hypereading
Hello friends!
The holiday season will soon be upon us, and as usual, I will be taking the perogative to drive the neighbors up the wall starting Thanksgiving with Michael Bublé’s and Pentatonix’s Christmas albums. Where did 2021 go? I still don’t know, to be quite honest. But I do know it’s the perfect season to curl up with a book with a warm drink of your choice.
During the last month, I’ve been reading books that have a lot hype behind them—perhaps too much. I apologize for my use of TL;DRs in advance, blame work and the fact you need H1/H2 TL;DRs with bullet points to get people to pay attention to anything you want them to read.
Beautiful World, Where are You by Sally Rooney
tld;r: Read if you like 300 pages of florid navel-gazing and existential angst about Life with a capital L. Don’t read if any of that sounds unappealing or if you can’t get over lack of quotation marks for dialogue.
My first Sally Rooney novel. A lot has been said about how white Sally Rooney’s worlds are despite presumably taking place in modern-day Dublin here and here that I won’t rehash the arguments, and the criticism is valid, based on my reading. But Rooney still has a way of drawing me in and getting me to read the next page in spite of (or because of?) the navel-gazing, which speaks to her skill as a writer. I was a big fan of the letter format—Eileen and Alice’s friendship stood out through the letters, and they discuss everything from the failures of the contemporary novel to growing climate anxiety.
The ending caught me off-guard in a bad way, and BWWAY, which is apparently what it’s called online and on TikTok (which I refuse to touch despite good things I hear about BookTok), ends abruptly after Shit Goes Down. This is 100% a character-driven novel, featuring four characters mired in late-20s angst who were definitely Tumblr kids during peak Tumblr. I couldn’t take Felix seriously because of the Fire Emblem: Three Houses character with the same name and kind of similar family issues and would both be Tumblr goths as teenagers.
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
tl;dr: Read for the hype if you’re a thriller fan
This was a book club pick on recommendation from a coworker. I’ve seen it in the window of my local bookstore for months, and between the subliminal advertising and the recommendation, I decided to check it out. The beginning was very strong. Alicia Berenson’s diary and the setting of the hospital made for a very compelling and creepy start. Without spoiling the twists, the final twist of the book made me feel the book was actively trying to trick the reader in a bad way. The psychotherapist characters The Silent Patient are unprofessional for many reasons (most of which involve spoilers), and I’m not sure how to feel about that either. On the flip side, Michaelides’s bio says he’s a screenwriter, and the book does feel cinematic. Wonder if there’s a movie adaption coming.
And now for a few non-books:
The King’s Jester, Hasan Minhaj
tl;dr: Yes.
This is a comedy special, but I thought I might as well throw it in here. Standup comedy appears to be a recurring pattern, but given how much standup I watch on YouTube, that shouldn’t be a surprise LOL. We saw The King’s Jester, Hasan Minhaj’s new special, live this past month, and it was the perfect sequel to Homecoming King, his Netflix special about growing up in Davis, California. Homecoming King is one of the specials that got me into standup and made me realize the power of comedy way back when. Hasan and Trevor Noah both excel at social commentary in their jokes (speaking of which, working on the The Daily Show when Hasan, Trevor, and Ronny Chieng were all there would have been so cool), and this new special was no exception. At a high level and without spoiling most of the actual jokes, he talks about why exactly he named his show Patriot Act and how it connects to the first joke he ever landed, what he’s learned about protecting his family after going after dictators repeatedly, and the origin behind that Patriot Act episode about disappearing local newspapers (petty revenge at the Scholastic Book Fair). Believe or not, his hair is as tall as it looks like onscreen. If/when this lands on Netflix, I’ll be watching it again.
My one gripe with The King’s Jester was that they started so behind schedule—around 40 minutes. When we left, people were lined up for the next show for blocks in the cold.
Cosi fan tutte by Mozart, performed by the SF Opera
tl;dr: Interesting for historical reasons, music is typical Mozart. Very entertaining despite being 200 years old and made for 1800s attention spans!
I was almost certainly the most underdressed person at the opera house, which is across City Hall on Van Ness (also across the road from the SF Symphony Hall and is IMO is one of the prettiest parts of the city—I challenge you to prove me wrong). Google says the the Herbst Theatre, which is one of the auditoriums at the War Memorial Opera House, is where the UN Charter was written and signed and the convention that lead to the UN’s creation was held in 1945. The Treaty of San Francsico, which reestablished American diplomatic relations with Japan in 1951, was also written and signed at the Herbst Theatre. Who knew a ballet theater and an opera house could be so historically important?
To the performance itself—there were also the most elderly folks I have seen since the Before Covid times gathered in one place, which was wild. The SF Opera took the setting and transplanted it to 1930s Mid-Atlantic USA, which was reflected in the costume and set design. The costumes/set design were great! One thing I found funny with this choice was that the male leads were dressed in American military uniforms while they were all singing in Italian, but it still oddly worked.
The music throughout the opera was typical Mozart: if you’ve heard even only Eine Kleine Nachtmusik or his K.545 piano sonata, I bet you have a good idea how it sounds. The plot is basically the opera version of a romcom but with an ending where all our heroes are jaded and cynical about love. Despina the scheming maid was a highlight—her singer looked like she was having a lot of fun with the role. I had a great time, but it was definitely challenging to pay attention to the music and the singing at the same time because I had to read subtitles. My very rusty Spanish I haven’t used in years (RIP) was not enough to parse out most lyrics because opera singing style is florid and full of ornaments and vocal flourishes which make the words harder to listen to. I think I’d need subtitles even for an English opera. (Edit: Yup, tested this out with Dido and Aeneas, which is in English, and I would need subtitles for sure.)
That’s it for the last couple weeks! For the Americans out there, hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. We’re going to need those jolly holiday vibes as the omicron variant rolls in. Fingers crossed it won’t be terrible, but I’ve given up trying to predict the future. If my brief stint as a data scientist taught me anything, it would be that trying to forecast the future is an exercise in napkin math full of assumptions about yesterday which don’t always apply to tomorrow (example: March 5, 2020 vs. March 15, 2020 in America). So I’ve given up guessing. Let’s see if it helps as we slowly roll into Year 3 of covid times.
Until next time,
tina