read, but I found there was something incredibly resonant in it to my own ambivalent feelings towards femininity. No one else depicts self-hatred this well.

First Place: Chain-Gang All-Stars - Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

As soon as I finished Chain-Gang All-Stars I knew it would be my book of the year. I read a lot of great books but this blew every single one of them out the water. It is Gladiator by way of The Shawshank Redemption by way of professional wrestling. It’s the scifi sequel to The New Jim Crow and Ava DuVernay’s 13th. It’s the best love story of the year. Chain-Gang All-Stars is an exploration of the humanity of inmates, who, in this world, are objectified both due to their involvement in the criminal justice system (as in ours) and from the gaze of sports and reality entertainment. It’s hard to decide which aspect of this book is most technically impressive. I usually don’t like when a political novel tries to comment on too many different issues, but this book deftly balances deep and effective discussions on a huge range of topics. I especially appreciated its engagement with an inmates’ personal feelings of guilt and culpability within a carceral system that doesn’t care at all about remediating the harm they have caused. This deft political messaging is combined with an insightful depiction of the ambivalent success of professional athletes, multidimensional characters, and a touching romance. My favourite part of the book was how effectively it traps the reader. I understand and agree with all the condemnations of the exploitation inherent to entertainment in watching primarily BIPOC athletes destroy their health (this is about wrestling but also boxing and American football), but I still found myself thinking about just how incredible this book would be as a TV series. The use of complicity as a theme is unparalleled.

#bookblr #books #best books of 2023 #best books of the year #read in 2023 #book blogging #yellowface #rf kuang #small worlds #caleb azumah nelson #breasts and eggs #mieko kawakami #penance #eliza clark #he who drowned the world #shelley parker chan #the radiant emperor duology #chain gang all stars #nana kwame adjei brenyah

[pinktinselmonstrosity]

went to an art exhibition and then to a brilliant bookshop and then had one of the best curries i've ever had in my life and then went home.......... that's basically a perfect day imo idk how it could get much better

#the curry....... guys.......... #also i bought some jalebi from the restaurant and now i'm eating them in bed with a cup of tea #jalebi my beloved #and i got some really good books!! #'penance' by eliza clark which i've heard really good things about #and a book i almost bought to bring on holiday but put back at the last minute and have been thinking about ever since #and a book of poems by wendy cope #🧃

[bones-clouds]

best books i read in 2024:

"penance" eliza clark

rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

genre: thriller, mystery

synopsis:

Do you know what happened already?

Did you know her?

Did you see it on the internet?

Did you listen to a podcast?

Did the hosts make jokes?

Did you see the pictures of the body?

Did you look for them?

It's been nearly a decade since the horrifying murder of sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson rocked Crow-on-Sea, and the events of that terrible night are now being published for the first time.

That story is Penance, a dizzying feat of masterful storytelling, where Eliza Clark manoeuvres us through accounts from the inhabitants of this small seaside town. Placing us in the capable hands of journalist Alec Z. Carelli, Clark allows him to construct what he claims is the 'definitive account' of the murder - and what led up to it. Built on hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research, and most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves, the result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil.

The only question is: how much of it is true?

#book recommendations #aesthetic #book moodboard #literature moodboard #penance #penance eliza clark #eliza clark #booklr #books and reading #litedit #moodboard #my moodboard #thriller #thriller books #lgbt books #crime

[evelynhug0]

books i’ve read in 2024: penance by eliza clark

“Do you know what happened to her already? Did you catch it in the papers? Are you local? Did you know her? Did you see it on the internet? Did some website the trawls local news for the worst details of true crimes bring her to your attention? Did you see the article about her, buried in the chum box of an already disreputable website? Did you see the red-headed stock image model juxtaposed against an edited charred corpse, captioned, "You won't believe what they did to her?" Did you listen to a podcast? Did the hosts make jokes? Do you have a dark sense of humour? Did that make it okay? Or were they sensitive about it? Did they coo in the right places? Did they give you a content warning? Did you skip ahead? Did you see pictures? Did you look for them?”

