I read:

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Thoughts:

Code Name: Verity by Elizabeth Wein: Such a YA novel. But, through this, I can see the allure of YA novels: one can do the soap opera bits and the genuine bits without that sort of detached irony that people expect if you were to do it for an adult book. Another book, like Beneath the Silence from last month, that sixth grade meghan would have loved.

The Book of Names by Royce Leville: Reviewed here.

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James: Almost perfect.

The Lotus and the Storm by Lan Cao: Reviewed here.

After Birth by Elisa Albert: I remember back in 2010 when I read The Breakwater House by Pascale Quiviger, realizing as I read it, that this was the first literary book that actually detailed giving birth, and not just the sitcom-y crushing-the-partner’s-hand wail, but in just a few sentences, in the middle of the book, the complete deconstruction of what it capital-M Means to give birth. After Birth is the spiritual continuation of that page of The Breakwater House with the after-effects of what it capital-M Means to give birth. It was like oysters down my throat, slippery but also nauseating. I wanted to retch but I kept stuffing myself with more.

The Monster and Other Stories by Stephen Crane: Reviewed here.

And the Birds Rained Down by Jocelyne Saucier: Back to spiritual successors, sort of like a spiritual successor to Bear (minus bestiality bits).

Outline by Rachel Cusk: Reviewed here .

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters: Sarah Waters’ books always feel pulp to me. There isn’t anything wrong with pulp and I do enjoy reading sort of smutty pulpy stories now-and-then, but I always feel sort of awful afterwards, like all I ate was candy for a week and my skin is now oozing oil.

1988: I Want to Talk with the World by Han Han: Reviewed here.

The Swallow by Charis Cotter: Reviewed here.

AsapSCIENCE: Answers to the World’s Weirdest Questions, Most Persistent Rumors, and Unexplained Phenomena by Mitchell Moffit and Greg Brown: Reviewed here.

Favourite book:

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It was a bit of a weird month. If you’d asked me at the beginning, I would have said A History of Seven Killings. If you’d asked me in the middle, I would have said After Birth. But now it’s the end (or the beginning of the next month, depending on whenever I get this finished and posted), so I’ll say All My Puny Sorrows, which took me by surprise since I loathed A Complicated Kindness and hadn’t read anything by Miriam Toews since more-or-less tossing ACK across the room in frustration near the end. Maybe because when I read ACK, I hadn’t stepped away from Christianity yet, so I couldn’t be the person who needed to read the book. Maybe now it’s different. I don’t know what it is since AMPS and ACK have so many of the same themes and ideas. So why did I hate one and really appreciate the other?

Except the last page and a half. Garbage. I got angry.

And Lydia, my blog-commenter extra-ordinaire: it has Mennonites in it!

Most promising wishlist book:

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Why does my library only have this book in French when I want to read it to Tesfa? How is that fair? Read the description:

Nine-lived cats have nothing on the “bluebear,” who, according to German author and illustrator Moers, has a whopping 27 lives. In this inventive, zany, fun-for-all ages odyssey (a bestseller in Europe), an intrepid “seagoing bear” offers his “demibiography.” A foundling floating in a nutshell on the Zamonian Sea, the azure-furred Bluebear is rescued by Minipirates, impish nautical geniuses, who raise him and then, after he gets too big, abandon him to live out 13 lifetimes of adventure populated by a dizzying array of eccentric characters. Among them, two argumentative waves known as the “Babbling Billows” teach Bluebear speech, sage dinosaur Mac (real name: Deus X. Machina) extends friendship and Professor Abdullah Nightingale at the Nocturnal Academy offers a particularly intense and wacky education.

I don’t want to have to translate it on the fly while reading it to Tesfa and her French is non-existent, so I guess I’m going to have to find myself an English copy and make the Leslie Knope unhappy face the next time I pass by the library at it.

I watched:

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Thoughts:

Odd Squad: Seriously. Stop. Get on US Netflix. Watch Odd Squad. Since this whole month has been about spiritual successors, IT IS THE SPIRITUAL SUCCESSOR TO SQUARE ONE PEOPLE! Go, what are you waiting for? Why are you still reading my silly thoughst?

Sponge Bob: Still not getting it. Maybe I need to be on drugs?

The Book of Life: It’s sad how progressive this film thinks it is when it really is not progressive even the tiniest bit. But it’s so beautifully animated. Why did it have to be so not beautifully done elsewhere?

Birdman: I guess writers write about writers and actors act about actors.

Odd Squad: Why are you still here and not watching Odd Squad?

