Tag: books

That time I bought a book in Kmart

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3 Christopher Pike books: The Midnight Club, Monster, Spellbound

According to the internet, The Last Vampire came out in 1994 about a month before I turned 12. Whether I was 11 or 12 in this story, the facts are the same.

I was staying with family when the guy in charge decided we girls needed a babysitter for the day. I hadn’t required a babysitter since I was 6 or 7 and I was thoroughly a latchkey kid by 10, and my approximately 9 year old niece wasn’t much different, so we girls probably would have been just fine without one. But adult rules meant we ended up at an older lady’s house – a friend of my family’s, who had babysat for them before, who I generally knew but hadn’t spent an entire day with before.

The babysitter’s apartment was sterile and she gave off a similar old, uptight stuffiness. For a kid, it was a miserable experience going to her place. I didn’t understand the agreeableness that my family had towards her. She didn’t play, she barely talked to us, there was nothing to do, and it was too quiet. Normally when I was stuck someplace I didn’t want to be I read their books, watched their movies, went outside and wandered, found some other kids to hang out with, but there was none of that.

On this glorious day she said we were going to Kmart. A break from the monotony! Yes! Kmart was not really top choice, but I’d take it. Apparently the main purpose of the Kmart trip was for her to have a look at the sewing aisle, which I didn’t much mind because it reminded me of making knotted bracelets with my best friend.

On the way to the sewing aisle, we passed by books on display. My eyes caught a cover and I stopped. It was The Last Vampire by Christopher Pike.

By this age I was insane about horror. I’d read some young horror novels but horror movies were my go-to thing. I lived next door to a small video rental place and would specifically head straight to horror every time my mom and I went, and most times I left with something to watch over the weekend. My mom liked horror but she liked everything, and she rarely said anything about me increasingly excited about specifically horror. I’d been watching Nightmare on Elm Street movies and more relevant things like Fright Night and Once Bitten for a while already. I was never told no or that I was too young. In fact, by 1995, I had a horror book club subscription that she bought me. Me seeing The Last Vampire and going “oh??” was a neutral act as far as I could tell.

But my mom wasn’t there. It was just me, my niece, and the babysitter walking away to look at yarn or needles or something. I picked up the book. I was very intrigued. My niece, lingering nearby, didn’t read and didn’t give a shit. I looked at the price tag. It was less than I’d walked in the store with. Theoretically I should spend my money on food, if necessary, but I didn’t see myself coming back to this store anytime soon. I lived in a completely different neighborhood many miles away. I should definitely buy the book now.

I knew how it was with babysitters rather than my mom, so I walked the book over to the sewing aisle. Can I buy a book? She seemed very annoyed that I would dare speak to her and said no. She didn’t look at the book, barely seemed to care that I was there, and generally gave “fuck off” vibes. I started to mosey back to the books but decided for her that she was wrong and I would, in fact, be buying that book. I was old enough. If I had fucked up and accidentally bought porn (in Kmart? The gray hair store? Unlikely!), my mom would tell me later.

As our babysitter walked into a checkout lane, I walked into the adjacent empty one and quickly purchased my book. We left the checkout lanes together, her largely unaware until just after we left the area and I still had the book in hand and my niece’s expression of shock at my gall grabbed the babysitter’s attention. If the babysitter said anything definitive, it was essentially an informative “your parents are going to hear about this” kind of statement, which I’m sure I shrugged at. None of the adults in my everyday life cared about what I read or watched.

But it was simply called The Last Vampire and the cover wasn’t acceptably pastel or pink, and I could feel the hardcore judgment permeate the car on the short ride to get to a restaurant stop for lunch. It was even worse in the restaurant. This lady was not only mad at me for being a young girl into reading but that I was reading potential horror smut. Young girls don’t do that. At all. Ever. I was supposed to be at home in a dark closet dressed to the stuffy conservative nines darning socks for my future husband or standing before the stove learning how to baste a turkey so my 47 children to be arriving shortly by osmosis (no sex allowed) don’t starve, duh. Reading is for recipes and the bible only. Beyond that, my only goal in life was supposed to be obedience, and I had clearly fucked up there.

