lesbian-helen-gansey

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have a student named Declan this year. the raven cycle really is everywhere

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Succession but every episode Logan Roy does a Dance Moms style pyramid

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Succession but every episode Logan Roy does a Dance Moms style pyramid

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Succession but every episode Logan Roy does a Dance Moms style pyramid

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what if I just started making memes using Canva

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Helen: you didn’t get mom a gift?!

Gansey: I’m literally neurodivergent and a minor

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On the other hand, Edward Cullen’s chaste and contentious characterization stands in stark contrast to the corrupting, seducing role vampires play in early, establishing works. In this essay, I will discuss how Mormon ideology in Twilight subverts Victorian Era vampire tropes. 

[lesbian-helen-gansey]

does this make any sense?

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God I miss tumblr so fucking much

[lesbian-helen-gansey]

(In which I triumphantly return to tumblr to do half-baked Biblical interpretation in regards to Adam Parrish’s name)

Before I get into the name Adam, I want to do a quick stop on Parrish. A parish, is the district of a church, so it does have religious connections, but I want to talk about Parrish blue. Maxfield Parrish was an artist in the early 1900s who mostly painted really vibrant and fanciful landscapes. Since we know that MS loves art, I feel like it would be a shame to overlook the potential Parrish Blue connection. Maxfield Parrish was a super interesting painter because he layered paints in a way that gave the color a really luminescent quality. The specific shade of blue he achieved with these techniques was named Parrish Blue. There’s no real point to this information other than an artist named Parrish created a shade of blue named Parrish Blue, and Adam Parrish has blue eyes, and I think it’s a fun little connection. And that I love Maxfield Parrish’s art. Now to Adam. In a religious context, Adam is the symbolic first man, and in the books, I feel like most of the overt references to the Biblical Adam are through the imagery of dust and dirt representing a sort of humanness, especially in relation to class and status. Like, Adam perceives himself as dirty because he is poor and works in contrast to the sort of “untouched-ness” of his wealthy peers who don’t have this sort of real and symbolic dirt on them. Which, I find sort of interesting in general because I don’t think this interpretation is part of the Biblical narrative. This is Adam’s perception of himself. In the Genesis story, God makes the Earth, and he says the Earth is good, and then from the Earth he creates Adam. At least initially, being created from the dirt isn’t some sort of negative. In the books, Adam perceives his “humanness” and his origins as a bad thing, but that’s his own perception; it’s not something that’s really true, and his friends don’t feel this way about him.

In addition to the way that Adam’s association to the dirt demonstrates his own negative self-perception, I’ve become also sort of fixated on the way that Adam’s curse in Genesis mirror’s Adam’s story in the Raven Cycle and his relationship to Henrietta. In Genesis, when the humans eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and are cursed by God, Adam is cursed with an antagonistic relationship to the Earth. He will struggle with the ground to make it grow food for him. He is cursed to have a hostile relationship with the place that he has come from, which I feel like is so reflected in Adam’s relationship to Henrietta. The idea in the books that he comes from “Henrietta dirt” and he now has this very hostile relationship with Henrietta and he struggles so much to make this place work for him and bear fruit for him in the sense of giving him something good and worthwhile. Like Adam’s curse in Genesis, where Adam will have to “toil” for the Earth to give him what he needs, Adam Parrish has to work extremely hard. The curse is that it will be hard labor and very difficult to get what he needs from the place that he comes from (The Earth, Henrietta.) “By the sweat of your brow, you shall eat.” (I also think there is maybe a slightly less logical relationship here to Adam’s struggle with his relationship to nature in the form of Cabeswater. Like, it’s hard and a lot of work for Adam to get this forest to work. I especially think of where God says the earth will grow “thorns and thistles” for Adam. But I feel much less strongly about this connection because I don’t know that I’ve really fully fleshed it out in my head. In the verses, the thorns and thistles are a punishment in opposition to the way that they are protective of Adam in BLLB, so idk about that one.)

I’m also very fascinated by what this means for Adam Parrish in context of the last part of the curse of Adam where God curses him to return to the earth, which, in the context of the Genesis story is death, but for Adam Parrish would be a return to Henrietta. “To dust you shall return.” If Adam’s story is so aligned with the way that Adam is cursed, is Adam in some way destined to return to Henrietta? There’s almost like a duel meaning to this aspect of the curse in the Genesis story because on one hand, it is the final blow of the curse where now Adam will die and return to the Earth, which is now hostile to him, but there’s also this sense that it’s in this return that he’ll finally be reconciled to the ground, the place that he comes from. The difficulty of both Adams’ lives come from being disconnected from where they come from, but God says that Adam will eventually return to the place that he comes from and has struggled with so long, and that sort of full circle-ness has a very reconciliatory nature to it, at least to me (particularly in the reading of Genesis as an allegory for the story of the early Israelites and their eventual return to the land of Canaan later in the Pentateuch).  (I feel like there is another aspect here of the concept of exile and Adam being forced to leave the garden of Eden and how Adam Parrish has left, but is really struggling at Harvard, being away from where he comes from).  