I wrote:

Wolf children, Dellarae story, faeries. Wolf Children draft zero is done. Dellarae is out for submission. Faeries still languish.

I read:

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Thoughts:

Where Did You Sleep Last Night by Lynn Crosbie: Not that I ever met him but I miss Kurt Cobain and this book makes me miss him more. The intro says Crosbie started it as YA, first chapter is totally YA, then YA no more. My heart aches for this book. I hate that I didn’t come up with the idea and I hate that someone else wrote it much better than I ever could and I just hate hate hate hate hate it so much that I love it.I need a physical copy of this book. It was on sale on kobo earlier this month and I didn’t buy it there because I need to be able to hold it in my hands forever and ever and ever and ever.

The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty: The best part of this book is that the cover is sort of shiny. I don’t even know how to describe it. Sort of shimmery, radiant. I spent a lot of time just looking at the shiny cover, like I was on drugs.

The Girl in Saskatoon by Sharon Butala: I can never truly love Sharon Butala, because one of her characters in The Garden of Eden was really disgusted by Ethiopia (I think she called it a hell hole or godforsaken or something) and even though it was a fictional character who said it, Butala still wrote it so we are not friends. This book has nothing to do with Ethiopia, but I can’t move past Butala’s fictional character in another book disagreeing with me.

The Divorce Papers by Susan Rieger: Ah, rich people problems. More intelligent chick-lit than most, although the resolution is pat; what’s the point of all the animosity if it’s just going to fizzle out boringly? Also, why are personal emails included in the legal files? And is that really how lawyers memo each other — so irreverent? If you already think lawyers are kind of scummy, this book isn’t going to change your mind much.

Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper: Reviewed earlier this month.

The Secret World of Og by Pierre Berton: Or, in the original language: Og og og-og-og.

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe: I always think the title of this book is Nip the Buds, Shoot the Leaves.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr: Oh my, does the end drag. It’s a fine book until that point and avoids using WWII to draw cheap sympathy, but then the last bit just seems like it’s trying to hit a bunch of points before it ends, to remind us how awful war is. Maybe just stop reading around (in my copy, which is really my mother’s) page 480.

Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski: I remembered how much I liked this novel, but I’d also forgotten how much I liked this novel.

Beneath the Silence by Charlene Carr: Reviewed earlier this month.

Day’s End by H. E. Bates: Reviewed earlier this month.

Favourite book:

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Don’t make me choose. I love them all so much.

Most promising book put on my wishlist:

I watched:

Thoughts:

• The Cat in the Hat Knows A Lot About That: This may be one of the worst shows ever made. Martin Short’s voice is like drill-bits being pushed into my ear.

I wrote:

Wolf Children story now has Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4 completed. Taking a break before doing Chapter 5 (the end!). Some faerie story reworking. Started a new story about a girl named Dellarae.

Happy Jingoism Day! And back to June:

I read:

Thoughts:

• Bent by Teri Louise Kelly: Reviewed earlier this month. For some reason, I always think the last name is Marsh. I wonder why.
• Cam Jansen and the Mystery of the Stolen Corn Popper by David A. Adler: You mean they had Cam Jansen when you were a kid? says my kid. Um yeah, this book was published in 1986, so yes, I did have Cam Jansen around when I was a kid.
• Unicorn on a Roll by Dana Simpson: Reviewed earlier this month.
• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson: A re-read in preparation for A God In Ruins. I liked it less the second time, and it was just as hard to get past the first hundred pages the second time as the first as the pages are are like having one’s head banged against a concrete wall. And I’m still not enamored about the fact that the life in which Ursula is raped, it destroys everything after it. I am in no way dismissing the trauma of rape, more tired of the trope of the fallen women who can never redeem herself.
• A God In Ruins by Kate Atkinson: There’s a bitterness to this book that makes it hard to like the book. I know likability isn’t really the point, but this book was really pointy-elbows-out uncomfortable. Thinking about it now, two weeks post-reading, I’m not really satisfied with the ending. I expect more of Kate Atkinson than the ending she gave. Hmph.
  
