This past week, September 16-23, has been Bisexual Visibility Week, and today, September 23rd, is Bisexual Visibility Day! See me. I’m right here. Well, in your screen. Along with my Latine Heritage Month post, this is another one that I’ve neglected to do some years since it comes at a slightly dicey time in the school year, but I probably shouldn’tbe neglecting, since it, y’know, directly correlates to my identity. Oops. A little embarrassing, but once again, no time like the present.
Every year. Every year, I swear to god. I’m much less online than I used to be, but from what I see snatches of, every other year, some discourse comes back about whether or not bisexuals are actually “queer enough” or if straight-passing bisexuals are allowed at pride, or something equally meaningless. (Also, I feel like everyone debating the latter should remember that Brenda Howard, a bisexual woman, was a key figure in creating Pride events and rallies as we know them here in the States.) Just seeing flashes of whatever’s going down on TikTok makes me lose a year off my life. But it brings up a point that I’ve often thought about when it comes to the queer community: the infighting needs to stop. Please. There’s no sense in playing the oppression olympics amongst ourselves, especially when the threats against the LGBTQ+ community at large are so much more pressing. Also, please stop being weird about bisexual people. This is coming from somebody who’s had the privilege of not experiencing any direct biphobia, thankfully, but has heard it in real life directed at friends and loved ones, as well as seeing it run rampant on the internet. All of this petty fighting is a distraction from what’s really happening: not long after they removed the word transgender from the Stonewall National Monument website, they removed the word bisexual from the “history and culture” section. As of now, they’ve since reinstated it (though the absence of trans people remains glaring…love to all my trans siblings, in light of, well, everything), but it sends a clear message: they’re bent on cutting our community up until they can conveniently erase it from American history. And we will not be erased.
To all of my fellow bisexuals: you are bisexual enough. No matter your relationship status, attraction, or partner, you will always be bisexual. Nobody can dictate your identity but you. Not the internet, not the people in your life—nobody. There is no one central bisexual experience, but every individual experience under the sun is valid, so long as you want to claim it. You’re the captain of this ship, and you are bisexual enough. And you are loved. I don’t know about you, but I’ve loved being bisexual in the nearly seven years (Jesus, has it been that long?)
TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK! Have you read any of these books, and if so, what did you think of them? What are some of your favorite books by bisexual authors? Let me know in the comments!
Today’s song:
MICHELANGELO DYING IS UPON US, LET’S GOOOOO
That’s it for this recommendations post! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.
Since I’ve been gone for a little while, here are the graphics for the weeks I was absent, because I am nothing if not a creature who lives for making little graphics:
You guys…Alien: Earth, right???? Oh my god??? Admittedly, the last two episodes have faltered, but I’d say the first five episodes made me remember why I love Noah Hawley so much. Toss him into another franchise and genre, and he adapts to the environment as swiftly as a frog tossed from the land into a freshwater pond. His take on Alien has sprawled into Fargo’s riddled dialogue and character building and Legion’s avant-garde aesthetics, yet easily stays true to Ridley Scott and Dan O’Bannon’s visions. No notes on the acting (Timothy Olyphant is top tier, Wendy and the Lost Boys are eerily good at playing children in adult bodies, and Babou Ceesay is both a worthy successor to Malvo AND a compelling character on his own). It’s…pushing my limits as far as body horror, for sure (had to knit in silence for an hour after episode 2), but that’s Alien for you.
But one of the more minor aspects of the prospect of new Noah Hawley content that got me going was the needle drops. I joked with my family that I couldn’t wait for the inevitable, devastating Lisa Hannigan cover song to come into the soundtrack, and while that hasn’t happened, I’m more desperate than ever to see this man’s playlist, because my god. For me, nothing’s come close to the pair of needle drops in episode 1 (though “Ocean Size” at the end of episode 4 comes close)—my brother, who has much more metalhead street cred than me, said that “you know Noah Hawley’s a real one because he included ‘E5150’ with ‘The Mob Rules.’”
But “Killer Crane?” Even though it wasn’t a TV on the Radio song that I was initially familiar with, I was instantly just giddy. The whole episode made me giddy, to be honest—with a few minor flaws, it felt like such a stunning, comprehensive intro to the show. GOD!! I already knew that Hawley was a fellow fan after he used “Quartz” in the trailer for season 3 of Legion, but I’m just happy to see it shine in a full-fledged show. I still think it’s one of my favorite needle drops in the show so far. It’s amongst one of the many spectacularly-shot scenes throughout the episode: soon after Marcy’s consciousness is transferred into Wendy’s robot body, we see her performing superhuman cliff-diving feats in the idyllic jungle paradise of Neverland. As a scene, it’s just so luscious with the visual metaphor of Wendy leaping off of a literal precipice, paired with the mental precipice of her transition into a new body. Paired with the glimmering, dewy production of “Killer Crane,” it makes for a perfect scene, as does these lyrics: “Her grace’s glide/Across the sea/Across creation/And over time/Her gracious life/Escapes its station.” But the song belies something much more somber; it was written as a tribute to Gerard Smith, their original bassist, who died of lung cancer nine days after the release of Nine Types of Light at the age of 36. Given the hybrid’s consciousnesses, taken from terminally ill children, it’s a grim, apt introduction for their states of being: “Sunshine, I saw you through the hanging vine/A memory of what was mine fading away.” It’s a bittersweet ode to the simultaneous beauty and impermanence of life; the final line of “I could leave suddenly unafraid” could mean both how death could come at any moment for anyone, or leaving the constantly fearful state of mind that comes with grappling with the transience of all things. Damn you, Noah Hawley!! These needle drops are too good, leave some for the rest of us!!
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Arrival of Someday – Jen Malone – grappling with imminent death and soaking up life while one can forms the emotional core of this novel.
I confess that I haven’t been following Wolf Alice too closely, but if my dear friend’s assessment is worth anything (which it obviously is), they’re still going strong. They released a fourth album, The Clearing, in late August. From the snippets I’ve heard, they’ve certainly polished up their sound, but it’s no less candid beneath the sheen. Their indie pop is as hooky as ever. But I can’t shake the feeling that they’re deliberately just making music for Heartstopper at this point. I mean…c’mon. When that moment kicks in at 1:11? Specifically engineered for a shot of Nick and Charlie gazing longingly into each other’s eyes under a string of fairy lights. But as an earnest, bubbly indie love song, “Leaning Against the Wall” perfectly captures that balance of wanting to run and tell everybody about love, but relishing the private moments in tucked-away corners the most. And as a closing track for The Clearing, it eases the listener into a gentle, artfully rearranged outro that leaves you with lingering butterflies in the stomach.
So…Japanese Breakfast! One of the highlights of my brief hiatus was seeing Japanese Breakfast with a wonderful, dear friend of mine. For an artist touring for an album called For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), I couldn’t have imagined a more joyful show—even without the amazing lighting team, Michelle Zauner and co. truly lit up the room, from the sweeping, romantic new songs to the ecstatic rendition of “Everybody Wants To Love You” with the help of Ginger Root. The sets? Truly a spectacle. The setlist? A perfect balance of her whole career. And Zauner just seemed like such a comforting, joyful presence—concerts are always enhanced when the artist actually feels like they want to be there. She played a deep cut solely because she overheard somebody humming it before the show, and that should give you an idea of her presence. And yes, I fucking lost it when she whipped out the gong for “Paprika.” 100% the highlight of my night.
