Long time no chat, friends! It’s been a minute. I didn’t mean for it to be a minute. But life happens, eh? It’s been a busy few months, but I’m glad we’re here together to celebrate the end of the year together. Let’s get caught up!

In Books…

• Ash: This is often billed as “lesbian Cinderella”, and while it’s certainly a retelling of the classic tale that has a female/female romance involved, that description doesn’t feel quite right. First of all, it’s really more “bisexual Cinderella”, because the plot is driven by a love triangle centered on the titular Ash and her connections to both the beautiful King’s Huntress Kaisa and the fairy prince Sidhean. Second, the romance(s) are incredibly underdeveloped, as are the characters themselves. It really relies on our memories of the fairy tale to do the heavy lifting. It annoyed me in that it drove the narrative tension through a choice that Ash would have to make…which had a payoff I found deeply unsatisfactory. I wanted to like this, but I just didn’t.
• The Inquisitor’s Tale: This was recommended to me by a coworker who had really enjoyed reading it to her young sons, and I can see why she thought I’d like it (which I did)! It tells the story of three young children who all have a supernatural power of some kind…and their dog. Two of the three are based on real historical figures (most notably Joan of Arc) and it’s an interesting exploration of the beliefs and prejudices of the medieval world through an adventure story with winning characters and an engaging plot. Was it a total home run for me? No, I’m nearing 40 and this is absolutely a book for younger readers. I want a richer and more thematically complex read. But it was very cute and fun!
• Dread Nation: I’ve always found alternate histories to be interesting thought experiments. In this case, what if the North won the Civil War…because the dead rose on the battlefield at Gettysburg. In this world, slavery has been abolished, but Black people (along with Native Americans) are still treated as inferior to whites and young women, in particular, are placed in boarding schools to train them to protect white people from the very much still present threat of the dead. Jane and Katherine, two teenage Black girls, find themselves exiled from their exclusive combat school to the country’s frontier, where they discover that there is much more to the state of things than they’d been lead to believe. The characters are compelling, and while the plot doesn’t always entirely work, it definitely hooked me and I’m very interested in reading the sequel!
• Blackout: I remember when Britney Spears dropped Blackout. I was in my early 20s, in law school. I followed celebrity gossip closely, though I tried to avoid Perez Hilton because I found his habit of drawing splooge on young women distasteful. There was no denying that Britney was a whole-ass mess, but the album she released in the midst of this turmoil became one of the most well-regarded of her career. In this edition of the ongoing 33 1/3 series, Natasha Lasky does a deep dive on the record, examining everything from the producers behind it, like Danja and Bloodshy & Avant, to the paparazzi culture of the time, which rewarded people like Perez and the photographers that would stop at nothing for a shot of one of the maligned, breathlessly covered out-of-control ingenues of Hollywood. A few songs (“Gimme More”, “Piece of Me”) see lots of focus, but I’d hoped for a more comprehensive look at the entire tracklist. Nevertheless, this is a very good read, especially for a pop-culture focused Elder Millennial like me.
• Frankenstein: For such a fundamental text of Western literary culture, I was surprised that I hadn’t ever read this. Of course I know the outlines of the story, but it was more interesting than I would have expected to actually read. I don’t think I knew that this was an epistolary novel? More substantively, though, both Frankenstein and the creature he creates are alternately sympathetic and monstrous, and the book raises questions of moral responsibility and what people owe one another, and even who counts as a person at all.
• One of Us: Mass shootings have always freaked me out. I was in middle school when Columbine happened. I’ve always had a little voice in the back of my head telling me that it might not be completely safe to be in public virtually anywhere. And now that I’m a parent, I hate even more that the country I live in has taken no effective steps to protect us from that violence, particularly in school. One of the most horrifying recent mass shootings, however, took place in Norway, and this book (translated from Norwegian) takes a deep dive into both how the killer became who he was/is, the lives of a few of the victims, and the awful lapses that failed to prevent more bloodshed on the day it happened, wrapping up with an account of the trial. Obviously this was incredibly difficult to read, often completely heartbreaking, and it took me longer than expected to finish because I could only deal with so much at a time but it’s honestly extremely good and very much worth reading if you’ve ever wondered how something like this could have happened there.
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Another classic story I’d somehow managed to never get to! It’s short, and unlike Frankenstein, I don’t know that I thought there was a ton to be gained by reading the actual text despite already knowing the gist of the story. The Victorians really were obsessed with the dichotomy between people’s public v. private selves.
• Madame Bovary: I’ve read quite a lot of classics lately, huh? This one took a while to get through, even though I very much liked it. It tells the story of a young woman who strives towards an idealized romantic world that she can’t quite manage to find as the wife to a simple country doctor in a small city in France. It’s the kind of book I have traditionally been drawn to, a character study where the dramas are intense but small, and beautifully written (at least in the translation I read by Mildred Marmur). I’m coming to realize, though, that I’m at a place in my life where I need something with more plot to grab me in my limited reading time.
• The Promise: A book club read! It’s always gratifying when we read something that was already on my list (which this one was because it had won the Booker Prize). This is the third South African book I’ve read, all of which have dealt with apartheid, and all of which have been written by white people. Which isn’t meant as a criticism, I quite enjoyed this book. It chronicles the downfall of the Swartz family, Afrikaaners who own a farm. The novel opens immediately after the death of the mother, Rachel, and the promise she extracts before she passes from her husband to give the family’s longtime Black servant the title to the home she lives in. This promise is witnessed by the youngest of the family’s three children, Amor, but is not immediately fulfilled and remains unresolved over the years as the remaining members of the family move on with their lives. The prose is the highlight of this book, filled with sharp, witty observations and insights, while the characters (particularly Amor) remain at a sometimes-frustrating remove.
• Blue Monday: With my recent increased interest in more plot-focused books, I had high hopes for this initial entry in a mystery series focused on Freida Klein, a London-based psychoanalyst who is drawn into the police investigation of a missing boy when a patient tells her about having strange dreams about a child that looks just like the one who has been taken. But honestly it fell pretty flat for me. You can tell it’s setting up a series because the first third of the book is dedicated to setting up Freida’s circumstances and introducing the various people in her life, which makes it feel draggy. Once things did start moving along, I just found myself with so many questions that the narrative had no interest in answering. There are some twists, of course, but it felt like one of them in particular just became an excuse for lazy plotting. Though there are some interesting characters, I doubt I’ll continue this series.