(I should also probably caveat that this is from a Christian perspective bc that’s what I’m familiar with and that’s the religious presence in the books in regards to Ronan’s Catholicism, but I don’t know in what ways this would or wouldn’t hold for the other religions that share the Adam story)

[lesbian-helen-gansey]

(In which I triumphantly return to tumblr to do half-baked Biblical interpretation in regards to Adam Parrish’s name)

Before I get into the name Adam, I want to do a quick stop on Parrish. A parish, is the district of a church, so it does have religious connections, but I want to talk about Parrish blue. Maxfield Parrish was an artist in the early 1900s who mostly painted really vibrant and fanciful landscapes. Since we know that MS loves art, I feel like it would be a shame to overlook the potential Parrish Blue connection. Maxfield Parrish was a super interesting painter because he layered paints in a way that gave the color a really luminescent quality. The specific shade of blue he achieved with these techniques was named Parrish Blue. There’s no real point to this information other than an artist named Parrish created a shade of blue named Parrish Blue, and Adam Parrish has blue eyes, and I think it’s a fun little connection. And that I love Maxfield Parrish’s art. Now to Adam. In a religious context, Adam is the symbolic first man, and in the books, I feel like most of the overt references to the Biblical Adam are through the imagery of dust and dirt representing a sort of humanness, especially in relation to class and status. Like, Adam perceives himself as dirty because he is poor and works in contrast to the sort of “untouched-ness” of his wealthy peers who don’t have this sort of real and symbolic dirt on them. Which, I find sort of interesting in general because I don’t think this interpretation is part of the Biblical narrative. This is Adam’s perception of himself. In the Genesis story, God makes the Earth, and he says the Earth is good, and then from the Earth he creates Adam. At least initially, being created from the dirt isn’t some sort of negative. In the books, Adam perceives his “humanness” and his origins as a bad thing, but that’s his own perception; it’s not something that’s really true, and his friends don’t feel this way about him.

In addition to the way that Adam’s association to the dirt demonstrates his own negative self-perception, I’ve become also sort of fixated on the way that Adam’s curse in Genesis mirror’s Adam’s story in the Raven Cycle and his relationship to Henrietta. In Genesis, when the humans eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and are cursed by God, Adam is cursed with an antagonistic relationship to the Earth. He will struggle with the ground to make it grow food for him. He is cursed to have a hostile relationship with the place that he has come from, which I feel like is so reflected in Adam’s relationship to Henrietta. The idea in the books that he comes from “Henrietta dirt” and he now has this very hostile relationship with Henrietta and he struggles so much to make this place work for him and bear fruit for him in the sense of giving him something good and worthwhile. Like Adam’s curse in Genesis, where Adam will have to “toil” for the Earth to give him what he needs, Adam Parrish has to work extremely hard. The curse is that it will be hard labor and very difficult to get what he needs from the place that he comes from (The Earth, Henrietta.) “By the sweat of your brow, you shall eat.” (I also think there is maybe a slightly less logical relationship here to Adam’s struggle with his relationship to nature in the form of Cabeswater. Like, it’s hard and a lot of work for Adam to get this forest to work. I especially think of where God says the earth will grow "thorns and thistles” for Adam. But I feel much less strongly about this connection because I don’t know that I’ve really fully fleshed it out in my head. In the verses, the thorns and thistles are a punishment in opposition to the way that they are protective of Adam in BLLB, so idk about that one.)

I’m also very fascinated by what this means for Adam Parrish in context of the last part of the curse of Adam where God curses him to return to the earth, which, in the context of the Genesis story is death, but for Adam Parrish would be a return to Henrietta. “To dust you shall return.” If Adam’s story is so aligned with the way that Adam is cursed, is Adam in some way destined to return to Henrietta? There’s almost like a duel meaning to this aspect of the curse in the Genesis story because on one hand, it is the final blow of the curse where now Adam will die and return to the Earth, which is now hostile to him, but there’s also this sense that it’s in this return that he’ll finally be reconciled to the ground, the place that he comes from. The difficulty of both Adams’ lives come from being disconnected from where they come from, but God says that Adam will eventually return to the place that he comes from and has struggled with so long, and that sort of full circle-ness has a very reconciliatory nature to it, at least to me (particularly in the reading of Genesis as an allegory for the story of the early Israelites and their eventual return to the land of Canaan later in the Pentateuch).  (I feel like there is another aspect here of the concept of exile and Adam being forced to leave the garden of Eden and how Adam Parrish has left, but is really struggling at Harvard, being away from where he comes from).  

