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.
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!
Here in the U.S., June is Pride Month! I usually start off these posts with something about how the world is slowly getting kinder to queer people, but that, as always, the shadows of homophobia and transphobia loom large. Well…Christ, it sure is looming larger than ever. Misinformed voters have decided that they’re perfectly content to return us to an administration that has already required passports to revert to the carrier’s assigned gender at birth and has been emboldened to toy with the idea of repealing the right to same-sex marriage. Of course, here I am sitting on my comfy couch in my comfy blue state of Colorado that thankfully has a) a gay governor (shoutout to Jared Polis), and b) enshrined the right to same-sex marriage in the constitution, but that doesn’t mean that my heart doesn’t constantly ache. All of us in the queer community are deeply interconnected. What hurts one of us hurts all of us.
Book banning across the country has disproportionately targeted queer books, deeming the presence of such subjects in children’s, middle grade, and YA literature as pornography and grooming. And god forbid that a drag queen commits the incredibly sexual and predatory act of…[checks notes] reading picture books to kids at libraries. Republicans have their priorities twisted. That’s old, old news by now. Books and libraries were never meant to be war zones, but fascists have made it their mission, then and now, to declare the right to information and new ideas as the most dangerous threat to their power. This goes for books both queer and non-queer. But the power of queer books can’t be overstated. Even I, who grew up in an incredibly supportive, accepting environment (biggest thank you imaginable to my wonderful family for being that way), was enlightened and comforted when, in the short period when I was closeted, I found bisexual characters in books that reflected my story and my feelings. Queer literature is revelatory, and it saves lives. For queer people, it gives them the comfort that they aren’t alone. For others, it gives them a glimpse into perspectives that they might not have otherwise considered, and compels them to empathize with people who are different than them.
So this pride month, and all year round (as always), when you think of what you can do to support the LGBTQ+ community, consider picking up a book. Support queer authors. Buy from queer-owned bookstores, because they tend to be pretty cool places. Support your local library (because they need it now more than ever)—checking out queer books shows them that they’re in demand, and that encourages librarians to keep on shelving them. For us book bloggers and other social media-oriented folks: keep on reviewing and shouting out books. And for all of us: no president, no government, and no legislation can take away your queerness. No one has that power but you. Your queerness is revolutionary and beautiful. Keep on being queer.
So here is my annual list of great LGBTQ+ reads from all sorts of genres, backgrounds, and identities. If I’ve mistakenly identified something about a book’s representation, please let me know! I’ve mixed YA and Adult books here, and I’ve also added a nonfiction section for the first time, as I’ve done with my other recommendation lists.
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 queer books that you’ve read recently? Let me know in the comments!
Today’s song:
lindsey…please tell me this is a sign that you’re cooking something…
That’s it for this year’s pride recommendations! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
I’ve got a confession to make. As die-hard of a St. Vincent fan as I am, it took me some time to warm up to this song. I never hated it, but it wasn’t an instant favorite. I haven’t seen Death of a Unicorn yet (though the trailer intrigued me…), but something that always bothers me about songs made for movies and TV is when they obliquely reference either the plot points of the movie or how the characters are feeling. Hot take, but it’s part of why I didn’t care for the original soundtrack of Arcane—it basically did that for most of the character’s conflicts and arcs. (That, and it’s a matter of my music taste. Don’t let that deter you from watching Arcane though, it’s a breathtaking show! Having Im*gine Dr*gons do the theme song was just the worst possible decision they could’ve made. Just skip the intro.) You can make a song subtly extrapolating on a movie’s themes and have it fit naturally! (See: “Strange Love,”“Sticks & Stones”) Hell, she’s done it before with the original songs for her concert-film-turned-thriller The Nowhere Inn! Granted, I haven’t seen the movie, but opening the song with “Right as I had stopped believing in miracles/In comes a unicorn right in front of me” is…right there. So is the unicorn, I guess.
