Happy Sunday!
The state of the world has me feeling like Simon Cowell in a spirit tunnel: panicked, overwhelmed, and unsure of what to do with my hands.
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Despite looking like an alien in a skin suit, this is the most relatable Simon Cowell has ever been. Look at him smiling through the uncertainty!
He is my new poster boy for social anxiety.
If you ever see me clapping like this, just know I’ve taken several edibles in preparation to leave my house.
Onto the books
The theme of my September reading was ‘unhinged hypotheticals.’
What if Hell were modelled after a university campus?
What if the moon were made of cheese?
What if I split myself into two people, one naughty and one nice?
What if I spent $20,000 renovating a motel room to avoid talking to my husband?
These are the big questions I want literature to grapple with! Lucky for you, all of the answers are in the texts below:
🧀 When The Moon Hits Your Eye, John Scalzi (4.5)
One day, the moon turns to cheese.
What a premise! Kafka
walkedscurried so John Scalzi could run!1To quote the acknowledgements:
“…you should know that the science in this book is, and here is an obscure technical term, extremely loosey-goosey”
Extremely loosey-goosey and extremely entertaining. This book was everything I wanted and more. I came for cheese puns. I left feeling moved.
When The Moon Hits Your Eye was beautiful, heartfelt, and crafted like a collection of short stories. I laughed. I cried. I Googled things about the moon. I was reminded of the hopelessness of lockdown. The uncertainty of …well, everything right now. Do yourself a favour and pick this one up!
🍈 Everyone’s Seen My Tits: Stories and Reflections from an Unlikely Feminist, Keeley Hazell (3)
A memoir & essay collection from a former Page 3 model.
Keeley Hazell’s audiobook reading charmed me enough to give this three stars. I hadn’t known that Keeley from Ted Lasso was based on a real person, and that — coupled with the incredible title and cover — was enough for me to hit play. Her story is interesting, but there wasn’t anything transcending this book from a woman’s individual journey to a must-read. The fame and self-image commentary was poignant, but Emrata’s My Body hit these themes harder in 2021. Still! Worth a read if you’re looking for feminist nonfiction.
🎓 Katabasis, R.F. Kuang (3.5)
Two graduate students follow their advisor into Hell.
If you’ve ever seen videos of dog owners saying all of their pet’s favourite words on a fake phone call, that’s what this book was to me. Cambridge as a setting?? An absurd amount of philosophy references?? A journey through Hell?? Nerds falling in love?!? Truly, no combination of words would make me pick up a book faster.
While I thoroughly enjoyed reading Katabasis, it didn’t change my life the way I hoped. Were my expectations too high? Probably. But something was missing. Salomé, a Goodreads reviewer, articulated the issue perfectly:
The most revealing flaw in Katabasis is its lack of a clear target audience. The novel gestures toward many readerships but satisfies none:
Too academic for a general audience, yet too shallow for readers steeped in classical or theological traditions.
Marketed as a romance, yet offering none of the emotional or narrative beats of the genre.
Potentially aimed at fans of hell-as-setting, yet doing nothing new.
…All of this leads to the central problem: Katabasis lacks purpose. It does not advance mythology in new directions, it does not interrogate misogyny with depth, it does not develop its disturbing content into critique. It offers spectacle, but not meaning.
For an author who has positioned herself as a serious voice in contemporary literature, interrogating empire in The Poppy War and language in Babel, this regression is striking. Katabasis is not ambitious, but hollow..If anyone else had written this book, I probably would have liked it more.
I love R.F. Kaung because of the commentary she tackles in her books (ie: Yellowface), and this book was not that. Can’t a girl just write a fun adventure without political satire? Maybe! But it’s hard not to hold Kaung to the standard that she set.
Also! If the intention was to deliver some cheeky fun, it should have at least been better than that other book about university students going to Hell from two years ago…
🏩 All Fours, Miranda July (4)
A middle-aged woman leaves her family to find herself on a cross-country road trip, only to spend two weeks unravelling in a motel 20 minutes from home.
In the most complementary way possible, what the fuck did I just read?
This book was complete and utter mayhem from top to bottom. At every turn, the main character made choices from a place of incomprehensible lunacy. Just when you thought she might level out, she upped the stakes with something pulled from the tickle trunk of terrible ideas. I could have stayed in her delulu mind forever. That other characters could follow her fabricated fantasies was mindboggling to me. We should all be so lucky to have friends and romances that allow us this level of creative depravity — renovating a hotel room as a nest for an affair, FBI telephotographer role-play, open source menopause advice, interpretative dance social media posts as love letters, street trash graffiti as a proclamation of devotion. Not to mention the applicator-less tampon foreplay or marriage breakthrough over dog poop… I thought this book was hysterical and fascinating, but it lost a star for the overuse of shock value and the glamorization of open marriages.
Anyway, here’s how I imagine Miranda July writes books:
🐍The Thorns, Dawn Kurtagich (1.5)
A woman reconnects with her best friend from boarding school and is forced to reckon with past trauma.
This was a flop, and it didn’t have to be! Dawn Kurtagich did so much right: The tween-girl bullying dynamics were nuanced, and the main character’s processing of sexual abuse felt extremely real. If this had been a coming-of-age story, I think she would have nailed it.
Instead, this was billed as a horror, and none of the scary elements landed. There was mention of a Glass Man? Never showed up. Thorns were scattered places sometimes? Never paid off. The ‘big’ twist was a classic psychological thriller trope, and it fell flat. If I’m being kind, I think the author had some really cool ideas and “killing past trauma” metaphors in her head that simply did not translate on the page.
Dawn! Your editor should have helped you more!!! You’re talented, but this was bad, and it didn’t have to be!!
🧪Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson (4)
Surely we all know what this book is about….
One of my favourite and least favourite parts of classic novels is how they read like gossip. Some guy telling some other guy about a spooky story that barely involved him. I feel like there’s a market to remake all of these in a similar format to The Real Housewives...
Anyway, for a book about a doctor who split himself in two via potion, a lot of these pages are focused on his will and estate. Property law is, and will always be horror fodder (see also: Wuthering Heights, Dracula, Bleak House, A Christmas Carol, etc.) A disfigured beast will be murdering people for sport, but 1800s novelists will spend 25-50% of the book discussing contracts. I guess those are scary, too…
Beyond being a foundational text in horror, this book gets four stars for one line and one line only:
Last Thought:
Simon Cowell core
Epilogue
What did you read this month?
Anything I should add to my TBR?
How many The Metamorphosis jokes can I make in this newsletter before it qualifies as a Kafka fan page?