Sharing a Library and Other Thoughts on Marriage

This week marks my tenth year of marriage to my favorite book person in the whole wide world.

Like most couples, one thing we bond over is talking about the books and movies we enjoy. We have, over time, combined both our physical and digital libraries and often read each other’s books. There are a few surefire crossover genres and authors we share: speculative horror, meticulously weird nonfiction, haunted houses, Shirley Jackson, John Darnielle, Joe Hill, Grady Hendrix, Stephen Graham Jones, and Peter Clines.

Of course, in life and in literature, we’ve sometimes found the boundaries of our tastes do not neatly overlap, but swell and curve wildly at angles, making the country of our library a strange shape indeed. There are books I find beautiful because their endings are unanswered questions, which he finds simply unresolved. There are books he feels show the poetry of our world, which I feel are just adverb-heavy. On vacation, he loves a huge book full of sorcery and galaxies, while I prefer a mid-length book full of missing murder weapons.

There have been some good surprises, too, times we’ve changed each other’s minds. Joe convinced me to invest the time in Dune, a book that felt so overwhelmingly long and of such grand “iykyk” mythos that I was intimidated to do so, but I loved it. I swayed him to check out Hidden Pictures basically sight unseen, with just a “You have to trust me, read this book!” I introduced him to Alma Katsu, and he introduced me to Keigo Higashino. We both read the Oklahoma City micro-history Boom Town and reference it constantly.

Sharing a library well is a lot like sharing a life. There are things you like more than your partner, and vice versa. There are things you both love, or are at least you are both willing to learn how to understand why the love is there. The best part, though? Having conversations with someone who respects your opinion. Joe doesn’t love all of my grisly true crime novels, but he loves listening to me describe key moments on car rides. I don’t love all of the epic trilogies he undertakes, but I love seeing how his eyes light up when he talks about how well-written his favorite passages are. Even the books we don’t read together, we end up sharing.

When you’re newly in love, or even a few years into it, it feels like you have to have so much in common to build something together. Extra true when you’re young, and you’re also learning how to be adults together. But you just have to trust that your joys will fill in the gaps. The joy you feel together, and the joy you feel as individuals. You have to trust that the joy will carry you through the stress of life.

You can build a bookshelf that holds lots of different kinds of stories. They all belong there together. It’s what makes it worth browsing.

Millions of Words: 10 Years, 200 Stories

I just noticed, as I added our road trip books to my Books page (The Troop and Devil House) that at approximately 10:45 PM tonight I completed my 200th book of this blog. I also realized that I first started this blog in 2012: a decade of recommitting to reading! How awesome is that?

Road trip in question: weekend trip to Chicago to see Nick Lutsko perform. We also saw bones 🦕🦖💀, trains 🚊🗺🌃, some Midwestern friends ❤️🍻🏠, and of course lots and lots of food 🍕🍳🥗.

I am really hopeful that this summer will provide lots of reading opportunities, too! I have considered getting a hammock for this exact purpose but also 100% acknowledge I will most likely end up playing Animal Crossing and falling asleep in it. 😉

How to Haunt a House: A Round-Up of Books That Go Bump in the Night

“Most times, a ghost is a wish.” – The Haunting of Hill House

It’s no secret that I love a good scary story. Even the barest skim of The Books reveals a long list of ghosts, monsters, vampires, and other creepy thrills. But nothing — nothing — gets my attention more than a haunted house story. It’s the perfect metaphor for pain, grief, fear, and identity. Haunted house stories are, by their very nature, deeply personal journeys, and the very best ones tend to make you more frightened of the protagonist’s motives than the ghost hiding under the bed. In 2020, I read several stories that center around hauntings.

In the Shadow of Spindrift House by Mira Grant

Mira Grant’s exploration of the haunted house theme centers squarely on Harlowe, a former teen detective (think Scooby-Doo, a tongue-in-cheek inspiration for several contemporary horror novels over the last few years) with a mysterious family history. It’s a short but effective story about loss and family, with a deeply upsetting basement.

If you like this book, I also recommend Mira Grant’s Into the Drowning Deep.

The Grip of It by Jac Jemc

This story had a lot of great atmosphere, but not a lot of substance. We meet Julie and James as they are in the process of buying a new house, and there is palpable tension in their marriage. A gambling problem, different career aspirations…they love each other, but they’ve been through a very difficult year where their trust in one another has been challenged. This book shows its cards pretty early. Will the house be haunted, or is their relationship too flawed to start over in this new home?