(I should also probably caveat that this is from a Christian perspective bc that’s what I’m familiar with and that’s the religious presence in the books in regards to Ronan’s Catholicism, but I don’t know in what ways this would or wouldn’t hold for the other religions that share the Adam story)

[lesbian-helen-gansey]

books I read in June & July

This is late because I’ve been on a self-imposed social media hiatus for the past few weeks! I’m technically still not back, I just got on to post this. My weeks being semi-offline have been relatively uneventful. I have watched pretty much every Netflix documentary I’m even remotely interested in and have regressed to listening to the podcasts I used to listen to in high school. I’ve completed a few sudokus and gotten stuck and quit a ton of sudokus. I’ve mostly been using my concerta to play mahjong tiles on my laptop with a laser focus. Staying off all social media entirely has so far been the only effective way of preventing me from doom scrolling, and it seems (at least from my daily listen of NPR up first) that there remains of plethora of things to doom scroll about, so I am going to try to wait a little longer before returning. The enchanting lure of Tumblr does call me tho. To quote John Milton “God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking object, ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore did he create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue?”

The Harbor by Katrine Engberg (4/5)

This is a crime novel that takes place in Copenhagen about detectives searching for a missing child. I think that it’s actually the third book in a series about this team of police officers, but it made sense as a stand alone having not read the others. It was pretty slow, and hard to get into, but I did end up really liking it. It was hard to get into it, but once I was in it, I was really in it. I read a lot of thrillers, and I find many of them to be sort of absurd in an attempt to be clever. I concede that it’s hard to think of an ending that is both surprising and satisfying, but I still think many of the current authors don’t do a particularly good job with the task. This one, however, built to a really interesting ending. It was both well-foreshadowed and sufficiently surprising.  I think I just dislike how a lot of thrillers and crime dramas build to something that is an almost absurdly dramatic climax in an attempt to, I don’t know, shock the reader or raise the stakes, and I really appreciated that this wasn’t that. I’ll probably read the others in the series. (adult fiction)

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino (5/5)

I liked this a surprising amount. I’ve grown sort of jaded with the personal essay scene, so I was a little skeptical about how much I would like a book of essays from a New Yorker writer, but I have really liked the Jia Tolentino essays I’ve read online, so I decided to read it, and I loved it. I find it difficult to find thoughtful, and nuanced essays about feminism, but these essays were really interesting. The kind of essays that are willing to hold a lot of things in their hands and aren’t interested in driving home some argument but rather examining thoughts. “Always be Optimizing” is one of my favorite essays from the book, and it just has such interesting thoughts about the influence of capitalism on feminism. I found Tolentino to be really self-aware and begrudgingly lovable. Almost against my wishes, I left this book really loving Jia Tolentino. (Before reading this, I had found her instagram incredibly annoying bc I am a judgmental person, but now I’m entirely endeared. Too bad I’m not on instagram anymore to see her photos.) (creative nonfiction)

Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (5/5)

This book is like, gay gay. I thought people were calling this book “lesbian vampires” like it had gay subtext 21st century readers were reading into. But no. Gay for real. Gayer than gay romances published today. Gonna have portions of it as the selected readings for my wedding one day. They probably won’t let me get married in a church if I do, but worth it. If you can’t get enough of Lucy and Mina in your inbox, this is for you. (adult fiction)

Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown (4/5)

Brene Brown Stans rise. This book basically defines and categorizes a bunch of emotions to help us better understand what we’re feeling, which Brown says helps us process our experiences. This wasn’t a favorite of mine by her, mostly because it’s a little more of a reference book, but I still ended up with a bunch of hastily typed notes in my notes app of things I need to remember from it. (nonfiction)

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (5/5)

This book is so fucking good. You have to read this book. I think it’s probably best to go into it with as little info as possible. It’s hard to describe without giving away things that make it exciting. When my best friend recommended it to me, she described it as if Madeline Miller wrote a psychological thriller. She all but forced my other friend and I to read it, and subsequently all three of us have been evangelizing about it. We’ve all but started some sort of mlm of our own personal downlines spreading the word about Piraniesi. I’m currently making my therapist read it. This book made me say “holy shit” and “oh my god” out loud as I was reading. (adult fiction)

