Consumption Diaries No. 10
A July consumed
July! Humid, languid July. I know it’s considered boring to talk about the weather, but all of summer is defined by how hot it is — what else are we supposed to talk about when we arrive to any gathering sweat-drenched and feeling vaguely ill? While it’s felt like DC has had a relatively mild summer so far, this July was the hottest July on record worldwide. Just in case you’d gone one brief moment without thinking about climate change.
I also read more than normal: six books and most of a seventh. They were mostly all books I really enjoyed, too. I also watched a few movies, since I have finally accepted that I prefer movies over shows. I like finishing something in two hours! I don’t like trying to stay motivated to watch something for a collective 10 hours.
what I read
the return of USA Today’s best-selling booklist! I appreciate that this list, though not as prestigious as the NYT’s, aims to provide a broader look at what books people are actually buying. I’m rarely looking to these lists for reading recommendations, but I love data and I love being nosy.
A Perfect Vintage by Chelsea Fagan — a very fun vacation read for me, and I posted a thirst trap for it, so that has to live on the internet forever. But really, I love privileged people behaving badly, and it was especially enjoyable for that to take place in the Loire Valley.
Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv — if you’ve hit the point in your mental health journey where you’re rethinking labels and diagnoses and who they help/harm by defining identities, read this. It’s a conversation I’ve been having with myself lately as I try to define my own relationship with my mental illnesses, and Strangers to Ourselves provided some context and language I was missing. Some stories are stronger than others, but the collective delivery is good. I really like Aviv’s regular writing for The New Yorker as well.
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang — my eyes are on the floor collecting dust after rolling them so hard they fell out while reading Yellowface. In the words of Marie Kondo, I love mess.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin — my insta review and substack review.
Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados — here’s my brief insta review. I could not get over the fact that this book, about 21-year-olds, was set in the summer of 2013, when I too was 21. It made me all the more glad I’m not 21 anymore, but I liked this book.
Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers — not bad, but not my favorite. I’m picky when it comes to romance, so don’t take that as anything except for my personal preference. The writing was giving Rupi Kaur to me, and that’s really the best way I can think to describe it: saccharine, trying hard for poetry, punctuated heavily. But the story itself was definitely cute and it’s always nice to read a romance that isn’t straight white people.
Most of The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa — I’ve since finished this book, but I’ll include it in August’s Consumption Diaries.
what I watched
Important note: the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes are ongoing, and none of this would exist without the labor of writers and actors who deserve fair wages. To read more about the strike and how to support it, go here and here.
TV shows
I got hooked on a National Geographic show called Secrets of the Zoo: Tampa about, you guessed it, the Tampa Bay zoo. This fascination happened one morning while my friends and I laid around my apartment after a Formula 1 race (ears bleeding from the millionth listen of the Dutch national anthem), too hungover to flip through the channels for more than 30 seconds. Since then I have watched so much of this show! Zoos are problematic, yes, and this show has reminded me of that, but also I’m obsessed with every single one of the animals and the only thing that’s keeping me from feeling like I missed my calling as a zookeeper is the fact that I tear up probably every episode.
If you watched Barbie and thought, “gee, I wish this movie were a lot darker,” boy do I have the show for you. I started watching The Power, which is based on the Naomi Alderman novel of the same title. I don’t see the book floating around on bookstagram all that much, but I read it in 2020 and enjoyed its thought experiment. The Power is kind of like if the Barbies could have electrocuted the Kens while they were taking back Barbieland. I haven’t finished the show so I’m not sure what direction it’ll take, but the book got dark.
movies
Charade (Stanley Donen) — This was a rewatch. I just love this movie.
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick) — I really wish I’d watched this sooner because it has provided context for …every single other space movie made since. I definitely should have watched it high, but the ending kind of made me feel like I was anyway.
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson) — charming, visually pleasing, classic Wes Anderson, there’s not much else to say. I’ve only seen four of his movies, but I’d like to make my way through the backlog eventually.
Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann) — I have long claimed this was one of my favorite movies, but after watching this again I wonder if it’s more that I have a favorite memory of it: As a teenager I showed this to my youngest sister, who was probably in early elementary school at the time, not thinking that it might not be entirely age-appropriate (I still maintain it’s fine!), and when she subsequently showed it to a friend, the friend’s conservative parents banned my sister from coming over. She was devastated at the time, but it’s very funny now.
It was only fitting that I rewatched this wide-eyed at a sleepover with two of my best friends after like five glasses of wine. I think one of us said “oh my GOD” every 15 seconds as yet another love song mashup accompanied a scene so visually chaotic you’d need to watch it five times just to see it all. But my god Nicole Kidman is perfect and I got to google a lot about tuberculosis.The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella) — I’d never known what this movie was about, and I’m actually so glad I went in clueless because I got to delightfully discover that this movie is gay through a scene of Jude Law playing chess naked in the bathtub. This era of Jude Law is unparalleled, which is confusing to me because he’s blonde. Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchett are also unparalleled blondes in this movie.
Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe) — I’m so behind on movies I should have seen, but at least I’ve checked Almost Famous off the list. Kate Hudson is so charming!
The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos) — I put this one off for so long and for what?! I deprived myself of the Emma Stone boob scene.
Barbie (Greta Gerwig) — I mean, of course I liked it
Interstellar (Christoper Nolan) — see also: movies mentioned above heavily inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey. Funny that I refused to sit in the theater for Oppenheimer’s three-hour runtime so I did three hours of Chris Nolan at home instead. This movie was great but the fact-oriented part of my brain struggled with how fucking corny it is and how that felt a little weird next to a movie that tried so hard to do big brain physics. I have a problem where I get caught up in minute details easily, and a movie like this is so easy to get snagged on. But if you embrace the corny parts, it is so sweet and sad.
Kimi (Steven Soderbergh) — I truly hope no one uses Siri/Alexa like this. Good lord.
what I bought
I bought a lot of books this month, for no reason other than I’m bad with money because I’m sure as hell not making my way through the books I already own.
Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi — a very random buy on the pangobooks app. I’ve been feeling on the verge of a sci-fi era, so I guess that explains this one.
I went to Solid State with my booksta gal Lilly (a highlight of the month!) and bought Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter and Real Life by Brandon Taylor. The former is one I simply cannot resist any longer, and the latter is one I’ve resisted too long and finally caved at Lilly’s urging.
I also tried out Vignette Bookshop, which is an online bookstore that sends you used books based on “edits” you choose. I picked one each from The Modern, The Strange, and The Hot Girl (even though I’m so over hot girls in a lit girly context — death to the hot girl, long live the hot girl). I received On Beauty by Zadie Smith, Oval by Elvia Wilk, and Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir (in respective order, based on my guess of which is which).
I almost don’t want to admit that I spent the amount of money that I did on this, but public shaming is a powerful tool in the world of Steph: I bought the Dyson hair dryer, but I did find it on sale! I don’t trust the AirWrap to not rip all of my hair out of my head and I’ve never been tempted to buy it, but when we were in Turks and Caicos, the hotel rooms had Dyson blow dryers (I hate that I just typed that sentence) and I was truly shocked at how quickly it dried and how smooth the fly-away attachment made my hair even though the humidity down there was literally in the 80% range. Do I regret it? Yes! Do I love it? Yes!
misc.
Since coming home I haven’t shut up about Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, the town where my dad and his family are from — and yes, the Groundhog’s Day town.
Squeezing into the last days of July was a trip up to see a newly unveiled six-foot groundhog statue (you read that correctly) dedicated to my grandparents, who died in 2010 and 2016. Thanks to my aunts, we have our very own groundhog outside the old Punxsy high school. My grandma and grandpa would have been so delighted to see it. They would have been even more delighted to see us all gathered around it, beaming.
These groundhog statues are all over town, which was a joy to my siblings and me during our childhood visits. The first one went up in 2004, so we’ve watched them all rise to rodent fame. This new one is educator-themed, as my grandparents (and many other family members) were teachers. The other themes are equally adorable, like a floral-themed statue outside the florist’s shop.
There isn’t much tying me to Punxsy anymore, and none of my family is left living there. I hadn’t been back since my grandpa’s funeral, and in the years preceding that, my family’s visits grew less and less frequent, as gathering extended family together for happy reasons always feels so hard until it happens.
Since then, even my grandparents’ house, in which they raised five children, has been mostly torn down and rebuilt into multifamily units. The apple tree in their yard that I loved to climb and where I always assumed my grandma picked fruit for her apple butter — though as an adult, I wish I’d asked instead of just eating it greedily — was uprooted. The now-massive tree my father planted as a kid is the only recognizable part of the house. My parents and sister and I drove by slowly this weekend, unable to pick it out of the lineup of houses.
It’s felt kind of strange that this town that was such a large part of my childhood holds no physical, material connection to me anymore. As important as memories are to how we define and create space for ourselves in the world, we need something to grasp with our own hands too. We’re luckiest if what we grab is the hands of others whom we love, but in the absence of that, it’s a relief to have something tangible that feels like a little piece of it is mine again.
But because memories are who we are too, I loved hearing the kind words everyone had to say about my grandparents, including non-family members who just came out to see the statue because my grandparents had meant that much to them.
Before we arrived, my sister had accidentally called the weekend “a memorial,” to which I had responded “you scared me” after the correction, but it did end up being a memorial of sorts. A memorial without fresh grief, which is the kind of celebration and remembrance that most of us hope takes place with our own deaths but is so rarely the case. Happy tears, overwhelming appreciation, gratitude for the people we’ve been lucky enough to love and be loved by.
If you happen to be passing through western Pennsylvania, say hi for me.
In August, I’m aiming to read a few books for Women in Translation month plus a whole lot of romances because my brain needs to shut off for a bit. Please indulge me and tell me what you’re reading right now and what’s up next!
Find me on instagram, goodreads, storygraph, or letterboxd, if you want to keep up with my obsessive tracking habits in real-time.
You had an A+ lineup of movies this month! So many good ones!