  Of course, I still love you Kate Atkinson. You can be in my list of famous people who are my friends but don’t know it yet (Amy Poehler, Mindy Kaling, Vin Diesel, etc.).
• Woes of the True Policeman by Robert Bolaño: Every Bolaño book I read means there is one less Bolaño book I get to read for the first time 🙁 Plus I now have memorized the code to write ñ on the computer (Alt-164).
• Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq: This was less caustic as maybe being less famous and this being one of his earlier works, his editors snipped a lot of it out? In any case, try Soumission in French or wait for an English translation?
• The Cat by Edeet Ravel: If you ever need proof that I read depressing books, here’s a book I read about a disfigured woman whose son dies and she can’t kill herself because she has to take care of her son’s beloved cat. All that for an ending that comes out of nowhere and for no reason. Plus it’s set in Guelph, a city I hate for the sole reason that sometimes the Kitchener-Toronto Greyhound winds its way through Guelph and it takes bloody forever, like a whole other hour, to get to Toronto. I used to hate that when I lived in Waterloo. Hence my dislike of Guelph.
• A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell: This book actually has an Italian character who cries “Mamma mia!” likely slapping her hands to her cheeks as she does so. And so we have an anthropological/sociological study of the prejudices of an upper-middle class British author in the 1970s.
  
  It does not age well.
• The Thrilling Life of Pauline De Lammermoor by Edeet Ravel: I’m pretty sure this is set in Guelph too, even though the town is called something else. Stupid Guelph.
• Dog Boy by Eva Hornung: I wanted to read this for a long time. So I read it. I should have read it right when I found out about it, rather than have my expectations build up. It was solid. I gave it four out of five. But it wasn’t miraculous, likely because I waited too long.

Favourite book of the month:

Continuing to lose myself in Bolaño’s universe.

Most promising book on the wishlist:

Internet tells me this book is great. I’ll probably leave it for four years, like Dog Boy, let the expectation of greatness simmer, and then be disappointed in 2019 that it wasn’t as transcendent as I thought it would be.

I watched:

I wrote:

Wolf Children Chapters One and Four and tentative starts on Chapter Two. Faerie story review. Fiddling with older short stories and submitting them here and there. I plan to be rejected from every major Canadian literary journal before my writing time is through!

I read:

Not as much as usual due to the behemoth of 2666.

Thoughts:

• The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins: This and Viviane last month, both I figured out the mystery only a few pages in. Boo. I know it should make me feel clever, but it does not make me feel clever even one tiny little bit.
• The Thickety by J.A. White: Such a good spooky kids’ book. It scared Geoff but Tesfa was okay with it.
• A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle: I have similar feelings about this book as I did with Harriet the Spy last year, i.e. a book having a female protagonist does not imply a feminist book. Meg’s constant hysterics (and purposefully I am using the word hysterics to describe her) with all the males knowing more than her and Calvin’s job to hold her hand and look after her fill me with righteous feminist rage. So I stick out my tongue although I suppose Meg is good at math, so I guess she can have one cookie, but nothing more. Plus the book is so random that it could give The Amazing World of Gumball a run for its money. Further (yet similar) thoughts by someone else here.
• What Boys Like by Amy Jones: One of my favourite Can-con story collections. A re-read.
• 2666 by Roberto Bolaño: First time in a long time that I was reading a book that I didn’t want to end. It’s like a whole universe in there. Then, once finished, I was still famished and rather than wanting to savour the story, I wanted to pick up a book right away and continue reading (maybe even reading 2666 again). I think you could read this book forever.
• When Everything Feels Like The Movies by Raziel Reid: I can see why Ru won Canada Reads, as it’s a less objectionable choice, but it’s also a conventional choice. This book is unconventional, so maybe that means it isn’t Canadian enough. Still let’s remember, Bear won a Governor’s General award way back in the 1970s and that’s a book about a woman in a sexual relationship with an honest-to-goodness bear, so maybe it is a perfect Canadian book. So When Everything Feels Like The Movies will make it into the canon eventually. Maybe even soon.
• Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters by Lesley M.M. Blume: I really wanted to love this book but children’s books set in New York have to live up to From The Mixed Up Files and this one just doesn’t. Tesfa enjoyed it, but I found the portrayals, especially in the Morocco and India sections, heavy handed and unnecessarily stereotyped.
• A Useless Man by Sait Faik Abasıyanık: Reviewed earlier this month.
• The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro: Oh my goodness, how inane the conversations are. The characters all speak like how an eleven year old would write a Game of Thrones fanfic. I’m starting to think I don’t actually like reading Kazuo Ishiguro. I loved The Remains of the Day (but I read it in high school, so maybe that negates my recommendation of it), I thought Never Let Me Go was okay, I loathed When We Were Orphans and got annoyed at The Unconsoled. And now this, a big fat meh. Maybe I’m just not a fan.

Favourite book of the month:

My new universe to lose myself in.

Most promising book on the wishlist:

It’s about a female mathematician!