The waitress came to our table. I wasn’t hungry for anything the restaurant had but decided to order something that I thought was simple – a grilled cheese sandwich. While we waited, I got mood from across the table. Eventually the food arrived and what was placed before me was not a grilled cheese sandwich. I was so confused. Did my tablemates get my order instead? No. Oh. Wtf. The sandwich in front of me had meat in it, and I didn’t much like meat. I looked at it and I just couldn’t. The babysitter had words about this. I was told, in anger, that I should just tell the waitress to replace it. You can do that?? The waitress came back and I got my new food order in. By then my anxiety was high and my appetite was gone. I felt like everyone was mad at me now. My intended plate arrived but there was something else wrong, like maybe it had a pickle that I didn’t expect, but I tried to eat it and it just wasn’t working out. I was picking instead of happily consuming the way I was “supposed” to be. The babysitter was absolutely fuming by now. We left the restaurant and I felt like I’d soon be marked on a hit list. Kids who make questionable decisions for themselves without permission then dare to also have opinions AND feelings: me, marked for death – the babysitter.

Of course my family heard about the situation, and of course they privately shrugged at the event despite oh-that’s-so-unfortunate to the babysitter’s irritated face. Kid me was not a fan of presumed authority figures pretending they actually had authority, and everyone who was around me long enough knew it. Me doing something against what an adult told me to do?! Holy shit, no way! Gosh! Oh well. Kid, can you please at least fake it for a few hours among strangers? Me: not when that stranger’s a fucking bitch.

It took me a while to actually get around to reading The Last Vampire because of that day. I may have been closer to 14 once I did, and by then it was exactly where I was in terms of reading and content levels. I don’t remember the exact story but I remember any expectation of possible vampyric smuttiness was dashed by the reality that you get strung along by irrelevant details. Maybe the average religion-informed 12 year old should not have been reading it because of Ideas™️ but I would have been fine.

Yesterday I went into a thrift store for no specific reason but air conditioning and already-in-the-neighborhood time-wasting. There, among the poorly organized fiction novels with darker covers, I found three Christopher Pike books. None had been properly labeled for sale, so I have to assume they were placed there just for me. An additional clue was, just below them, some needy jackass had misplaced a title from the opposite aisle and situated it cover-first in the scary dark-cover book section: The Book of Mormon. I heard you weren’t married and were walking around this earth without children – don’t you dare touch that horror book, you adult with autonomy and opinions! The Holy Ghost is looking! (I know. 😘🥵👻🫵🍆👌💦😇🪽) Alas. You know what I did. I bought all three. I hope my one-time babysitter turned in her grave.

I hear The Midnight Club was adapted by Mike Flanagan (Midnight Mass, The Haunting of Hill House) a few years ago, but I haven’t seen it yet, so perhaps I should read it then watch the show. Yikes, IMDB has it as a 6.5. That’s bad for a TV show. Oh well, I can still read the book now, at least.

The Books & TV of 2024

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The Books

Towards the end of 2020 into 2021, when I realized I could finally read actual books uninterrupted for the first time since spending a summer reading A Song of Ice and Fire, I realized I no longer knew where I stood with this form of storytelling. I could guess I liked some amount of horror and sci-fi, and I always appreciate a well-written non-fiction astrology book, but… was that it? Proceed the most low-effort attempt at trying to figure that out.

And then this year happened. I actually branched out. As you’ll read, I don’t think I made the best choices, but I Made An Attempt.

John Edward – Crossing Over

I remember wanting to read this 20 years ago, and I finally got around to starting it in 2023 at around the same time that my mom died. Coincidence? Nope. I ended up fully finishing this in January or February this year. It’s a biography style book, with Edward here discussing the lead-up to the TV show that was airing around 2001 and explaining some of his history learning he was a medium and his peripheral experiences with mediumship. If you’re interested in the topic, it brings up some existential ideas. If you’re a hardcore skeptic, it’s unlikely to be a picnic as the whole thing is anecdotes. Since closed-door skeptics aren’t going to be reading these kinds of books two decades after their release, I’ll just say it was worth finally doing.

AO3

Over the spring I was doing some serious writing where I hit a wall of both pacing and trying to find the right words without repeating myself or sounding like a robot. I needed to branch out of the box I was in and read other people’s adjective-filled voices without breaking the flow too much by committing to a full book. I ultimately ended up wandering the way of AO3.

I learned I hated fan fiction way back in 1999, so “original work” aka porn it was. I read a few things, mostly things I don’t remember well enough now to find. Apparently someone wrote and posted a story about a punky lady stopping at a hotel run by bimbos, only to be mysteriously brainwashed into becoming a hotel bimbo herself; proceed insane sexual acts to please some unseen client. I read that and thought, wow, that was something. Another thought: how come I can talk about Hollywood movies featuring “interesting” sexual content (like, I dunno, licking a bathtub) on social media, but 2000 words getting straight to the point is like, WTF YO DANGER WORDS GRANDMA’S LOOKING *ban*? I get the idea of slow drip teasing and intellectual foreplay just in the sense of humans gonna human, but why does that get the sticker of classy, high-brow, socially approved artistic merit badges, but very similar content without the lead-up or atmospheric pretense is, in a word, improper or immature?