The energy of the prose is suspenseful, but ultimately frustrating as vivid descriptions of rotting wallpaper, mysterious childlike voices, and rainy, grey waterways lead to dead narrative ends. There’s obviously something wrong with the house, but it infects its owners, too, creating an inescapable enigma of the nature of the haunting. We are given tantalizing glimpses into the previous owners, rumors swirling through the town, and a shared torment that drives everything forward. But the resolution is too subtle, the pacing is a little too brisk, and the fear featured most prominently is less about the ghosts in the walls than the idea of putting down a down payment on a house that has mold issues.

If you like this book, I also recommend The Apartment by S.L. Grey.

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

The second chapter of this excellent novel, Dreams of the Which House, is a take on Lovecraft’s short story, “Dreams of the Witch House,” with one of our main characters, Letitia, pioneering into a white neighborhood after an unexpected inheritance leaves her with enough money to buy a house. She moves into the Winthrop House, a somewhat dilapidated but once glamorous building owned by a notoriously nasty man named Hiram Winthrop.

[This next paragraph contains spoilers.]

Winthrop’s ghost is a virulent racist, but Letitia is determined to fix up the building and rent out the rooms to other Black Chicagoans who want to fight the redlining and discriminatory housing practices of 1950s America. She rebuffs the ghost again and again, even when he tries to kill her. She threatens to haunt him for all entirety if he does anything to her, so they come to an uneasy alliance. They are by no means friends, but they both want the house in good condition and even begin a game of chess together. When a group of violent young men threaten Letitia and later break into the house to burn it down, they mysteriously disappear into the basement as Letitia sleeps, none the wiser.

Letitia is a joy to read, a fun and confident woman who stands up for herself and does what’s right even when everything seems to stand against her. Her joy and ambition are her own, and I love that she has her own story, one in which she exists in her own space and is not just propping up our central protagonist, Atticus. This is a fantastic book, probably one of my top five books of the year.

If you like this book, I also recommend the television show, adapted by HBO. This story is depicted in the episode “Holy Ghost.” The show’s depiction of Hiram Winthrop is much less generous than the book’s and highlights Letitia’s bravery in the face of visceral racism and abuse.

The Good House by Tananarive Due

This book is a TREASURE. A DELIGHT. One of the best haunted house stories I have ever read in my life. It’s a story about curses, magic, youth, and intergenerational trauma. Its writing is rich and expressive, with a slow burn of dread as an old family curse spreads outward into the community of Sacajewa, Washington.

Angela Touissant has inherited her grandmother’s house, The Good House, on a plot of land that is considered a peaceful gem of the town. There, she experiences an unspeakable loss. It sets in motion a series of events that’s both unexpected and predestined, a bit of bad magic that broke the world a generation ago. As the points of view shift from person to person, we see a complicated interplay between Angela, her ex-husband, her grandmother, her son, and various townsfolk. It is excellent storytelling, leading the reader into powerful revelations about the deaths occuring in Sacajewa and the power in attempting to right hidden wrongs.

If you like this book, check out all the amazing things she is doing at https://www.tananarivedue.com/.

The Hunger & The Deep by Alma Katsu

Author Alma Katsu has written two books depicting historical events as slightly reimagined supernatural horror. I am going to classify them as haunted house stories even though one took place on a wagon trail and one took place on a luxury ship because people were living on them as homes while unruly spirits affected their journeys. It bends the parameters a little but I still think they’re worth noting here!

The Hunger is a story centering around the Donner Party’s cross-country wagon journey, a blend of accurate historical record utilizing real locations, names, and weather, with the spectre of ravenous spirits. It’s very effective and atmospheric, and reminded me a lot of The Terror in the way that the events of the book were terrifying before anything out of the ordinary even showed up. The isolation, fear, uncertainty, and sense of being lost were conveyed powerfully through several different characters’ accounts, with only the slowest introduction of otherworldly elements into the situation.

In The Deep, the lines between reality and fiction are much clearer, as the story leans heavily on the Irish folklore and superstitions that affect Annie, one of the employees on the Titanic. It is through her connections to its voyage that we experience the event, though we do occasionally see chapters written from other points of view. The mystery of Annie dominates the narrative, whether we are following her down a hallway or watching one of her charges play a card game many floors above. This was a less satisfying read for me than The Hunger, as I felt like it tried to do too many things at once. A lot of the book was a flashback, and sometimes the muddiness between the past and present felt intentional while other times it felt genuinely confusing.

Our unreliable narrator was also a bit too unreliable. Was she in love with one of the passengers? Had they met in another life? Or wait, was she actually thinking of someone else altogether? What are memories, even? Intriguing ideas but they became repetitive as our poor protagonist became bogged down by existential ennui while refusing to ever actually clear any of her questions up by having a conversation with…anyone. By focusing so much attention on what Annie didn’t know or didn’t believe, we lost the richness of having an ensemble of characters. This book strived to be a doomed love story, a ghost story, a mystery, a mistaken identity story, a story about very niche Irish lore, and a version of the tragedy of the Titanic, all at the same time.

