Happy Sunday! It was recently my birthday, so I come to you another year older and maybe wiser (probably not) and with lots of good stuff to talk about! Let’s get to it.
Reading
A couple of weeks ago my beloved book club that I don’t run anymore but attend whenever I can had “horror books” as its topic, and I decided I really wanted to read The Good House except I decided this three days before the meeting and the book is like 600 pages long, so I also decided to read Through the Woods in case I didn’t have time to finish the former. When I first opened up Through the Woods, I was concerned that this tiny graphic collection of stories wouldn’t count as horror, because the pictures are so delightful and how could anything so lovely be scary? Well, if you’re like me and you prefer your scares slow and psychological, this book gets pretty darn creepy. There’s a story about some kids who don’t listen to their dad and then bad things happen, there’s a story about a woman who marries some kind of royalty and then finds… pieces… of his previous wife inside the house, there’s a story about a guy who kills his brother and yet his brother still lives. Creepy, man. But the pictures are so pretty!
I ended up being right about The Good House and the fact that I couldn’t finish it in three days, but this was not for lack of trying. I was up at least an hour past my bedtime every night reading this book, super creeped out and very anxious about having nightmares, which I somehow avoided. I was also wary of this book when I started it, as it begins as a kind of sexy adult book about a woman and her estranged husband maybe getting back together, but it grows quickly dark when the couple’s kid acts kind of weird and then shoots himself in the head during a 4th of July party. The story then jumps back and forth between the year of that event, the present day two years later, and various points further in the past to explain how some seemingly very good magic once performed by the woman’s grandmother led to some very not good magic affecting everyone in the town in the present. If you are prone to stomachache, I do not recommend this book, but otherwise I think you need to grab it and read it in as few sittings as possible and with bright lights on.
On the not-creepy front, I also read Little Fires Everywhere this week, and I cannot believe I managed to wait so long (read: a month) to read it after its publication. I loved Celeste Ng’s first novel, Everything I Never Told You, and this book is equally as good. It’s primarily about two families living in Shaker Heights, Ohio, during the late 90s, and yes, it is SUPER weird to read a book about teens living near where I grew up near when I grew up there. Nostalgia is real for me in this novel. It’s hard to summarize this book as there’s a lot going on in it, but I think I can say that it’s about the awfulness that is being a teenager no matter what your life looks like, the awfulness that is being an adult no matter what your life looks like, and the danger of pretending that your prejudices don’t exist. I read Everything I Never Told You for two different book clubs, and there is almost no way I’m not foisting this book on another two.
Listening
I finished up Wild shortly after I last talked about it, and I feel basically exactly the same about it and have gone hiking several times since finishing it. I also listened to We Are Never Meeting in Real Life on the advice of the internets, and while it was not quite as amazeballs as the internet led me to believe, there were some pretty hilarious essays in the collection and Samantha Irby is great at reading her own words, so it was a great at-work listen.
Watching
Fall TV is back and I am… excited? The Good Place came back first and I was moderately concerned by the direction it took in the beginning, but a few episodes in everything seems to have fallen back into place and also I love Kristen Bell, so. Similarly, I am reserving judgement on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which is as funny as ever but the plot is a little iffy at the moment, until I see where that goes. A brand-new show for me and the husband this season is Inhumans, which I want to love because I love SHIELD and I love the Inhumans concept in general, but again, I’m not quite sold on it. On the plus side, another new show called Ghosted is weird and hilarious and also I’m catching up on a Disney cartoon called Gravity Falls that is differently weird and hilarious, so I think that puts me at 3-2 for shows I’m definitely into (4-2 if you count John Oliver’s show, but that’s been on all summer), so it’s going to be a good fall, especially once I get around to the Jane the Virgin season premiere. Bring on the awesome!
Playing
I am inexplicably still playing the heck out of Township, that resource-management phone game I picked up a few weeks ago, and I played several amazing matches in Rocket League recently that put me at Silver III, which, for me, is wow. But what I want to talk about today is this great new game I’m into, you may have heard of it, it’s called Dungeons & Dragons? I’ve been wanting to try a tabletop RPG for ages and have failed miserably at actually doing it, so when my brother and sister-in-law were like, hey, can we try playing this with you over Skype, I was like YASSSSSSSS. We played our third round on my birthday, because I am a giant nerd, and already my half-orc has hit many things with sticks, gotten to level 2, stolen a pastry from a rogue, and tried very hard not to kill a dangerous vampire that is currently charmed into being friends with my party but only for 45 more minutes so we’ll see how that goes. It’s awesome and I also love that I’m playing it with my husband, brother, and two sisters-in-law so it’s quality family time as well! Quality family time spent destroying skeletons is the best quality family time, I think.
What have you guys been up to lately?
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