Anyway, I learned that absurdist written porn is still somewhat entertaining, I still don’t know how to turn 10 words into 30, and after repeat youtube recommendations about 100+ page books to read because I’ve previously looked at top-whatever lists looking for sci-fi and horror to shortlist, I thought perhaps I should mix it up and try some smut. The goal when I started reading actual books again was to branch out and sample what was out there, so, let’s actually go the distance.

Colleen Hoover – Verity & It Ends With Us

This was my first clue that maybe socially perceived “spice” was not for me. In short, these fucking lightweights!

Verity was an alright story, but the overall essence of the thing reminded me a lot of just-alright movies I’ve seen. It’s more dark, creepy romance than anything, where if it were a movie it would be a romantic thriller. The porny parts are brief, if vital to the story, and largely handled like a 13 year old christian girl whispering to her best friend that she needs a sanitary napkin even with the presence of being dark. The it’s-been-a-while (cue Staind) piece was excellent, at least.

That wasn’t a negative experience and folks were talking about It Ends With Us more, so I went ahead with that. Here things intellectually derailed – the ending of the book is a fucking bullshit attempt at empathy meanwhile shitting all over the sanctity of oneself or one’s family – and the characters were more wooden. It wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever read, and plenty of fictional and non-fictional people make dumb decisions, and I learned that I probably don’t want to read this subgenre, so it was ultimately an alright, informative experience. (Is it cool if I leave this run-on sentence here in this literary review?)

Liza James – Vibe

Straight up porn. I haven’t finished this, but for what I’ve read, the plot of this is pretty fucked up. It’s solidly in the “not for everyone” camp, featuring coercion, pedophilia, rape, murder and a whole lot of lesbian sex. The way the characters all talk to each other is ridiculous and toxic as fuck. If you’re familiar with the movie 8MM, this falls in that ballpark of tonal “vibes”. Anyway, the angry, aggressive sex got old and I’m having trouble getting through the final chapters despite wanting to know what happens already.

Ray Bradbury – All Summer In A Day

This is a short story, but because I read The Martian Chronicles last year, I figured I might as well include this.

Fair story, very easy read, not a fun ending. Recommended if you’re looking for a quick drive into woe town via route sci-fi. You can easily find it online at the usual places one might find “free” media.

Maggie Smith – Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change

I picked through a bunch of other psychology-adjacent books, but this one was necessary for a relatively quick skim when I was having an extremely bad day. The simple messages and platitudes helped on the surface but I didn’t relate enough with her specific story of divorce for it to make a true impact. I tried.

Kathleen Hanna – Rebel Girl

I got to the part just before the formation of Bikini Kill and crapped out, not sure I wanted to be sad about music today. Other things (see above) took over and I forgot to return. The first parts of the book were often difficult to read because of the subject matter, though throughout it I felt like I was listening to a friend talk. Teenage and early 20s me had a weird relationship with perceived femininity or womanhood thanks to not wanting to be seen as weak, stupid, a sexual object, or a housemaid, and rarely relating to being “a girl” (little did I understand that I was experiencing this regardless), so even though I was listening to Le Tigre and picking at Bikini Kill by 20, I felt an awkward disconnect from their overall girls-first advertising… and then I got older and it made more and more and more sense, and I really wish I didn’t live in a world that feels about as backwards as it did when I was literally a girl. Something something I will resist the psychic death. At this point in my life I think Kathleen Hanna is the bee’s knees. I shall return.

While that’s not literally everything I read this year (I also read a 200 year old book of poems!), that’s about as much as I have record of. As I’ve leaned into presumptively female voices and temporarily shifted away from my home turf, the question of what’s next comes to mind. Am I finally going to read a grown-up horror book? We’ll see where I land after I finish Vibe.

The Shows

I didn’t watch a ton of TV this year, which is a shift from the last decade of having Star Trek or Stargate lull me to sleep and binging at least one show per month. Movies took priority, YouTube videos second, and then I actually read some things. The shows I did watch and finish this year I also didn’t get super invested in – again, my attention was elsewhere.

