Happy February everyone! January was a whirlwind of a month filled with family, friendship, and love, and of course- many great books! It’s been a while since my last post, but I wanted to say thank you to everyone who read it and sent me such thoughtful comments! My cute fever has not since subsided; say hello to my newest friend!
To catch up, I thought I would mash up the reviews and links + recs in one long post.
✎𓂃✎𓂃✎𓂃✎𓂃✎𓂃✎𓂃✎𓂃✎𓂃✎𓂃✎𓂃✎𓂃✎𓂃✎𓂃✎𓂃
Starting off with books
**some spoilers ahead**
Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra
Technically I read this last year, but I felt bad I didn’t write about it given how much I loved it. In short, this book is about family, post-Pinochet Chile, poetry as a national affair, dealing with feelings of inadequacy, and so much more.
The story begins in Chile with a high school couple, Gonzalo and Carla, who breaks up only to be reunited years later at a bar. Carla now has a 6-year old son named Vicente, and Gonzalo is working towards being a published poet. They move in together and Gonzalo forms part of the family. Despite this, Gonzalo is plagued by the etymology and ugly connotations of the word padrasto (stepfather). While he loves Vicente as his own, he never feels like his true father, so when a sudden opportunity arrises to study in the United States, Carla and Gonzalo split for a second time and Gonzalo loses contact with Vicente.
The narrative then picks up years in the future from Vicente’s perspective, who is about to graduate high school and refuses to apply to colleges. Vicente, like his now ex-step-father, also wants to be a poet and has faith that the new government is going to make college education free. In the meantime, we are also introduced to Pru, an American writer who winds up in Chile on search for an assignment and escape from her failed relationship and stagnant career in NYC. After meeting Vicente on a night out, she decides to write a piece on Santiago’s poetry scene. From here we meet a cast of characters, all with differing opinions on what it means to be a Chilean poet. The writing is spectacular, the references are clever and funny, and the story is both heartwarming, heart wrenching, but hopeful throughout it all.
Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It by Kaitlyn Tiffany
This book is mostly about One Direction fans. From fan-fiction, to shipping, to shit posting, to squabbles between factions of fans, this book covers the infinite ways that fans -predominantly, but not necessarily, girls and young women- invest time, money, and energy into building a community around their shared love of someone or something. As a former 1D fan who spent hour watching their X-factor videos on Youtube and reblogging gifs of the boys bantering on stage, I was excited to read this book.
Tiffany strives to give the fangirls credibility. Often regarded as immature, hysterical, and childish, she poses that fangirls are actually self-aware, creative trend-setters who have shaped the way we interact with social media and the music industry. This sort of argument has proliferated since the mid-2010s, as music critics began to take pop music more seriously and academic analyses of music, trends, and other popular forms of media have blown up over Twitter, Tik Tok, and podcasts. Overall, I enjoyed the depth into which Tiffany dives into the One Direction-verse; the section on Larry Stylinson (Harry + Larry’s controversial ship name) was humorous to me, but might drag on for someone not familiar with the lore. I also would have liked to learn more about how fan girls used the internet pre-social media. Last thing I’ll say, if you want 1D fan content, but don’t need a whole book, check out the episode of Normal Gossip below about the story of two pairs of friends who decide to travel together to see one of their concerts. You won’t be disappointed.
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas
I’ll admit I partially picked this up because of the saucy cover. This book is narrated by an unnamed female English professor at a small liberal arts college. Her husband, whom she has an open relationship with, has been accused of having several affairs with students. Our narrator is aware, and further-more encouraged this behavior, which opened up the possibility for her own affairs. What she didn’t see coming, was that in our current cultural climate, the professor-student relationship is no longer sexy or illicitly romantic, but instead condemned as an abuse of power that comes with both the profession and the age gap. Our narrator feels that woman are stripping themselves of the sexual agency they fought for years to achieve, but her students disagree.