In Life…

• I turned 37: I’m officially in my late 30s now, I think? And a mom, so I’ve officially given up on being cool and it’s kind of great. I feel like it’s such a cliche to talk about how I care less and less about what other people think as I get older, but I’m super focused on my family right now and it’s freeing in a lot of ways to feel that increased sense of purpose with outside distractions falling away.
• My best friend and I made our annual trek to a skating event: This turned out to be my first international trip since Italy in 2015! A slightly less glamorous destination, though. Skate Canada was held in Mississauga, Canada, at the end of October. My best friend’s mom lives about an hour outside of there and was generous enough to open her home to us, and we had a super time hanging out and talking about skating and motherhood and everything else that crossed our minds.
• My mom visited: She’d come to see us shortly after C was born to meet him, but got sick halfway through the trip and he was so teeny that we were forced to cut it short. So it was super nice that she was able to come back, especially now that he’s a much more active baby with a personality and less a potato, and we had a lovely time together!
• Girls trip resumed: I still remember talking with my two best friends from high school in spring of 2020, waffling over whether it made sense to cancel our annual trip, which we’d set for Charleston in June. Obviously, the world decided for us that it wasn’t going to happen the way we’d planned it. And then the pandemic continued, and then I had a baby, but we finally made it happen. In San Diego, rather than Charleston, but we had a ton of fun visiting breweries and whale watching and just spending time together!