How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell (3/5)

This was a little too conceptual and philosophical for me. But the author does love birds as much as I do, which I loved. (Also I recently discovered that there are apps that basically let you Shazam bird calls. This is one of the greatest discoveries of my life. I’ll never be bored again. I’ll be outside shazaming the Sparrow songs.) The book is basically about pushing back against the capitalistic urge to always be productive and instead to really engage in the world around you, which I have, subsequently, been trying to do more of. I’ve been spending a lot more time than usual almost moved to tears by how many different shades of green trees are. One of my favorite things is when the leaves blow in the wind, and you can see the undersides have a whiter color, and the contrast between the tops and bottoms of the leaves blowing looks so dynamic. (nonfiction)

Nice Girls by Catherine Dang (3/5)

Speaking of thrillers with over the top endings. I was actually pretty into this book until the end. I think I had to stop and roll my eyes more than once during the climax. It seemed like it was building to something interesting, and then, at the big reveal, the author took like, the least interesting route, which was disappointing. I don’t know, it was fine. I don’t know why I keep reading like, the women’s thriller genre when I always feel meh about them. (adult fiction) 

Peril at End House by Agatha Christie (4/5)

Not my very favorite Christie, but I still liked it. I did find it a little difficult to keep up with who all the characters were, but that’s par for the course for me with Christie lol. I wish I had more to say about it, but I really don’t. Poirot meets a young women who has had several attempts on her life, and he interjects himself to try to save her. Maybe one day Poirot will go on vacation without getting mixed up in a murder, the poor guy. He can’t go anywhere. (adult fiction)

Feminism is For Everybody by bell hooks (5/5)

Everything about feminism that I read from bell hooks I’m just like, yes. Fucking yes. She gets it. I think (hope) everyone is finally realizing the extent to which the modern feminist movement is slightly spineless and had been eaten away at by capitalism, and this book is like, back to basics. It’s time to end lifestyle feminism. (nonfiction)

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (5/5)

I loved this one. A man is murdered in his study and a local doctor helps Poirot, who recently moved to the town, solve the mystery. Super clever, couldn’t put it down. I don’t ever expect that I’m going to solve Christie’s mysteries, but I felt truly had by this one, in the best way possible. She got me good. (adult fiction)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (5/5)

Honesty, Pride and Prejudice is a page turner. Having seen the movie a lot combined with Austen’s writing style, I knew I would like it, but I didn’t expect to like, can’t-put-it-down-love-it, but I totally did. I could not stop reading it, and the whole time I was like, girl you know Pride and Prejudice how are you on the edge of your seat about this, but it was so good. Austen knows how to write a romance. She perfected the craft in 1813. (It also got me back into the Lizzie Bennet Diaries which is somehow still super fun all these years later). (adult fiction)

Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke (3/5)

Told through the lens of her patient’s stories of addiction, a psychiatrist writes about how modern society’s easy access to dopamine is actually making us more unhappy. A lot of the book focuses on how we are able to get high dopamine rewards very easily from things like social media without any of the effort it would usually take to get a dopamine reward, and this is skewing our ability to find happiness in more mundane things. There were definitely parts of this book that I thought were super interesting and important and have encouraged me to spend more time without any sort of distraction and to not be so pain and boredom averse. That being said, the book really lost me in the last half. I feel like it kind of goes off in a different direction that feels less relevant. (nonfiction)

The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentil (4/5)

A meta-feeling mystery about a writer writing a book about a writer who is in the Boston Public Library when a woman is found dead. She and the group of people she meets while they get wrapped into trying to solve the mystery. I really liked the story within the story and the connection between the fictional author and the mystery. I don’t think it actually meets the definition of a cozy mystery, but it felt more like that than a sort of traditional mystery or thriller. I found the main character slightly annoying, but it didn’t bother me all that much. (adult fiction)

Running with Lions by Julian Winter (3/5)

This was a cute book. It’s a ya romance about two boys on a soccer team who reconnect at their team’s summer practice camp. It was a little young for me, which is why I didn’t love it. If I had read it at like, fifteen I probably would have been a lot more invested in it. It was cute though. I just, don’t really connect with a character worried about graduating high school anymore. It’s a little harder to get into. (ya fiction)

Rush by Lisa Patton (3/5)