So without further ado, let’s talk about…a song that wasn’t even on the setlist. Oopsie. Either way, the setlist from the show inspired me to dig into more songs from Soft Sounds from Another Planet, an album with one of the best album titles in Japanese Breakfast’s career (though For Melancholy Brunettes is probably tied for the title). Zauner was initially going to make a sci-fi concept album, and though this vision never came to fruition, the atmosphere remains; the album is shrouded in shoegazey, drifting instrumentals that airily swirl around you (see: “Jimmy Fallon Big!”). With a hushed, dreamy tone, Zauner yearns into a starry abyss, longing for an escape: “In search of a soft sound from another planet/In search of a quiet place to put this to rest/Striving for goodness while the cruel men win…” Ow…yeah. If that hasn’t been what life has been like for me since I was a teenager. I don’t have all the answers, but as far as I know, all you can do is look to people like Zauner: make art, spread joy.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Library of Broken Worlds – Alaya Dawn Johnson – “That’s not the way to hurt me/I’ll show you the way to hurt me/In search of a soft sound from another planet/In search of a quiet place to lay this to rest/Striving for goodness while the cruel men win…”
This just in: I’m a total Big Thief poser. Well, maybe not since I’ve actually listened to a full album now, but Double Infinity did turn out to be the first album of theirs that I listened to it in full. There’s something so comforting about it; though it has its weak moments here and there, at its best, it feels like the caress of a warm, woolen sweater, secure and fuzzy. It’s got the feel of Christmas music, but not in the way that you might think; not in the sense of the actual structure of most Christmas songs, but in way that the harmonization feels warm, like the feeling of being curled up by the fire as night fades into he falling snow in late December. “Incomprehensible” remains the pinnacle of the album for me (but how can you top “Incomprehensible,” really?), but the tearjerking closing track comes close.
Talking to my brother and his girlfriend (both much more dedicated fans than me…bigger thieves, if you will) about the album made me realize something about songwriting that’s very contradictory to me, specifically. They were lamenting that some of Adrianne Lenker’s more poetic language had gotten lost in the more plainly spoken lyrics on Double Infinity, and having heard an album like songs, I would honestly agree. If this series has proven anything to you all, it’s that I am an absolute sucker for some good ol’ poetic lyricism. Yet sometimes, things are best said so plainly, affirmations or words of comfort. I can think of ways that the themes of “How Could I Have Known” have been sung more poetically—Wilco’s “Say You Love Me” comes to mind. But sometimes words as simply stated as these can be just as impactful: “They say time is the fourth dimension/They say everything lives and dies/But our love will live forever/Though today we said goodbye.” For me, it’s all in the delivery. Lenker and co. have readily embraced their Grateful Dead jam band era, and honestly, it really isn’t a complaint. The mixing makes it so that the instruments sound truly harmonious, warm and blurred at the edges like snow melting into dirt. The harmonies of the singers themselves not only mesh together beautifully, but they’re just ever so slightly out of sync that it feels like “How Could I Have Known” is being sung around a campfire. And that tight-knit feeling of togetherness is all the better for a song about gratitude for the small, improbable miracles that stacked up that allowed us to meet the people we love.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Last Gifts of the Universe – Riley August – “And they say time’s the fourth dimension/They say everything lives and dies/But our love will live forever/Though, today, we said goodbye…”
“Strange brew/killing what’s inside of you” that would be the water bottle full of alien ticks ❤
And I thought that Legion meant that we were done with Noah Hawley and Jeff Russo making deeply eerie covers of ’60s-’70s songs…no devastating Lisa Hannigan cover yet, but “if you don’t watch out/it’ll stick to you” really does kinda sum up the entire Alien franchise. As always, Noah Hawley continues to impress me by not just being an accomplished author/television writer, but also by having genuinely great pipes…they put too much talent in that man!! I’ve reached my Alien: Earth yap quota for the week, but god, what a great theme song, complete with some subtle creaky spaceship sounds.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Eartheater – Dolores Reyes – “She’s a witch of trouble in electric blue/In her own mad mind, she’s in love with you/With you/Now, what you gonna do?/Strange brew/Killing what’s inside of you…”
Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.
That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Guess who’s back/back again…with a negative review. Oopsies.
Yeah, sorry. I feel like this always happens, and I hate that it’s happening a) right when I come back to blogging in earnest and b) at the start of Latine Heritage Month. I swear this has happened so many times. (Don’t worry! I made a whole post about so many more books by Latine authors that are actually worth a read!) But a gal’s gotta review some bad books sometimes, and remember, kids: a book’s diversity doesn’t immediately mean that there aren’t any issues with the writing.
I’ve been hearing about Mistress of Bones around the blogosphere, and the premise seemed like some classic, YA fantasy fun. I regret to inform you that I’ve once again been duped into reading a very lackluster and generic fantasy book. There’s some slack I’m willing to give this novel because it’s Maria Z. Medina’s debut, but god, I haven’t read such a hot mess in quite some time.
Azul de Arroyo cares for little more in life than her beloved older sister, who had an early death at fourteen. But by channeling the bone magic of her people, she was able to resurrect her at a young age. But when her sister is killed again, she has no choice to journey to the capital city in order to steal back her sister’s bones and return her to life. Soon, Azul has run afoul of the Emissary of Lord Death; her escapades have not gone unnoticed, and he’s got his eye on her. The rules of Death cannot be reversed so easily, and he’ll do anything to stop her—however pulled he is to her. Dragged into a tangled web of dark magic and court intrigue, Azul must do everything in her power to bring her sister back—even at the cost of the world.
TW/CW: animal death, loss of loved ones, violence, gore, murder
DNF at about 60%. I just couldn’t take it. I really tried to make it through this one, but at a certain point, I realized just how fleeting life is, and wanted to spend that life with something other than this novel.
Listen. There’s a certain amount of slack I’m willing to give a novel like this based on a) the fact that it’s a debut novel, and b) how hard it is to get published as a marginalized author. Every novel is, to some extent, a labor of love, and I’m sure this was the truth for Mistress of Bones. I don’t mean to discount the work of Medina and anybody else involved. But god, this was a MESS. Labor of love as writing always is, this needed at least two more rounds of editing. At LEAST.
The problem with the setup of Mistress of Bones wasn’t that it had a nonlinear timeline. I don’t even know if I would call it nonlinear, but there aren’t adequate words to describe…quite what the situation with this novel is. It’s less nonlinear and more just thousands of flashbacks in a trenchcoat posing as a novel. I didn’t mind them in the prologue, and in fact, I did actually enjoy the way the prologue set up the narrative and the tone of the story. It was appropriately spooky and it set up Azul’s character nicely—it got the job done. However, this novel ended up being 50% flashbacks. Mind you, they weren’t just to the same period as the prologue, but jumping to entirely random years in the past. None of it made any logical sense, and not even in a convoluted way—it wasn’t complex, the plot points were just scattered every which way. At that point, if that much of your plot is propped up by taking random detours into the past, there’s something desperately wrong with the plot. Take the flashbacks away, and the plot was just the writing equivalent of a pile of crumpled-up tissues on the ground.
I’m usually one for bombastic dialogue; in fact, I’d like to think that I have a good tolerance, given the steady diet of classic sci-fi novels and ’80s X-Men comics I consumed when I was in high school. If done right, campy dialogue can enhance the atmosphere and the writing style in many ways. But Mistress of Bones missed the mark by miles. The key to its downfall was how self-serious it all was. Once again: I still read a good amount of YA, and there’s a certain amount of drama that you’ve got to accept from the get-go. But Medina constantly had teenagers exclaiming “Bah!” like Romantic English poets and then spouting off the corniest lines of dialogue known to man without an inch of self-awareness. (Thomas Thorne-core, and I don’t mean that in a good way. iykyk.) It was just so self-serious that it defeated the purpose of amping up the drama. What’s more is that all of the characters had the exact same voice. I expected it to be just reserved for the spooky edgelord male YA love interest, but no…they were ALL involved in this. If you’re aiming for drama, you at least have to do it right.