I look forward to Alma Katsu’s next historical horror because I think she’s very gifted at capturing these time periods, but I did feel one was quite superior to the other.

If you liked either of these books, I also recommend The Terror by Dan Simmons.

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

Grady Hendrix is one of my favorite writers. I knew back in 2015, when I read Horrorstor on a cross-country road trip, that I wanted to read everything this author had to say about horror, friendship, nostalgia, and consumerism. Recommended by many and described by a friend as “Fright Night, but about the parents,” never have I ever pre-ordered a book so quickly.

*This review contains what might be considered spoilers, though no major plot points are discussed/revealed. Read with caution if you haven’t picked up this novel yet!

The prologue warns us, this book ends in blood. It is unambiguous: yes, there is a vampire in this book. Yes, there is danger for our characters. And yes, one way or another, this book’s climax? Gory and gross, and don’t you forget it. Sure, there are carpools and laundry detergent and many proper Southern manners, but this story can only lead to one conclusion: blood.

As bold a proclamation as that is, it is hilariously forgotten within the first few chapters. We meet Patricia, the wife and mother of two young children, who is trying to join the well-respected community book club but didn’t get around to reading the book. She was busy taking care of her family, the typical brood of late 1980s suburban South Carolina. Her overwhelmed confession gets the attention of a small group of women who find the important books boring anyway: Grace, Slick, Kitty, and Maryellen. They decide to form their own group, which they refuse to call a “book club” because it seems too stodgy.

Their literature of choice? Unsolved mysteries, true crimes, and serial killer memoirs.

Grace is the impeccable image of an Old Dominion housewife: prim, proper, slightly cold, fiercely proud. Slick is a Bible-beating shrinking violet, a sheltered but kind woman who doesn’t tell her family about the book “club.” Kitty is a loud and proud PTA parent, and the initiator of their split from the literary society. Maryellen is from New England, the tough wife of a cop with a low tolerance for bullshit. Though their personalities differ, their shared experience as housewives in a tight-knit neighborhood — and their penchant for researching the Zodiac murders, among others — bind them together.

When Patricia starts noticing odd things in their quiet neighborhood of Mt. Pleasant, she doesn’t know what to think. A new man has moved into a deceased relative’s house, and he just seems so strange.  After a few more encounters, though, she is relieved to discover how personable and friendly this stranger is. She still gets a bad feeling from time to time. And his stories about his past don’t entirely add up…

But she doesn’t want to be a bad neighbor. She doesn’t want to make waves. Above all, she doesn’t want her husband or children thinking she’s being weird. All this despite the increasingly hard-to-ignore reality that there are weird things happening, and she has a feeling if she doesn’t do something, there’s going to be hell to pay.

A very interesting, and devastating, aspect of this novel is the character of Ms. Green. An early stressor introduced in Patricia’s story is Patricia’ mother-in-law, who moves in with her family due to failing physical health and dementia. Mrs. Green is hired as her caregiver, and she is a delightful foil to the old woman’s grumpy disposition. A Black woman living in a redlined area just outside of Mt. Pleasant, she brings perspective and reality to Patricia’s handwringing: the danger she fears is already happening on her side of town, and it’s being ignored because it’s not happening to the children of rich, white families. What kind of mother, Mrs. Green asks, would not help another mother in need?

There are so many things to like about this book. The atmosphere of dread is constant, but our lone stranger is just so damn charming on the page that…even we as readers sometimes question if we’re really seeing the ghoul Patricia fears. And then we realize, that’s what our characters are being made to feel at every moment, for year after year. Gaslit, ignored, and called flat-out hysterical, the band of true crime friends are fighting monsters as well as sexism and the status quo.

My favorite line of the book occurs when one of our book clubbers is being admonished for spending her days polishing china. When told all she aspires to be is someone’s perfect wife, she cries out, “You say it like it’s nothing!” My heart ached for her deeply, even though I agreed with the charge against her in the context of the a narrative (saving children > fine china). Maybe it’s because my own mother prided herself so deeply on how she kept our home. Maybe it’s because for the vast majority of our history, women have been expected to submit to men’s whims and have suffered severe consequences for standing against those desires. Or maybe it’s because she stands so strong throughout most of the book but sounds so very fragile in that moment. It’s an excellent, empathetic bit of writing.

5 out of 5 glasses of red wine while reading In Cold Blood on a floral couch.