From then on out, “DOA” easily saves itself. It’s an absolute ’80s freakout from start to finish. The synths are so dense and bubbly that St. Vincent’s voice easily drowns in them—it’s like they’re the main vocal, and that kind of chaos, especially towards the latter half, is what makes the song so rich. “DOA” leads me to believe that somewhere, there’s a better, kinder alternate universe where MASSEDUCTION sounded more like this. It strikes the balance that album never got, with lightning-quick synth palpitations duel with Annie Clark’s classic, punchy guitar breakdowns. Piercing yelps cut through the dense, purple fog shrouding the song—again, I haven’t seen Death of a Unicorn, but it certainly brings to mind what I might feel if I was being pursued through the woods by a dubiously carnivorous unicorn. Given the film’s purported balance of campy concepts and dark execution, “DOA” is the perfect merging of the two aesthetics.
No way, I’d never listen to a band just because I saw a picture of them where one member had a Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space shirt. Me? Nah, never. I’m a woman of taste…it was the album cover and the shirt that convinced me to at least listen.
I heard of Jawdropped by way of Stereogum; they reviewed the first singles off of their forthcoming debut (!!) EP, Just Fantasy, and I figured I might as well give it a go. Thankfully, they’ve got more to them than just a cute sphinx on their album cover and one guy with a Spiritualized shirt! I keep coming back to “Skully,” the opening track, which is about as propulsive as an opening track can get. It’s truly one of those songs where they’ve mastered how to make guitars cascade down like an avalanche on the first go, which is something not every band can say for themselves—especially not on a debut EP. Between the instrumental chaos of the chorus, they ease the verse into calm, a beast of burden tugged out of a sprint, in order to let the harmonies of Roman Zangari and Kyra Morling take the spotlight. But it’s that colossal cascade that makes “Skully” so excited; they don’t strike me as particularly similar to Spiritualized (this may be a bit too loud for shoegaze), but Jawdropped has a similar quality of encasing the listener in a fizzling, crackling bubble of sound. For all of 2:48, you’re cocooned on a moment’s notice—and it’s a cocoon worth revisiting time after time.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Ones We’re Meant to Find – Joan He – “I wait for you like a dog/Anxiously pacing/But you’re here when things fall apart/It’s just your nature/ We’re always stuck at the start…”
If I just put this song on in the background, I can ignore the cringy, “hip” lyric videos that The Rolling Stones started putting out after their newest album. I can’t stand that soulless, faux-graffiti/DIY aesthetic…I just can’t separate them from how painfully hard they’re trying to stay relevant to The Kids™️…
Anyways. We’ll pretend it’s 1978 and Official Lyric Videos For the Youth won’t be a thing for many decades to come. Like “Crooked Teeth,” “Miss You” was one of those songs where I’d have that opening riff (not the lyrics, this time) ping-ponging around in my head. It lingered in the fog of my childhood, but too far to discern anything clear. So thank you to the instagram for The Laughing Goat (and Rita) for making me remember it after however many years it was! And then, mere days afterwards, they played this song, amongst several other seventies rockers (see: “I Saw the Light”). “Miss You” was going to reach me either way. Some Girls seems to have come at the time when the Stones had cemented that sleaze was part of their brand, and subsequently became said sleaze. Despite “I guess I’m lying to myself/It’s just you and no one else,” it’s a song that lies squarely in the kind of horniness that defined them throughout the late ’60s and the ’70s. Even if he’s denying them, the way he croons the line about the “Puerto Rican girls that’s dying to meetchoo” betrays the partying and sex that later became as much a part of him as the press originally made them out to be when pinning them against the goody-two-shoes (citation needed) Beatles. There’s a Lou Reed-like drawl to the way he turns to a half-whisper as he speaks of stalking Central Park in the dead of night like some kind of werewolf, yet it couldn’t be more Jagger; the bluesy, “hoo hoo hoo-ooh hoo-ooh ooh” refrain almost becomes an abated, wolfish howl against this backdrop, roiling with angst.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev – Dawnie Walton – I try to refrain from talking about this book whenever I mention something from the ’70s, but this kind of bluesy rock fits in with the scene that it describes.
