February 2025 Wrap-up

[tullycat]

I have nothing quippy to put here.



Books

• Daisy Jones and the Six, Taylor Jenkins Reid
  • Inspired by Fleetwood Mac, a band recounts what led to their fame and why they left at its peak in oral interview form. I listened to the audiobook for this and I found it pretty entertaining. I think the cast really added a lot to the experience, I think it would've been more bland if I had read it myself. TJR is readable for me in that I always know what I'm going to get, and this was no different. At time it felt like she was trying to introduce an element of 'memory is fallible and we all have our own interpretations of what happened' but she never delved too deeply into that theme, which was disappointing. I think most disappointing was the twist that came near the end that just made me roll my eyes. Again, I would've liked it if it had something to do with 'memory and narratives are fallible' but it didn't, TJR just wanted a twist to be clever.
• The Spear Cuts Through Water, Simon Jimenez
  • This book is a little hard to summarize, but two warriors attempt to free the Moon from the emperor to rid the world of his and his sons. Simultaneously, a boy (I think?) is having this story told to him by his Lola in closer to present day. This book uses first, second, and third POV in the same paragraphs, sometimes the same sentences. In the hands of so many other writers this would've been awful, but Jimenez is skilled enough that it worked. I will say it did take a while to understand the writing style and really sink into it, but after 50 pages I was sold. I loved this book and it made me cry at the end so I am completely biased but yeah it was a five star read for me. It's the kind of book where I don't even want to rec it to people because if they hate it, I don't want to hear about it. There are also some elements of the book that are weird enough that I wouldn't necessarily rec it to normies...I feel like you need to be at least a little bit of a freak to really get it.
• Heaven's Official Blessing #4, MXTX
  • A big reveal happens in this book that I somehow had never been spoiled for, even though I've been seeing beefleaf on my timeline for years. Also exciting for me personally is how much MXTX is letting hualian kiss already.....topping in their coffin and making out on the altar this book is SICK. Xie Lian laments that Hua Cheng has a future wife.....fool you are the future wife...
• Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, John Carreyrou
  • This is the narrative non-fiction account of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, written by the journalist who originally wrote the exposé on her. The story of Theranos itself is wild (it started feeling like a thriller near the end and also why the hell was Kissinger involved 😭) but in terms of the book itself, I did appreciate how deeply researched it was. I also thought it was interesting that because the author was involved in exposing Theranos, the author himself ends up entering the story as a central player.
• The Wedding People, Alison Espach
  • A 40-year old divorced woman manages to book a room at a hotel during the week it's been rented out to a wedding party. The bride then adopts Phoebe into her wedding party for the week. Throughout the week, Phoebe learns about herself and the engaged couple who perhaps should not be getting married. This is the kind of book where I understand why it's being highly rated and why people like it - it was competently written and full of the big emotions that people love in books. It just didn't connect with me.
• Lucky Red, Claudia Cravens
  • An orphaned teen makes her way to Dodge City (picture the wild wild west with saloons etc) and starts working in a brothel to make money. Bridget is unfazed by her male clients....only to realize it's the ~women that get her going. I liked this a lot more than I expected to actually, considering it was a debut and I've read some bad debuts. It's tagged LGBT, which it is, but had me hoping going in that it would be a love story. I would say it's more focused solely on Bridget, not really any relationship she has. (Honestly, I'd say the friendship has a bigger role.) I would say the genre is pretty firmly historical fiction, not romance. The book does drag a tad in the middle, when it's just Bridget working, but it didn't stop me from liking it overall. The book is pretty sex positive towards sex workers as well. If there's a sequel, I would read that as well.
• The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017, Rashid Khalidi
