hagatha-christie
Pay Attention. Be Astonished. Tell About It.
I'm from Chicago and I'm not very interesting.
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reading for April, prepared to be let down
this month was A Lot and I felt like I needed to be swaddled so I only managed to finish one book, which was a reread of A Prayer for the Crown Shy by Becky Chambers.
Currently reading: Selected Robert Burns (good!), A Fate Inked in Blood by Danielle L Jensen (not a huge fan atm but powering through bc a friend wanted me to read it), Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay (exactly what I want from a historical fantasy), The Battle of Blair Mountain by Robert Shogan (definitely a slow and steady situation). Dropped several books this month due to lack of focus or lack of interest, so I'm honestly not sure I'm even going to finish these
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A hexagonal storm with a diameter of 25,000 km raging at the north pole of Saturn.
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I'm very much Team "Astrology isn't real unless it is" and I saw one astrologer say yeah April is going to be chaotic but the REAL mess is gonna come in August. Anyway who thinks we're going to get Chicago in 1968 Pt 2: Electric Boogaloo in August when all these idiots come to town
#i for one will remain as far from the united center as i can get!#atp let's just put a big bag of money in charge of everything it'll have the same effect on us
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anybody else absolutely drowning in existential dread/anxiety about their own mortality every single night for the past few months or is it just me?
#every! night!#i think about how scary it is to exist and then die! and that people existed before us and are just gone!#what happens after? idk! must be real scary! gotta find out sometime i guess!
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I only finished 4 books in March so here they are:
The fine:
These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever - pretty twisty and fucked up and at least 40% unsettling the whole time, love a book about toxic relationships
The good:
The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse, ed. by Kaveh Akbar - a solid collection that made me want to look into a few unfamiliar poets
The great:
Seeing Things by Seamus Heaney - my ideal poetry is just observations about, like, a puddle or a pair of old shoes or some boring bullshit like that and this collection had those in SPADES. Heaney will always be That Dude for me.
The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui - graphic memoir that was so striking, I don't know if I've (yet) read a memoir of the Vietnam War that had this level of nuance. Extremely upsetting but I'm still thinking about it 3 weeks later.
just abandoned Maurice by EM Forster (I want to like it so bad and will prob revisit at some point but it's just so boring???) and have not finished a single book in about a week and a half so idk
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reading list for my Redwoods trip is so up in the air. so far I've settled on Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer which I have started already but not finished, The House on Marshland by Louise Gluck, and will probably be listening to the Hobbit/LOTR audiobooks read by Andy Serkis with my dad while we're driving. What else am I missing?
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February reads, here we gooooooo
The bad: None!
The fine: Darius the Great is Not Okay/Darius the Great Deserves Better by Adib Khoram: Any time I read a book for kids/teens, I always ask myself what audience it's for and if I think the book would benefit them. This is for the awkward high schoolers who despite their best efforts are kind of bumbling idiots who aren't great at communicating (me as a kid!!!). I think this is generally is entertaining and sweet and relatable, and I liked the first enough to read the second one. Overall would recommend.
The good:
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler: I was not as in love with this as I thought I'd be, I think mostly because of how clunky the dialogue felt at times. Still a very solid read, absolutely brutal though and I had to take a long break after finishing this because it was ROUGH and made me sick to my stomach at times.
Space Invaders by Nona Fernandez (Chile): Short and surreal. I feel like it only gave me a taste of Fernandez' writing style but I enjoyed it enough to want to check out her other stuff.
The great:
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin: I read this and Parable of the Sower in the same week which was a mistake!!!! I thought this was super unique and I generally like Jemisin's writing style so I flew through this after kind of struggling for the first 70 pages or so. I think I need a break before continuing with the Obelisk Gate, but I'll for sure keep reading the series.
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin: Underlined half the damn book and cried through the other half, can't wait to be absolutely wrecked by Beale Street next.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (Sri Lanka): Listen I just finished this and have a headache because I didn't have the energy to cry about it. I love a book about characters who maybe aren't the best people but are trying to be better and also situations that don't end tidily and also books that are both sad and funny so this kind of ticks every box. I listened to the audiobook on Hoopla (recommend btw - the narrator is fantastic) and decided I need a physical copy of my own.
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I'm currently making a list of albums I need to own physical copies of because I will die if they are ever not accessible digitally.
So far I have the entire discography of Sufjan Stevens, The White Stripes, Nick Drake, and St. Vincent. Someone give me $3,000 to fund this endeavor.
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I have exactly 2 months to get strong so I can hike a bunch in Redwoods, pls drop music recs for working out because I get bored real easy and need to daydream while I'm struggling on the treadmill
Also what books should I bring when I'm there, this is very important to consider
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I saw the Sufjan Stevens musical/dance performance TWICE this weekend (it's more on par with a ballet if it was set to music w lyrics and also instead of ballet it's contemporary dance) and let me tell you, wrecked my shit for maybe ever because I doubt I'll ever see it again. The Decatur-Chicago-Casimir Pulaski Day-Predatory Wasp sequence had me in full body chills actively not trying to weep. I've never heard his music performed live and it's a travesty that whole album is not performed start to finish because WHEW it was like a wall of sound
#like every time i try to talk specifically about Predatory Wasp i start to cry again it was magical
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new year new reads and also i'm now consciously trying to read a book from every country plus places like Hawaii and Puerto Rico and Greenland that should be their own countries. Anyway here's what I read in January:
I've been pretty brutal about not wasting my time reading books I'm not into so hopefully I won't have any books that fall into the "bad" category this year. Also I did read 2 embarrassing romances and tbh i'm gonna keep those a lil secret because I dont really recommend either of them
The okay
You Are Here by Thich Nhat Hanh (Vietnam): I think it's good for its intended audience and it reinforced some of the stuff I've been discussing in therapy but I found it very repetitive and kind of surface level when it came to actual Buddhist philosophy. Like I wanted to know a little more than what he wrote.
A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib: I am obsessed with his prose but unfortunately I do not think his poetry is for me! I read his other collection last year and felt similarly. I think in the future I'll maybe skip any other poetry collections that come out.
The good/great (this is always in ascending order, I feel like I need to specify that)
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor: She did a pretty good job of worldbuilding in the like 90 pages of this book, and it's part of a series so I'm really curious to continue it and read more books in this African-futurism genre. Took a minute to get used to the YA narration (is this YA? I don't know)
Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski (Poland): This was a little sad and a little sweet, and I liked it very much but wish I would've read in the summer because it really would've hit. More vibes than plot but still enjoyed it.
Monstrilio by Gerardo Samano Cordova (Mexico): Finally a book that was as weird as I wanted it to be! Loved the 4 POVs we got, loved how messy the characters were, loved the ending. Would recommend despite one plot point that I found so disturbing I had to put it down (the book wasn't that graphic I just let my mind run a lil wild and scared myself).
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar: as good as everyone says. Read it.
Brickmakers by Selva Almada (Argentina): I started this book a couple months ago and had to put it down because it was soooo jarring and I wasn't prepared, which I think makes the book so effective given the themes criticizing machismo culture. It's crass and gross and really blunt but omg I have not been able to stop thinking about it, or about the final line of the book since I read it.
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