Women and Power: Electricity, Fire, and Blood

I have been meaning to type this review for a long time! But it was hard to put all of my thoughts together cohesively. I read these three books, by women and about aspects of being a woman, back to back to back and it left a very strong impression.

I will say at the outset that I feel like The Power and Red Clocks would have benefitted from an exploration of transwomanhood, as there were biological and legal concepts that would have been enriched by it, and of course I would always like to see a more culturally inclusive cast of characters. When we talk about feminism, in the year 2020, there is absolutely no reason we can’t have that discussion be bolstered and made more relevant by committing to intersectional feminism. Its absence in literature about gender, parenthood, and societal upheaval is loud.

Electricity

The Power, by Naomi Alderman, is a science fiction/superhero approach to gender inequality on a global scale, through a handful of POVs that we follow over the course of several years. What would happen to society if men were no longer considered as threatening because of a literal surge of power in women? Women gain the ability to channel electricity and shock others with it through a quasi-spiritual, quasi-evolutionary turn and every aspect of civilization is affected. Religion, politics, crime…violence against women no longer dominates any culture. It is fascinating and brutal, positing that such great harm comes at an enormous cost, even if it does seek to “balance the scales.”

5 out of 5 Earl Grey teas at a stressful state dinner.

Fire

Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng, tells the story of two families in the late 1990s: the Richardsons, a family of wealth and reputation in Shaker Heights, OH, and the Warrens, a free-spirited artist mother and daughter pair who come into the neighborhood after a lifetime of moving around.

We see the world of each of these mothers, and their obvious contrasts. The Richardson home is filled with plush furniture, Diet Cokes, and crown molding in every room. All seems well in the home, with the exception of rebellious Izzy, who rebels against her mother’s niceties and shallow pleasures in favor of Doc Martens, loud music, and radical political ideas. Meanwhile, a few streets over at their rental home, Mia and Pearl live amidst DIY furniture, stacks of photographs, and leftover Chinese food from Pearl’s part-time job. Pearl becomes close to the Richardson children, entwining the two mothers’ lives uncomfortably together.

Adding to the tension is a custody case that has the community completely divided: a Chinese-American baby girl was put up for adoption by a distraught young single mother, who now wants to reclaim custody. The themes of motherhood, “proper” parenting, and the middle class anxiety of the 1990s all seem to lead our families only to destruction, but within the chaos there might be hope, as well.

3.5 out of 5 Diet Cokes while flipping through a June 1998 Seventeen magazine.

Blood

Red Clocks by Leni Zumas is a dystopia so close to reality, it seems like the possibility of its world existing is only a few years away. Abortion is completely banned in America, and leaving the country to get the procedure done in Canada is blocked by an agreement between the two nations known as The Pink Wall. Abortion-seekers are extradited back to the US if they’re suspected of traveling for that purpose. We follow several women though extremely different worldviews and circumstances, though with more in common than first meets the eye.

A mysterious woman who seems out of time and place, a forest druid who refers to women’s “clocks” and “waters.”

An angry, intelligent woman racing the clock against an unjust law that would close the possibility of motherhood to her forever.

A young woman, terrified, not ready to have a child.

A lonely woman who loves her children but ultimately despises her marriage, and the unseen work of domesticity.

And a woman whose life we never truly inhabit. A life lived long ago, one which found solace not in family but in unfamiliar ice flows in the Arctic.

Their stories all highlight the different ways we experience the idea of motherhood, legacy, choice, jealousy, and our bonds with other women.

2.5 out of 5 strange cups of mushroom and dandelion brew to cure cramps and bloating. Wait…is that a twig floating in it?

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

My fourth book of 2020 was the nonfiction book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou. I picked this up after watching HBO’s The Inventor on my flight back to the US after our Tokyo vacation.

I was so struck by the narrative Holmes creates around herself, and the bafflingly flimsy structure of the Silicon Valley startup model. Holmes, a bright woman from a well-connected and well-educated family, dreamed of being a rich and powerful businessperson. But her aspiration for business success outweighed her aspirations for nearly anything else, eschewing college to start a company in which she seemed less interested in the science and more interested in the market need for novel medical devices.

If you somehow missed the bizarre story of Theranos and its wide-eyed CEO and founder, Elizabeth Holmes, it’s essentially the story of a company over-promising and under-delivering so many times that the over-promising became flat-out lies, and the under-delivering became laboratory mismanagement, obfuscation, and fraud to such a scale that people could have died using the “technology” Theranos was creating. 

The device in question: a blood-testing machine that used minuscule amounts of blood to conduct elaborate health tests, and which could allow its users to forego expensive, potentially physically taxing traditional blood draws. The Edison machine was the first prototype of the device, with the 2.0 version dubbed “miniLab” never fully coming into operation.