But, as soon as it was out, I watched the newer Three-Body Problem. It was not as good as the Chinese show but had I not known better I might have found it fine. I’m more looking forward to what’s next for the Chinese series, so hopefully that comes out first.

Presumed Innocent was a random pick and was fine. Bridgerton was alright. Feud was a bummer watch. True Detective was decent. House of the Dragon was cool. Started to watch The Penguin, got bored, quit.

I’m currently watching Silo and Dune: Prophecy. I’m a little behind, so, no strong opinions yet, but they both look aesthetically good.

I’m sure I’m forgetting something (edit: I completely forgot about finally watching S1 of The Terror. Oh well.). Overall, it just wasn’t a big TV year for me.

One big marker of my year was not watching a single episode of Survivor. I can’t remember the last season I watched now but I skipped all that aired in 2024, and that was a first for me since the show first began. The whole thing comes down to it being a shared experience with my mom. We originally watched the show together, and then at the same time in different spaces followed by checking in the hours or days after. Once her dementia took off, that was that. It was weird to watch the show but not be able to talk to her about it and hear her over-sure opinions that I almost always disagreed with. Now the thought of watching feels like ripping open a wound, much like christmas just felt. I was too deep in grief and anxiety last year, but this one? Life is fucking bullshit. Sharing Survivor with her felt like a Forever thing, a staple to existence, and now… enh. I’m sick of feeling sad. So no Survivor for me.

Looking forward to Severance and finishing Yellowstone. I plan to watch The Creep Tapes in time. Curious about the Oscars as usual anymore. Gotta get back to From. A new Yellowjackets season is coming.

I’m sure there will be more announcements for 2025 in the upcoming weeks as the world wakes up again, so, til then.

I can buy myself flowers.

escapatoria

I read another book outside of my wheelhouse. On theme with the previous attempt, this time I read It Ends With Us.

Once again, the writing was simple and easy. I didn’t read this one in two days but I read it fairly quickly. Like the former, the Lifetime/Hallmark movie cliches were immense, and there was a lot of tell-don’t-show going on. That makes for a snappy read, but also makes for a poorly believable, hollow story.

The plot centered on a lady who comes from a domestic violence household who swears she’ll Never when she grows up but, of course, runs head-first right into it. That brings her to Mr. Toxic Masculinity, a guy who has no impulse control because he has a mopey dark past and boohoo him. Right out of the gate he tries to coerce her into sex. Proceed nonsense. We end up on a journey while main character decides how she feels about walking red flags.

I was still pretty skeptical of romance as a genre when I was young, but if I had been much younger than I am now, I might not have noticed the overall tone of what this book put out. At this point in my life I saw through the character(s) and saw the author’s psyche showing, as well as took note of the popularity of this book as a general reflection of society being stupid. I am yucking your yum, kids. Or not-kids, even. Because the author was around 36 when she puts these words out into the world and, as much as she was trying to go for empathy towards her IRL parents, she put out a message I don’t feel best represents those who’ve been abused or grew up in an abusive environment (or might potentially be facing those things). In the fantasy “spicy” realm of the book, it’s a bad representation of female sexuality, whether we’re talking the teenager or the adult. While there are folks who are (for example) demisexual, or prefer to be pursued, or only find enjoyment in superficial and physical attraction, or are into victim-savior ideas, the book insinuates the character has a strong attraction to a man but the actual “show” (not telling) element is not apparent and it comes across like cardboard. In reflection, it seemed like more evidence of purity culture leaking into the minds of folks who don’t participate. While that might be a result of tempering for one’s audience, ennnnh. No. We can do better.

Of course, the sex-is-scary crowd has things to say about “spicy” content in the sense of “oh no! not the children! my begonias!”, even if it’s limp noodle city to anyone who’s ever read, written, watched, or imagined women doing their own thing outside of the context of being seen as a prized series of holes by some random asshole begging on the floor that he just needs one fuck.

I wrote a billion more words about this and wrote about how irritating society was about apparent sexuality when I was a teenager (things haven’t changed much), but that sums it up. The book wasn’t a terrible read as far as the literal reading experience, but the content needed assistance. I hope the young people who pick this book up because it’s popular know better, but based on the 4-5 star reviews I keep seeing, ennnnnh.

No idea what I’m reading next.

In which I read a 300 page book in 2 days because why not.