Speaking of the characters…they were also woefully mishandled. I’m wise enough in my older years (read: my early twenties) to know that hardly any YA fantasy book marketed with a Six of Crows comparison delivers. But this was a special kind of mismarketing. First off, only Azul, the Emissary, and Nereida really got any page time. There were a handful of other purportedly important characters skittering about somewhere, but they got so little page time that I lost interest in them and their minimal sway over the plot. Not only that, but even between the main characters, they all had virtually the same voice. They all had that pompous, overly self-serious tone that I spoke about earlier, but there was almost zero variation between any of them. You mean to say that a witch, the emissary of death himself, and a seventeen year old girl would have the exact same speaking voice? It’s almost like they were indistinguishable from each other on purpose—I can’t think of any other explanation for the breadth of how far this hot mess spreads.
Beneath it all, I can’t really say that there was much about Mistress of Bones that grabbed my attention. There were a few quirks in the worldbuilding that kept me reading for a good length, but they were barely sustained. I’m always excited to see Latine-inspired worlds and cultures in genre fiction, but it barely extended past the Spanish-inspired names. I was intrigued by the whole concept of the floating continents and the gods that mandated this seismic shift, but it barely seemed to have any bearing on the plot or the characters. The Emissary of Death should’ve had significant sway over the plot and over Azul’s actions, but the title only served to give him more edgelord love interest points. Looking back, I think this issue boils down most of my problems with Mistress of Bones as a whole: it was all setup with no payoff. We were promised a multilayered, multi-POV fantasy with romance and intrigue, and we only got the bones of those things (no pun intended). It was all skeleton, with no skin or muscle tissue to make the novel into something that could function on its own.
All in all, a novel full of messy, undelivered promises masquerading as a plot. 1.5 stars.
Mistress of Bones is Maria Z. Medina’s debut novel and the first novel in the Mistress of Bones duology; no information is currently available about the sequel.
Today’s song:
GORILLAZ AND SPARKS, THIS IS NOT A DRILL
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
TW/CW: there are mentions of gun violence/school shootings as well as deportations/racism in this post. If those are sensitive topics for you, scroll down to the bold, underlined text to see the book recommendations. Take care of yourself!
Happy Monday, bibliophiles! Looks like I’ll be back for the foreseeable future, now that I’ve adequately got my stuff in order life-wise. As much as I can.
I’d like to take a moment before I get into this post to talk about something nobody seems to want to talk about. I hate to start this off on a somber note, but I have to get this off my chest. I was planning on coming back to the blogosphere earlier, but last week happened to be a dumpster fire like no other. On Wednesday, September 10th, Evergreen High School—the high school I attended—was the victim of a school shooting. Yet nobody seemed to care, solely because a certain conservative influencer happened to be louder and more favored by Trump, and therefore more important, than my community. Days after this tragedy hit my community, it seemed to disappear from the headlines, even when it was revealed that the shooter, like so many in this country, had been radicalized by neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideologies online. I’m livid. I’m heartbroken. I’m only just now coming down from the horrific mess of feelings that came about on Wednesday. If you take anything from this part of the post, it’s that none of these shootings are nameless. This happened in the town where I grew up, where I made friends and had crushes and went through awkward high school stages, just like the rest of you. I beg of you: remember that school shootings are neither abstract nor nameless. End gun violence now. To everyone in the mountain community that I’ve called home for so many years, I love you. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other.
If you’d like to help out, the Colorado Healing Fundis taking donations to support repairs for EHS and to help the families whose children have been affected by this tragedy. Please chip in what you can. If not, keep speaking out. Remember Evergreen. Remember every other victim of gun violence.
…
Now, then…here in the U.S., September 15th-October 15th is Latine Heritage Month! Regrettably, I never got around to making a full blown recommendations list like I usually do. September-October is a dicey time as far as getting my stuff together for school, but it is a little embarrassing, given that I’m half Latina. But there’s no time like the present.
But as with any marginalized community, even in times of such strife as these, we must resist the fact that our lives are defined only by suffering. Every time I learn more about my Colombian heritage, I feel fuller. More me. Even though it’s only a half of me, I feel like I’m discovering more of myself. And that brings me so much joy. Reading beautiful books by Latine authors brings me joy. Eating food from my culture brings me joy. If nothing else, we must remember that joy is an act of resistance. No amount of slander and hurt from the government will make us less Latine. They can never erase us. So I hope we can come together and celebrate what makes us fuller and celebrate the joy of community, because that can never be extinguished.
For my past lists for Latinx Heritage Month, click here:
NOTE: I’ve switched to using “Latine” as opposed to “Latinx” from now on, as there have been criticisms that “Latinx” is more Westernized; though Spanish is a gendered language, the suffix -e is frequently used to denote gender neutrality. Personally, I use Latina to refer to myself since I’m a cis woman, but I generally use Latine to refer to the community at large. If you’re in the community, use whichever language suits you best. I’m just too lazy to change my header…oops.
THE BOOKISH MUTANT’S BOOKS FOR NATIONAL LATINE HERITAGE MONTH (2025 EDITION)
TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK! Have you read any of these books, and if so, did you like them? What are some of your favorite books by Latine/x authors? Let me know in the comments!
Today’s song:
That’s it for this recommendations post! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Once again, I dropped off without warning, so apologies for that. But I just started school and moved into a new apartment, so I haven’t had much time to squeeze in some blogging. (Never mind the fact that I also have a short story due tomorrow and it’s only about 3 weeks into the semester. Whee!) This post has been written in advance, so that’s why you’re seeing it here. Chances are, I’ll probably be radio silent for a little while longer as I get my stuff fully together. But for now, here’s a recap of the latter half of my summer!
Let’s begin, shall we?
GENERAL THOUGHTS:
I’m one of those people who, even in the face of an expanse of free time (summer), easily gets restless and anxious. The solution was there all along…employment. I helped out with some online summer classes, which was a wonderful way to give some structure to my summer and provide something to break up the routine. And when the class ended, I’m proud of myself for committing to not slipping back into my anxiety before school started. When I look back at the person I was a year ago…well, I want to give her a hug, first off, but I’m so proud of the progress I’ve made since then. Anxiety really had taken ahold of me, and little by little, with the support of my wonderful family and friends (thank yous are due) and the work I’ve put in, I’ve been learning to take the reins back. There’s no feeling quite like seeing measurable progress in yourself. It’s worth it to try, is all I’m saying.
My obligatory temperature check on American politics might be pointless at this point, as the thermometer reached its hottest point long ago and the glass has all but shattered. I’d prefer not to dwell on it much. As a birthday treat, I stayed off the news for the whole week, and I’m continuing the streak. Some days the spirals get me, but I’m fighting like hell to make sure that they don’t take my sanity away and make me vulnerable to complete, utter helplessness. All I can say is for everyone to take care of yourselves. I love you. My heart goes out to everyone, but especially those in Washington D.C., Minneapolis, and Chicago.
And oh my god…I guess when I’m doing these 2-month wrap-ups, I forget that so much can happen in 2 months! Crazy, right? Superman? A massive ray of light in a dreary landscape of gritty superhero movies. Hope is punk rock. Saving squirrels is punk rock. (If anything, see it just to see Nicholas Hoult seething after Superman saves some kids.) Fantastic Four: First Steps? The first MCU movie I’ve enjoyed—genuinely enjoyed—in years. The world needed all that Silver Age goofiness (and Cousin Thing). I had the immense privilege of seeing Wilco twice, and both nights were spectacular! And Car Seat Headrest…I’ve already rambled enough about it. I crode. (See my accounts below scattered amongst the various July Sunday Songs posts.) I dyed my hair another crazy color. I finished knitting a whole scarf yesterday. I played guitar, I drew, I read, I wrote…I’m trying everything to keep the art in my life, even if only a smidge every day.
And I took another trip around the sun. I feel so grateful to be closing another chapter and starting a new one. I don’t want to jinx it, but I have a feeling that my senior year of college (how the HELL did that happen?? 😭) will be a good one. I’ll try to approach it in the same way that I’ve approached decorating my new place: putting in the work to making a space that I love. If anything, I ended August celebrating my birthday, laughing and eating cake, surrounded by people who I cherish. I have to remind myself, always, that even if I don’t see it, that I’m surrounded by love.