I watched: (and there is more than usual because of being on vacation with a television)

Thoughts:

• The first row of cartoons: So kids cartoons are all dadesque now? Nothing makes sense. NOTHING!
• Secrets and Lies: Another mystery I figured out near the beginning. And man, being poor in Australia must suck, what with having a house with a pool and a guest cottage and two cars and super nice furniture and a big open kitchen. *rolls eyes*
• Game of Thrones: I didn’t bother with the rape episode though.
• Futurama: In bad parenting move of the year, my six year old is now obsessed wtih Futurama. This really is a bad parenting move. I’ve got to wean her off it and back to something more appropriate. I feel like an even worse parent than normal now.

I wrote: Wolf Children Part One and typing up. Faerie story. Submitted some short stories to journals and slushed out some more. Taking a slush break as the collection is currently on exclusive right now, so yay!

I read:

Thoughts:

• The View From Castle Rock by Alice Munro: I go back and forth on Alice Munro: I find her overrated, then I get to a story I really like, then it goes back to being overrated or dull or not my style or whatever you want to say. Of course, I can only recall everything about the stories I didn’t like and very little of the stories that I did. I guess she always surprises me. I can say that at least.
• Canada by Richard Ford: I try, but American novels, so American. I don’t care about white male problems. Plus such a slow moving structure (50% of the book goes by before they even get to Canada) and each chapter seems the same – a minute movement forward of the plot, followed by a paragraph of self-reflection or summary that stays the same for large chunks of time and which I feel like yelling I know your parents robbed a bank because you tell me every other page. My anger is a shame because the writing is good but there is no purpose to anything that happens. I know I am rapidly approaching old age and nihilism so maybe when I’m in my seventies, nothing mattering will all make sense, but right now, don’t put the gun on the mantel unless you’re going to do something with it, you know? Besides, the guy goes to Saskatchewan and doesn’t say bunny-hug even once.
• Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer: So, an ecological Roadside Picnic/Stalker then, eh?
• Ellen in Pieces by Caroline Adderson: That’s right, I read a book I put on my most promising list ages ago!
• Uzumaki 3 by Junji Ito: Not as creepy as #2
• Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos by R.L. Lafevers: Tesfa liked it, I found it tedious.
• The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen: Reviewed earlier this month.
• Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers: Oh my, Mary Poppins is so vain and strict and grouchy in the book. Also, for the fact that Travers rewrote a chapter because of racist undertones, the book doesn’t seem to think that calling people Arab and Red Indian as an insult is also worth excising.
• Little Birds by Anaïs Nin: Some tingly in the nether-regions stories, some dull ones.
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys: The introduction talks about how the work doesn’t feel dated, and it’s true. It doesn’t feel like it’s written in the 1960s. It could have been written now. It’s really good.
• Someone Is Watching by Joy Fielding: Reviewed earlier this month.
• Elle by Douglas Glover: I read one of his short story collections last year and it didn’t gel for me, but I really liked this. It was something else.
• Viviane by Julia Deck: What’s this? A second book I put on my most promising list! Meghan reading lists FTW!

Favourite book of the month:

I have a new favourite book to read and re-read. But oh is this book decadent, like a really fancy dessert with cheese and chocolate and cream; I can only read about twenty pages at a time before feeling ill.

Most promising book on the wishlist:

For the name alone.

I watched:

I wrote: Re-did a start of the wolf children story. Faerie work. Slush pile work. I wrote a poem today.

… is either coming tonight if I get myself organized enough or not until maybe around May 9. So if you’re waiting around with baited breath to know what books I read this month, either yay, you’re going to get it early or (more likely) you will forget you were waiting for it and then it will pop up suddenly partway through May.

It snowed here yesterday. I think that’s all that needs to be said.

I read:

Thoughts:

• Adult Onset by Ann-Marie MacDonald: Too frenetic a pace and too close to home to really enjoy it as much as I thought I would.
• Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce: Finally finished!
• I Am Malala (Young Readers Edition) by Malala Yousafzai: Slightly frustrating because it had American spellings (gray) but then British terms (nappies). Be consistent.
• The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks: How jaded am I? Only one truly gicky part even though the guy I borrowed it from told me I’d be shocked, Shocked, SHOCKED!
• Brueghel Moon by Tamaz Chiladze: Review here.
• Under The Skin by Michel Faber: I actually like the movie better, but the movie is more restrained than the book, and less internal. I just didn’t really need to hear any of Isserly’s thoughts — they aren’t that interesting.
• Nowhere to Be Found by Bae Suah: Reviewed here.
• So Sexy, So Soon by Diane E. Levin, Ph.D. and Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D.: Oh goody, yet another pitfall added to all the things I have to be wary of raising Tesfa. She’s so perfect and I don’t want to screw her up.
• Great American Short Stories edited by Wallace and Mary Stegner: Last month I said that these were the stories that made you hate short stories. Yeah, I’m going to stick with that. But I’m keeping up with the idea of reading of a short story a day because why not? Geoff’s dad was saying one should savour short stories, read them slowly, bit by bit. So I’ll try that.
• White Tiger on Snow Mountain by David Gordon: Reviewed earlier this month.
• Up The Pier by Helen Cresswell: So end of the British empire feeling. People take trains that get in forty three minutes past the hour and people vacation in little houses by piers and the sea.
• Nobody Cries at Bingo by Dawn Dumont: I wish I could write funny.
• The Best Is Yet To Come by Anne Mazar: It’s really hard to want to continue reading a book to Tesfa when the “weird” family in the book does the things we do as a family (calls parents by first names, kids get to decide what to wear, no forcing of eating food – although I feel I should have a caveat here – we don’t force Tesfa to eat dinner, but if she doesn’t like what we’re eating, we don’t make her anything else.) And they make fun of a girl’s clothes. This book is mean.
• The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank: I remember way back in the nineties when this book came out, all the comparisons to Bridget Jones. Why? This novel is nothing like Bridget Jones other than (a) written by a female and (b) female main character and her relationships. For some reason I also thought this book took place in Minnesota; don’t know why.
• Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín: Reviewed here.
• Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel: So someone cut out a bunch of pages (consecutive) from my library copy! What the hell is up with that? I really liked the book but I also had a hard time staying focused. I wish I loved it.
• Uzumaki Volume Two by Junji Ito: So creepy, the snails chapter, ugggggg.
• Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk: A hard book to convince yourself to pick up and a hard book to convince yourself to put down and get back to life.
• The Juggler’s Children by Carolyn Abraham: I know that the idea of non-fiction lately includes personal stories and the vanishing of distance between the documentor and the subject, but I rarely feel in books like that (and like The Juggler’s Children) that I get as much out of it as I would if the bias was disguised better. Also, there were ghosts. FMRL (Fuck my reading life).

Favourite book of the month:

Oh, I liked this book. So funny.

Most promising book on the wishlist:

I’ve been trying to cut back my wishlisting. So I didn’t have a lot to chose from and am not super inspired this month. So nothing.

I watched:

I wrote:

A story about cutlery. Slushed it out. New story came out at Found Press. Feeling middling about writing as a whole. Had some nice compliments from a neighbour and from Geoff about my writing, so I’ll keep going for now.

I read:

Thoughts:

• Suee and the Shadow Volumes 1 and 2 by Ginger Ly: Reviewed earlier this month.
• Queen Sugar by Natalie Bazilie: Reviewed earlier this month.
• Count on Yourself by Alison Griffiths: I never thought I’d invest my own money. Then I read this book. I now invest my own money and am moving over my mutual-fund RRSPs to manage them myself as well. Now, if I only had some more money (come on book advance for any of my half-formed books).
• McSweeney’s Thirty-Two edited by Dave Eggers: Read for my short-story-a-day-in-February. I continue to dislike compilations with multiple authors.
• Logic Lotty: The Fortune Teller’s Spoon by Paige Peterson: Reviewed earlier this month.
• Us Conductors by Sean Michaels: It made me want a Theremin.

  Reading parts of the book, I was like “This is exactly like Gulag” or “This is exactly like The First Circle“, only to get the end and see Michaels listed them as sources. So I felt clever. I enjoy feeling clever.

• The School for Good and Evil: A World Without Princes by Soman Chainani: Wonderful in world building, but failing in everything else. The book is just mindblowing reductive in terms of gender roles. Did you know that girls relying on themselves equates to getting rid of boys with the goal of making them slaves? Did you know that boys, without the civilizing effect of girls or adults, turn into rampant, disgusting pigs who feel the need to pee on everything? Did you know that feminism isn’t a dismantling of patriarchal structures that trap both men and women, but rather women who despise, ridicule, and exploit men? Did you know that, no matter what, doing something like a girl is an insult? Did you know that you can’t have both friends and romantic interests – only one or the other? What a shitty messages to put in a book geared towards pre-teens. There are parts of this book that read like they came straight from a MRA forum.

  I am angry I wasted my time on this. I am angry that pretty much on every page I had to rewrite what was happening so I could read it to my six year old. This book had so much potential and squandered it all so we could have a standard tale of damsels in distress, feminazis, and needing men to save the day.

• Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis: Reviewed earlier this month.
• Fingersmith by Sarah Waters: I can’t ever really love Sarah Waters. I find her stories too long. I understand they are supposed to be rich and decadent, like French cooking, but I don’t like French cooking since the sauces are usually cream based and make me sick, and I just want to cut about 150 pages out of every Sarah Waters book I read
• Tita by Marie Houzelle: Reviewed earlier this month.

Favourite book of the month:

Now I don’t know whether I want Leslie Knope or Amy Poehler to be my best friend. Maybe both? How can I get Amy Poehler to be my best friend without me becoming a super-creepy stalker?

Most promising book I put on my wishlist:

So I put it on my wishlist, and then bought it with a gift card I had for Chapters (but I bought it for the kobo). I think that counts as most promising, that I actually went out and got it.

I watched:

Thoughts:

• Darknet: I watched about fifteen minutes of Darknet while washing dishes on a Thursday. Then it got dropped, just like Steins:Gate got dropped last month.

  I guess they were worried, in Darknet, that people would not realize they were in Toronto, since they mentioned it at least twelve times during the fifteen minutes I watched. This is why Toronto will never be a world-class city, OMG how needy.

I wrote:

Nothing. At least not anything new. I am focusing on editing what I have. It is tedious and most days I want to claw my eyes out and every day I get myself all pumped to sit in front of the text on my screen and make changes to comma placement and adverbs there is a snow day and Tesfa is home and nothing gets done. For March, I am, regardless of weather co-operation and the fact that the first week of March is Tesfa’s March break and she feels that if I am at the computer that means I want her to loudly and repeatedly ask me questions about things that I have no control over (Why can’t you make the colours rhyme with the animals? What does that even mean?), going to do twenty pages a day until I am done. One file (called big file because naming is totally my thing).

Then I really have to do the same big overhaul for faerie story.

I’m glad I printed out faerie story and big file before my printer ran out of ink. Possibly my printer ran out of ink because of.

Then, once that is done, I can get back to new stories. My story about a devil and my story about wolves and who knows what. A big breath out, aaaaaaahhhhh.

I read:

Thoughts:

• The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber: Reviewed earlier this month.
• Katamari Volume 1 by Alex Culang and Raynato Castro: Reviewed earlier this month.
• Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin: I found the personal essays far more affecting than theory ones, but the theory essays on race are definitely not at a 101 level, which is where I am at. Thus a good reminder to me not to expect people to only be writing for me as an audience. I am not the most important person, nor the audience for everything.
• Turn Us Again by Charlotte R. Mendel: One time I read an article about fake book awards (it’s not this article, but similar). Turn Us Again had an award sticker on the front, and I know this is going to sound so mean, but after reading the book, I couldn’t help wondering if the award was some sort of vanity book award. The main character ends up being a repugnant apologist for domestic violence and the whole thing sours.
• Siberiak by Jenny Jaeckel: Reviewed earlier this month.
• Bang Crunch by Neil Smith: Sometimes (like let’s say two bullet points above), I get angry with bad books and I think Why am I not getting published and I get all ggrrrrrrr. Then I read books that are much better than my writing and think “Ohhhhh, so this is why I don’t get published.” This book is of the second category.
• Double Trouble by Jenny Dale: Ugggg, one of those kid books where girls like pink and boys like blue and everyone is always helpful and pleasant and possibly this book is a shill for the veterinary industry with such riveting discussion as:

  [regarding the missing dogs]

  “If only they’d been identi-chipped.”

  “What’s that?” asked Chris.

  “It’s a way of keeping track of your dog,” Neil explained.

  “You can insert a tiny microchip, about the size of a grain of rice, under their skin,” his father added. “If the dog is found by anyone, a scanner can be run over the chip and it will identify the dog.”

  Plus the book was relocalised for the US, even though they are in the UK, so all these British kids using American words (soccer rather than football, cell phone rather than mobile), everything spelled the American way. I hated every second of it.

  Tesfa, however, was enthralled.

