July 2025 Wrap-Up

[tullycat]

The year is racing past wtf...



Books

• The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, Meg Elison
  
  • This is post-apocalyptic book where an unknown virus wipes out most of the world, but affects men and women at disproportionate rates (at one point the narrator does the math and women's survival rate is somewhere around 0.001-0.01%?). The virus also kills children - both alive and any child being born. Compared to The Road, which I read in May, this book remembered that women and queer people existed. But in a lot of ways the survival aspect of it felt too easy—though maybe this book was closer to the start of the disaster than The Road was, so it would be easier to stumble upon a house that was well stocked with food and camp out for 4 months. This book also felt like a very obvious homage/reference to The Handmaid's Tale to me. The narrator is unnamed, society obsessed with birthing children. Plus the book started with a scene of children writing down the story we are reading of the unnamed midwife, so we know there is a future beyond what we see in the book, which is how I remember The Handmaid's Tale starting. All this to say, I thought it was just okay.
• Small Boat, Vincent Delecroix, Helen Stevenson (translator)
  • Another Intl Booker Prize read. This is an imagining of the operator that responded to the calls made by the migrants crossing the English channel from France in 2021. The police interrogation with the operator takes up at least half the book and feels like the circular, looping logic in conservatives' arguments, and it did have the feeling of being how liberals view conservatives where you're like 'well of course you should care about migrants and not be racist.' This is a mild spoiler, sorry, but it turns out the interrogation we just read is actually with her conscience. The book then ends with her turning the question onto the reader—are we caring about the people in ours lives? From my POV this felt like the most politically relevant book for today of the three I read and I liked it the best, but it did not win the actual prize.
• Atmosphere, Taylor Jenkins Reid
  • Joan is one of the first female astronauts in the 1980's, along with Vanessa and a few others. I don't think it was originally marketed as queer but it most definitely is. It deals with being a women in a male dominated field and with being queer in the 80s. The beginning chapter really throws you in with tons of characters and a crash in space and was kind of overwhelming, but then it switches back to the past and narrates Joan's life as it leads up to that moment. I would classify this as more romance than anything science-y. Personally I thought the romance felt a little hollow, though I think it was partially because she was trying to write more literary than like...romance in terms of style? But also in a way I appreciate it because like, damn she wrote a mainstream book that was unapologetically lesbian. i really liked Joan's relationship with her niece and the ending did make me tear up a bit. I think this is maybe my favorite from her? But not my favorite book ever.
• Educated, Tara Westover
  • A memoir of Tara growing up in a fundamentalist Mormon household and eventually escaping through her education. This does feel like it's popular because people love rubbernecking.....me included okay, I admit it. Some of the medical trauma described is really horrific, and the abuse of not letting any of the family seek medical help after these serious injuries.....ugh.
• No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay, Julian Aguon
  • Like the title says, a collection of essays. Wish this had been more environmentally focused and edited a bit more? It included 3 commencement speeches which made me wonder if he wrote anything new for this. However I did learn new fucked up things from this, like uhh nuclear testing on the Marshall Islands
• Blood of the Old Kings, Sung-Il Kim, Anton Hur (translator)
  • Uhh this book is hard to summarize because it made me feel illiterate?? Individual sentences made sense but any time I took a step back I felt like I had no idea what was happening and nothing stuck in my brain. Felt like we were dropped in an RPG world and had no fleshing out of characters. There were so many mentions of one character's spectacles, like probably 30 times. Every single scene was something about his spectacles. I would've DNFed if I hadn't been the one to suggest it for bookclub....bookclub did not enjoy. I later learned that this book was not translated because it was popular in Korea—it was just kind of randomly picked up by Tor and translated. Which maybe explains why it was not good.
• The Starless Sea, Erin Morgenstern
  • Zachary Ezra Rawlins reads a random book that exactly describes his life and gets pulled into a world of books and doors and stories. The payoff for this book is loooooong. Every other chapter is a random story that doesn't really make sense until around page 400 out of 500, at which point I had to go back and reread all of them to know what was about to happen. So good luck to the audiobook listeners. I think some of the motivations for some characters (Allegra) were muddy and the writing was unnecessarily pretentious (why did every chapter start with 'Zachary Ezra Rawlins'?) and the prose wasn't as good as the author felt like it was? That being said: I did like the connections and how everything was wrapped up even though some of them felt obvious. And it was gay, yippee. This kind of feels like it would work for people who couldn't get into the prose of The Spear Cuts Through Water, because I could feel that the author was trying to hit some of the same notes as TSCTW (though TSCTW was published later). But where TSCTW made me cry, The Starless Sea didn't reach the same heights. (This is now making me wonder if I would've liked this more if I hadn't had TSCTW to compare it to, but I was meh on The Night Circus when I read it years ago so I think my opinion is organic.) Other books it reminded me of: Piranesi, Water Moon. I think I liked this a little more than The Night Circus which everyone loved but was around 3 stars for me.
• The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves, J.B. MacKinnon
  • This is...imaginative nonfiction? Very similar vibes to the show Life After People (2008). The author starts the book by saying what would happen if the world stopped shopping? and then attempts to sketch out the next few days, months, years with the help of economists and modeling and some historical references. Obviously since there has never really been a time when the world stopped shopping, the historical references are mostly recessions/depressions and....the 2020 pandemic. I did feel like every mention of the pandemic felt weird because at no point did he really mention the fear everyone had of dying? Which just feels like an important confounder, but I guess his point was moreso 'this is what happened because people didn't shop.' (Though I do distinctly remember being told to shop/order takeout during the pandemic to save small businesses which he also doesn't really cover.) His suggestion at the end of the book was that digital consumption (like virtual outfits instead of buying real outfits) might be a way to consume less and all I could think was 'lol' this was clearly written before everyone and their mother started using generative ai for everything. Overall I feel like I was exposed to some interesting ideas but it felt light on the 'nonfiction.'
• Listen for the Lie, Amy Tintera
  • 5 years ago, Lucy was suspected of killing her best friend Savvy, but was never arrested or charged and cannot remember what happened that night herself. After moving away for 5 years, she returns to her hometown when a true crime podcaster uses her story as the newest season for his podcast. I listened to the audiobook for this which I think is how the book is intended to be consumed—every other chapter is excerpts from the podcast and the audiobook had a large voice cast. It was not the most twisty-turny thriller I've ever read, but I still had a good time.
• The Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Vuong
  • A young man named Hai lies to his mother about going to med school and runs off, planning to kill himself, until an older woman talks him off the bridge and takes him home. They strike up a deal that is essentially Hai takes care for her as she slips into dementia and he gets a place to stay. Hai ends up working at a fast-casual restaurant on the side, which introduces us to a cast of characters, including Hai's cousin. This book is about suffering and friendships and it swings between emotions in ways that make some scenes feel clownish at times. I really enjoyed On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by him, so I was expecting to love this, but I didn't...Both of his books are essentially autofiction, and I feel like writing memoirs when you're young can be tricky because have you really lived long enough to process and contextualize your life? And I think that's maybe what I felt about this book. I finished it thinking 'what was this book about.' He can have very heavy prose at times, which I don't think bothered me in OEWBG but did feel like it bogged down this book. I don't know, I am still kind of confused why I loved OEWBG so much and not this one.

