Monthly Archives: August 2024

The Folio: What I Read Mid-July Through Mid-August 2024

Book Review, Books, Inspiration, Reading, Recommendations, The Folio

* Runs in to the blog page, breathless* 

Sorry I’m late. Vacation, then back to school, illness, busy-ness and WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DIDN’T EVEN NOTICE I’M A FEW DAYS LATE WITH THIS POST?

Fine. I won’t pay the late fee then.

Let’s start with some good news, because I believe in having dessert first: I’m now writing book reviews for Reedsy, and I’m beyond excited!. Fret not, my reviews will also still appear in the usual places: Here. Over there. Yonder. Maybe even scribbled on a crumpled piece of paper, locked in a dusty museum chamber, to be discovered centuries from now.

Which is all just to say that those of you who wanted MORE places to read my brain blarps? Wish granted.

I am coming to terms with the fact that summer as an adult is nothing at all like summer for children or teens or even college students. It’s not months of freedom and relaxing and doing what we want. There’s no time for me to go running around after the ice cream truck (neighbors, you’re welcome!) And, in a plot twist as horrible as and then I woke up, there’s less time for me to read than during the school year. My inner Veruca Salt is stomping around, demanding TIME, SPACE, QUIET, COZY UNHUMID NOOKS, AND TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES ICE CREAM BAR, but that’s not how this summer panned out.

 (photo credit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TMNT/comments/p508mk/i_miss_the_tmnt_ice_cream_bars_on_a_hot_summer_day/)

And that’s ok. I finished five books I can talk about now, and multiple (*bats eyelashes coquettishly*) ARCs (Advanced Reader Copies) and alpha- and beta-reads that I will be able to share with you soon enough. Trust me when I say that there are some really excellent books to be released in the next year or so and I can’t wait to talk about them with you.

These are the books that I enjoyed enough to finish in the last month:

Fallen Spirits by Diane Hatz

Fallen Spirits, the second installment in the Mind Monsters series by Diane Hatz, is a gloriously offbeat fusion of satire and sci-fi, perfect for those who enjoy sharp humor and gleeful absurdity. (Also space-time disruptions! Beings from other realms! And possibly the end of the world!)

We reunite with the beleaguered and somewhat bewildered Alex as her life implodes then intersects with that of the lost and endangered Crystal, a woman who seems to be at the mercy of some metaphysical shenanigans. Alex embarks on a cross-country journey for answers and a chance to find anything that might help her crawl out of the wreckage that is her life.

Along the way, she encounters unforgettable characters, like JT, a power-hungry mogul whose craven need for omnipotence imperils pretty much everyone. I’d also like to give a friendly wave to Dr. Max, one of Hatz’s many delightful secondary characters into whom she breathes life with a few keystrokes.

At its heart, Fallen Spirits is about hitting rock bottom, scrambling up again (and again), and just maybe believing in something — whether it’s oneself, community, or unseen guiding forces.

Hatz incorporates these deeper themes into a fast-paced story that is as thought-provoking as it is entertaining. She skewers the moral vacuity of the uber-wealthy elite in scathing commentary on capitalism gone awry. Hatz’s narrative voice is incisive, sarcastic, and a lot of fun. She is also gifted in what I believe to be an underrated skill: ending chapters well. Each “button” works, and putting the book down is a struggle because we just want to see what could possibly happen next.

Word of warning: if bodily functions — even when used satirically — are not your cup of tea, you will want to approach this with extreme caution.

If you’re looking for a full-speed-ahead slipstream novel that cheekily challenges conventions while exploring the power of belief, Fallen Spirits is the book for you.

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

This novel is a fever dream set afire with a postmodern match.

Oedipa Maas, ordinary California housewife, becomes the executor of her ex-lover’s estate, a task that quickly thrusts her into a bizarre labyrinth of centuries-old conspiracies, and reality soon seems to slip through her fingers.

Pynchon’s novel is dense, surreal, and mind-bending. It’s quite a trip and you may need a DIY conspiracy board to make sense of it all.

The Crying of Lot 49 intentionally doesn’t aim to fully develop its characters. Pynchon is here to play with form rather than character development, twisting narrative to near disorientation. His prose is playful, almost entirely brilliant, and underscored with pain. It’s a nutrient-dense cocktail of words that’ll mess you up in the best possible way.