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The intention years ago was to explore where I was with fiction as an adult. I read two different sci-fi things, hesitated to read any horror given the last few years of living it, picked at a biography or two, and then stagnated again. I tried some short fiction, including some absurdist porn in the personal pursuit of fresh adjectives, but that wasn’t really what I meant to be doing. The goal was novels.

A youtuber kept coming across my feed. She’s repeatedly given signs of a tenderness I do not possess as a human being, but I’m into my gathering of perspectives in full-blast Gemini mode, so I listened to what she had to say about some books she read. She gave a simplistic rating scale, including whether things were scary and “spicy”. I don’t trust anyone’s account of what scary or sexy is, but I was listening specifically for those. I gathered a few more potential future reads, thrown into the collection of book-reading ideas that have gone nowhere past research.

Clicking on Verity was to check to make sure it was technologically readable, since I’ve made that mistake before. I’m not sure why now I actually read anything past thinking “yep, that’s English”. But it felt familiar. The main character’s mom just died after she’s spent a while caring for her, so, weird. How’d I end up here in my escapism? Not much happens in that first chapter beyond some scene-setting and character introductions after a catalyst event, but it ends on a cliffhanger. While intriguing, not enough. Thrillers are not my cup of tea… but what the fuck do I know anymore. The whole reason I’m here is because I don’t know. Still, I left it alone to go focus on the million other things.

Maybe a week later, I went back. And I was little confused, trying to make sense of the apparent genre classifications that didn’t feel apparent beyond the first chapter. But it arrives, gradually, then suddenly.

I got distracted early on by the basic plot of the book. It’s about a writer hired to ghost write another author’s book. I got to thinking about how wonderfully synchronistic that is when I have Jupiter transiting my 9th house (publishing) just now, conjunct my Mercury when I grabbed the book then Sun when I started actually reading it. I’m a 9th house Gemini. It’s about two authors. Wild how that ended up being the choice of book just now.

Further reading, it’s strangely reflective of other things in my chart and life. It echoes recent words I’ve put down, pulling similar ideas into different contexts. The other author’s words in the book might as well be my Scorpio Moon, presently squared by transiting Pluto: Obsessive thoughts, over-focus on shitty things, taking things to their lower limits and putting on a blank face while it goes on because the alternative sucks. I ended up thinking about how I’ve never had an original thought or experience in my life, how humans be humaning and we can never escape it. As one does.

It takes a minute to show up, but there’s a lot of matter-of-fact sex in this book. Intellectually I feel like I’m supposed to be titillated, one way or the other, somehow; the focus is quite female gaze without outright screaming “FOREARMS!”. But much of it feels factual, even mechanical, and less experienced. It’s like someone telling a story three days later rather than being in that person’s body (which is, basically, what it is… until it isn’t, and then it feels like the most oddly mechanical, Sahara Desert display yet). So the “spicy” element, while there, is a bit lost on me. However, it could just be me, because, you know. I’m confused by how the human brain ends up interpreting things as sexual. The delayed BJ thing was fantastic, at least. But mostly it feels like porn for people who don’t read or watch porn… which may be a pretty fair assessment of popular book genre readers. And maybe the cleanliness is a reflection of knowing the audience. We don’t talk about wet pussies and the sound of macaroni around these parts, no sir. No switching wigs in the book, guys.

Rewatching the video: ha. I definitely got it because the youtuber was disturbed by the “spice” level. It wasn’t that spicy. Why am I using this word? It was porn lite. Loads of sex, just not especially vivid most of the time.

The thriller element to the book felt on par with a Lifetime movie mixed with something like Gone Girl. I also had Hereditary thoughts, minus the horror element of that movie. Jane Erye also came to mind, though it’s been a long time and I’m not sure the specifics. In any case, there’s fucky minds and fucky results, a man is at the center of the story, and women around him are dealing with their separate issues. That reads wrong: it’s a woman-focused story, but the major events come about due to a particular man’s existence. All the same, I could see the Lifetime crowd of yore eating this up. That doesn’t make it bad, just familiar.

The ending was… a thing, yes. It’s meant to be disturbing, and yes, it succeeded. It’s also a bit frustrating because of what it implies after the story ends. I can see why it ended as it did, but it still feels like there were other, better options here. But the whole book is like that. How come it takes the protagonist so long to get through her obvious need to know what she wants to know? And why are we questioning the choices of fictional characters trapped in a make-believe universe, anyway? Said like a true horror fan. Just here for the ride! el oh el. *brain seizes in acceptance of The Whatever* Art, amirite?

All the same, after the first chapter, I read this whole book in two days, so it obviously kept me intrigued. The writer did a fine job at that for sure. Attention grabbed and escapism obtained. Win!

