the slow and unyielding march of time | episode 31
Hello friends!
Big news: I stopped watching all the Bachelor franchises! I don’t know if I ever actually wrote a whole newsletter about my love of reality television dating shows, but after the last, extremely rough, two-bachelorette season of the Bachelorette that ended with a brutal breakup and an engagement, I decided I was done. While there were a couple things I enjoyed about the season — notably, the two bachelorettes did a really lovely job of supporting each other and putting their friendship first — it’s clear that the show no longer cares about 1. the health and well being of the leads, or 2. good storytelling. The first bit offends me morally, and the second bit offends me aesthetically, so it’s f-boy island or nothing for the future.
Short preamble today. I’ve been too tired lately to think interesting thoughts, but the book list was getting long so I wanted to send it before getting too overwhelmed!
Debris:
I saw this massive double rainbow in early September. Goodness gracious.
This article about the future of work (spoiler: it should be no work) doesn’t help my general feeling of being trapped by capitalism but is a great read!
I’ve been thinking about doing National Novel Writing Month this year. Should I do it? Please write in with any plot ideas.
I saw Bros (rom-com) and Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon (thriller with some body horror) and they are wildly different but are both really fun!
What I’ve been reading:
In Progress:
Tokyo Express by Seichō Matsumoto.
This is a pretty slow-paced but absorbing murder mystery that, like Murder on the Red River is run by vibes. Vibes and a timetable of the Japanese train schedule in the 1950s.
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu.
Like all short story collections, there are some that connect more than others with me, but they are all thoughtful and beautifully written.
Finished:
New Animal by Ella Baxter.
This was such a good book about loss, and attempting to exert some sort of control over your surroundings. Also it’s deeply funny!
Sedating Elaine by Dawn Winter.
Frances asks Elaine, her rich, newish girlfriend to move in in order to scam her for enough rent money to pay off her debts with her drug dealer. Unfortunately, Elaine is so fucking annoying that Frances stoops to sedating her. It turns out this book is also about recovering from trauma! (Frances’, not Elaine’s.)
One's Company by Ashley Hutson.
Bonnie, victim of an unspeakably horrible crime, just wants to be left alone and watch rereuns of Three’s Company. When she wins an unfathomable amount of money in the lottery, she recreates the apartment complex and sets of Three’s Company and seeks solace in living as the characters from the show, one year at a time. Trauma makes us do funny things! Unsurprisingly, this does not heal her, and seams emerge in the perfect, seamless world she has tried to construct around herself.
I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy.
I watched all of iCarly, a tv show for teens, when I was in my late 20s, extremely bored in Southern California and trying to recover from my own trauma. It’s a very weird show! When it was recently rebooted, one of the actresses, Jennette McCurdy declined to be part of the reboot, and the reasons why are laid out in this book about her abusive and traumatic relationship with her mother, whose dreams for her were allowed to eclipse Jennette’s own wants and needs. This book is a *really* well written, funny, and revealing account of how emotional abuse can slowly overtake one’s own sense of self and reality.
Murder on the Red River and Girl Gone Missing by Marcie R. Rendon.
Cash Blackbear is a 19-year old Native woman whose live revolves around driving grain trucks and shooting pool in the local bar. She but she gets drawn into a murder mystery and then a missing-girl case. Technically mysteries, the trajectories of the stories are more intuition and vibe (which is honestly preferable to a lot of procedural murders, imo). Set in the 1970s, Cash is a really fascinating narrator. I really love being able to read protagonists whose experiences are so different from my own.
The Death of Jim Loney by James Welch.
I read about the James Welch Native Lit festival happening in Missoula a few weeks ago and decided to pick up one of his books. I’m really happy I did! This isn’t a happy story; Loney is a man living an isolated life in a small town in Montana, and his death is foretold in the title, but Welch’s careful, spare language is beautiful and tragic.
Boys Come First by Aaron Foley.
Three gay black men in Detroit navigate their mid-thirties, and lean on each other as they confront the fact that their lives aren’t what they imagined for themselves. There’s some romance, some recovering from trauma, and a lot of figuring out their next steps forward, all while alternatively roasting and supporting each other. I love a friendship novel!!!!
Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces by Elamin Abdelmahmoud.
Despite the title, I didn’t expect this memoir to be quite as fractured as it was. Each chapter picks up on different threads and pulls on them, in a way that is really satisfying and
Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be by Nichole Perkins.
This was a totally fine book of essays. Part memoir, part pop culture study. I really like Perkins’ poetry and her podcast Thirst Aid Kit, but wasn’t super into it.
The Midnight Bargain by C. L. Polk.
This book is trying to be a feminist fantasy romance kind of thing, and honestly, I found it pretty boring. Blah blah magical world where women can be powerful witches but if they get pregnant they’re liable to let a spirit enter their baby and that’s bad for some reason, so witchy women who want to get married have to wear magic-repelling collars that uh make them dead on the inside. Or they can be spinsters, I guess, unless their dads make them get married to restore the family fortune. I hate the focus on pregnancy, all the characters seemed pretty stupid and frustrating, and I don’t remember what the midnight bargain actually was.
Hope you all are enjoying autumn as much as I am.
love,
davida