Pynchon taps into not only a wobbly paranoia, but also a sense of how lost we can feel in a stubborn country of lonely souls pointing fingers at each other.

The novel is also about the greater dread that nothing is connected, that everything is random and meaningless. And Pynchon takes not a few shots at 1960s counterculture. Even rebels can trap themselves in their own belief systems.

Reality. Just sound and fury, signifying nothing — or perhaps, everything.

How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

Tom Hazard, a man who appears to be in his 40s, has rather inconveniently been alive for over 400 years due to a rare condition that slows his aging. While everyone he knows bustles about living and dying, Tom just…doesn’t. While the world spins on, Tom lives a life of history and solitude. He’s hobnobbed with some historical greats, sure, but immortality-ishness comes with its own set of problems — chief among them being found out, but also the agony of loving and losing and living with for centuries. This isn’t a novel about history so much as a look at time — how it moves, how we cling to it, and how hard and how necessary it is to live in the present.

This book is like a slow, deliberate sip of whiskey — smooth, then burn. The timeline jumps the author makes put us in Tom’s shoes as he increasingly “slips” back and forth in memory. You feel his disorientation as time plays tricks on him, causing him memory headaches. This novel does not shy away from THE BIG STUFF: resilience, fear, regret, mortality, the urgency and blessing of a lifespan. And in the end, it’s the stubborn optimism of it all. It’s a gentle nudge toward living our best lives in this very moment. (It’s also eminently quotable and a lot of fun.)

Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

A quirky, sharp novel about what happens when modern life pushes a creative soul to the edge. Semple critiques absurdities of modern life, particularly suburban conformity, tech culture, and the pressures of social status. The story follows Bernadette Fox, a brilliant but eccentric architect who doesn’t quite fit into the neat little boxes that society — and suburban Seattle — tries to place her in. Bernadette disappears just before her family is to take a trip to Antarctica. Narrated through a series of emails, letters, and documents pieced together by her 15-year-old daughter, Bee, the novel painfully and hilariously pokes at creativity, family, and the lengths people go to maintain appearances or reject them altogether.

The satire hits HARD from the get-go. Bernadette’s reluctance to engage with her community is relatable for anyone who’s ever felt like there was some fun partying going on in a private breakout room during a Zoom. The struggle against absurd norms is the heartbeat of the novel, emphasizing how fricking exhausting it can be to keep up with the Joneses when you don’t even want to be anywhere near that racetrack. But Semple lets us know there’s always a different (hilarious! charming!) path.

A quick side-eye to how some characters — ELGIN — get handed one too many Get Out of Jail Free cards, but that’s a minor quibble in an otherwise deeply resonant, offbeat, well-balanced novel that may make you reconsider wild trips to the end of the earth or lawn warfare.

The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry

A thoughtful guidebook/kick in the pants for anyone trying to be creative while the world tells you to go faster, do more, and SMILE while putting nose to grindstone. Despite sounding like something an overenthusiastic AI model would suggest, concepts like “Creative Rhythm” and “Idea Management” are actually quite brilliant, even for non-business creatives like me. He emphasizes balancing focus, relationships, energy, and time to help you generate ideas without burning out or losing quality. It’s something to keep close by and a good reminder that slow, steady, and deliberate make those big moments of creative inspiration possible. Make your creativity bulletproof. I’ll let you know as I buckle down to work on my own book if these ideas are more than inspiration.

I’m off to go figure out my new Reedsy stuff now. Wish me luck. I, a Luddite, stopped keeping up with tech once my iPod Gen 2 gave up the ghost (to the tune of Bubbles by ARTIST). Maybe I’ll reward myself with a quick jog behind the Good Humor truck, should those bells toll for me.

What did you love reading this month?

10 Books That Clearly Need to Be Written

Books, Creative non-fiction, Fiction, Humor, Ink Spatterings, Life and Other Existential Problems, Reading, Under 750

Someone get on it

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Squeaky Curds, Surging Back, and the Twerpiest, Torque-iest of Months — July 2024! Month in Review

Inspiration, Life and Other Existential Problems, Poetry, Recommendations, Writing, , , , , ,

What comes to mind when you hear “JULY 2024!”?