There was only one problem with the Edison machine. It was criminally inaccurate.

The results varied so greatly, the information it provided put patients at risk. It was so inaccurate, at one stage in its usage by test trials in Walgreens stores, Theranos wasn’t even running the blood through its own technology for every test…it was often using Siemens blood analyzers and acting as though they were using their own proprietary technology.

Holmes modeled herself after Steve Jobs and truly considered herself a revolutionary mind in the field of blood analysis, despite having no medical training or engineering skills to speak of. She hired amazing scientists and engineers to work for her, though, which you’d think would start to legitimize the company. However, she and her boyfriend Sunny, the president of the company, had a lot of opinions about the work, which made progress on the devices impossible. Work that they themselves could not do! I just can’t understand why you would hire NASA-level biochemists and then tell them that their math didn’t match an esoteric idea of what a good invention is. It’s the complete antithesis of imposter syndrome.

And it worked, for a while anyway. Holmes amassed millions of dollars from investors during her time as CEO, and even after the Carreyrou report hit the Wall Street Journal, many of those same investors stuck by the company.

The impossibility of what she was trying to create aside — and the specifics she wanted were exactly that, according to dozens of experts working for her over the course of the company’s life — the business itself was also run very poorly. High security and surveillance, verbal abuse, loyalty pledges, every conversation potentially litigious, and laboratory management below the bare minimum. The reports of former employees working for Theranos are heartbreaking and horrendous, with some employees even being tailed by private investigators.

The book devotes itself to these stories, the employees and investors duped by Holmes’ big promises and glossy marketing. From multiple perspectives, across a decade, the entire ordeal seems doomed from the start.

There was no way to create the technology she pitched without modifications.

There was no way to run multiple kinds of tests on such a small blood sample.

And if somehow these first two issues were overcome, there was absolutely no way to create anything meaningful without substantial dedication to research and development.

But because Holmes refused to listen to any of these people, and because they were forbidden to share information with each other (yes, really), the buried problems mounted privately as Theranos became more profitable publicly.

From the book, it’s obvious that Holmes at least partially believed in her own importance to the world through the creation of the Edison machine, and the miniLab. But she never put anything meaningful behind the practicality of it. She never compromised or deviated from an image she had in her mind when she was very young and very inexperienced in the industry, and she ignored all the regulations that would have guided the company to a more viable product.

It’s also obvious that things might have gone differently for the company if Sunny Balwani had never become involved with Holmes, as he escalated personnel situations far beyond what any reasonable professional would do in a functional workplace. He was a vindictive man who threatened anyone who dared question the god-status of the startup.

Carreyrou weaves together a fascinating story of innovation and fraud, ego and despair, and ultimately the hubris of the tech bubble of late capitalism. He also skillfully creates an unbelievably compelling character study of real people, and the ethics they either choose to abide by or ignore in the face of a complicated moral failing. It was a great read, and a close look at one of the most captivating “rise and fall” stories of the last ten years.

Rating: 5 out of 5 Bay area cocktails while speaking to a confidential informant.

 

The Threshold Series by Peter Clines

Happy New Year, sweet book bbs. I have just finished Patricia Lockwood’s delightful memoir Priestdaddy, my first book completed for 2020. It’s lyrical when it’s funny as well as when it goes deep into her fiercest recollections, and so many moments are simultaneously both. Her audiobook reading has the added benefit of Patricia’s impassioned impersonations of each of the members of her family, so fascinating and stark that I hear her version of her younger sister in my head when I reread the first line of this post.

Sweet book bay-ya-baaaays.

I highly recommend it, but today I am actually going to talk a bit about a series of books that my husband and I have come to love, Peter Clines’ trilogy (as of this writing…could there be more!?) referred to as The Threshold Series.

The series consists of three books: 14, The Fold, and Dead Moon. It’s a loose series, and one you could conceivably even read out of order! Each book takes place in the same narrative universe, with different characters and scenarios in each one. My personal favorite is the first one, 14. It’s about an apartment building that’s just strange enough that all the tenants are a little confused, though not frightened, by its structural oddities. Light fixtures that only emit black light. Randomly locked doors. Floor plans that don’t meet at the correct angles. The most suspicious aspect is the rent: well below the standard for the outskirts of Los Angeles. Did they get a good deal on a rickety old building, or are they part of something profoundly weird? This book has an extremely likable cast of characters, as the tenants gradually form a group of apartment explorers. They meet on the weekends to look at the sunset, have a beer, and follow clues about the building’s history. The more they discover, the more questions they seem to have.