This book is about girls and their moms going through sorority rush at the university of Mississippi, which is an incredible concept. Sorority rush is fascinating, and dramatic, and cutthroat. However, this book, especially the second half, stops being about the drama of rush and starts being “white girls discover racism and then decide to fix it.” They do fix, by the end of the book. Don’t worry, the white girls do solve racism. The parts of this book that were about rush were great, the parts that attempted to be about race were just, borderline painful. I think this is probably what would have passed for a “brave” book about race in like, 2011. Except it was written in 2018. (adult fiction)

[lesbian-helen-gansey]

books I read in June & July

This is late because I’ve been on a self-imposed social media hiatus for the past few weeks! I’m technically still not back, I just got on to post this. My weeks being semi-offline have been relatively uneventful. I have watched pretty much every Netflix documentary I’m even remotely interested in and have regressed to listening to the podcasts I used to listen to in high school. I’ve completed a few sudokus and gotten stuck and quit a ton of sudokus. I’ve mostly been using my concerta to play mahjong tiles on my laptop with a laser focus. Staying off all social media entirely has so far been the only effective way of preventing me from doom scrolling, and it seems (at least from my daily listen of NPR up first) that there remains of plethora of things to doom scroll about, so I am going to try to wait a little longer before returning. The enchanting lure of Tumblr does call me tho. To quote John Milton “God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking object, ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore did he create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue?”

The Harbor by Katrine Engberg (4/5)

This is a crime novel that takes place in Copenhagen about detectives searching for a missing child. I think that it’s actually the third book in a series about this team of police officers, but it made sense as a stand alone having not read the others. It was pretty slow, and hard to get into, but I did end up really liking it. It was hard to get into it, but once I was in it, I was really in it. I read a lot of thrillers, and I find many of them to be sort of absurd in an attempt to be clever. I concede that it’s hard to think of an ending that is both surprising and satisfying, but I still think many of the current authors don’t do a particularly good job with the task. This one, however, built to a really interesting ending. It was both well-foreshadowed and sufficiently surprising.  I think I just dislike how a lot of thrillers and crime dramas build to something that is an almost absurdly dramatic climax in an attempt to, I don’t know, shock the reader or raise the stakes, and I really appreciated that this wasn’t that. I’ll probably read the others in the series. (adult fiction)

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino (5/5)

I liked this a surprising amount. I’ve grown sort of jaded with the personal essay scene, so I was a little skeptical about how much I would like a book of essays from a New Yorker writer, but I have really liked the Jia Tolentino essays I’ve read online, so I decided to read it, and I loved it. I find it difficult to find thoughtful, and nuanced essays about feminism, but these essays were really interesting. The kind of essays that are willing to hold a lot of things in their hands and aren’t interested in driving home some argument but rather examining thoughts. “Always be Optimizing” is one of my favorite essays from the book, and it just has such interesting thoughts about the influence of capitalism on feminism. I found Tolentino to be really self-aware and begrudgingly lovable. Almost against my wishes, I left this book really loving Jia Tolentino. (Before reading this, I had found her instagram incredibly annoying bc I am a judgmental person, but now I’m entirely endeared. Too bad I’m not on instagram anymore to see her photos.) (creative nonfiction)

Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (5/5)

This book is like, gay gay. I thought people were calling this book “lesbian vampires” like it had gay subtext 21st century readers were reading into. But no. Gay for real. Gayer than gay romances published today. Gonna have portions of it as the selected readings for my wedding one day. They probably won’t let me get married in a church if I do, but worth it. If you can’t get enough of Lucy and Mina in your inbox, this is for you. (adult fiction)

Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown (4/5)

Brene Brown Stans rise. This book basically defines and categorizes a bunch of emotions to help us better understand what we’re feeling, which Brown says helps us process our experiences. This wasn’t a favorite of mine by her, mostly because it’s a little more of a reference book, but I still ended up with a bunch of hastily typed notes in my notes app of things I need to remember from it. (nonfiction)

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (5/5)

This book is so fucking good. You have to read this book. I think it’s probably best to go into it with as little info as possible. It’s hard to describe without giving away things that make it exciting. When my best friend recommended it to me, she described it as if Madeline Miller wrote a psychological thriller. She all but forced my other friend and I to read it, and subsequently all three of us have been evangelizing about it. We’ve all but started some sort of mlm of our own personal downlines spreading the word about Piraniesi. I’m currently making my therapist read it. This book made me say “holy shit” and “oh my god” out loud as I was reading. (adult fiction)

How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell (3/5)

