Monday Miscellany: In thought and viewfinder I take you with me

Notes from April 21 - 27

Apr 28, 2025

It’s the last Monday of the month, which for me means bookstore trivia tonight!1 Plus, the Mountain Goats t-shirt I treated myself to for my birthday just arrived in the mail, and it’s pleasant enough outside to have the windows open. I’m in a good mood.

900 cc’s of raw, whining power, no outstanding warrants for my arrest

Man, I could probably write an entire post just about the song “Jenny” and why I love it so much. John Darnielle is a goddamn poet. But I digress. I hope your week has started off strong! Let’s talk about some books and stuff!

Read this week

I didn’t notice it in the moment, but looking back over the books I’ve just finished, I’m seeing an accidental theme, which is challenging. All of them are long, dense, difficult in subject matter, or a combination of those things. But they’re all book club books, which means I got to or will soon get to discuss and decompress with other readers, always helpful for mentally working through tough material.

My Friends by Hisham Matar is a novel about friendship and exile that my IRL book club selected for our next meeting. It follows Khaled, a young man who grows up in Benghazi in the 1970s and 1980s, attends school in Edinburgh and, after a protest against the Qaddafi regime turns violent, lives out much of his adulthood in London, afraid to return home. Only a day passes in the present as Khaled wanders the streets after seeing his friend Hosam off to catch a train, all the while reminiscing and mulling over his life so far. His memories are anchored around this friendship and one other, and through them we learn of his upbringing, his family, his relationship to art and literature, his political struggles, his love life, and his ideas of home. This is a book of history and longing and hope, the writing lyrical and carefully considered.

Then he looked at me and said, “Isn’t it just terrible how life keeps on? It just keeps on and on and on, without a pause.” (202)

It took me a while to get through this one, but the experience was ultimately a deeply rewarding one—I learned a lot about Libyan politics and history and the Arab Spring, and I felt so tenderly toward Khaled and his loved ones.

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers was last month’s pick for The Stacks book club and decidedly not an easy read. It’s an academic text about exactly what the subtitle suggests, a disproving of the commonly-held assumption that white women’s role in slavery was a passive, secondary, or subservient one. When I had trouble getting into the print version I switched to audio, which was easier to absorb and also freed me from my self-imposed need to flip back and read each and every endnote I came across.2 But there was something about the narrator’s voice that I didn’t love, especially when she was voicing quotations from former slaves. I made it through, learned some things, and am grateful to Jones-Rogers for doing this work, but the dense, scholarly nature of the writing3 made the book feel occasionally repetitive and hard to engage with as a casual reader.

I finished The Antidote by Karen Russell at 12:58pm yesterday for a 1:00pm Gretagram book club Zoom conversation.4 When I picked it up from the library I was shocked at its chonkiness (419 pages), especially considering how slim some of Russell’s previous books are. But this one, wow. It’s about a prairie witch in 1930s Nebraska who serves as a Vault for people’s memories, listening and storing what she is told, then returning it when called upon. It also follows Harp Oletsky, a wheat farmer, his teenage niece Asphodel, and a host of side characters including a Black woman photographer for the Resettlement Administration, a sentient scarecrow, and an orange tabby cat.

Anyone who truly loves a cat must admit that it is a love between equals—it does not fall from a great height like rain, or pity. (396)

This is a sweeping tale, based in the real world with a hint of magical realism, that examines colonialism, memory, justice, climate, and so much more. There’s a scrappy teen girl basketball team.5 A mysterious, indescribable cloud of color emanating from a suspiciously healthy and hydrated wheat field. Flashbacks to a character’s time at a home for unwed mothers.6 An awakening to the horrors of Native population displacement and an acknowledgment of colonizers’ negative effects on the farmland.

Shame is a guide, if you can direct its burning light to the next right action. (303)

There were a few aspects of the story that got lost in the shuffle and didn’t wrap up as satisfyingly as I would’ve liked, but I think that’s to be expected with a project this ambitious. I did appreciate Russell’s vast amount of research (don’t miss the author’s note) and extensive bibliography, as well as the real historical photographs featured throughout. If you’re a fan of her previous work, you love historical fiction or immersive, multifaceted sagas, or you just want to learn a little more about the Dust Bowl, give The Antidote a try.

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Watched this week

Since I’m apparently in a pattern-finding mood: the common thread in the movies I’m going to yap about today is visual trickery!

First, Sinners (2025). Holy cow. I think this is technically a horror film? But it’s also a period piece, an ode to the blues, a supernatural thriller, and an all-around triumph. Michael B. Jordan plays twins Smoke and Stack, who have returned from Chicago to their small Mississippi hometown and immediately get to work converting an old sawmill into a juke joint. But opening night has some unexpected things in store for them. Dun dun dunnn! I’d seen the trailer but otherwise knew very little about this one beforehand, and I very much enjoyed being surprised by and fully drawn into it.

One of my favorite scenes involves live blues music at the juke joint, with imagery from the past and future slowly and perfectly incorporated in. After the film I had a grand time reading articles about how that scene, and all the ones involving two Michael B. Jordans, were shot.

And I, Tonya (2017)—I remember being really interested in this one when it came out, having followed Tonya Harding’s career and its associated scandals as an 8-year-old in the 90s. But I missed it in theaters and somehow only yesterday finally got around to watching. In short, I loved it. The casting is incredible (Allison Janney and Paul Walter Hauser, especially), the historical accuracy is impeccable (these scene comparisons!), and the balance of drama and comedy is masterful. And, as with Sinners, I really enjoyed learning after the fact about the artistry behind the finished product—Margot Robbie did do some of her own skating, but here’s how the slow-mo triple axel scene was shot. SO COOL.