Year in Review: Music

one 5 hour long playlist + some snaps of last weeks art crawl

Dec 12, 2022

Welcome back to Arroz con Mango! Before I get into this week’s post, I want to address what my bf so graciously pointed out only hours after I published my last review; I misspelled Magda’s name SO many times. It seems I added “Madga” to my computer’s dictionary, and the rest was history. Oops!

This week I finished Death in her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh. I really hated My Year of Rest and Relaxation, both for the plot and the writing style, but most of the internet seems to disagree with me, so I thought I’d give her another chance, as DIHH was available at my local library. I must say, I thought the story had me drawn in by 3/4 of the book and I was pretty happy with the ending (which absolutely drove me nuts in MYRR). I ultimately decided not to review it, because I didn’t have much else to add.

That being said, I still don’t think she deserves the hype she gets. None of her imagery is particularly descriptive, her stories are often predictable, and she’s weirdly obsessed with writing characters who are disgusted by fat people (apparently this comes up in Lapvona too) to no service of their or the plot’s development. The other ebook I was working on, The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, was return because I guess I was reading too slowly and there was a checkout queue behind me. Sadly no book review this week, but I’ll make it up to you with some music and art recs!

It’s been over a week since Spotify wrapped came out, and although I am a huge fan of this feature, it does a disservice to all the cool music we discovered throughout the year, but didn’t leave on loop. I decided to make a compilation with highlights from my monthly playlists; songs I kept going back to, but apparently not enough to bump out the entire Is This It? album from my top songs.