JULY READING WRAP-UP:
I read 16 books in July! Though there were a handful of misses, I read a ton of fantastic books for Disability Pride Month. The last book I read this month (On Earth As It Is on Television) unexpectedly blew me out of the water.
I read 14 books in August! Thankfully, I only read two books that I really didn’tcare for, and there were tons of wins throughout the month: monsters in space, a surprisingly emotional story about sea monsters and Pokémon-obsessed children, and the great Brian Eno.
Another Björk album down! I was highly anticipating listening to Biophilia from the sheer conceptual layers of it; though the original app is now defunct, it still exists as a glittering piece of music and science education, reuniting our understanding of the sciences with the emotion that was always inherent to it. Whether it’s the structure of our genes (“Hollow”) to the phases of the moon (“Moon”), the ability Björk has to weave personal narratives of the rocky parts of healing with the natural processes of the world never ceases to astound me. Admittedly, Biophilia took me another listen around to fully get with it, but that’s mostly because being stuffy and lethargic from a nasty cold whilst the Amen break comes hurtling at you at 90 mph isn’t ideal. The artistry of…well, every single music video of the album never ceases to astound me. It would be easy for the concept to supersede the actual contents of Biophilia, but Björk never fails to pull the rug out from under me every single time. GOD.
“Virus” was one of the most delightful tracks from the album, so gentle, yet carrying a sinister undertone. Wreathed in tinkling chimes and gameleste, it uses a virus as a metaphor for a parasitic, one-sided relationship: “Like a virus needs a body/As soft tissue feeds on blood/Someday I’ll find you.” The virus motif sings sweetly, with Björk’s vocals as delicate and crystalline (no pun intended) as the icy instrumentals surrounding her, reminiscent of Vespertine. It makes itself indispensable (“Like a flame that seeks explosives/Like gunpowder needs a war”) as it sucks the life from its host, but never betrays its true intentions. Everything is hidden under the sweetness—as things tend to be in parasitic, codependent relationships, if we’re taking the more literal route with it. Even when she takes on the persona of a virus slowly killing a host, Björk’s vocals have never sounded more emotive and warm, only getting richer with age, something that time has proven since 2011. Though she uses that same voice to portray much more genuine and non-parasitic feelings throughout Biophilia, the beauty of her voice never ceases to entrance me, no matter the narrative delivery and what it’s hiding—which is exactly the point. It’s intoxicatingly sinister.
Nearly five months after Forever Is a Feeling came out (and about a month after Lucy Dacus got a license to start marrying people onstage…what a queen), I’ve cooled down slightly from the initial disappointment, even if only a few degrees. I still hold that it’s her weakest and most commercial album, but at the end of the day, it’s a Lucy Dacus album, and knock on wood, I’ve never encountered a bad Lucy Dacus album. I’ve warmed up much more to “Bullseye,” but most of the other tracks I wasn’t a fan of on the first listen have remained the same for me.
But not long ago, Dacus released two extra tracks that were meant for Forever Is a Feeling but were ultimately cut from the album. REJOICE!! She said that “Bus Back to Richmond” didn’t fit with the rest of the album, but to me, replace some of the weaker tracks with this one, and the album would’ve been more memorable. Though it falls instrumentally into the more introspective, acoustic side of her discography, “Bus Back to Richmond” is a soft, wintry ramble through missed opportunities and sparkling promises of the future. Dacus’ poetically observational lyrics shine in this one, from her descriptions of the “watercolor fireworks” bursting on New Year’s Eve and “eight of us left to the floor and the bed/and the futon that sunk in the middle.” In Christmas light-dappled vignettes, she paints with startling tenderness the coalescing of a future romance, the moments that slowly merged together to form something gleaming in the not-too-distant distance. Even in the heat of August, it feels like a woolen blanket wrapped around you as you stare at the embers of a crackling fire—the perfect winter song for summer.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Whiteout – anthology – intertwining love stories that all converge in a record-breaking blizzard.
New music from IDLES is always a welcome thing, but granted, it was quite disappointing that it was from the soundtrack for, of all things, Caught Stealing. I saw the trailer before seeing Superman (which was as wonderful as everybody has been saying it is. HOPE IS PUNK ROCK! I think Superman would love IDLES), and it basically just looked like a vague “punk rock” pastiche involving a slightly terrifying looking Matt Smith and a vague plot involving Austin Butler battling a bunch of ethnic stereotypes for…uh, reasons, I guess. Regrettably, the punk aesthetic fits with IDLES’ sound, and I hate to see them involved with something that looks so downright stupid, but…they do kind of fit the vibe.
“Rabbit Run” is one of four songs that will eventually appear on the soundtrack of Caught Stealing. Though it doesn’t seem to fall into the Arcane curse of “movie/TV soundtrack songs whose lyrics blatantly regurgitate whatever plot points they’re paired with,” it still feels restrained for IDLES; despite how cagey the lyrics are, it feels relatively free-flowing until the chorus kicks in. But the layers of Nigel Godrich-sounding production give it the perfect middle ground between slick and gritty, as do Joe Talbot’s vocals. The lyrics are certainly weaker than the typical IDLES far (“Beat you slow like your padre/Got you running like a jailbreak”), but when “Rabbit Run” hits the spot, it feels like the perfect score for high-octane chase scene, and a worthy display of Talbot’s vocal range.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Fortuna – Kristyn Merbeth – “Make way for collateral damage when I’m bored/Pick the scab on the arm of the beast til it’s ravaged when I’m bored/Oh so many things to do or not do when I’m bored…”
Today on “Madeline won’t shut the fuck up about Brian Eno,” we’re going back to the glammier days of the early ’70s. But in the case of this song, “glammier” feels like a misnomer, even though it’s placed both directly in the heyday of glam rock and Eno’s own heyday of his brand of glam rock. If it’s glam, it’s the zenith of uptight glam—it has the texture of touching guitar strings that are one wrong move away from snapping in half. It’s been wound up so severely that for all of nearly five minutes, it remains in the liminal space milliseconds before the tension breaks. With a thrumming bassline from Brian Turrington being the most freeform part of the song, every other part of “Third Uncle” is the music equivalent of squishing as many objects as possible into a box that will barely fit all of them—everything’s under the lid, but the seams are bulging. In the right mood, it’s energizing, and in the wrong mood, it’s borderline anxiety-inducing. To me, though, that’s proof that Eno’s rock experiment worked exactly as he calculated it: it’s an exercise in tension without release, only hints of freedom once the guitar swerves in one direction or the other. Even Eno’s nonsensical lyrics—a laundry list of items, some of which are burned—are uttered with the urgency of someone passing a secret code along through a burner phone.
Through this song, it’s easy to see just how much Eno’s influence spread. We mostly hear of Eno’s pioneering influence in the fields of glam rock, post-punk, and ambient music, but “Third Uncle” practically had a shockwave effect when it came to the early goth bands of the ’80s, starting in earnest after Bauhaus covered the track in 1982. It feels looser and less claustrophobic than the original, but it contains all of the trademark roughness around the edges carried over from Eno and into the grimier catacombs of what had just become goth. They achieve a balance of being hurriedly frantic (weirdly, I can hear the urgency of “It’s The End of the World As We Know It [And I Feel Fine]” in Peter Murphy’s vocal delivery) and yet mistier than looser than their forefather (or fore-uncle?), resulting in a rare cover that reinterprets the original way that somehow feels true to its original spirit.
“mangetout” starts at about 3:59 in this video, but the whole Tiny Desk Concert is worth a watch!
