meghan rose allen

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:

• Boy Snow Bird by Helen Oyeyemi: I’m going to forget I read this novel. It just isn’t going to stick. Like right now, I’m trying to remember which is Snow and which is Bird and I can’t. I remember Boy though, and her father. So some stuck I guess.
• The Enchanted Wood and The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton: I know these books are considered declassé, but I still love the Faraway Tree books, probably because I read them so often when I was younger. There’s not too much questionable content in these two; there are brief mentions of golliwogs, but no pictures and I can just say gnomes or something else when I read it aloud.

  I have the old English versions, not the new releases that Americanize it all. So lots of biscuits and jumpers and the like. Expand Tesfa’s vocabulary.

• A Calculated Life by Anne Charnock: I reviewed this book earlier this month.
• The Series of Unfortunate Events Books by Lemony Snicket: Whenever I come across what seems like a misprint or an odd word in the books, I keep thinking that it must be a Verse Fluctuation Declaration and I wish I’d known about it sooner so I could make a note of all of them and see if it actually is a code, but some of the books have gone back to the library, so I can’t.

  I’m not sure of the ending. In some ways I appreciate it, but in others, I am quite unsatisfied. I feel a little cheated, like Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler made this whole universe, and then, rather than resolving anything, just said Yep and put down his typewriter.

  I still like these books far more than Harry Potter though.

• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson: I am going to take some words I wrote in an email earlier about this book and put them here:

  My views might be tainted, since I haven’t been feeling great (physically or mentally) the past few days and I kept falling asleep when I was reading it. I thought it would be more approachable then it ended up being – some critic wrote that Marilynne Robinson is religious for the formerly religious, or something like that; that if you had once been religious, it would warm you up again. But I didn’t find that very much. There was a level where I thought the book didn’t even need religion, except for the character’s struggle with forgiveness, especially towards John Ames the younger. I guess I thought it would put me back in the mind of being really religious, as really religious as one can be at 18 and in the United Church. But it didn’t do that. I don’t know why I thought it would really.

• Mrs Stevens Hears The Mermaids Singing by May Sarton: I reviewed this book earlier this month.
• A Book of Canadian Animals by Charles Paul May: Ignoring the educational aspect, in one way this book is great since all animals are it unless specifically discussing male or female behaviour, and so we avoid the dogs and smurfs phenomena. On the other hand, this is a book from the sixties, so all the people discussed default to male. Can’t win.
• Collected Stories by Frank O’Connor: I reviewed this book earlier this month.
• All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu: This book was far too similar to The Dissident for me to really enjoy it. Also, there were parts that reminded me of a story I tried to write, vaguely about Ethiopia. Do you think Dinaw Mengestu found my old drafts online and then used them as a starting point?

  I don’t either, but it is nice to dream.

• Caught by Lisa Moore: A book club book.

  I’d been reading about point-of-view right before I read this book, so that ended up being what I focused on while reading. I can never remember all the terms, but the narration was third-person, but with little internalization from any of the characters. So everything felt floating and distanced, unreal, which was, I suppose the point as the situations all felt unreal to the people involved.

• The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice: 1. I’ve read this book before, but not since 2010. It is one of my favourites.

  2. I bought a copy to give someone this year as a Christmas present. But the book is hard to find in Canada, so it ended up being used. I hope that goes over all right with the recipient.

  3. Not that I’m planning on telling them this, but I read the copy I am giving them because I wanted to read this book again and it isn’t in the library.

  4. Eva Rice, the author, also wrote a book about Enid Blyton. I haven’t read it, but I hope she would approve of my month’s earlier Enid Blyton choices I shared with Tesfa.

Favourite book of the month:

As opposed to last month, I had a more pleasant book month. Lots of 4.5 or 5’s out of 5’s (Enid Blyton’s, Capital, Lemony Snicket, Olive Kitteridge, Interpreter of Maladies, The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets). But, of course, best was:

See my review for glowing praise.

Most promising book I put on my wishlist:

I watched:

Thoughts:

• Happy Endings: Meh. Still not seeing why everyone was so upset it was cancelled. Not an awful show, but it’s gone from my mind now. I watched all the episodes and now one to something new.
• Office Space: TPS reports. Hee hee hee hee hee.
• Happy Valley: Half-way through. So far, the portrayal of violence isn’t as problematic as, say, The Fall. Maybe it will end up being so and then I’ll be annoyed.
• Cosmos: Why do they make it all cuts and green screen and nonsense in an attempt to make the content interesting? Science is inherently interesting. It hardly needs to be gussied up. Only watched one episode so far. Don’t know whether to continue.
• Zodiac: American movies are too long.
• The Secret in their Eyes: I have a hard time understanding Argentine Spanish accents. Paint-by-numbers thriller set in South America.
• The Wizard of Oz: Geoff rented this to watch with Tesfa, I think not knowing that it was a musical. Tesfa can remember one line from all of the songs, We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz, which she sang over and over and over again, off-key and loud, until I felt like clawing my ears out. She has since moved on to practicing Christmas carols for the school concert. The universe is guaranteeing that I will go crazy before Christmas I’m sure.

I wrote: Did I finish typing my Log Driver’s Waltz story in October or November? I don’t recall, but it’s done typed. I wrote a story about Chagall paintings. I wrote some of a story about a glass of spoiled milk. I fiddled around with my faerie story. I got rejection after rejection, including one saying mine was one of the stronger stories submitted, so maybe it got to the last round of that contest and Margaret Atwood, the judge, read it? Maybe December will be full of acceptances.

And now, where do I put Serial, as I neither read, watched, or wrote it. Listened? I listened to Serial.