Another 10 books this month, I guess this is happening.


Music

• Artists
  • Ateez (1270)
  • The Rose (111)
  • NCT Dream (99)
  • The Boyz (47)
  • P1Harmony (46)
• Albums
  • Golden Hour: Part 3 'In Your Fantasy' Edit, Ateez (1059)
  • Dreamscape, NCT Dream (72)
  • KPop Demon Hunters Soundtrack (55)
  • The World EP. Fin: Will, Ateez (44)
  • This is For, Twice (37)
• Tracks
  • In Your Fantasy Ateez (149)
  • The next 14 songs are just the In Your Fantasy album ranging from 60 to 79 scrobbles

I have nothing to say for myself other than give me more full albums!!! Let me listen to an album for 45 mins, not the 18 min bullshit we've been getting.


Concerts

• The Rose
  • They started the show at the front of the stage, with the curtains down and just one guitar and a hand drum, so really light accompaniment which was nice considering they are a band so I expect them to be singing live. A few months ago I had seen someone complain on reddit that they thought The Rose were so cold on stage and just robotically hitting each point of the setlist and idk, maybe The Rose were off the night that person saw, but I felt like they were the opposite. The demographic at this show was also so interesting, so many couples in their 50's-60's? You could tell the woman was the one into it, but not in the fandom way I see at most kpop shows. The crowd made me feel like I was at a Western artist honestly so I am curious how The Rose tapped into this market.
• Ateez
  • I saw them twice, once in an arena and once in a stadium. I was the first row of the 100s right by the main stage for the arena show so everything on the main stage was soooo close, which was a nice contrast to the stadium where I was definitely further away and didn't bother taking any videos because of that. I think the setlist for this show was not as tight as the last tour, but I think the towards the light tour was genuinely a piece of art that it's hard to come close to that. This setlist wasn't trying to tell the story that the last tour was either. It also had to fit in 8 solo songs so there is a moment in the setlist that dragged a bit - setting up a stage for We Know, only to take it off again and wait for Yeosang to appear for his solo. But those are my small complaints that I had to make to try to be somewhat objective, because otherwise I love this show. They performed Blind which I love and all their solos are sooooo good, oh my god Hongjoong's DJ intro for NO1 feels so special every night <3 He said once that fans give them, like, the burden of a large responsibility but Hongjoong and the rest really rise to meet it.

Fic

• Started working on the body swap fic again yay. Also started a cowrite.

Recipes

• I was lazy this month and didn't track these.

Comments

[littlerhymes]

ATINY????

Based on nothing but vibes, Erin Morgenstern feels like the kind of author that mainstream readers love but fantasy/sf readers think is just fine.

I am up to chapter 6 of Emperor of Gladness and so far it's not grabbing me but then again neither did On Earth so it's probably just me.

[tullycat]

I do think Erin Morgenstern's books (at least the night circus) did get popular enough to hit the mainstream readers which may have bumped up the rating on Goodreads.

ATINY!!!!