I’m late to writing about moisturizer in whole by about a month; for me, it’s not making my hypothetical 2025 best-of list, but god, it’s such a fun album! Wet Leg have gotten even more energetic with their sound, never quite pushing the boundaries of their previous musical landscape outwards all the way, but introducing enough novelty to it that it feels fresh. It’s a perfect summer album with its glistening production and shouted lyrics. And honestly, anyone who shoves Oasis out of the #1 spot on the charts has an immediate seal of approval from me. Somebody had to humble those clowns.
Even though I’d already had a preview of “mangetout” from their Tiny Desk Concert, released days before moisturizer came out, for me, it represents the melding of where Wet Leg once was and where they are today. The lyrics could’ve come straight out of their self-titled debut, and though, admittedly, they’ve written this song in some variation at least four times, they always manage to keep it fun, whether it’s with the gleefully shouted end of the song that snaps away just before devolving into chaos, or the blatantly obvious but still hilariously random inclusive of the name “Trevor” just to rhyme with “clever.” (It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.) Of course, I know maybe…ten words tops in French, so I fully just thought they’d mashed together “man get out” into a single word, but as one of the comments says on this Tiny Desk, “there was always going to be someone to be first on the moon, and there was always going to be someone to be first to realize that the French word for sugar peas was spelled ‘man, get out.'” If anyone was to be trusted to deliver this knowledge accordingly, it’s Wet Leg.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Not My Problem – Ciara Smyth – “You think I’m pretty cruel/You say I scare you?/I know, most people do/This is the real world, honey…”
Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.
That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles! Apparently today marks ten whole years since I started with this blog…granted, it was a pretty far cry from what it is today, but it’s a marvel that I’ve kept it going for this long. Thanks for tagging along, everyone! 🫡
In my ongoing quest to read more translated books, I’ve stumbled upon a lot more Japanese books about cats than I anticipated. Granted, they’ve varied greatly, but it’s a pattern. Not that I’m complaining—I’ll read most anything involving cats! Which is partly why I decided to read The Full Moon Coffee Shop. It sounded downright whimsical, and to some degree it was, but ultimately, that quality was dulled by the formulaic nature of…well, pretty much everything else.
The Full Moon Coffee Shop is no ordinary café. It only appears during the night of the full moon. Its waitstaff are talking cats, and you can never order what you want—they only serve you what you need. And if you find yourself in the Full Moon Coffee Shop, you’re in need of direction in life. Weaving together the interconnected stories of five unlikely strangers, the Full Moon Coffee Shop may be the answer to their burning questions—and the healing they desperately need.
TW/CW: cheating/affairs, sexism, grief
One of the biggest letdowns in reading: finding a book that seems super cute and whimsical, and then said whimsy is there in name only. You can’t just give us an incorporeal coffee shop manned by talking astrologer cats and then be so unconvinced by your own whimsy! God.
The worst thing that a cozy book can be is preachy. Having a low-stakes novel centered around life lessons, healing, and character growth doesn’t mean that you have to have a Learning Moment™️ worded like a PSA every few chapters. It’s a pitfall that’s easy to fall into with cozy fiction, but it’s one that takes away the magic for me. For novels that are meant to be about taking quiet moments that are often taken for granted and giving them more weight and value to the narrative, having everything explained to you seems so contrary to what “cozy” means to me. I just resent books that try to show character development decently, and then ruin it all by assuming that the reader doesn’t have the capacity to figure out what just happened and regurgitating it word-for-word. This was the main problem with this novel—it assumed so little of the reader and spelled everything out in the least subtle way.Every chapter of The Full Moon Coffee Shop pulled a “And what did we learn today, kids?” moment at the end without fail, and it just got so tedious so quickly. It just felt so preachily worded and repetitive, dulling any emotional impact this story could’ve had.
I feel so conflicted when talking about the writing of The Full Moon Coffee Shop. I read it in translation, so I really don’t know who’s to blame for the quality of the writing. I don’t know if Mai Mochizuki’s original text was dryly written to begin with or if Jesse Kirkwood’s English translation somehow dulled some of Mochizuki’s writing style and rendered it blander than before! I have no clue! Gaaaaaaaah! In any case, The Full Moon Coffee Shop was written so stiffly for a book that billed itself as so whimsical. The characters’ inner monologues all feel very rote and one-note and there’s hardly any sensory descriptions to immerse the reader in the setting. The writing let me down the most when we were introduced to the coffee shop itself, the most unique part of the novel; while I enjoyed the concepts of everything, from the celestial-themed desserts to the talking cat waitstaff, it was all described with the sparsest possible detail, the bare minimum word count to get the reader to visualize a new image. The Full Moon Coffee Shop is a slim novel, so it’s not like more detailed descriptions would’ve made it overly long—I was barely immersed in both the real-world and magical settings. The same can be said for the characters, who were barely developed beyond a problem they needed solving. The writing just felt like the bare minimum of describing…well, everything.
For me, one of the main issues with The Full Moon Coffee Shop was just how formulaic everything was. I had the same issue with What You Are Looking For is In the Library, a similarly cozy book about finding direction in life, but in that case, the stories were so repetitive and short and seemed to be saying the exact same thing, so my patience ran thin much earlier than with this novel. Once again, cozy doesn’t necessarily mean predictable—it should mean something that’s low-stakes, not repetitive. The Full Moon Coffee Shop felt like hearing the same story three times over; character is dissatisfied with life, character discovers coffee shop, character gets their natal chart read, character has a revelation and magically figures out how to fix their life. Rinse and repeat for 200 pages. You can see how tired that got. I appreciated that Mochizuki at least attempted to switch things up for the last story, but it didn’t do much to my interest in the story. All that changes is that it’s framed through the characters thinking that the coffee shop experience is a dream. Sadly, that amounted to little more than a perspective change and a switch to a handwritten font. It just got so repetitive and boring after a while, and even though the stories focused on different problems, Mochizuki rarely had anything new to say.
I hadn’t read a ton of reviews of The Full Moon Coffee Shop going in, but it seems a lot of people had problems with the heavy emphasis on astrology. The presence of astrology in and of itself wasn’t an issue for me, but it was more how said astrology was woven into the novel that got on my nerves. “Woven” is a generous word—even as someone who’s at least sort of into astrology, I felt absolutely sledgehammered over the head with every minute detail of it. After a certain point, The Full Moon Coffee Shop just became Astrology for Dummies. You know that meme of the kid pretending to read the Bible, but there’s a Minecraft book peeking out of the Bible? That’s what it felt like. It’s less of a novel and more somebody talking at you about the natal charts of complete strangers for 200 pages. I guess it might be beneficial to assume that your reader doesn’t know much about astrology, but Mochizuki got so bogged down in explaining every minute detail of every character’s astrology that the real meat of the story got lost. For me, it took away from the heart of the story, which should’ve been getting insights into the characters and their healing journeys. I feel like astrology easily could’ve been a fascinating aspect of the novel if not for how unsubtly it was shoehorned in—there could’ve been a chance to give it some narrative significance rather than spending 50 pages explaining astrology to the reader like they’re 5 years old.
Despite the formula of The Full Moon Coffee Shop getting on my nerves, I at least appreciated some of the messaging that the cats gave to the characters on how to fix their lives, particularly in the second chapter. However, the advice that the cats gave Mizuki seemed downright weird. I get that she’s not having success in her career, but the cats telling her to get with the times and not write what she loves just seemed so odd to me. There could’ve been something so poignant about success not being everything and her failures only being a small part of her career, but the cats were just talking to her like they were corporate executives telling her to be hip with the kids! Not only did that rub me the wrong way, the story itself seemed to refute the cats’ advice as well. Mizuki ends up finding success when she injects her signature style into a project that she was only doing for the money, thereby finding success in being herself and putting her own personal spin on things! Crazy concept! So why even have the cats tell her that in the first place, if that’s not even the lesson that the novel leads us to believe that Mizuki takes away from it?