• 20 000 Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne: If I ever need a book that in no way whatsoever passes the Bechdel test, here I am. I don’t even think there are any women, let alone named ones in the entire book.
• History of Loneliness by John Boyne: Reviewed earlier this month.
• Cosmo by Spencer Gordon: Some of the stories were from a female point of view! I’m always chuffed (to steal a word ridiculed in one of Spencer’s stories) when a man writes stories from a female’s perspective and doesn’t just barricade to the white twenties upper-middle class male cave. Plus, I am going to call him Spencer because I have exchanged a few emails with him (he is the editor of The Puritan which published my story Darién Gap) so I am going to take it that we are on a first name basis. He also wrote a story about adult entertainment in the book, and one of my emails to him, I talked about there is an adult entertainer with the same first and last name as me. I have no idea when Spencer wrote the adult entertainment story, but I’m going to take credit for the inspiration anyway.
• The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell: Good then not so good (psychosteric chapter), then all right again, but not as good as the beginning was. I had been hoping I would fall into the story and wrap it around me like a blanket, but I didn’t. I read it and returned it to the library and now I’ll forget about it.
• A Spy Among Friends by Ben MacIntyre: Dull until Elliott is going to visit Philby to get him to confess, although the dullness might be because I already knew a lot of the information before that point. I would have liked more about the actual debriefing of Philby by Elliott.
• Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët: Creepy, in a good way and not a good way. Uncomfortable. I think I would have liked it more had I known going in that it was supposed to be awful. For some reason, I thought it was a kids’ book. It is most definitely NOT a kids’ book.
• The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani: Tesfa loves this book so much and I just loathe it, with its muddled story and lessons. For a story that wants to break open the good/evil dichotomy, it sure relies on a lot of nasty tropes (pretty = good, ugly = evil, etc.). I also hate things where they use “fat” as a pejorative term, which this book does in spades. I want to take the setting and rewrite my own, feminist, good vs evil tale for Tesfa instead.
• Women of Karantina by Nael Eltoukhy: Reviewed earlier this month.

Favourite book of the month:

It’s sad. I didn’t have one five out of five book this month. I did have two four and a half’s, this and Cosmo, but this makes me worry that either I am picking lousy books or I have lost the ability to enjoy life.

Most promising book I put on my wishlist:

I mean, how could I not?

I watched:

Bletchley Circle: This show is so unintentionally silly. I would never have watched it if it were American, but somehow I can handle it when they all have UK accents. I’m sure that’s some sort of ingrained classist colonial brainwashery.
• Bojack Horseman Christmas Special: Only took me until January to watch the Christmas special.
• Pitch Perfect: I’m glad that when they had two black women in the Bellas, right away they got rid of one because two black women, that’s just too confusing. Also, I loved that they won after they abandoned the idea of singing only songs by women and switched to straight up songs by men. The message there, ahhh, inspiring.

  End sarcasm.

  I did, however, actually love Fat Amy’s reasoning for her name though.

• Wet Hot American Summer: Totally don’t get the love for this movie.
• The Slap: It’s like Heartbreak High, but all grown up! Still as vitriolic as the book, but somehow more palpatable as a TV show. Of course, since this is TV, they were very rude about extended breastfeeding, and the whole plot about Connie’s dad being bisexual seems to have vanished. But, the show did teach me that everything in Australia seems so close to the road, like with no sidewalks. Every time a character opened a door to go outside, I worried they were going to get hit by a car. Also Australians seem to have very dirty doors and busy wallpaper if this show is anything to go by; I’m going to assume saltwater ruins paint jobs and the ugly wallpaper thing is just a difference in taste?
• The Fall: There’s a part in the second season when Spector says what sort of sicko are you for watching this and Stella later denigrates people who get their thrills from watching violent shows (like The Fall) and I was like joke’s on you, I’m only half watching while I do other work, so take that critique of violence in media! Less sexualized violence than in Season One due to Season Two’s plotline.
• Steins;Gate: I watch in background while I sew or clean dishes and don’t really pay attention, but I’m thinking it isn’t a show you have to pay that much attention to. Just because it’s about time travel, it isn’t Primer-intricate or anything.

I wrote:

Nothing. Tesfa didn’t go back to school until January 7th and there were three snow days this month. Plus, I gave up writing for January to do all the things I’d been procrastinating from doing:

• replace all the garage and outdoor lights,
• get new toilet seat,
• take off the broken screen door,
• sew tea towels,
• make soap,
• redesign this website here,
• find a sports bra that fit properly (trying to find bras in 30FF is not a fun experience),
• sew a Snuggie (it’s white! I look like a member of a doomsday cult!), and
• I did a lot of miscellaneous baking and cleaning.

So that was January writing. February writing: get a collection of short stories ready to send out (i.e. put them in one file, print them out, proofread them, then send them out and wait for the crickets of not-even-worth-a-rejection-letter coming in). Ditto faerie story.

