1. I have decided to greatly limit my social media time. I don’t have X, Bluesky, Threads, or TikTok so I don't get sucked into those like many people I know, but while recovering from surgery I got into the habit of spending a ridiculous amount of time on Instagram and a couple of other apps, and I have gotten sick of it. So I set a limit of 30 minutes per day for Instagram, and that alone has prompted me to think twice before opening other apps. So far, I have greatly reduced my screen time, and I feel better for it. I'm going to keep going with this. Does Instagram and whatnot add value to my life? A little, sure, but it doesn't need to eat a bunch of my time every day. 2. Over the summer, I made a list of notable albums from the 1950s through the 2000s I wanted to listen to so I could widen my musical palate and also learn more about music in general. Before my surgery, that project had been going well. Surgery and the recovery really messed things up in regards to my projects. The nice thing is that I can start these projects back up. I have no time limit. So I'm back to listening to these albums. A friend threw a small wrench into the works, however, when we were talking about music the other day. The topic of R.E.M. came up, and he mentioned that Monster is R.E.M.'s fuzzy album. The others, he said, are jangly. While I grew up in the heyday of R.E.M., I haven't listened to all of their albums, so when I got home that night I pulled up Monster and gave it a listen. My friend was right. Monster is indeed a fuzzy album. I quite like it. 3. If you're wondering what I'm up to with my grand plans to learn how to knit socks, I'm wondering that, too. No other comment.
What I've Been Reading: Clear by Carys Davies- In the mid 1800s, John, an impoverished Scottish minister is sent to a remote island in the Shetlands to remove Ivar, its sole remaining resident. After a near-deadly fall, John finds himself in Ivar's care. Though they do not speak the same language, John slowly starts to learn to communicate with Ivar. As John recovers, the two build an unusual and fragile connection. This was a slim, gorgeous story told with such spare language that still managed to convey volumes about the land, the weather, and the three main characters and their emotions. I could hear the ocean and feel the wind blowing while I read this, and it made me want to seek out more of Davies' work. I highly recommend this book. Check it out. It's fantastic. Orange Wine by Esperanza Hope Snyder- Inés de la Rota is the youngest daughter of a wealthy Colombian family whose fortune is nearing its end in the early twentieth century. Though she is a great beauty and imagines that her life will be wonderful because of that, she discovers that this is not the case. Though life has beautiful things in store for her, it also has more than its share of hardship and heartbreak. Though the narrative distance was a little further away than I usually prefer, once I got into the swing of this book I got used to it and found that I wanted to find out what happened to Inés. Would she find happiness, would life deal out even more heartbreak? If you enjoy the work of authors like Isabel Allende, give this one a try. A Theory of Dreaming by Ava Reid- After their adventure at the cliffside manor of Hiraeth in A Study in Drowning, Effy and Preston decide to present their findings to the only place that will share their history-altering story: the local newspaper. But plenty of people aren't interested in changing their view of history, and they'll do anything to maintain the status quo. While Effy finds herself harassed into a state of despair, Preston falls into the sway of a professor obsessed with finding a source of magic that will change the world forever. I don't really know why I read this, aside from a case of morbid curiosity. I hated A Study in Drowning, I don't like Ava Reid's writing, and I thought the worldbuilding of this fantasy duology was wishy-washy at best. Though the plot of A Theory of Dreaming was marginally better than the one in the previous book, everything about it was worse. The prose was awkward, the plot resolution was both convenient and weak, and I can't forgive a book for being classist when it states that people in lower social classes have unintelligible accents. Katabasis by R.F. Kuang- Alice Law is an ambitious graduate student who has sacrificed just about everything to study magick with Doctor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge. She's nearing the end of her doctoral program when the worst happens: Grimes is killed in an accident and his soul is sent to Hell. To graduate Alice needs to rescue Grimes's soul, so with the assistance of her academic rival, Peter Murdoch, Alice goes to Hell. I'd been curious about this book since it was announced. I've only read one of Kuang's other books, Babel, and I ultimately thought it was heavy-handed in its messaging. Katabasis proved to be just as heavy-handed and as it was tedious. The characters would make a smidgen of progress in their goal, then the narrative would stop to provide a lengthy definition of a Greek term or drone on about French philosophy. In an interview, Kuang described this book as a sort of 'magpie collection of shiny things'. And she's right. The trouble is that she failed to take her collection of shiny things and actually integrate it into the narrative instead of interrupting the narrative every page or so to provide an essay about chalk or give a dubious explanation of weird geometry. After this and Babel, I probably will not be reading anything else by Kuang. Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker- In March of 2020, Cora and her sister Delilah are debating their next move as the pandemic shuts New York City down and shuts off their job opportunities. They're waiting for the subway when a man appears out of nowhere and with the words 'Bat Eater', shoves Delilah in front of an oncoming train. Weeks later, Cora lands a job as a crime scene cleaner and spends her days scrubbing murder scenes when the police are done with them. The trouble is, most of these scenes involve murdered Chinese women– and the Ghost Festival is upon them. Though Cora doesn't fully believe in such things, she's soon forced to confront the spiritual nature of her Chinese heritage, for she is being haunted by restless spirits who are not easily appeased. Suspenseful, compelling, and often gory, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng is one of those horror novels that succeeds in being a ghost story while also showing that reality can be the worst thing of all. Baker shines a light on the anti-Asian racism she and many others faced as Covid-19 spread. I was hooked by this story from the first few pages, and by the time I reached the last hundred pages, I was racing through to find out what was going to happen. I definitely recommend this novel, but I'd suggest not reading it before bed. Or while you're eating. Traveling in Books is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Traveling in Books that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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Sunday, September 21, 2025
Three Things #6
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