All in all, a cozy novel that billed itself as tender and sweet, but ended up being unsubtle, preachy, and unconvinced of its own lessons. 2 stars.
The Full Moon Coffee Shop is the first in the Full Moon Coffee Shop series, followed by Best Wishes from The Full Moon Coffee Shop. Mai Mochizuki is also the author of the Holmes of Kyoto series.
Today’s song:
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.
This week: a David Bowie double feature (who could’ve seen that coming?), upcoming artsy albums, and more reasons why I really just wish I had dual British citizenship, because apparently all of the good music related stuff happens exclusively in the UK.
I could really do with some more restrained excitement about Michelangelo Dying, but…these singles just aren’t letting me do it! They’re both so enchanting! I can’t get enough!! I’m really hoping they’re not the best of the bunch, but I have faith that Cate Le Bon has something quirkily artsy up her sleeve, if this and “Heaven Is No Feeling” are any indication.
“Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?” takes the palette of the album down a more subdued, melancholy route than “Heaven Is No Feeling,” trading the former’s synthy strut for glassy-eyed introspection. But even with the thematic shift, Le Bon’s signature modern touches are there. Awash in fizzling, electronic textures, this track is an outstretched bolt of lavish fabric, much like the pink background of the album cover. Silky and watery, it makes every instrument feel like it’s been drenched in sunlit water, from the gentle, barely perceptible bass to the saxophones. I’m not usually this big of a fan of saxophones, but the way Le Bon utilizes them, more for added sonic texture than for dramatic solos, make her world even more layered and delectable to pick apart. It’s distinctively her, but I can’t help but think of the dense, dreamy soundscapes of the Cocteau Twins when I listen to it. (“For Phoebe Still A Baby” jumps out in particular.) Yet drama is what this song quietly thrives on, as the lyrics muse on trying to make light out of abject sorrow: “Open up in hell/And dress the hall/It’s a holiday/It’s a birthday/Is it worth it?/Is it worth it?” The lyrics nearly get swallowed by the sheer magnitude of sounds woven into the production—including the signature, lilting cadence of Le Bon’s voice—but it almost seems exactly her intention. It feels both mean and inaccurate to call any of it window dressing, but next to the lyrics, all about trying to laugh heartbreak away and pretend it’s something that it’s not, it feels like exactly the kind of shrouding she’s singing about. At the end, she laments that she’s “Checking out/Even with my language in him,” just as the listener tries to extricate her from the vibrant sea of sound she’s crafted to shield herself. It’s easy to get washed away in, and if the rest of Michelangelo Dying is anything like this, I’ll be gladly losing myself in it come September.
“David Bowie predicted ChatGPT” would’ve been a good headline for this post, but as much as I love him, he was far from the first to ponder about AI. But really…this song does basically predict ChatGPT, and in this song it’s “President Joe” who introduces it to the world, which is kind of a crazy coincidence. Had to do a double take when I first heard the lyrics, for sure. Drawing from much of the sci-fi media of his time, Bowie’s version of AI comes in the form of The Prayer, an AI system introduced by President Joe to make the population’s decisions easier for them, from stopping wars to simply thinking themselves. However, it’s The Prayer itself that calls for its own destruction, going insane after having such decisions weighing on its shoulders and pondering: “Please don’t believe in me/Please disagree with me/Life is too easy/A plague seems quite feasible now/Or maybe a war/Or I may kill you all!” Life is too easy for sure, now that everyone’s trying to flirt and make art and music and go through school entirely with AI. Sorry, but can’t you idiots stop and forgo convenience to experience the tedious pleasures of the human experience? Embarrassing. Jesus Christ. Remember, kids: you can’t stake your life on a savior machine.
“Saviour Machine” rings reminiscent of short stories of the likes of Ray Bradbury, but it also reflects the much darker tone of The Man Who Sold the World. Though it wasn’t like he hadn’t trod into darker lyrical subjects before, going from something like “Uncle Arthur” to an album comprised of insane asylums, the Vietnam War, and gay sex with Satan in the span of three years is a whiplash-inducing left turn for anyone. I don’t think it’s the edginess of the subject matter that makes it feel more mature, but the exploration—The Man Who Sold the World represents a critical turning point in Bowie’s storytelling ability, and he was willing to explore places that he hadn’t explored before, pushing himself out of his typical territory in order to create something wholly unique. It feels to me what he said when he spoke about art: “If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.” Darkness was coincidental, and of course, not all of the album is necessarily dark—it was merely territory that he hadn’t scoured before, and that challenge led him to create some of his most innovative work, time after time, album after album. “Saviour Machine” feels like the prelude to that storyteller’s attitude, one that would guide him to untold heights in his career.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Outside – Ada Hoffmann – A few centuries in the future, when something like The Prayer gets out of control…
Katherine Paul has a distinctly whispery voice—everything they sing sounds like they’re singing it into a cool breeze. Most of her music pre-The Land, the Water, the Sky suits it perfectly; though she’s become more adventurous with her vocal capabilities later on, a lot of her songs had a slower, softer demeanor that suited the airiness of her voice. But if there’s any song to be characterized by this, it would be this one. I’d forgotten all about “Real Lovin” for years—I initially listened to At the Party With My Brown Friends around five years ago—until it popped back into my shuffle out of nowhere. Though Paul’s voice soars with more volume towards the end of the track, her whisper-singing is perfectly suited to the quiet tenderness of the lyrics: “Now that you can dream/What is it you see/When you wake up in the folds of blankets in your bed/In your room/In your house/By yourself?” It’s the sound of a sliver of dewy light sliding through the slats of shutters in the early morning as you blink away the threads of sleep. Paul’s voice is a comfortable sheet over me as I listen, and she delivers what’s easily the softest, tenderest uttering of “well that’s bullshit” I’ve ever heard in a song. But no matter the intensity, which rises with every passing minute as the instrumentals build up, I never have a doubt that Paul means exactly what she’s saying.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Each of Us a Desert – Mark Oshiro – “You’ve tried and tried/What seems a million times and you wonder how you’ll end up/Is it the moon?/Is it the stars?/Do they rule you and your heart?”
While I froth at the mouth that I can’t go to the Gorillaz exhibit in London, I figured it would be fitting to talk about them…for the millionth time on this blog.
It was a strangely pivotal moment when, a week after Cracker Island released back in early 2023, three more songs were added to the lineup. I had middling thoughts about the album up until then; for me, it represented the point at which Gorillaz (and later Blur with The Ballad of Darren) became nearly indistinguishable from Damon Albarn’s solo work. There were a handful of fun tracks, but as a whole, it failed to hold as much water as something like their first three records, even with the star-studded list of collaborators. And when it seemed all hope was lost…Del the Funky Homosapien and De La Soul returned! (Two years later, “Captain Chicken” has no business being so good for a song with such a goofy title AND samples of chicken clucks. God, it’s so good.) Disregarding the “Momentz” haters (heathens, all of you), every time De La Soul and Gorillaz collaborate, a special kind of magic happens. Even with Trugoy the Dove’s too-soon death hanging over it, “Crocadillaz” was one of the unmistakable highlights of the album. For a song about constantly looking over your shoulder and the trappings of fame, it has a steady, easy calmness to it, propelled by Dawn Penn’s “Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo” chorus, which gets delightfully stuck in my head more often than not. Trugoy and Penn make for an unlikely but smooth pairing for this song, with the former providing the sharp-edged, quick-witted verses and Penn’s smooth, resonant vocals giving the song a simultaneously retrospective and playful chorus. I’m not usually a fan of the “Gorillaz but it’s just the collaborators” songs, but with a pairing as talented as these two, it’s easy to excuse.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
So Let Them Burn – Kamilah Cole – “Could play the sheep, but beware of the wolf’s eye/Hypnotized by the crocodile’s smiles/The exchange is brief, but watch for the teeth…”
Aladdin Sane has to be the most iconic album cover in David Bowie’s catalogue. If you know any album cover, it’s that one—the nondescript, asleep-looking Bowie with a glittering lightning bolt slashing across the front of his face. And that silvery bit on his collarbone—I always thought it was a bone fragment when I was a kid, and my dad thought it was something like mercury pooling on his skin. It raises questions! It sticks in your head! And yet, the album cover gets talked about much more than the actual album. Sure, it’s probably the weakest if we’re grouping it in with Hunky Dory and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, but that’s because you’re grouping it with two of the greatest albums of all time. But it’s really such a disservice that the album only gets remembered for the cover—there are so many excellent cuts from the album, even if it never usually makes the cut for hit Bowie songs (except for maybe “The Jean Genie”). It’s slick as hell, incredibly funky…it just rocks. Listen to the album and you just know. And “Watch That Man” is what sets the tone, a rollicking dance floor rocker that begs for you to shake your hips with every word—not just the “shakin’ like a leaf” bit. Inspired by seeing the New York Dolls live, “Watch That Man” follows a lively party, with the lyrical camera roving over every participant as the music blasts. I never had any particular problem with the mix, but it was one of the more rushed songs on the album, and on reflection, doesn’t sound as clean as some of the other tracks—it’s all a bit muddy, with most of the instruments, Bowie’s voice included, being at a very similar volume. But for a song meant to emulate the rush of a concert or being on a crowded dance floor, it gets the job done spectacularly.