  • Sometimes I go into nonfiction books thinking even if I only retain 10% of the book by the end, that's still 10% more than I knew going in. That's kind of how I feel having read this book - it is dense, especially at the beginning. I don't have much knowledge of the history, geography, or politics of this region, so when the author just kind of drops you in, I was just trying to keep up. The last few chapters cover more recent history, which was easier for me. Also eye opening that the book only covers up til 2017, yet pretty much everything described in 2017 is currently happening, which really emphasizes the systems that are in place. This book is pretty openly written with a Palestinian bias, but I didn't realize how deep the author's connection went. Similar to Bad Blood, the history mentioned by the author has a lot of his family members and friends popping up, kind of without any warning from him. Not sure if the political sphere is just small enough that the people positioned with enough knowledge to write this book have necessarily also been involved in talks and resistance movements etc, but every time he mentioned another family member I was like 'huh.'
• The Woman in Me, Britney Spears
  • Britney Spears memoir about her life, from childhood to the conservatorship ending. Some of the stories in the beginning were disjointed and I don't think Britney has done enough reflection on her life yet to really have any big revelations, but frankly is that why any of us read this? Nah...I just wanted to hear in her own words about the conservatorship. So from that perspective, this was an interesting read.
• James, Percival Everett
  • A retelling of Huckleberry Finn, from the point of view of Jim, the slave that Huck goes down the Mississippi with. The retelling converges pretty closely with Huck Finn at the beginning, but there are pretty big chunks of the original book where Huck and Jim are separated, so in those moments Everett is free to construct the plot as he likes. The conceit of the retelling is that every slave/Black person has been code switching from slave speak in front of white people to basically contemporary speech when among each other. So after you put aside how hard it would've been for Jim to be self-educated while in slavery (he can read and write), the book goes beyond that and makes Jim hyper intelligent. He is constantly thinking about philosophers (and has a near-death hallucination of John Locke?) to show how smart he is, yet the actual prose of the book is written quite simply. I read this book so quickly in part because of how simply the prose was written. So the dialogue and prose felt fairly mismatched. I also felt like a lot of the choices the author made at the end weren't interrogated to a satisfying conclusion...you're left thinking about 'why did this happen to x and what's gonna happen to y in the future?' Comparing the actual ending of this book vs Huck Finn is interesting...I don't think I'm done pondering how they fit together and the depth of Everett's critique. I think my overall feelings about this book were....it was just okay?
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
  • I was about 30% into James when I decided I wanted to read Huck Finn to compare how much of James was faithful to Huck Finn. I would recommend reading Huck Finn first and then reading James, not reading them simultaneously. The use of the n-word is a jump scare every time it happens in this book and it sure happens a lot. At first as I started reading, I said 'why is this book taught in school' and then by the end I was ready to have a Socratic seminar over whether Mark Twain's satire was effective as social critique/commentary so I guess that's why. And then the last 15-20% of the book made me want to STRANGLE Tom Sawyer...I sure hope it was a metaphor for how newly freed slaves weren't actually free during Reconstruction because of sharecropping etc because jesus christ was it infuriating.
• Book Lovers, Emily Henry
  • A book agent goes to a small town in North Carolina to appease her sister's attempt to let her live out the tropey Hallmark love stories that she's usually on the other side of (she is the big city girlfriend back home that gets dumped when the guy meets the small town bookstore owner of his dreams etc). While she's there, she runs into her sexy kind-of enemy editor. So this was my first Henry and honestly I was expecting more from how much people rave about her. Everything felt so surface-level to me. And Henry was very into calling romance tropes into the foreground but the ending is still a white straight couple getting together so....if she thought she was subverting romance tropes, I don't agree. I admit I am curious to read more of her books to see if this is one of her better ones or one of her worse ones...