This was a little too conceptual and philosophical for me. But the author does love birds as much as I do, which I loved. (Also I recently discovered that there are apps that basically let you Shazam bird calls. This is one of the greatest discoveries of my life. I’ll never be bored again. I’ll be outside shazaming the Sparrow songs.) The book is basically about pushing back against the capitalistic urge to always be productive and instead to really engage in the world around you, which I have, subsequently, been trying to do more of. I’ve been spending a lot more time than usual almost moved to tears by how many different shades of green trees are. One of my favorite things is when the leaves blow in the wind, and you can see the undersides have a whiter color, and the contrast between the tops and bottoms of the leaves blowing looks so dynamic. (nonfiction)

Nice Girls by Catherine Dang (3/5)

Speaking of thrillers with over the top endings. I was actually pretty into this book until the end. I think I had to stop and roll my eyes more than once during the climax. It seemed like it was building to something interesting, and then, at the big reveal, the author took like, the least interesting route, which was disappointing. I don’t know, it was fine. I don’t know why I keep reading like, the women’s thriller genre when I always feel meh about them. (adult fiction) 

Peril at End House by Agatha Christie (4/5)

Not my very favorite Christie, but I still liked it. I did find it a little difficult to keep up with who all the characters were, but that’s par for the course for me with Christie lol. I wish I had more to say about it, but I really don’t. Poirot meets a young women who has had several attempts on her life, and he interjects himself to try to save her. Maybe one day Poirot will go on vacation without getting mixed up in a murder, the poor guy. He can’t go anywhere. (adult fiction)

Feminism is For Everybody by bell hooks (5/5)

Everything about feminism that I read from bell hooks I’m just like, yes. Fucking yes. She gets it. I think (hope) everyone is finally realizing the extent to which the modern feminist movement is slightly spineless and had been eaten away at by capitalism, and this book is like, back to basics. It’s time to end lifestyle feminism. (nonfiction)

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (5/5)

I loved this one. A man is murdered in his study and a local doctor helps Poirot, who recently moved to the town, solve the mystery. Super clever, couldn’t put it down. I don’t ever expect that I’m going to solve Christie’s mysteries, but I felt truly had by this one, in the best way possible. She got me good. (adult fiction)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (5/5)

Honesty, Pride and Prejudice is a page turner. Having seen the movie a lot combined with Austen’s writing style, I knew I would like it, but I didn’t expect to like, can’t-put-it-down-love-it, but I totally did. I could not stop reading it, and the whole time I was like, girl you know Pride and Prejudice how are you on the edge of your seat about this, but it was so good. Austen knows how to write a romance. She perfected the craft in 1813. (It also got me back into the Lizzie Bennet Diaries which is somehow still super fun all these years later). (adult fiction)

Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke (3/5)

Told through the lens of her patient’s stories of addiction, a psychiatrist writes about how modern society’s easy access to dopamine is actually making us more unhappy. A lot of the book focuses on how we are able to get high dopamine rewards very easily from things like social media without any of the effort it would usually take to get a dopamine reward, and this is skewing our ability to find happiness in more mundane things. There were definitely parts of this book that I thought were super interesting and important and have encouraged me to spend more time without any sort of distraction and to not be so pain and boredom averse. That being said, the book really lost me in the last half. I feel like it kind of goes off in a different direction that feels less relevant. (nonfiction)

The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentil (4/5)

A meta-feeling mystery about a writer writing a book about a writer who is in the Boston Public Library when a woman is found dead. She and the group of people she meets while they get wrapped into trying to solve the mystery. I really liked the story within the story and the connection between the fictional author and the mystery. I don’t think it actually meets the definition of a cozy mystery, but it felt more like that than a sort of traditional mystery or thriller. I found the main character slightly annoying, but it didn’t bother me all that much. (adult fiction)

Running with Lions by Julian Winter (3/5)

This was a cute book. It’s a ya romance about two boys on a soccer team who reconnect at their team’s summer practice camp. It was a little young for me, which is why I didn’t love it. If I had read it at like, fifteen I probably would have been a lot more invested in it. It was cute though. I just, don’t really connect with a character worried about graduating high school anymore. It’s a little harder to get into. (ya fiction)

Rush by Lisa Patton (3/5)

This book is about girls and their moms going through sorority rush at the university of Mississippi, which is an incredible concept. Sorority rush is fascinating, and dramatic, and cutthroat. However, this book, especially the second half, stops being about the drama of rush and starts being “white girls discover racism and then decide to fix it.” They do fix, by the end of the book. Don’t worry, the white girls do solve racism. The parts of this book that were about rush were great, the parts that attempted to be about race were just, borderline painful. I think this is probably what would have passed for a “brave” book about race in like, 2011. Except it was written in 2018. (adult fiction)