On Earth As It Is on Television has been on my TBR for at least a few years, and I’ve nearly bought it at least twice at my local Barnes & Noble before settling on it last week. It seemed quirky and interesting, but this novel ended up blowing me away with how inventive, heartfelt, and downright funny it was. The best 5-star reads come out of nowhere, and On Earth As It Is on Television is one of them.
Aliens have finally come to Earth. Without warning, dozens of spaceships appear over Earth, causing a worldwide panic. Days later, they leave without a word. As the world falls into chaos, the lives of three people intersect as the world struggles to reckon with this occurrence. Blaine struggles to wrangle his TV-addicted children, now convinced that they need to skin people to find the aliens within, and go along with the mercurial plans of his wife, Anne. Catatonic for 30 years, Oliver suddenly regains consciousness, only to be whisked away on a strange journey by a stray cat. Heather, always the outsider among her stepfamily, ponders if the aliens could finally mark the start in the next chapter of her mundane life. All of their journeys converge as the world reckons with their place in the universe—and what could be next for the human race.
TW/CW: car accident, death, imprisonment, suicidal ideation, substance abuse
I did not expect a book with such a massive volume of millennial cat meme-isms to nearly make me cry multiple times. One minute they’re going on about Mr. Meow-Mitts and “himb peets” or something, and 20 pages later I’m a puddle on the floor. What a book.
There’s not a ton I can compare to in terms of On Earth As It Is on Television, but if anything, it’s quite like No One Is Talking About This, a book that also deals with the chaos of 21st century life; there’s a lot of meme-speak, there’s a lot of mindless media consumption, and there’s a whole lot of absurdity. A lot of the humor takes cues from the oversaturation of memes in the 2010’s (cats, bacon, etc.), but it’s a lot funnier than that entails—it’s more about the ridiculousness of that microcosm than it is about the actual humor; for me, it fed into the whole side of the story that was about the ridiculousness of modern life, as we are oversaturated with…well, everything. Plastic, fatty foods, cat memes. (If you have minimal tolerance for phrases like “heckin chonker” and “floofy boi,” this might not be the book for you. It’s a lot, but stay with it, trust me.) Surprisingly, this ends up being very poignant by the end of the novel, but it was both an astute observation on our 21st century state of being in a perpetual deluge of mindless information and content. Jane cranks the absurdity up to its absolute maximum without it feeling overwhelming—it’s totally goofy at times, but it’s great satire as well.
Both of the sci-fi books that I’ve rated in the 4.75-5 star range this year have involved cats in some way. Coincidence? I think not. (Shoutout to The Last Gifts of the Universeand Pumpkin the cat.) The way that On Earth As It Is on Television uses cats was one of the funnier parts of the novel, setting aside the pervasion of cat meme-speak. As well as causing worldwide panic, the alien ships have an unexplained effect on the world’s cat population—they all come back telepathic, and the results are hilarious. It’s clear that Jane is a cat lover, and it came through in every page. It added another wonderful layer of silliness to an already absurd novel, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. And honestly, it seemed completely plausible for cats to be the ones to pick up on alien frequencies, out of all the creatures on Earth.
Usually for a 5-star novel, I get super attached to at least a few characters. On Earth As It Is on Television might honestly be an exception, but that’s not a slight against it in the least. I didn’t like all of the characters—in fact, I doubt it was the point for them to be likable—but they all felt real. Blaine didn’t have a distinct personality for the beginnings of the novel, but you come to realize that he’s been so swallowed up by trying to juggle everyone else that it’s become his personality. Avril and Jas are the most insufferable children you could ever dream up, but they feel like the terrible kids you’re stuck sitting next to at the DMV or on the plane. Heather came off dramatic and whiny more often than not, but I could easily see how much her life felt out of her control. All of this is to say that though they were not all likable in the traditional sense, they felt real, and that was what felt refreshing. For a novel that tracked the trajectories of ordinary people, they felt especially authentic. It’s a mass reckoning with the absurdity of life, and Jane makes every detour worth it.
If anything, it was the characters’ journeys that were the most compelling part of the novel. All of the interconnected characters throughout On Earth As It Is on Television were thrown into circumstances outside of their control, both physical and mental, and nowhere that any of them went ended up being predictable. The concrete trajectories ranged from the ordinary (Heather feeling forgotten amongst her stepfamily) to the outright bizarre (a catatonic man regaining consciousness after 20 years and going on the world’s weirdest road trip with a telepathic cat), but all of them presented such rich character development. They crisscrossed all over the country, at times laugh-out-loud funny and other times more grounded and solemn. Wacky as it was, Jane used them all to wring out so much emotional development from a worldwide crisis that affects everyone differently; grappling with the fallout of feeling important in the universe, but then being forgotten just as quickly.
I’m a sucker for fun alien designs, and I didn’t expect On Earth As It Is on Television to deliver as much as it did. The Malorts aren’t peak creature design, but with their three-handed meerkat-like appearances and affinities for plastic crap, they hammered home the themes of the novel excellently. I wasn’t looking for any kind of realism in this novel, which is why I’m so glad that Jane went so bonkers with the design and culture of the Malorts, from their dietary preferences to their fascination with cats. They were a perfect vehicle for the absurdity that this novel emphasizes, and they provided as many laughs as the humans. There was a moment where there was so much plastic involved in the novel that I thought that the wry commentary on consumerism was going to fall flat, but the Malorts ended up turning it into a solution for climate change in-universe: why not give the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to a bunch of aliens who really like plastic for some reason? It was totally wonderful and goofy, but it segued nicely into the novel’s themes of finding joy in unlikely and mundane places and things.
More on that…any book that makes observations of shiny, plastic souvenirs and children repeating meme-isms into something genuinely poignant and moving deserves some kind of praise. But by the end, I loved what it had to say about the nature of life, however absurd it may be: everything is messy and out of your control, but that’s okay. Life is worth living for all of the strange detours and tiny miracles that you can find in every day life—cats, children singing, good food, silly television, and unexpected forks in the road. No matter our place in the universe or what the government does, we can always look to the ordinary to find solace. And beyond that, we can look to each other—our family, our friends, and strangers—to anchor us in the face of upheaval. On Earth As It Is on Television is a novel about many things (cats, TV, road trips, aliens), but above all, it’s about the small miracles that make life worth living—and what better way to end such a strange, beautiful novel? When we are inundated with mindless consumption, what better resistance is there than to notice life’s small, organic miracles? Finding and reading this novel felt exactly how it was intended to be read—on a whim, and being unexpectedly moved by it in so many places.
