oilan

Halfway through The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble, kindly loaned by osprey_archer, which I'm liking quite a lot. Ostensibly about three women (Liz, Alix, and Esther) who became friends at Cambridge in the 1950s and are now middle-aged professionals going through various upheavals in the early 1980s, it's actually much broader in scope, featuring a tangled web of colleagues and in-laws and ex-lovers and acquaintances— for example, Liz's sister who never left their home town is married to Alix's husband's... uhh, cousin, I think?— that the narrative just kind of chucks you headfirst into and assumes you'll figure it out as you go along. Omniscient third-person narrative POV flits from character to character and occasionally breaks the fourth wall: "It is evident to Liz Headleand herself, as well as to the reader, that she is concealing something from herself. But what is it? Does she know what it is? Do you know what it is? Do I know what it is? Does anybody know what it is?" ( ... )

Also decided that halfway (57%) through War and Peace was the perfect time to get around to re-reading the Lord of the Rings, which I've been meaning to do since completing the series for the first time in 2017. (I'd read The Hobbit and loved the LOTR movies as a kid, but stalled out on The Two Towers when I tried to read the trilogy in middle school and then didn't get around to trying again/finishing it until college.) Only a couple of chapters into The Fellowship of the Ring, so Frodo and friends haven't even left the Shire yet, although Tolkien has already come out swinging with:

"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

Read Not the Life It Seems: The True Lives of My Chemical Romance by music journalist Tom Bryant, because MCR is kind of my sole main interest at the moment. (X) An unauthorized biography published shortly after the band's 2013 breakup, I was glad to be able to read this from the 2026 perspective of and then they got back together when everyone was in their 40s and doing well and now they're touring again and having so so much fun with it! :) rather than the book's rather anticlimactic ending of and then they broke up for reasons no one wants to talk about right now. (And it certainly helped with some of the harder-to-read parts about substance abuse and mental health issues— they came so, so close to becoming the type of rock band that gets too big too fast and ends tragically.) A fair amount of overlap with broader music biographies covering the same era/scene— Where Are Your Boys Tonight? by Chris Payne ("Emo's Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008") and Sellout by Dan Ozzi ("Punk, Emo, and Hardcore 1994-2007")— and anecdotes/quotes I already knew, but it's a pure adrenaline-rush love letter to MCR. In particular, Bryant does a great job of writing about the music itself and, not unrelatedly, really gives Ray Toro his flowers as the band's "quiet mastermind." Plus, I've had The Black Parade, Danger Days, and (pseudo-album) Conventional Weapons on heavy rotation lately, but reading about their early influences, writing/recording processes, etc., made me go back and listen to their first two albums with a more curious/appreciative ear. (For example: "Headfirst for Halos" is my favorite song off of their debut album, in part because— as "Queen-ish, camp-punk stomp"— it sounds different from the rest of the album, and it turns out that was on purpose, along the lines of no one can complain our sound has changed in the future if we keep 'em guessing from the start!)

Read The Land of Sweet Forever, a slim collection of (unpublished) short stories and (previously published) essays by Harper Lee, in more or less one sitting. The short stories were all early works, some of which were clearly the seeds of scenes/ideas that made it into To Kill A Mockingbird— one, almost wholesale, as the scene where Scout's kindergarten teacher scolds her for already knowing how to read; another story features a father who's pure proto-Atticus, standing up for his daughter Jean Louie (not Louise yet) Finch after she gets into a scrape that I don't recall actually being in TKAM but feels very Scout-coded— and a couple which may have made it into her first draft of TKAM, later published as Go Set A Watchman, as they feature a grown-up Jean Louise returned to Monroeville Maycomb, Alabama from New York City, although a. these largely feature an older sister based (per Harper Lee biographer Casey Cep's introduction) off of Lee's sister Alice, who never made it into either book as far as I can recall, and b. I don't recall GSAW enough to recognize any specific scenes. On the other hand, I found a couple of the Alabama hometown (also variously renamed over the course of the stories, but eventually settling on Maycomb) stories genuinely kind of disturbing, or at least discomfiting— one about a preteen girl who, bereft of any sort of actual sex education, is convinced she's pregnant after hugging a boy, which I think is supposed to read as funny but I found upsetting; the other one has a grown-up Jean Louise, on a visit home, biting her tongue about her sister's (and, tbh, her own) racism— both with an incongruously light tone, looming implications, and ambiguous endings. Other stories were set in New York, including one that feels like listening to a friend gossip about her messy sort-of-friend from college who she stayed friends with only because they'd both moved to the same city and ended on a narrative swerve that made me shriek/yelp out loud, and— perhaps my favorite of the collection— one, which feels more like an essay than a story, per se, in which Lee turns her sharp and witty eye for social dynamics to the voluble audience at a NYC movie theater.

Of the actual essays included to pad out the book... to be honest, they were all too short— blink and you'll miss 'em— for me to have formed any definite thoughts on any of them, but one quote that caught my attention, having recently read an argument for Shakespeare and Cervantes as a sort of wine-and-cheese pairing in Daniel Hahn's Lunatics, Lovers, and Poets: "Why is it that the quotation we are seeking, when we can’t find it in the Bible or in Shakespeare, most often turns up in Don Quixote? Because Cervantes, from sheer love of life, made the nuances of life immortal."

(Another memorable quote, from a 2006 letter from Harper Lee published in Oprah's self-titled magazine: "And, Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up—some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal." The irony of reading this on my phone...)

Read Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert by Bob the Drag Queen: in a world where various historical figures have mysteriously appeared and adapted to life in the present day ("Cleopatra is now an instagram model, Rockefeller is having public battles of wealth display with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos"), Harriet Tubman taps an ostracized gay hip-hop producer to write an album about her life. It is, basically, a not-so-subtly-framed history crash course about Harriet Tubman, the Civil War, the abolition movement, etc.— a lot of the book is Tubman/other characters diegetically (as it were) telling their stories to the producer, and him reacting to those stories. (Some of the displaced historical figure characters were real people— e.g., Tubman's brother Moses, 18th century Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay— and others were fictional stand-ins representing different types of experiences of enslaved people.) So it did feel a bit like (and I mean this fondly) a Magic Tree House book for grown-ups. Was surprised and delighted to learn about William Dorsey Swann, the first self-described "queen of drag."

Finished North Sun, or the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther by Ethan Rutherford, a haunted, harrowing novel about a doomed whaling voyage/rescue mission out of New Bedford in the late 1870s; historical fiction with a top note of magical realism— which tips over into full fantasy/horror by the end— told in little vignettes ranging from a paragraph to maybe a page and a half long. ( One content warning and one spoiler )