Whether I’ll read another thriller or romantic thriller remains to be seen, but that I read anything bigger than 10 pages not my own work is a miracle I’d like to continue, so if that’s what hits when I next think to read something, I guess that’s what happens.

Now I’m going to go cry at other reviews of this book. “Graphic sex scenes”? It’s fun when 17 year olds and christian-affiliated people write stuff on the internet, isn’t it.

TV & Books of 2023

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Books of 2023

So, I only read part of a single book released in the past year. However, I read – if briefly – more than one book this year, which is a christmas miracle after so many years of not reading much beyond astrology textbooks and whatever internet things.

I finished The Martian Chronicles. I’ve already written about that, and it was a positive experience. Definitely recommend if you like spooky sci-fi and quick, easy reads.

As for this year’s releases, the single book I began to read was the Britney Spears memoir. I got about halfway in. I probably could have finished it but it came out at the same time my mom died, so my follow-through wasn’t up to snuff. That said, I was really enjoying it in terms of astrological reference, both in general and the commonalities vs differences between my own and her chart. We have the same Ascendant and some of the things she said about her youth echoed how I noticed people treated me at around the same times. Her first video taking place in a school is wild with her Sun in 3rd, too. Among other things. I went total astro nerd. Perhaps I should read more biographies just for that reason.

I picked at others, but one other I got past a few paragraphs: Crossing Over by John Edward. That’s also a memoir style read, about a medium approaching the time of when his TV show began. I remember that show (Crossing Over) airing near early 2001 on Sci-Fi and being glued to the TV fascinated about how any of this was possible. My skepticism easily set it aside as a “whatever” but every so often I end up back on these sorts of thoughts. Semi-recent exploration of tarot has me back there, wondering about the creativity of the human mind to fill in blanks and make things fit even when they’re entirely made-up or random. But then comes thoughts of how the core human experience might be so simple and predictable that it follows that any of this works simply because it pretty much always will, irrelevant of audience or timing or source or method. Then I’m brought back to mediums who give better in terms of details and the shared opinions about what takes place post-death. I wonder if, instead of literals, perhaps there’s no post-death and what these people pick up is akin to general awareness of living human space, and it’s the human mind interpreting it as beyond life due to the idea being psychologically comforting. In any case, the fascination remains, despite all the questioning in the world. If nothing else, it’s an interesting story.

I have to assume more reading will be coming in the following year as I’m due to lose my access to near-24/7 internet and electricity. I hope that’s not the case, but being a realist, it’s probably best to assume I’m probably going to finish more than one book this next year.

TV of 2023

Is anyone going to be surprised if I say my favorite TV show experience this year was watching Three-Body Problem? I’m seriously considering rewatching it, but with the Netflix version of the same story coming soon enough (March?) I will probably hold out and see how I feel after. In any case, this was the first chinese TV show I’ve ever seen, and it was weird how fast I didn’t have to always look at the subtitles given my total lack of experience with the language. The show itself had an odd flow, starting in a weird depressive place (the main guy has an existential crisis), then going fucking bonkers with hard science terminology and concepts, and then taking a left turn into the past. The video game scenes were done well, and the specific computer science episode about broke my brain. I should know these things. For that reason, this would be an excellent show to introduce on a younger person getting into science who can handle a bit of dark, apocalyptic content. Should I read Silent Spring? Dehydrate!

My other favorite show of 2023 was Silo. It felt similar to other claustrophobic sci-fi I’ve seen, particularly whichever season of The 100 where some of the kids live underground for too long and Deep Space Nine. The world-building and depth of characters and acting and set design and everything about the show was perfect. I’m curious to see how another season will go given the ending opening up a fresh can of worms. heh.

I saw a few horror shows, and both The Last of Us and The Fall of the House of Usher did a fair job at keeping my brain occupied without making me feel like I wasted my time. The death scenes in Usher were rough on the soul, especially the first one. The Last of Us felt familiar to a thousand movies and episodes I’ve seen before but for some reason the mall episode continues to stick in mind and I’m curious to see where the show goes from here.

Yellowjackets was fun to catch up on and see. I’m not a big fan of being strung along from episode one for answers about what happened where, but the 5-star casting and occasional silliness works.

