Tag: On Earth As It Is on Television

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 5/24/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: inventive covers, timeless anthems, and some classic quirked-up white boy music.

Enjoy this week’s review!

SUNDAY SONGS: 5/24/26

“A Mistake” – Fiona Apple

If we live long enough under the patriarchy, most of us women have the urge to permanently destroy something at least once in their lives. Once is generous, honestly…have you read the news lately? For Fiona Apple, who had been heavily scrutinized under the public eye and lambasted by music critics in the years leading up to When the Pawn…, the urge must’ve been constant. That’s why “A Mistake” feels so genuine. It’s a slinky, trip-hoppy track about breaking free of society’s expectation of a “good girl” and deliberately wrecking things, fully cognizant of the consequences but not caring in the slightest: “And when the day is done and I look back/And the fact is I had fun/Fumbling around/All the advice I shunned, and I ran/Where they told me not to run/But I sure had fun.” No matter if you act on it, Apple taps into that universal urge to raise hell after being boxed in and stymied by expectations of femininity (“I wanna make a mistake/Why can’t I make a mistake?”), societal control, and an urge to just rebel, even if you don’t know what against. And then there’s the element of deliberately going against good advice—Apple’s trail of destruction, by her own admission, isn’t entirely justified, but there’s that constant, biting urge to defy well-meaning advice anyway. After all, “And if you wanna make sense/Whatcha lookin’ at me for?/I’m no good at math.” It’s all wrapped up in a complex package, not always thoughtful, but from a messy, nonsensical place of rage with nowhere to go. Screeching guitars that give the effect of buzzing insects and a luscious synth loop to back it all up, creating a fully-fledged ode to giving into your most reckless urges.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Gideon the Ninth – Tamsyn Muir – “So I’m gonna fuck it up again/I’m gonna do another detour/Unpave my path/And if you wanna make sense/Whatcha lookin’ at me for?/I’m no good at math…”

“Crosseyed and Painless” – Talking Heads

This might be the moment where I finally, finally get into Talking Heads. My brother recently listened to Remain In Light and introduced me to a handful of songs from it; apparently, he’d also fully Mandela-effected the idea that I owned a Remain In Light t-shirt, so maybe I should just listen to it. So much has been said about the album: the fusion of rock, funk, and early hip-hop, the influence of Afrobeats, the early electronic instrumentals. And all of that’s there. But you know what strikes me immediately?

Brian Eno. This just reeks of Eno. I mean, he obviously produced this album, but his rhythmic influence is so clear. “No One Receiving,” one of my favorite songs of his, is very Talking Heads, and he’d worked with the band on several albums at that point. But the frantic, anxious rhythms of “Crosseyed and Painless” and the chirping electronics are so Brian Eno. (He also provides backing vocals on the chorus, and Byrne’s certainly got some “King’s Lead Hat” in the delivery.) Maybe I just love it because of the Eno by proxy. But I feel like that would be a disservice to David Byrne and co., whose unique touch seems to have made Remain In Light so iconic. First off—oh my God, Tina Weymouth’s bass playing is nothing short of phenomenal. Once she finds the groove, she grabs ahold and never lets go. I think Byrne is what separates this from Eno in the end—though they share the same kind of angular energy, Byrne’s seamless shifts between desperate crooning in the chorus to frantic, anxious proto-rapping in the bridge: “Facts all come with points of view/Facts don’t do what I want them to/Facts just twist the truth around/Facts are living with their insides out.” That’s just nothing but David Byrne, as is this song’s spirit, in the end. Eno bolstered it, but the sweaty-palmed sprint through a state of alienation is nothing but Talking Heads.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Volatile Memory – Seth Haddon – “Nothing there/No information left of any kind/Lifting my head/Looking for the danger signs…”

“Modern Girl” – Sleater-Kinney

I hate to say it, but the strongest memory I have of hearing “Modern Girl” was hearing Sleater-Kinney play it live while co-headlining with Wilco about five years back. They did the classic “this is our big song, sing it with us!” thing and tried to get the crowd to sing the chorus…and only a handful of people did. Yeesh. Probably some of the largest-scale secondhand embarrassment I’ve ever felt. But they’re plenty successful, well-known, and presumably happy with their lives, so I can’t imagine that one (1) crowd in Colorado not singing along with them made much of a dent on their egos.