In the second book of the series, The Fold, the weirdness is front and center. A man with some unusual intellectual abilities is called to investigate a research team that believes they have, more or less, invented a teleportation device. The facility is deeply protective of its information, but rumors are starting to get out in the infosec community. Erratic behavior, secret meetings, and promises of the impossible. Science fiction is no longer fiction at their R&D center, so how is it that the wildest part of the operation…is the scientists themselves?

The third book in the series is called Dead Moon. It is about the colonization of the moon. And it contains many zombies. I think that is all I can properly tell you about this one, lest I give away too many good bits.

I know what you’re thinking: “How are these books related in a series?” But friends, they definitely are! It’s up to you to read the books and figure out the common theme. These slow-burn science fiction stories have excellent action, horror, and humor. The audiobook narrator, Ray Porter, lends a lot of heart to every voice and fills out the world in a remarkable way.

What were your favorite science fiction stories of 2019? What are you looking forward to reading in 2020?

Rating: 5 out of 5 Heinekens on a Southern California rooftop…that might be humming? Slightly?

 

A Ranking of Tokyo Coffee Shop Chains

This fall, I went to Tokyo with Joe and our friend Jeremy, and we met up with another old friend once there. It was one of the best vacations I’ve ever been on, and while I did not read on the plane as I had planned (thank you, melatonin tabs and free in-flight HBO) I do still have some content for this blog: we had coffee every single day of our trip!

So, here’s my personal ranking of the coffee shops we visited while in Tokyo. (While Tully’s and Starbucks are also available in America, there are some key differences in their marketing and products for Japanese consumers.)

1.) Tully’s Coffee

This one tops the list by quality and proximity. There was one located downstairs from our AirBNB, plus they opened early and closed late. The Royal Milk Tea, Honey Milk Latte, and Green Tea Swirkle are all excellent. Bonus points because, as mentioned, the proximity is king. There is a Tully’s on nearly every major city block, and at every train station. We also consistently managed to get Wi-Fi here to check our maps and iMessage our local friend.

 

2.) Starbucks

Not as prominently spotted as Tully’s, Veloce, or some other shops we didn’t get a chance to try like Dotour, but one I wanted to try since I could make such a clear comparison to its sister stores back home. We stopped at a very nice one in Ginza and watched the sunset over Nihonbashi Bridge. Their distinctive Japan-only holiday flavor is strawberry cake rather than peppermint, and I am 100% won over.

 

3.) Caffe Veloce

The service is very fast and the drinks are quite good. I had the Matcha Float a few times but was *shattered* to learn that acquiring their promoted holiday cat-cup-hanger was a very involved process. To console myself, I bought a bear keychain. At Tully’s.

 

Honorable Mentions:

Suntory Vending Machines

Many bottles of green tea, milky coffee, and sodas were the benevolent result of Japan’s expansive vending machine system. You can buy drinks with coins or by tapping your train card. The USA needs to get on this level.

 

Tower Records Cafe

We stopped here after walking from Harajuku to the epicenter of Shibuya — about eight miles. We were very tired and the drinks were some of the most expensive we bought while in the city. My companions tell me the coffee was good. I bought a really elaborate cotton candy Ramune drink and retied my shoelaces several times, trying to improve the circulation. It makes the list for being highly photogenic.

When it Feels Like the End, Keep Going

Season’s greetings, book lovers. It’s been a while. I am prone to long hiatuses on this blog, but this one’s been a little different. I noticed that my last review was in the late summer of 2017. This shouldn’t have surprised me, and yet it sort of did.

I started school full-time that semester, picking up a second major in graphic design. I started a new job, a part-time contract position that has now become my full-time career in a place I love.

It was also the last season I would have with my mother. She passed away on December 29, 2017. She began exhibiting symptoms of her decline in late September, the colon cancer she had courageously fought for eight years finally migrating and finding root in her brain.

My mom was an incredible person, and part of the inspiration for my vow to read 25 books a year. My dad is also a lifelong bookworm. We even had a competition that year to see who in the house could read the most; I think Mom would have caught up to Dad and Joe if she hadn’t been so ill. My mom loved to read, and I have vivid memories of her throughout my entire life sitting on the sofa with a cup of coffee (black, preferably Gevalia, never ever artificially flavored) and a hardcover book, a Danielle Steele novel or a devotional or just something she saw at a book sale that looked “neat.”

Part of the way I processed my grief during that time was to stay busy. I added a certificate in web development to my degree track and started interim/winter break classes just a few days after her funeral. My husband and I moved into a new house. Admittedly, I made myself busy in ways that didn’t involve the most emotional and artistic bandwidth. I took up coding in Python. I watched the same three or four TV shows over and over. I stopped drawing for a while, except for school assignments. (I still haven’t quite gotten back into it as much as I did when I was drawing at my parent’s dining room table, chatting with them while I worked on charcoal homework and doodled forest animals.)