I know I saw For All Mankind this year since it’s currently airing. This is another excellent sci-fi show with, now, enough modern realism to just about piss you off. Imagine a world where we kept going to the moon, actively exploring space tech, and trying to do fucking anything besides waste money on the war machine. 9/11 didn’t happen in this reality. But the war machine clearly exists in this world, too, and that’s where the current season is at when it’s not playing around with workers vs the rich concepts. It seems timely in a way the previous seasons didn’t, even though it’s talking about the early-mid 2000s, because of the current flavor of international politics. Assuming they jump ahead another full decade, the next season will be almost current day, probably with absurd tech attached.

I finally watched Over The Garden Wall. I did not expect a silly cartoon to work that well. It has an autumnal gothic style with a weird manic comedic energy and the episodes are perfectly short for both kids and not-into-cartoons people. Now I know why I keep seeing one episode’s pumpkin guy everywhere these days. If you haven’t seen it before, hold out for falling leaves & rainy nights times and binge it.

I barely remember the final season of Physical now, but for that reason, I think they ended it in a good place. The story didn’t feel 100% complete, but the given plot was wrapped up after what felt like a janky season by comparison to the previous two. I’d recommend the 1st season if you’re interested in an early 80s-era drama featuring bad mental health that’ll take every Californian alive then back in fuckin’ time.

And Just Like That went to the usual nonsense places it does, where people with money have people with money problems and we sprinkle in social and/or relationship issues to ponder on top. This franchise is brain candy. You already know how you feel about it by now.

Season one of Invasion was excellent. Two was too slow with too much going on so the story barely moved forward. I would hope that’s fixed in the third season, which has yet to air.

The Morning Show is doing similar things with reality vs fantasy that For All Mankind is, just compressed to very modern times and politics of the moment. Until this past season, most of the content was an obvious simile of the time period, covering very early covid and #metoo and the like. This past season seemed like it was going to talk about megarich people buying out companies they don’t have the credentials to run but it took a turn away from talking about Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and went somewhere I didn’t recognize as a metaphor for 2022 anymore. The lack of resolution for a lot of those things in real life probably contributes. The next season will meet modern times close enough that I wonder if they plan to switch things up more towards personal dramas and make-believe over addressing modern news issues. If they wait long enough, they can just talk about the 2024 election, but probably by 2025 when it airs we’ll all be sick of that shit.

I either wasn’t alive or wasn’t very conscious of the world for the time periods The Crown covered prior to its last season. The last one had a lot of awkward familiarity. I remember when Diana died and the world acted real fucking weird about it. I’m the same age as William, so that also echoed familiarity as he grew up in the show. I didn’t pay attention to what was going on overseas, didn’t find whatever these people were doing very relevant, so this show might as well be entirely made-up, but the sore spots it hits about people and life and sadness of one’s time and usefulness coming to a close worked. It probably could have gone for another season, but it remains to be seen how things will pan out for the current dude and his children.

I’m struggling to remember when I watched certain shows because I don’t keep a record of shows like I do movies. Did I watch House of the Dragon early this year or late last? Wednesday? Yellowstone? I do remember it took quite a while to catch up on Yellowstone, and that was a quality watch.

I tried the shows From, Archive 81, Servant, Ascension, Shining Vale, The Peripheral, Cabinet of Curiosities, Interview with the Vampire, Willow… Didn’t finish Willow, Interview with the Vampire is great horror brain candy, Cabinet was fun, The Peripheral just was, Shining Vale didn’t really hit, Ascension the same, Servant has its moments but something about it doesn’t work well, Archive 81 was fine, and From was good but I’m not caught up to see where it was going.

One more: The White Lotus‘s 2nd season. I waited to see it until I was in a better mood for comedy, and it was another decent job of keeping things interesting on planet rich lady vacation. If there’s a 3rd season, I’m curious to see if the lack of a certain character will matter to the tone of the show or if we’ve all but literally jumped the shark on this one.

This was a lot of words, hence why I started with my favorites, but the TLDR is that I highly recommend Three-Body Problem to those into hard science fiction, Silo for those into dramatic sci-fi, The Fall of the House of Usher for those into moody + gory horror, and Over The Garden Wall if you’ve got young kids but you need some light spoopy content.

The Martian Chronicles

escapatoria

The book hoarding of recent years hasn’t come to much. Empty moments lead elsewhere, or nowhere at all. I still don’t know which rabbit trail to follow as I don’t have a solid theory to work from over which genres or topics or styles of writing appeal to adult me in written form. Best guess is I probably still like horror like I did as a teenager, but I read synopses about someone’s broken family or blah blah murder ghost blah and I’M BORED ALREADY. I asked for horror, not Karen/Kyle Had A Feeling.