Nonetheless, “Modern Girl” is one of the songs I took away from that setlist all the way back in 2021. Despite the painful mix on the version I have (once it gets loud, it gets crunchier than a bass-boosted meme from 2018…somebody remaster this already, Jesus 😭), it has the same staying power. It’s an anthemic, gradually building story of mounting emptiness; every verse, happily sung until bitterly screamed, scrambles for meaning in a world of artifice. There’s a void (a donut hole, if you will) at the heart of “Modern Girl” that fruitlessly gets filled by consumerism, mass media, and hollow love. It’s a sort of universal story of filling the hole in your life with all the plastic that TV advertises, only to find that “My whole life/Looks like a picture of a sunny day”—beautiful on the surface, but really just a flimsy piece of film in the end. Where you end up is sprawled out, floundering in the drowning tide of distortion that gradually swallows Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker’s riffs and harmonicas. Sometimes, all you can do when faced with the emptiness at the heart of your life is shout at it—and shout Sleater-Kinney does.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

On Earth As It Is on Television – Emily Jane – “My baby loves me/I’m so angry/Anger makes me a modern girl/Took my money/I couldn’t buy nothin’/I’m sick of this brave new world…”

“Company In My Back” (Wilco cover) – Cate Le Bon

Somehow, while spreading the gospel of Cate Le Bon to my family, I completely missed this cover, which my brother thankfully found. Wilco Covered, a limited-edition album only available on CD (and another big thank you to my dad for digging it up on eBay), was a real mixed bag, but this cover is a staggeringly good fit for both Le Bon and Wilco. “Company In My Back” comes from A Ghost Is Born, and Jeff Tweedy’s signature lyricism was already at some of its delightfully weirdest; “I attack with love/Pure bug beauty/Curl my lips and crawl up to you” is still one of the more memorable Wilco openings if we’re going by lyrics alone. Add in the wording of the chorus (“Holy shit/There’s a company in my back”) and some dulcimer, and you’ve got one of the more left field early Wilco songs out there. The original’s clattering percussion, like bug’s legs against tile, are equally so. It’s natural that Le Bon covered it, given her weirdo proclivities. Her moody lilt and agitated instrumentals fit in so naturally in her interpretation of this song. (I especially love the way she sings “They are hissing radiator tunes.” Pure magic.) This was recorded in 2019, and Reward has its footprints all over it, with blasts of saxophone to replace the acoustic guitars of the guitar. It’s such an excellent tribute, turning “Company In My Back” almost inside out while lovingly preserving the offbeat-ness of the original without sacrificing her own artistry.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Half-Built Garden – Ruthanna Emrys – “You learn so slow, old radiant beauty/I’ll curve my flight…”

“I Wanna Be Adored” (Stone Roses cover) – King Woman

What makes a cover good to me is when it captures the song’s spirit; like I just talked about with Cate Le Bon’s take on “Company In My Back,” it messes around with the instrumentals but retains Jeff Tweedy’s soul beneath it. Though King Woman’s take on “I Wanna Be Adored” doesn’t reach those heights (and how could it, with the original basically defining a good portion of the alternative/indie rock sound of the ’90s?), I think it succeeds in the same way. While the Stone Roses’ original dips into a dreamy haze, King Woman’s cover basically sounds like Stone Roses by way of Chelsea Wolfe. It’s longer and more drawn-out, with sludgy guitars and a thick, foggy echo clouding everything. Kristina Esfandiari shouts the iconic chorus as though into the mouth of a canyon, pleading into a cold void, a stark contrast to the speed at which it’s sung in the original. It’s an exciting take on this song—one that clearly melds King Woman’s style into the original’s beating heart.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Redsight – Meredith Mooring – the sludgy, doomy atmosphere of this cover absolutely fits with this tale of dark magic in space.