I read:

Thoughts:

• The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor: I found these hollow compared with the Frank O’Connor collection I read in November, not that that is bad, just she treats her characters differently than O’Connor does. There’s a pattern to how some of the stories end – a sharp drop. I have similarities in many of my stories’ endings too so it’s helpful to see examples of differentiated sameness.
• Nathaniel Fludd Beastologist: Flight of the Phoenix by R.L. Travers: Tesfa liked this book. I was more meh.
• The Passion by Jeannette Winterson: Not my favourite Jeannette Winterson (still Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal), but a good Jeannette Winterson in any case.
• Confessions of a Sociopath by M.E. Thomas: I don’t really know what I expected. Actually, I guess I do, I thought I’d be entertained, but for all of the author’s professing how likable and intriguing she is, my goodness is she a braggart and a bore. This is a very dull book.
• The Russian Debutante’s Handbook by Gary Shteyngart – What is the purpose of the whole first half of the book, the part set in New York? Nothing really happens until he goes to Prava, and even then, what happens is just a random collection of musings on former Soviet biznesmen and wealthy yet dim ex-pats. There are echoes of say, Bulgakov, in the second half, but by then I had trouble keeping focused and just rushed through to the end because I felt bad on giving up on the book. As another review on librarything said: Am I supposed to spend the course of the entire book hoping Vladimir gets offed by the mafia? If I am, the book’s succeeding amply, but if not…
• An Untamed State by Roxane Gay: I had to keep putting it down, or flipping to the end, like Room, because it was stressing me out too much.
  
  Even though there were tonnes of reviews of An Untamed State all summer long, I don’t think I read any of them because I was totally surprised by the plot. Maybe that’s better. Maybe I should read less reviews and just read books randomly.
• One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B.J. Novak: Some people are, unfairly, funnier than me.
• Watch How We Walk by Jennifer LoveGrove: We’ve read this story before, the story of leaving a fundamentalist household. There’s nothing new here in terms of plot or pacing. But stories can be told again and again. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with reading a familiar story with variations as long as the variations are enough to keep my interest. The Emily in the now sections aren’t as interesting as the Emily in the then sections. I feel bad for all the characters, so trapped. Their hopelessness shines through in the writing.
• The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan: In the introduction, Anne Fadiman writes that Marina Keegan wrote like a 21 year old. Sure she does but, realistically, I don’t want to read the thoughts of a privileged, white 21 year old at Yale. Other bits I thought were decent, or better than decent, good. I would have liked the underwater one to be a whole claustrophobic novel. Or a movie, although I don’t know how a movie taking place completely in the dark would actually work. It sounds like it could be a James Incandenza sort of film.
• The Treatment Mo Hayder: The cover said it was supposed to be Completely terrifying. I think I’m jaded. It wasn’t terrifying at all. But then again, I tend to get scared more about stupid things like alien abductions, so maybe I’m the wrong audience.
• The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcom: Maybe I would have found this more compelling if I had a background in journalism. It was a quick read but very little stuck.
• Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman: There will be a full review of this up hopefully by the end of the week.
• The Woodcutter by Reginald Hill: So we’re just going to drop the whole child-porn video plot? Shouldn’t they still care about the video once guy got cleared?
  
  And talk about white male fantasy, the young, POC, sexy psychiatrist goes off with the grizzled and deformed old man at the end. Blech.
• The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer: Slow, almost tortuous to read with a plot that is essentially, a meditation on the same thing as Common People by Pulp. Worthwhile but tough.
• Paris Trout by Pete Dexter: I saw the movie years ago, and the movie cuts out a lot of the book for the better, because the second half of the novel drags whereas the first half is much more snappy. I actually am struggling to remember what happens in the second half. I spent the last five minutes thinking and came up with it, but the first half is better.

Favourite book of the month:

Most promising book I put on my wishlist:

I want to get this book and do the things with Tesfa.

I watched:

Thoughts:

• Bletchley Circle: This is my new in the background while I wash dishes show.
• Two Lives: liked how they didn’t make it a big twist at the end, but it did get more and more outlandish the longer it went on (the last ten or so minutes especially).
• Wolf Children: Nice but should have been about 20 minutes shorter.

Listened to: Serial, although I feel kinda slimy about it. I feel bad for everyone involved. Maybe it shouldn’t have been an entertainment. Maybe it will help find out the truth. Maybe it’s just voyeuristic with no merit. I don’t know.

I wrote: Proofread Chagall story. Typed spoiled milk story. Thought of my own Wolf Children story in my mind, same with a story about being stuck in time, although I might just be mining a repressed memory of Groundhog Day.

Published: Nil. Rejections though, so people are reading what I write, just saying no.