Of recent years, I’ve been liking sci-fi in movies/TV more than most things. The Myst series were already my favorite books. I went through a little “best of” phase of sci-fi books when I was in my early 20s and enjoyed them all okay. So maybe I do that and see how it goes. I read Project Hail Mary last year, and while it didn’t have my darker sensibilities due to the self-censoring narrator, it went to some places that were nice to “experience”. But even then, I didn’t keep going. I hoarded the info and nothing more.

Recently I was on social media and saw a poorly credited Ray Bradbury quote that was intent on making a statement about today, reflected from some past view. I skimmed over it, continued on with life. But the quote popped up again. It piqued my curiosity this time. What was the context, here? Why was anyone saying that at any time ever? Where’s the rest of the thought?

Soon I grabbed The Martian Chronicles and started reading.

The book is organized as short stories with an overall connecting plot. It was likely written in the later 40s and published in 1950, so it reeks of everything circa that time, with an eye on a future in space. In it, Earth is approaching its final days and is sending missions to Mars to colonize it, initially unaware that it’s already populated. Enough science has happened since 1950 to make the potential of believability go to shit (plus I’m pretty sure they could have spectrum-analyzed Mars by 1950 to know it didn’t have enough oxygen for humans to breathe), but it’s easy enough to set aside the reality of the thing and look at it like any fantasy idea, especially in contrast to what’s going on with Earth in the background.

The book touches on some heavy topics. Racism, colonization (think giving native americans smallpox blankets and “manifest destiny”), relationship abuse, nuclear war, dealing with death, and humans being fucking trash. There’s also a story transparently about hating on religious capitalism and censorship in media/art where all the censors get murdered (it’s a fun one). My brain personally lit up at the gas station story, of how simple it was, yet revealing this huge mind-bending thing. And it’s barely touched on elsewhere, and given no explanation in the first place, because fuck you that’s why. Why, why not, who cares, it happened, here’s the next thing, lol f u.

It didn’t take long into reading before I had my regularly scheduled existential crisis. This was written no later than 1950. That was 73 years ago. My oldest parent was 5 when this was published. My grandparents were collectively approximately 25. And this isn’t even original, when funneled down to ideas put into writing before. Somewhere down the line some relative was probably reading The Time Machine. Before that, I don’t have titles offhand, but I’m sure 200 or 500 years ago they had ghost stories, stories of corruption, stories about crossing into unknown places or meeting strange foreigners, stories of humanity meeting its end. Maybe they were a little simpler than Game of Thrones or The Odyssey, going much further back, but I’m sure they existed. Because that’s humans being humans, and the stories are a product of that.

I got to thinking about how we, as a species, are living a perpetual broken record. Every so many years we hit the rewind button and do the same essential shit over again, on perpetual repeat until the tape gets trapped in the VCR. The stories are essentially the same because we are what we are. People continue to be corrupt and corruptible. We were always at war with Eurasia, no wait it’s East Asia, fuck I forget which. Oh well, hit the automatic response button to fight against whatever the blurry faraway monster is this week. Might as well forget the past in favor of whatever now looks like, even if I knew the past I’d know that now is yesterday in new clothes. Be kind rewind.

The overall book is an exaggeration of a series of thoughts about war and immigration, but nevertheless hits on the sore points of how we’re mammals just doing the mammal thing trying to survive and perpetuate through the illusions of love and home.

Technically, it had good story-telling, but needed a little work in the description department and some of the characters were a little too similar to each other. It reads akin to teenage level, meaning it’s very easy to read (the short stories make it extra easy) but the content is probably a bit too much for the sensitive given the amount of death going on, so college level makes more sense, and college aged and older are more likely to be able to contextualize the setting and understand that RB was trying to make a statement about people after WWII. In short, would recommend, just not to a 12 year old or someone who can’t handle bleak content akin to Black Mirror. Genre is not hard sci fi at all, but a more floral version of sci fi mixed with western themes, horror, drama, fantasy. One story in it is only tangentially sci-fi as it takes place on Earth and sounds like a normal thing except for what’s going on in the background.

Back to the reality of my situation. Do I keep reading sci-fi? I don’t know. This is evidently a well-known “best of” book, so perhaps I lucked out and further in will just make me angry that people are boring. Perhaps it’ll be time for a detour or a new thing entirely, soon. Don’t know. Maybe it turns out I’m fine with the Sex And The City of novel-kind after all. Humans be humaning.