BONUS: In addition to Programmes for Cools, Jim Noir has just released The DLC Tapes exclusively on Patreon—or you can buy it on his KoFi! It’s another album of polished releases from previous EPs and outtakes. Here’s the reworking of “Scene 2”:

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!

Posted in Books

The Bookish Mutant’s 5-Star Reads of 2025

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

2025 is a year that defies any kind of platitudes for me, but it was a year full of upheaval—good and bad. I’m nearly finished with college, I moved into an apartment, I had my golden birthday…all with the looming specter of fascism overhead. Too many people are concernedly fine with that last bit.

This year, I wanted to make a concerted effort to read more nonfiction. As of now, according to my Storygraph, my ratio of fiction to nonfiction is 88% to 12%, which…yeah, there’s still a pretty obvious bias. But compared to last year, where only 6% of what I read was nonfiction, that’s a significant jump up! 6% more than last year! Yet even still, most of my 5-star reads ended up being nonfiction this year, something that I did not see coming. Granted, not every nonfiction book I read was amazing, but there were some real heavy-hitters this year. Spanning from memoirs to essays on everything from grief, art, and identity, I feel like this nonfiction exemplifies my aim this year: to learn more, but to resist the kind of person that the government wants me to be, and that’s someone who is ignorant. I don’t want to thank the current administration for anything, but I will give them this: their insistence on dumbing down the population has only made me want to learn more.

Last year, I talked about how my 5-star reads seem to shrink a little every year; I still maintain that it’s probably for the best, since I’m more selective now than I was before. (Also, it’s bound to be less since I read less and more slowly these days. I’m not blowing through 300 books a year like I was when I was 10 years ago.) And yet I noticed this year that sometimes, I was almost afraid to rate books 5 stars. I found myself second-guessing constantly: did it really move me that much? Was it that good to deserve full marks? Sure, I’ve retrospectively changed ratings of books here and there—it’s bound to happen as we age—but I just need to remember to go with my heart. And what spoke to my heart this year was an oddball bunch—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and science fiction featuring cats. All of it moved me in some strange way, giving me the liberatory knowledge to move forward and the strength to persist. So here’s to these amazing novels that moved me the most this year.

NOTE: Normally, I don’t include re-reads on my 5-star reads of the year, but in this case I’ll make an exception, since for one of them, I retrospectively changed my rating to 5 stars. There’s nothing like a book that’s even better the second time around.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️THE BOOKISH MUTANT’S 5-STAR READS OF 2025⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

*I’ve bumped this up to the full 5 stars from 4.75 in retrospect. Deserved.

HONORABLE MENTIONS (4.5 STARS)

TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK! Have you read any of these books, and if so, did you enjoy them as much as I did? What were your favorite reads of the year? Let me know in the comments!

Today’s song:

That’s it for this wrap-up of books! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Monthly Wrap-Ups

July/August 2025 Wrap-Up 🧁

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Monday, bibliophiles!

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.

2 – 2.75 stars:

The Words in My Hands

3 – 3.75 stars:

The Two Lies of Faven Sythe

4 – 4.75 stars:

Open Throat

FAVORITE BOOK OF THE MONTH: On Earth As It Is on Television – 4.75 stars

On Earth As It Is on Television

REVIEWS:

SUNDAY SONGS:

BONUS:

AUGUST READING WRAP-UP:

I read 14 books in August! Thankfully, I only read two books that I really didn’t care 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.

2 – 2.75 stars:

Salvación

3 – 3.75 stars:

Of Monsters and Mainframes

4 – 4.75 stars:

Here Beside the Rising Tide

5 stars:

What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory

FAVORITE BOOK OF THE MONTH: What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory – 5 stars

REVIEWS:

SUNDAY SONGS:

Today’s song:

CANNOT stop listening to this!!

That’s it for this wrap-up! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (8/5/25) – On Earth As It Is on Television

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

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.

Enjoy this week’s review!

On Earth As It Is on Television – Emily Jane

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 Universe and 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!