I did keep reading, though. In fact, in the year after losing her, I read almost 30 books. I read nearly nonstop. It was the thing I did to get back into my head while sorting through my strange new life without her, and I will forever be grateful to John Darnielle, Jeff Vandermeer, Aaron Mahnke, and many more for reminding me that sometimes, it will feel like the end of everything. The worst thing happens. The world becomes incomprehensible to you, and you have no idea what is next. But you just have to keep going. The story won’t finish itself. 

I have updated The Books section to reflect the last few years of books. My favorites, in no particular order, have been Foe by Iain Reid, 14 by Peter Clines, The Terror by Dan Simmons, The Institute by Stephen King, Through the Woods by Emily Carroll, Mindhunter by John Douglas, Universal Harvester by John Darnielle, My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix, the Lore collection by Aaron Mahnke, the Area X trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer, and I’ll be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara.

I wrote an essay about my mom’s tiny superstitions in early 2018 if you’d like to know a little more about her, or really me, too, I guess.

If you have lost someone close to you, I am so, so sorry for what you have experienced. Griefshare and other support groups exist in many communities at no cost and can be an amazing source of comfort and motivation. Additionally, The Order of the Good Death is a death-positive online resource that provides a lot of information about death, grief, funerals, and society’s understanding of mortality. There is a blend of light-hearted and deeply insightful content, and its founder has several books out on the subject. These are some of the things that have helped my family.

Lastly: Read. Talk to people whose company you enjoy. Cook fun things. Stay healthy. Say their name. Say it as often as you’d like, and remember them with joy.

And always, always drink good coffee.

Six Months Later, Part I

It’s been almost six months to the day since my last entry, when I completed The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey. You might be pleased (surprised?) to learn I have enjoyed so many books since then. So many! I have finished fourteen books in the last six months, which — if you have followed this blog for any length of time — is a lot for me.

Audiobooks are pretty much my main jam these days, what with busy, painty, charcoal-smudged fingers and lots of driving being fairly big components of my life, but it’s all good. (Did you know that your brain recognizes content gathered via listening comprehension and reading comprehension the same way?)

Since I have so many books to review, and since I have Certain Feelings about so many of them, I am going to break this up into several entries, for my sake and yours.

Let’s get to the books!

#3. The Fireman by Joe Hill

I received a signed copy of this in hardback novel form from my husband, Joe. It is proudly displayed on a bookshelf in my office, but I was nervous to carry it around town, so I downloaded the audiobook version of this on Overdrive and occasionally read some passages out of the book. It’s a doozy of a story: a wild epidemic sweeps across the United States, perhaps the whole world, which causes people to break out into “Dragonscale” markings all over their body. When agitated or panicked, the sufferer bursts into flame.

We see this epidemic through the eyes of Harper Grayson, a school nurse obsessed with Mary Poppins and expecting her first child in the midst of what looks like the apocalypse. The first third of the book is riveting and epic, as we see how people are reacting to Dragonscale as it spreads. Apartment buildings burn to ash every other day, the Internet goes deep underground, and rabid radio hosts declare Dragonscale a biblical act of world-cleansing. Harper tries to stave off her own terror by caring for the infected as a nurse and humming cheerful songs to herself while her husband becomes unhinged with paranoia and dread. One night during a shift at the overwhelmed local hospital, Harper meets a man dressed as a fireman caring for a shy young boy. He seems to know more about the deadly spore causing the spontaneous combustion than he lets on, but nobody can survive its blaze…right?

This story then pivots pretty sharply into what I will describe here as an unusual refugee camp for Dragonscale sufferers who have not yet burst into flame. There is A LOT more to it than that, but as the story of Dragonscale tightens in geographical proximity, it sprawls out with conspiracy and good old-fashioned “People Are the Real Apocalypse” character arcs very reminiscent of Hill’s father. It remains compelling but for different reasons than the threat of self-immolation. Which…says a lot.

Rating: 4 out of 5 cartons of summer camp apple juice.

#4. Fellside by M.R. Carey

Joe and I listened to this audiobook on a road trip to a college friend’s wedding in Iowa. It is an incredibly even-paced story about memory, redemption, and ghosts. Yes, ghosts. (It’s M.R. Carey, it’s going to be good-weird.) Sent to the infamously cruel women’s prison, Fellside, for her potential role in a child’s murder, Jess Moulson is a heroin addict trying to remember the last days of her life before she woke up in a hospital as an arson suspect. Her dark feelings and fragmented memories lead her to a strange, dream-like place where she meets a lonely spirit who doesn’t remember who they are. Could this be the young boy for whose murder she’s being charged? Can he help her remember the events of his death?