picture credit: x x x x x x

#read in 2024 #books #penance #eliza clark #tumblr #bookblr #booktok #literature #reading #tumblr girls

[elenichr]

Year of Lists

February Books

Penance by Eliza Clark * 3/5 - would recommend for anyone who's into true crime: podcasting, documentaries, reporting. It's an interesting study of how we approach tragedies, with all the expected questions of what is truth, who has a right to tell a story, is there a respectful way of writing about tragedy, etc. It feels like a book born out of the question "what would In Cold Blood be if it was written today"? It's more like an exercise or a project than a gripping story. For those willing, there is a lot to unpack.

Beloved by Toni Morrison * 5/5 - Toni Morrison was an exceptional writer. From Zadie Smith's introduction to this edition: "All readers and writers are indebted to her for the space she created". Beloved is one of those books that deserves all the praise and hype it got, if not even more. I can't even begin to explore the nuances of the narrative, language, characterisation. I will just say that it reads urgent, dreamlike, true, affecting. And, from the foreword by Morrison: "To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must get out of the way".

"I husband that moment on the pier, the deceptive river, the instant awareness of possibility, the loud heart kicking, the solitude, the danger. And the girl with the nice hat. Then the focus."

Flèche by Mary Jean Chan * 5/5 - it's often I rate poetry collections a 5*, but it's rare it's so clear a 5*. It's just superb.

The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara * 3/5 - Yanagihara's books could all be studied. The craft is always incredible as is the depth of the storytelling. I just wasn't crazy about this one, but, she writes, I read.

Open Throat by Henry Hoke (ToB Read) * 5/5 - a moving, hungry, feverish dream of a book

#penance #eliza clark #on true crime #toni morrison #beloved #mary jean chan #flèche #the people in the trees #hanya yanagihara #open throat #henry hoke #literature #fiction #tournament of books #bookblr #books #reading #poetry

[betty-burnout]

just finished Eliza Clark's Penance and you're all right, it's very good especially as a former true crime fan. there's also a few sections where she writes tumblr posts and they are just chef kiss perfect

looking forward to reading something a bit lighter tho haha

#penance book #penance #eliza clark

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

no10 for the book ask i want a recommendation!!

10. What was your favorite new release of the year?

Penance by Eliza Clark is exactly as fun as the posts about it on Tumblr suggest, and significantly more thought-provoking.

end-of-year book ask

#books #reading #give me love give me memes #anonymous #eliza clark #penance

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Penance: A Novel

By Eliza Clark.

#Penance #Eliza Clark #books #book covers

[serkershit]

Despite the controversy attached to this book, we have chosen to republish it in its original form.

#penance #eliza clark #ten out of ten this was good #marita blogs about books

[sophielovesbooks]

Ahhhh I am obsessed with Penance by Eliza Clark, it's sooo good. I'm almost done with it though and I don't want to be. 😩

#booklr #books #reading #book rec #penance #eliza clark #feels a bit ironic to post about this book on tumblr #bc the dark sides of tumblr feature heavily!

[lesmiserabelles]

eliza clark's new book, penance, is a literary masterpiece and a savvy examination of true crime entertainment, but it's also a nightmarishly vivid time capsule of mid 2010s fandom tumblr

#books #bookblr #eliza clark #carmella enlightens us #descriptions in alt text

[hungryfictions]

books i read in the first third of the year

most liked:

all fours, miranda july

margo’s got money troubles, rufi thorpe

the southern book club’s guide to slaying vampires, grady hendrix

the grown-up, gillian flynn

the guest, emma cline

madwoman, chelsea bieker

disappointed:

death in her hands, ottessa moshfegh

sugar, baby, celine saintclare

penance, eliza clark

worry, alexandra tanner

the odyssey, lara williams

#most of the books in the disappointed category #are there because i liked previous a book or books by the author #and didn’t like this one much at all #mine