While her husband is on probation and awaiting trial, a new professor has been hired: Vladimir. Unlike our main character, Vladimir has recently published a book with decent critical acclaim, and is poised to keep advancing in his career. The narrator is smitten and grows increasingly obsessed with Vladimir, culminating in a weird dinner-quasi-kidnapping that ends tragically. While this book covers important topics such as how consent works in instances of uneven power dynamics, I don’t think it offers any interesting perspective. The closest it comes is when our (white) narrator attempts to clear the air about her husband’s situation and her complicity, to a student of color. The student grows uncomfortable then flat out tells her she doesn’t care- she has more important things to worry about. Plus, she adds, something like that would have never happened to her. It’s the only moment in Vladimir that made me pause to think, “what did she mean by that?”
Stay True by Hua Hsu
This is my first memoir of the year, and boy was it a good one to start with. I read the end on the plane, and I was fully crying for the last 1/4 of the book. Stay True is the story of Hua’s experience at Berkeley College, growing up second-generation Taiwanese in Cupertino, and trying to find his place and take on the world. Had he been born maybe 10 years later, he might have been described as a quintessential hipster. He hated the popular music of the time, dressed exclusively in thrifted clothes, made radical anti-capitalist zines, and took any philosophy class he could. At the age where you believe you are the things you consume, he obsessed with only surrounding himself with the coolest. Despite this, he befriends a third-generation Japanese student named Ken.
Ken is everything Hua on paper thinks is lame. He’s into Pearl Jam and Dave Mathews, he wears Abercrombie, and he wants to rush a frat. But, he’s also poised, charismatic, self-confident, and good with the ladies- traits Hua believed were typically reserved for white kids. Through late night cigarettes and a shared love for movies and analyzing books, they become close friends. Suddenly, the summer before their senior year, Ken is killed outside his apartment in a late night car-jacking and their whole friend group’s lives are turned upside down. Hua is filled with grief, but also guilt, believing had he stayed around longer at Ken’s he might have prevented his death from happening. Stay True is a moving memoir for its honest explorations of friendship, family, and love. Some of my favorite moments were the faxed conversations between Hua and his father in high school, when Hua’s father was working in Taiwan. I think I also related to the contrarian attitude Hua had in his youth, because it reminded me of myself when I’d scour through Pitchfork to find bands to like that none of my classmates had heard of. He captures the optimism of youth well, painting a vivid picture of Berkeley’s activist spirit in the mid-90s.
♫꒰・‿・๑꒱ *^ω^♪. (  ̄.)o-【 TV 】
Links + Recs
This song is fuzzy, loud, and fun. It’s the follow up to their debut EP “Hunger for a Way Out.”
Just learned Automatic’s drummer, Lola Dompé, is Kevin Haskins’ (Bauhaus’s drummer) daughter.
Guga Foods “I Dry-Aged an IGUANA, ate it and this happened!”
My boyfriend showed me this Youtuber who goes by Guga Foods and dry ages a bunch of meat in weird liquids like maple syrup and ketchup. As his catchphrase goes, “the result will surprise you!” Despite the gimmick, he’s very funny and it’s cool to see how the meat ends up (for example, Maple syrup preserved the meat and made it tender). The episode linked above is hilarious because he has his family blind taste sous vide, dry aged birria Iguana tacos.
Danababy (who used to go by DanaTooTurnt) is one of those internet gals who grew up on vine and now makes the occasional vlog. I love how her videos are for the most part un-narrated, wildly stitched together clips of her and her friends being hella goofy. This one had me cackling as she and her friends put together Grimes, Taylor Swift, Cookie from Ned’s Declassified, Ma from the 2019 movie, and Minnie Mouse in a Sims house party. The result is hilarious and might make you want to download Sims.
If you made it this far, you’re a real one! Leave a comment below if you’ve read any of these books or have anything you want me to talk about next time. TTYL (´꒳`✿ )