This?

Or, if you’re from the USA, this?

Ok. But nope.

July 2024! was the temporal equivalent of the playground merry-go-round. Dizzying, uncomfortable, and with an unshakeable sense that some punk ran up, grabbed one of the bars, and whipped this fun/hell contraption into a breakneck speed. Some people flew off, some clung with all their might to the hot metal. Almost all of us wanted to puke.

Torque. It’s not for the faint of heart.

Neither was JULY 2024! if you’ve paid attention to anything at all. It’s been a fire hose of information, no matter where your radar dish is pointed. That’s the wonderful horror of being a writer. Like it or not, we pay attention. Perhaps we write because we pay attention, or perhaps we pay attention because we write. Either way, the writing-attention bond is embedded in the very grooves of our ink-smudged fingerprints.

Things seep in. It’s spectacular. It’s a lot. We write to figure out how we think and feel about these things. When we’ve been at it awhile, we learn what to pay attention to and how to hold the attention-prism up to the light.

But oof. JULY. Basta.

I spent almost half of July sick, as I do every year. Something low-grade, with unearned exhaustion and a sense of being perpetually stuck in finals week, leaving me just enough energy to get through the day but not enough to conjure up my own special brand of goddamned delightfulness.

The two weeks of corporeal slowdown triggered or at least coincided with something excellent — my brain seems to have returned from whatever hiatus it’s been on for the last couple years. Writing no longer feels like trying to breathe while encased in a giant Jell-O mold. Whatever Roto-Rootered my noodle, I’m grateful and am scraping out remaining sludge while putting this refreshing spray of thoughts into words.

But next time my brain takes a sabbatical, I’d like to hitch along for the ride.

In times like JULY 2024!, you twerpy month, all we can do is either hold on for dear life or tuck and roll off, then stare at the sky until the wooziness passes and we recalibrate.

Mostly I clung to small comforts in JULY 2024!, especially those in carb form. (Confession: I am also in carb form.)

And also screamed JULY like this:

Here are some splashes of marvelous from July 2024

  • Someone I love dearly sent FOUR PINTS of Jeni’s ice cream and also some dog ice cream (for the dog, not dog-flavored). They are now my favorite person. (All apologies to my husband, but he had a good run.)
  • I’ve hit that age where I understand the technology but am tired of keeping up with it like I’m the third dog in the sled team. My kids run my tech now. Despite their help, I still can’t get the Target app to work at the checkout line. My offspring are polite enough to keep from howling with laughter until I’m out of earshot, but that’s because they see how devastated I get catching a glimpse of myself in the checkout camera. Despite that, this Target commercial shows they (generally) understand their customers, even if they overestimate our enjoyment of the checkout camera.
  • Sometimes you dream of going to a certain place. A dream you’ve dreamed for, oh, your entire marriage. SOMETIMES DREAMS COME TRUE!. Ladies and gentlemen, the Mars Cheese Castle. Squeaky Curds! Whey (probably, and if not, there should be!) T-shirts! Kringle! Pickled mushrooms! Pants! Cheese hats that we refused on principle! Beer! What more could you want?
  • OMG when is the last time you heard this? Too long, I’d guess.
  • Talk about honesty and balance. 
  • This reaches far beyond writing. We only have each other: 
  • Perhaps July was just an illusion, but a necessary one as Oliver Sacks points out in this passage. 
  • I came across this as I sorted through papers in my office. It’s one of those pieces that, like the merry-go-round, is dizzying and thrilling. 
  • Writers (and some normal people, probably,) form nearly-unholy-yet-mutable bonds with writing instruments and notebooks. I use Sharpie S-gels and 5-Star notebooks for novel writing, glitter gel pens and fun notebooks for journaling, colored pencils for planning, and whatever pen is on hand to put stuff in my second brain. We’re one scratch-and-sniff sticker away from teleporting here:

Someone tell Mars Cheese Castle to get on an aisle like that.

  • Oh no, I just went down this rabbit hole. DO I WANT THESE?

What delights popped up in your July?