Back to The 6ths after last week, I’m dipping my toes into Hyacinths and Thistles, Stephin Merritt’s 2000 follow-up to Wasp’s Nests, and slightly less of a tongue twister, if you say it slowly enough. (Maybe?) In contrast, there’s still some of the same synth-pop love songs, other than…the last track being nearly a half-hour long? Not sure if I know what’s going on there, and as much as I love Merritt, I’m not sure I want to know. In contrast to the ’90s indie-rock guest list, we’ve got everybody from Melanie (sadly, kind of a miss) to Gary Numan (wild pick, but great)—Merritt had his feelers out everywhere, to varying degrees of success. From the few songs I’ve sampled, “Lindy-Lou” was one of the undoubted hits, sung by Miho Hatori, one of the founding members of Cibo Matto, but best known to me as the original voice of Noodle from Gorillaz. As with Anna Domino and Mary Timony for you, she lends her tender vocals to a song gleaming with dreamy-eyed innocence. Accompanied only by keyboard, this seems to stare wistfully from a balcony as the wind toys with its hair, Amelie-style. It’s never cloying in its sweetness, but it’s so soft and intimate, the musical equivalent of a sweatered shoulder to lean on.
BONUS: somehow, I had no idea this existed beforehand, which is crazy, considering how much Car Seat Headrest has been a part of my life…back in 2013, in the car seat headrest-recording days, Will Toledo covered this song!
I’ve now seen Shakey Graves…2.5 times. I don’t fully count the second time, as it was at a crowded festival and I had no way of seeing him, so my mom and I listened to him at a safe distance behind the wall of drunk people. I amended it this time by shouldering my way up to the front row for round 3, as Shakey Graves is touring for the tenth anniversary of And the War Came! Other than the two drunk people who tried to get me to give up my seat (one even offered me $100), this show fully made up for not being able to seehim last time. Shakey Graves, seen unobstructed for the first time since 2023!
What struck me at this show in particular was how genuine he is as a songwriter. So many artists in the folk and country-adjacent genre put on this kind of persona of being a wanderer with no permanent home, forever married to the road and dismissive of being bound to any one location. Alejandro Rose-Garcia has fully leaned into this persona (see: “Built to Roam”). Yet he’s the only one I’ve seen who makes it genuine. He’s roamed his fair share, but he’s never dismissive of the journey or the people who helped him along the way. Throughout the show, he paid tribute to friends and enemies throughout his life, his wife and newborn daughter, and for “Family and Genus,” raised a toast to family and friends that make the roaming easier—and more interesting. He’s a troubadour storyteller, but he never tells a lie. I keep coming back to how genius “Family and Genus” is—even as one of his most popular songs (I’m sure the Elementary TV spot helped), the craft is so intricate and lovingly stitched—just as the relationships he penned this as an ode to. Where the studio version’s “ohs” on the chorus sound like a choir of trickster ghosts, he imbues every raw ounce of love into them, turning it into a raucous crowd-pleaser that makes you feel that family, the sinew and atoms binding us together. And his rapid-fire fingerpicking on his guitar never ceases to amaze me—the fact that Rose-Garcia has barely gotten his flowers as the masterful guitarist that he is remains a disservice to his ingenuity. Hearing the echo of hundreds of voices around me, a handful I have the treasure and pleasure of calling family (minus said obnoxious drunk people), and countless others that I’ve never seen again after that night, solidified his statement of purpose.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Hammajang Luck – Makana Yamamoto – “If I ever wander on by/Could, could you/Flag me down and beg me to/Drop what I’m doing and sit beside 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!
Here in the U.S., February is Black History Month! I normally begin by talking about how critical it is in these times to uplift marginalized voices (in this case, Black voices) with the attacks on so-called “critical race theory” in elementary schools and the attempts in both the classroom and the government to whitewash our fraught, racist past. However, I find these posts becoming more relevant as the Trump administration strikes down D.E.I. initiatives and has started shutting down “identity months” among many federal agencies. As Trump and his cronies push us into an age (certainly not a golden one) that strips away the celebration and acknowledgment of the wonderful difference that makes up this country, it’s more valuable than ever to celebrate those who have historically been downtrodden. Especially since Trump has purported himself as a friend to Black Americans (then turned around and committed unspeakably racists acts during both terms already), we need to emphasize the truth: Black people are and will always be vital to this country, and their history and contributions are an irreplaceable part of American history. No policy, removal, or dismissal can change that.
As with all of the related lists I make each year, this is not an exhaustive list; I encourage you to always look further and discover books and authors of your own during Black History Month (and during the rest of the year).
TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK! Have you read any of the books on this list, and if so, what did you think of them? What are some of your favorite books by Black authors that you’ve read recently? Let me know in the comments!
Today’s song:
That’s it for this year’s Black History Month list! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles, and happy New Year’s Eve! 2024 was…well. It sure was a year, wasn’t it? Things happened! Too many things. Man.
I’ll keep it short, because I’ve said something along the lines of the same thing for several months now. I like doing these wrap-ups, but they’re certainly time-intensive, so I doubt I’ll be able to keep up with the monthly schedule going into 2025. However, my brain does like sorting things into silly little lists with bullet points and whatnot, so I thought I would throw this together for the end of the year. Even though I was working so much, I did get to a lot of fun reads, and I didn’t want to leave them out! As I said in my 5-star Reads post, it’s been a rocky and anxious year, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t populated with good reads—and moments in general—throughout. So, for the last time in 2024, here’s a wrap-up of everything from August to December.
Enjoy this massive wrap-up!
WRAP-UP: EVERYTHING I’VE READ SINCE AUGUST
AUGUST
I read 17 booksin August! I don’t think anything for the rest of the year will measure up to having two 5-star reads back to back, but either way, this ended up being a lovely month for reading. Also, before everybody comes after me for DNFing Remarkably Bright Creatures…you can’t blame me after this line was said by a supposedly 30-year-old character: “bicep day was lit at the gym today.” How do you do, fellow kids?
I read 15 books in September! I was so caught up in my reading schedule being disturbed (somewhat) by school starting that I didn’t even realize that I didn’t have any 1 or 2-star reads! Miraculous. Either way, between my work, I was able to squeeze in some great reads for both Bisexual Visibility Week and Latinx Heritage Month.
I read 15 books in October! Spooky season, busy as it was, another great month for books—new Crumrin Chronicles, new books from Amie Kaufman and Eliot Schrefer…oh, and I finally read Hamlet after all these years. I’ve seen so many adaptations that I just found myself going “HE DID IT!!! HE SAID THE LINE!!! HE SAID THE LINE!!” whenever I saw a passage I recognized.
I read 14 books in November! I shouldn’t have to explain why I decided to read The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet on Election Day. Jesus fucking christ. Also, I hate to speak ill of the dead, but either I’ve grown out of Rachel Caine, or I just read her better books in high school…maybe I should’ve read Ink and Bone when my taste was less discerning.
I read 13 books in December, and rounded out my Goodreads challenge with 199 books read this year! I’d say that’s pretty impressive. December proved to have a solid bunch this month (to say nothing of the pretentious, 212 pages of nothing that was Orbital).
In lieu of my usual songs/albums that I’ve been listening to lately, enjoy some selections from my Apple Music Replay. It appears I’ve lost my hypothetical Welsh street cred (no longer in the top 100 listeners for Super Furry Animals…it’s been an honor), but it’s been replaced by being in the top 500 for XTC? I did listen to “This is Pop?” and “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead” an unhealthy amount…
In addition, here are my Sunday Songs for each month:
it’s finally cold enough to allow myself to listen to Victorialand! Great album to close out 2024 with.
Now, how to wrap up a wrap-up…all I can say is that I love you. My blog may not have the numbers of views and likes that it used to (even though the follower count has gone up…620 of y’all, oh my god, thank you!), but I treasure the small community that I’ve got here. I write these things mostly to write out into the world what I want to see and ramble about the things I love, but I’m grateful that, through it all, you’ve all stayed to stick it out and listen. I’ve always done it for myself and not in the service of getting more likes or views, so I’m glad that someone’s listening anyway.
I hope you all find love, solace, hope, or whatever it is you need in this coming year. In the grand scheme of things, I’m frightened (and hoping that my Canadian cousins have a room to spare up north, hahahahaha [SCREAMING]), but on the smaller scale, with the things I can control, I’m glad to be turning over a new leaf. It’ll be difficult, but I’ve built up the tools to go forward in a healthier, compassionate, and more loving way. Whoever you are, I hope 2025 brings what you need, big or small. As always: spread love, not fear or hate. Look at the stars. Keep on reading, watching, listening, and engaging with what you love. And most importantly, be kind—to others, and to yourself.
The Bookish Mutant 