Monday Miscellany: Back aching but spirits high

Notes from December 23 - 29

Dec 31, 2024

For those of you stuck in the liminal nothingness between Christmas and New Year’s, wondering where you are in space and time: hello, it’s Monday! I’ve just returned from seeing family in Memphis, and it felt so nice to wake up at my own house this morning, with a full day to settle in and rest before going back to work tomorrow.

Currently reading

The drive to and from Jordan’s parents’ place lasts anywhere from ten to twelve hours depending on which route we take and how bad traffic is, and since I’m usually in the passenger seat the whole time, I’m able to get a good chunk of reading done.

On the drive over on Thursday, I did start knitting a sock, yes, but I also finished The Wedding People by Alison Espach! This book came to me over the summer as a prize for winning book trivia at my local indie bookstore, and it was on my radar in the first place thanks to the enthusiasm of several friends, like Morgan, who read early copies and raved about it on instagram.

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Pausing for a heads-up that the novel contains discussion of suicidal ideation and attempted suicide. I only briefly mention this in my comments below, but if you need to skip ahead, please do!

This story is about Phoebe, an adjunct English professor in her early 40s, whose husband has an affair with (and then leaves her for) their mutual friend and coworker. Alone and adrift, Phoebe decides to splurge on a night at a fancy waterfront hotel, with the intention of going to sleep in a giant comfy bed and never waking up. However! When she arrives to check in, she realizes that she is the only guest at the hotel who isn’t part of the wedding festivities taking place there all week; she then meets the bride-to-be in the elevator and almost immediately finds herself tangled up in the wedding people’s chaos.

In less capable hands this premise might have gone in a corny Hallmark direction, but Alison Espach really pulls it off. As she’s becoming more and more involved in the lead-up to these strangers’ wedding, Phoebe is also going deep into her own internal shit and figuring out what to do and how to live moving forward. The sense of freedom she slowly discovers as she wrestles with herself is so inspiring and exciting.

How much of her life had she spent in this moment, waiting for someone else to decide something conclusive about her? (28)

Maybe this is just what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body. (170)

At the same time as it’s tackling the heavy subject of, you know, human existence, the book is also funny and ridiculous and completely absorbing. When I picked up my phone somewhere along the way to jot something down, I saw that more than an hour had passed uninterrupted without my realizing—the sign of a truly excellent reading experience.

Next up was Gay Poems for Red States by Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr., a poetry collection I bought at Bookmarks Festival last year. I’d call it a memoir in poems, spanning from Carver’s childhood to his more recent experiences as an educator in Kentucky public schools. While I was interested in his story, I wasn’t blown away by any of the poems on a craft level—I think I might’ve preferred a more traditional prose version of this. Still, it’s worth a read, and because it’s pretty short, it probably won’t take you more than an hour or so.

Finally, my first and only full-length translated work of the year (oops), Happiness, As Such by Natalia Ginzburg (trans. Minna Proctor). I found this book at Shelf Life in Richmond a couple of years ago and finally picked it up this week because I’m trying to stop chasing waterfalls (buying or checking out new books) and instead stick to the rivers and the lakes that I’m used to (read what I already own)!

Written largely in the form of letters, Happiness, As Such is about a family in Italy in the 1970s. The son, Michele, has moved to England for political reasons, and his mother and sisters are all pretty lost without him. Not a lot happens, but Ginzburg is great at setting you down right in the middle of the action and painting a vivid slice-of-life portrait of her characters. Even if I couldn’t relate directly to what they were going through, I could feel it. The tone at times is funny in a Wes Anderson sort of way, but there’s also a healthy dose of melancholy here—a winter book to be sure.

A legally-required heads-up: if you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. ♥︎

Currently listening

Did you know that Andrew Bird, yes, the whistler extraordinaire Andrew Bird, has a holiday album? It’s called Hark, and it came out in 2020 but I just discovered it this week. And, full disclosure, I’ve only listened to “Oh Holy Night” so far, but it’s fantastic—no singing, just whistling! My dude does some unbelievable trills and runs! It’s wild!

I’m pretty much over holiday music at this point, but I’ll check out the rest of the album next December and report back—if the other songs are even half as good as this, they’ll be going into my Christmas rotation.

In other cover news, Coheed and Cambria released Claudio Covers last month. When I saw “Welcome to New York” on the tracklist, I thought I had an idea of what that would sound like—and I was wrong. Let’s just say it’s not really Coheed, it’s the dude from Coheed, which is an important distinction. If you were excited about a prog rock or alt-metal rendition of a Taylor Swift song like I was, here, come cry on my shoulder and we can be disappointed together. It’s pleasant, to be clear (I added it to my massive covers playlist), just much more chill and down-tempo than I expected.

After that, I tried “Pompeii” and couldn’t get further than the intro before I had to just go listen to the Bastille original (which still absolutely rules, btw). And then I got distracted and never listened to the rest of the album. Shrug!

Added to my to-read list this week

This is Happiness by Niall Williams: my friend Cheryl recently called this one of her favorite reads of the year, and from the description (“an intricately observed portrait of a community,” catnip for me) it sounds like a perfect, quietly sprawling story to sink into during the doldrums of January or February.
I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger: Nora McInerny said in her interview on The Stacks that this is the book she’s “absolutely in love with” this year, that it’s timeless and timely, and that she won’t rest until everyone has read Enger. I’ve had one of his earlier novels, Virgil Wander, on my list for quite a while, so maybe this is a sign that it’s finally time.