[lesbian-helen-gansey]

books I read in June & July

This is late because I’ve been on a self-imposed social media hiatus for the past few weeks! I’m technically still not back, I just got on to post this. My weeks being semi-offline have been relatively uneventful. I have watched pretty much every Netflix documentary I’m even remotely interested in and have regressed to listening to the podcasts I used to listen to in high school. I’ve completed a few sudokus and gotten stuck and quit a ton of sudokus. I’ve mostly been using my concerta to play mahjong tiles on my laptop with a laser focus. Staying off all social media entirely has so far been the only effective way of preventing me from doom scrolling, and it seems (at least from my daily listen of NPR up first) that there remains of plethora of things to doom scroll about, so I am going to try to wait a little longer before returning. The enchanting lure of Tumblr does call me tho. To quote John Milton "God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking object, ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore did he create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue?”

The Harbor by Katrine Engberg (4/5)

This is a crime novel that takes place in Copenhagen about detectives searching for a missing child. I think that it’s actually the third book in a series about this team of police officers, but it made sense as a stand alone having not read the others. It was pretty slow, and hard to get into, but I did end up really liking it. It was hard to get into it, but once I was in it, I was really in it. I read a lot of thrillers, and I find many of them to be sort of absurd in an attempt to be clever. I concede that it’s hard to think of an ending that is both surprising and satisfying, but I still think many of the current authors don’t do a particularly good job with the task. This one, however, built to a really interesting ending. It was both well-foreshadowed and sufficiently surprising.  I think I just dislike how a lot of thrillers and crime dramas build to something that is an almost absurdly dramatic climax in an attempt to, I don’t know, shock the reader or raise the stakes, and I really appreciated that this wasn’t that. I’ll probably read the others in the series. (adult fiction)

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino (5/5)

I liked this a surprising amount. I’ve grown sort of jaded with the personal essay scene, so I was a little skeptical about how much I would like a book of essays from a New Yorker writer, but I have really liked the Jia Tolentino essays I’ve read online, so I decided to read it, and I loved it. I find it difficult to find thoughtful, and nuanced essays about feminism, but these essays were really interesting. The kind of essays that are willing to hold a lot of things in their hands and aren’t interested in driving home some argument but rather examining thoughts. “Always be Optimizing” is one of my favorite essays from the book, and it just has such interesting thoughts about the influence of capitalism on feminism. I found Tolentino to be really self-aware and begrudgingly lovable. Almost against my wishes, I left this book really loving Jia Tolentino. (Before reading this, I had found her instagram incredibly annoying bc I am a judgmental person, but now I’m entirely endeared. Too bad I’m not on instagram anymore to see her photos.) (creative nonfiction)

Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (5/5)

This book is like, gay gay. I thought people were calling this book “lesbian vampires” like it had gay subtext 21st century readers were reading into. But no. Gay for real. Gayer than gay romances published today. Gonna have portions of it as the selected readings for my wedding one day. They probably won’t let me get married in a church if I do, but worth it. If you can’t get enough of Lucy and Mina in your inbox, this is for you. (adult fiction)

Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown (4/5)

Brene Brown Stans rise. This book basically defines and categorizes a bunch of emotions to help us better understand what we’re feeling, which Brown says helps us process our experiences. This wasn’t a favorite of mine by her, mostly because it’s a little more of a reference book, but I still ended up with a bunch of hastily typed notes in my notes app of things I need to remember from it. (nonfiction)

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (5/5)

This book is so fucking good. You have to read this book. I think it’s probably best to go into it with as little info as possible. It’s hard to describe without giving away things that make it exciting. When my best friend recommended it to me, she described it as if Madeline Miller wrote a psychological thriller. She all but forced my other friend and I to read it, and subsequently all three of us have been evangelizing about it. We’ve all but started some sort of mlm of our own personal downlines spreading the word about Piraniesi. I’m currently making my therapist read it. This book made me say “holy shit” and “oh my god” out loud as I was reading. (adult fiction)

How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell (3/5)