All in all, a clever, quirky, and unexpectedly moving novel about the biggest and smallest things in our human—and alien—experiences. 4.75 stars, rounded up to 5!
On Earth As It Is on Television is a standalone, but Emily Jane is also the author of Here Beside the Rising Tide and the forthcoming American Werewolves.
Today’s song:
BIOPHILIA ‼️
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.
This week: even if Wilco wasn’t ever-present in The Bear, we’d have to physically restrain Jeff Tweedy just to stop him constantly cooking in that kitchen. Plus: lots of top tier album intros and some lyrics I probably should’ve reconsidered playing in the presence of my guitar teacher.
Both Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory had been musically active before they joined forces, but even then, to come right out the gate with a single like this is so impressive for a band just getting its start. “Lovely Head” was the first single that Goldfrapp ever released and eventually became the opening track for their debut album, Felt Mountain. The U.S. didn’t seem to see the wave of popularity it eventually gained, but in the U.K., it was used liberally in film, TV, and commercials in the early 2000’s. But if there was ever a song that was meant for all of those things, it’s this one. Everything about it is cinematic, from the Ennio Morricone-like whistling intro to the soaring, theremin-like melodies, which wasn’t actually a theremin at all—just Alison Goldfrapp’s voice filtered through a synthesizer. It’s just so deliciously eerie, cool and distant, with lyrics that seem romantic only from the furthest distance, but disaffected and almost scientific once you examine them more closely. “Frankenstein would want your mind/Your lovely head” is probably only romantic for…y’know, a serial killer, or something, but it’s the precise effect that I think the song is going for—a love song penned by a cold-blooded killer.
I promise I’ll shut up about Car Seat Headrest for a few more months after this week. Well…I can’t make any promises.
Though I never got around to writing an album review for The Scholars (or any other of the amazing albums that have come out this year…oops. Phonetics On & On is the only album to come out in 2025, folks! Rejoice!), I feel like it’d be a crime for me to not talk about “Devereaux” at some point. After the back-to-back slew of excellent singles, “Devereaux,” along with “Equals,” is the song I’ve come back to the most from The Scholars. It’s what duped me into thinking that the album was going to be a re-hash of Teens of Denial, but even though it calls back to the song, the rest of the album proved me dead wrong…though I wouldn’t complain about Teens of Denial 2: Electric Boogaloo. Despite being from the perspective of one of Will Toledo’s many characters, a crocodile named Devereaux, the themes of living under the roof of religious bigotry and longing for escape could’ve been plucked straight out of his early discography. Anthemic and pleading, I see it becoming a future crowd-pleaser at shows—the kind I’d see the fans emphatically jumping up and down to. Hell, I saw them doing that on this tour, and it was only the second song in the setlist. Toledo’s soaring vocals meld the yearning, melancholic lyrics into a cry of longing: “I wasn’t born to be this, I was born to fight dragons/With a cowl on my face/With an auspicious birthday.” If there was ever a more air-punch worthy song, chock-full of lyrics meant to be yelled into the spacious walls of a sturdy venue, or simply into the darkness of a firefly-tinged summer night, “Devereaux” is it.
BREAKING: water is wet, the sky is blue (sky blue sky, even? [gets dragged offstage by a comically large cane]), and Jeff Tweedy cannot stop cooking. Seriously! Even within a band, how is it possible that in the last five years, this man has put out one solo album, two albums (one of which is a double album) and an EP with Wilco, three reissues of past albums, and now a triple album out this September? It’s been a while since I’ve read Tweedy’s book, How to Write One Song, but if that kind of insane output—not only prolific, but consistently good to boot—doesn’t convince you that he can, in fact, teach you how to write one song, then I don’t know what will.
Out of the four singles that have been released so far, “One Tiny Flower” seems most like Tweedy’s mission statement with Twilight Override. It’s not his most lyrically complex song, but it evokes the most classic imagery of resistance and resilience possible: a tiny flower sprouting out from the concrete. It’s an ember of joy, a labor of intensive hard work to make the roots hold onto concrete, and a fuck you to whoever poured the concrete over the space where they didn’t want more plants to grow. Even without the rest of Wilco, “One Tiny Flower” reeks of Cousin, shifting from understated, softly sung acoustic melodies to a jingling, entropic dissolution before straightening itself back up again. The other three songs veer between different sides of Tweedy’s range, but if there are any more songs like this one, then I’ll be satisfied with Twilight Override.
I’m surprised that I’ve never talked about Guerilla Toss on any of these posts, but I think it’s mainly because my main heyday listening to them ended right around the time when I started making these graphics, several months after their last album, Famously Alive, came out. I don’t tend to habitually revisit them, minus most of the tracks from Twisted Crystal (see: “Come Up With Me,” which I swear needs to be the theme song for a quirky Cartoon Network show with a plucky girl protagonist on a bicycle exploring a magical realm). But even though I’d never place them among my most-listened to bands, I’m always happy to hear something new from them. You’re Weird Now comes out this October, but the truth is, Guerilla Toss have been weird all along—and that’s what makes them special. They’re doing nothing but their own thing, pasting together surreal lyrics with electronic and rock beats frankensteined together. “Psychosis Is Just a Number” mashes together thrumming bass and a surprisingly smooth brass section—I’d never think to compare Oingo Boingo and Guerilla Toss musically, but the madcap, off-the-walls excitement of this track is so wonderfully reminiscent of them. They throw everything at you (the chorus is borderline overstimulating if you listen to it over and over) but that’s just how their unfiltered, raw excitement and creativity shines through.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Finna – Nino Cipri – this is a highly specific situation, but strangely, Guerilla Toss seems like the ideal soundtrack to being trapped in an interdimensional, legally distinct IKEA full of monstrous furniture.
I’ve loved “The Width of a Circle” for at least a few years, and I’ve been interested in learning how to play it on guitar. Unfortunately, though it has been a wonderful experience, I made a…uh, slight oversight, and didn’t realize how painfully awkward it would be to be in my guitar lesson and have my guitar teacher go through the whole “He swallowed his pride and puckered his lips/And showed me the leather bound ’round his hips” bit. Whoops.
As you probably gathered, “The Width of a Circle” is about as freaky as they come. Though the actual subject is somewhat ambiguous, it’s about Bowie encountering either God or Satan…and proceeding to have the most earth-shattering gay sex with him. (I’m more inclined to the Satan interpretation, as the figure fools the Bowie character into thinking he’s a humble, young God, then opens up the pits of Hell.) Even though The Man Who Sold the World didn’t get a ton of attention when it came out, it’s impressive that this got through any kind of censors and was released all the way back in 1970—just as impressive as the fact that Bowie was slaying in that dress on the front cover of the album. It’s honestly one of the queerest songs in his catalogue to me, and this was even before he made a whole album about a queer alien. The Man Who Sold the World didn’t gain much notoriety until Bowie’s career started picking up in earnest, but in retrospect, it’s the album where his storytelling really took a turn for the truly artful. Though the sound isn’t as cohesive, you can see the leap he took into going more daring places with his songwriting. “The Width of a Circle” truly is an epic in every sense of the word; originally two separate songs, it was tied together by the connective tissue of Mick Ronson’s jamming, expanding it into an eight minute long behemoth of a tale. The theatricality that would come to dominate Bowie’s work in only a few years blossoms here as he takes a journey through innocence and into shock and revelation. Even if it came to my disadvantage in that guitar lesson, this is the first time in Bowie’s career where his imagery takes on the quality of being so startlingly evocative—he’s a master of weaving worlds through song, and whether or not he’s selling them, each song is a Faberge egg of allusions and stunning songcraft.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Familiar – Leigh Bardugo – “And I cried for all the others until the day was nearly through/For I realized that God’s a young man too…”
Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
The Bookish Mutant 