In the midst of all of this, can she survive Fellside itself? It’s an ominous place led by the ruthless inmate Harriet Grace and her numerous cronies, with several people in positions of power also caught in her web of violence. There are a lot of things working against Jess, most of all her own sense of guilt and confusion.

I really loved this book, it felt like a fairy tale hidden inside a mystery/crime novel. It is very different than The Girl with All the Gifts, so I am sure some fans of that probably didn’t connect to this one in the same way. But I thought it was wonderfully written, and it’s a must-read for the adventurous genre-surfer.

Rating: 5 out of 5 mugs of black coffee.

#5. The Good Nurse by Charles Graeber

This one was recommended by a friend of mine, and it was a great rec indeed! First and foremost, the absolute avalanche of research and investigation in this book is so impressive. It’s a true crime story that encompasses so many different players over such a a long period of time: hospital staff, family members, detectives, whistle-blowers, etc. This book does its homework and then goes back for extra credit, and it never feels dry or unnecessary.

Charlie Cullen, later dubbed “The Angel of Death,” was a nurse who worked for sixteen years across Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It is almost impossible to estimate how many people he killed by intentional overdose and excessive medical intervention. His motives have always been equally hard to nail down: he was delivering neither mercy nor vengeance in his action, and all of his victims appear to be random. While the questions surrounding Cullen are disturbing, perhaps more disturbing is that many hospital staff members suspected Cullen of foul play over the years, but little more was done than transfer him on to other hospitals. Graeber goes in depth to explore not just how Cullen committed his crimes, but why he was allowed so much continued access to patients in spite of red flag after red flag.

Rating: 5 out of 5 cups of ice chips brought in by an overly helpful night nurse. Actually, um, can maybe someone else bring me something?

#6. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

This book was…fine. It reminded me a lot of Ruth Ware’s In A Dark, Dark Wood, which I read last year and didn’t love. We have an unreliable narrator in Rachel, a troubled woman who spends lots of time riding trains. She enjoys seeing a young couple in one of the neighborhoods she passes going about their life — a happy-looking wife out in the garden during the day, the wife and her husband eating dinner together in the evening. One night, she sees something incredibly out of the ordinary and shortly thereafter, the young woman goes missing. Rachel immediately dives into investigating her disappearance, as it seems the only thing driving her forward in a life that has been marked by recent misery.

This story is told by three different women in an overlapping timeline: Rachel, our train-riding sleuth; her ex-husband’s new(ish) wife Anna, who lives near the couple; and Megan, the woman who goes missing. I liked this device, that it focused on the women’s perspectives and revealed the mystery in parts through each of them.

What I did not care for immensely was Rachel’s part in everything. Though we are given a reason why Rachel feels so fiercely connected to everything going on, her motivation still feels very flimsy. Rachel explains fairly early on that she has become an alcoholic, and that she is a profoundly unhappy person following a heartbreaking divorce. She also used to live in the same neighborhood as the couple. So looking into Megan’s disappearance gives her something to do, and to feel useful…but she goes SO FAR into this, you guys. SO FAR. And I just didn’t entirely understand it, except that Hawkins wanted to give us an, “A-HA!” moment at some point where her story bumped up against the other women, who seemed so put-together in comparison but had secrets all their own.

Something nice that came out of this was that I spent an afternoon in the park eating tacos and listening to a large portion of this, which was fun. But that has less to do with the novel and more to do with the sunshine…and tacos.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 gin & tonics.

#7. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

This was a paperback book that I read, for real and for true. I bought it toward the end of 2016 and actually started it around Christmastime, but got sidetracked and read the bulk of it in April. Some of it during a very chill beach house weekend:

I really loved this book. It was a departure from all the…you know, terrifying and gruesome stuff I read most of the time. It’s a story about Lotto and Mathilde during the course of their marriage. The title, Fates and Furies, describes not only the deep belief Otto holds that the gods and the stars have brought them to one another, but also the ebb and flow of joy and despair during their time together. The structure is impressive, moving through the time and space of the characters but also their deep emotional states and their personal histories. There are parts that take on the dramatic, operatic style of Lotto and the quieter, keenly aware style of Mathilde. It paints a beautiful, strange portrait of a life shared and of two lives individually experienced. This one is a must-read.

Rating: 5 out of 5 glasses of wine at yet another dinner party with old friends.

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Keep an eye out for Part II (and maybe Part III). I may actually hit my target of 25 books in 2017, that would be pretty great! Happy reading and/or listening!

What books have you been reading? Do you prefer audiobooks, ebooks, or traditional books?