This was a little too conceptual and philosophical for me. But the author does love birds as much as I do, which I loved. (Also I recently discovered that there are apps that basically let you Shazam bird calls. This is one of the greatest discoveries of my life. I’ll never be bored again. I’ll be outside shazaming the Sparrow songs.) The book is basically about pushing back against the capitalistic urge to always be productive and instead to really engage in the world around you, which I have, subsequently, been trying to do more of. I’ve been spending a lot more time than usual almost moved to tears by how many different shades of green trees are. One of my favorite things is when the leaves blow in the wind, and you can see the undersides have a whiter color, and the contrast between the tops and bottoms of the leaves blowing looks so dynamic. (nonfiction)

Nice Girls by Catherine Dang (3/5)

Speaking of thrillers with over the top endings. I was actually pretty into this book until the end. I think I had to stop and roll my eyes more than once during the climax. It seemed like it was building to something interesting, and then, at the big reveal, the author took like, the least interesting route, which was disappointing. I don’t know, it was fine. I don’t know why I keep reading like, the women’s thriller genre when I always feel meh about them. (adult fiction) 

Peril at End House by Agatha Christie (4/5)

Not my very favorite Christie, but I still liked it. I did find it a little difficult to keep up with who all the characters were, but that’s par for the course for me with Christie lol. I wish I had more to say about it, but I really don’t. Poirot meets a young women who has had several attempts on her life, and he interjects himself to try to save her. Maybe one day Poirot will go on vacation without getting mixed up in a murder, the poor guy. He can’t go anywhere. (adult fiction)

Feminism is For Everybody by bell hooks (5/5)

Everything about feminism that I read from bell hooks I’m just like, yes. Fucking yes. She gets it. I think (hope) everyone is finally realizing the extent to which the modern feminist movement is slightly spineless and had been eaten away at by capitalism, and this book is like, back to basics. It’s time to end lifestyle feminism. (nonfiction)

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (5/5)

I loved this one. A man is murdered in his study and a local doctor helps Poirot, who recently moved to the town, solve the mystery. Super clever, couldn’t put it down. I don’t ever expect that I’m going to solve Christie’s mysteries, but I felt truly had by this one, in the best way possible. She got me good. (adult fiction)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (5/5)

Honesty, Pride and Prejudice is a page turner. Having seen the movie a lot combined with Austen’s writing style, I knew I would like it, but I didn’t expect to like, can’t-put-it-down-love-it, but I totally did. I could not stop reading it, and the whole time I was like, girl you know Pride and Prejudice how are you on the edge of your seat about this, but it was so good. Austen knows how to write a romance. She perfected the craft in 1813. (It also got me back into the Lizzie Bennet Diaries which is somehow still super fun all these years later). (adult fiction)

Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke (3/5)

Told through the lens of her patient’s stories of addiction, a psychiatrist writes about how modern society’s easy access to dopamine is actually making us more unhappy. A lot of the book focuses on how we are able to get high dopamine rewards very easily from things like social media without any of the effort it would usually take to get a dopamine reward, and this is skewing our ability to find happiness in more mundane things. There were definitely parts of this book that I thought were super interesting and important and have encouraged me to spend more time without any sort of distraction and to not be so pain and boredom averse. That being said, the book really lost me in the last half. I feel like it kind of goes off in a different direction that feels less relevant. (nonfiction)

The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentil (4/5)

A meta-feeling mystery about a writer writing a book about a writer who is in the Boston Public Library when a woman is found dead. She and the group of people she meets while they get wrapped into trying to solve the mystery. I really liked the story within the story and the connection between the fictional author and the mystery. I don’t think it actually meets the definition of a cozy mystery, but it felt more like that than a sort of traditional mystery or thriller. I found the main character slightly annoying, but it didn’t bother me all that much. (adult fiction)

Running with Lions by Julian Winter (3/5)

This was a cute book. It’s a ya romance about two boys on a soccer team who reconnect at their team’s summer practice camp. It was a little young for me, which is why I didn’t love it. If I had read it at like, fifteen I probably would have been a lot more invested in it. It was cute though. I just, don’t really connect with a character worried about graduating high school anymore. It’s a little harder to get into. (ya fiction)

Rush by Lisa Patton (3/5)

This book is about girls and their moms going through sorority rush at the university of Mississippi, which is an incredible concept. Sorority rush is fascinating, and dramatic, and cutthroat. However, this book, especially the second half, stops being about the drama of rush and starts being “white girls discover racism and then decide to fix it.” They do fix, by the end of the book. Don’t worry, the white girls do solve racism. The parts of this book that were about rush were great, the parts that attempted to be about race were just, borderline painful. I think this is probably what would have passed for a “brave” book about race in like, 2011. Except it was written in 2018. (adult fiction)

[lesbian-helen-gansey]

Girls with anxiety doing deep breathing exercises at the family garage sale