Yeah I'm not sure what happened this month, I somehow read 11 books. I did listen to 4 of them as audiobooks but still...

Music

• Artists
  
  • The Boyz (129)
  • Taemin (123)
  • Ateez (107)
  • Minnie (88)
  • GOT7 (81)
• Albums
  • Her, Minnie (88)
  • Winter Heptagon, GOT7 (79)
  • ONF: My Identity (70)
  • Trigger, The Boyz (68)
  • Frequency, WayV (48)
  • Salvation, Rebecca Black (45) - adding this in at 6 because I literally listened to it on Feb 28 and it jumped that high in a single day lol
• Tracks
  
  • Abracadabra, Lady Gaga (21)
  • Cherry Sky, Minnie (18)
  • Attitude, IVE; Her, Minne; The Stranger, ONF (15)
  • Blind Eyes Red, Minnie; Obsession, Minnie; Night Tale, ONF; bAd, The Boyz (13)
  • Out the Door, Python, Tidal Wave by Got7; Drive U Crazy, Minnie; Good Place, ONF; Re-Wind, The Boyz (12)

Liking a Cube album just feels icky lmao. And I am obsessed with the new Rebecca Black...perfect club music. This is what I wanted the b-sides of brat to be.

Watched

• More Severance!! TV is back, baby!!! Yellowjackets also started up. I did watch Hereditary this month which was good!

Concerts

• Aespa
  • Sometimes you pay too much money to go to a concert you only mildly care about because friendship! This concert didn't make me an Aespa stan, but it was fun for the night! I went in thinking Winter was my bias because of her cunty bob in Whiplash and left thinking Winter was my bias because of her cunty solo song, Spark - she cooked she served she ate! However I would've been perfectly fine if I had skipped this concert and will pass in the future unless friendship compels me to go (in which case we will get cheaper tickets...)
• Taemin
  • The first 30 mins of Taemin was better than some full concerts I have been to (not naming names....but maybe the other concert mentioned in this post is one...) and every time he went backstage I said 'how is there more concert after this??'. He basically had four acts - Catholic guilt, Emily Gilmore, hiphop/rock, and the classics. Catholic guilt was my favorite but I enjoyed them all. And I loooooved the concert version of the Rizzness, I need that to be on Spotify. The concert versions of his songs were all so good that I wanted to just jam out and dance but if I looked away from the stage for a second I was missing some amazing choreo so I was torn haha.

Fic

• Word count: 5386
• Unscripted Programming - Changmin/Sunwoo, The Boyz (a cowrite)
• bisexual! at the concert - Jaehyun/Juyeon, The Boyz

Recipes

• Favorite quinoa salad
  • I think I made this, but I'm including it for posterity anyway since I have been making it about once a month for years now.
• Roasted veggie and chickpea bowl with maple dijon tahini dressing
  • I went overboard and roasted so many veggies for this, and my oven is smaller than the standard American oven so this took me wayyyyy too long. I also added farro so this ended up being fairly involved. I didn't love the dressing which is my only reason to detract it - roasted veggies themselves are delicious.
• Chicken paprikash
  
  • My real reason for making this was to serve as a vehicle for egg noodles....however I didn't check whether I had enough paprika?? For a recipe that has paprika in the name??? oops.
• Chicken gnocchi soup
  • I did not find this written out recipe until later so I was suffering trying to make this from the youtube short I found. I was suffering.....also I thought I could make myself like sundried tomatoes and I still don't really like them rip.

Comments

[littlerhymes]

I'm sooo looking forward to Spear Cuts Through Water. (If it doesn't work for me I'll simply never mention it to you again lol.)

What happens if I read Huck Finn and I LOVE Tom Sawyer? jk or am I

[tullycat]

If nothing else I'm curious what you think of The Spear Cuts Through Water from a technical standpoint...

If you still like Tom after that ending idk what to say 😭😭😭

[greetingsfrommaars]

ooh i remember being assigned a chapter or two of Bad Blood to read in school, but then i ended up finishing the entire book because it was so absorbing. it really does feel like a thriller!

[tullycat]

It does! Because why were they following people??!??? Truly doing too much.

[sleepypapercrowns]

So many books!! 👀

Like you said I don’t think Emily Henry is anything new or „special“ for the genre but they’re super easy to get into and binge. I like them as pallet cleansers and they’re probably the only straight romance I still read?

I just picked up a spear cuts through water which I am afraid to tell you because what if I don’t love it and you won’t look at me in April? 😂 (I’m sure I’ll love it)

[tullycat]

Yeah I don't think I'll devour Emily Henry's books but will probably read them when I'm bored or in the mood.

If you don't love The Spear Cuts Through Water I will politely nod while crying inside 🥲