Consumption Diaries No. 19: May flowers

and books!

Consumption Diaries is a monthly series on what I’ve consumed and been consumed by. 

If you missed last month’s report you can find it here, and the full archive lives here.

I love the month of May. Summer tends to be depressing to me for reasons I have yet to discover, but May is tepid. May is simply sticking a toe into the scalding bathwater swamp that we’ll all be soaking in soon. It carries all the hope of summer (the beach! Reading by the pool! Picnics and bar patios and fun cocktails! Spontaneity!) before the reality of the season sets in (suffocating humidity! Boob sweat! Existential crises as time goes faster and faster and suddenly it’s too late to do the things you wanted to!)

I am trying to be happy, while I can and while I feel like trying. And by that I mean I’m trying to appreciate what needs to be appreciated, despite all the world’s cruelty and uncertainty. I am trying to believe that it is a privilege to be here at all, to bear witness to both the horror and joy of it all. I hope June brings you some happiness in whatever form you need most. Even if that just means seeing the uncertainty as a reminder that things could get better.

I took two trips in May, because I am nothing if not a cliche Sagittarius chasing happiness everywhere but at home. First, I went to Miami with some friends. It took me about a week to dry out after, but it was so much fun and I can’t believe I hadn’t prioritized going sooner. One of my most toxic traits is that I feel entitled to bottle service, but doing so poolside at a day club is peak.

I also took a Memorial Day weekend away trip outside of Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, with my partner. It’s only an hour and a half from DC, but I see so little of nature these days that it almost feels like the middle of nowhere. We rented a cute little cabin in the woods¹, waded in a cold brown lake with shitty vodka lemonades from the snack bar, took walks through the neighborhood.

My desire for a little more “nature” came too harshly in the form of the tiniest fawn I’d ever seen, emerging from the trees on wobbly knees and running straight to us, then following us down the road. Even though it felt obvious that something was wrong, that the baby was in distress, I listened to what the wildlife centers that I frantically called told me to do: put the fawn somewhere safe, away from the road, and keep an eye out for its mother. I learned it’s normal for does to leave their babies all day while they’re looking for food, and plenty of well-meaning people kidnap fawns (fawn-napping, the infographic that the Blue Ridge Wildlife Center texted me said) not realizing they actually aren’t orphaned or abandoned.

Unfortunately, the fawn’s mother did not come back, at least not that night, which we knew because it laid down in the brush next to our cabin’s driveway all throughout a severe thunderstorm. It was gone when I checked first thing in the morning, an imprint in the wet leaves where its tiny body had sheltered. I do not know if the fawn made it, if its mother came back in the damp post-storm early hours or if another animal got it first.

Before the storm, the baby deer came back to us, crying, and climbed into my lap looking for a place to feed as I sat on the front steps. I’d like to say a wildlife encounter like this felt like a gift, or that I felt like I’d been chosen and am somehow special for it, but it was incredibly sad. I still wish there was more I could have done or more that the wildlife rehabilitation facilities were willing to do. I could blame nature for being cruel, but it felt overwhelmingly like nature sorts itself out but humanity makes it cruel.

I am dramatic! And easily devastated! But also, finally, I read books in May. Brave of me. You can jump straight to that section if that’s what you’re here for.

In more bookish content news, if you missed it, I published a summer reading guide here on Substack in May! because I’m not the most avid or creative reader, here are some other summer reading lists I’ve enjoyed so far this year:

• Summer reading guides from Substack writers: Literary Leanings, Books + Bits, FictionMatters, and plenty others I’m sure I’m missing.

• The BiblioLifestyle guide for new releases

• Your Summer Reading Horoscope from Electric Lit

• A list of anticipated summer releases from NPR’s book critics and also one from LitHub’s staff

books

• Birding with Benefits by Sarah T. Dubb — a cute, very niche romance between two 40-somethings trying to win a birding competition in Tucson, Arizona. It’s bird girl summer, baby!

• Circe by Madeline Miller — I can see why there’s been so much hype around this book, which has been rated an overwhelming 1.08 million times on Goodreads. It was a fast read for me, despite it being a rather quiet book. It did feel somewhat surface-level, which is maybe a bold claim to make as someone who knows fairly little about Greek mythology. It just wasn’t the feminist rallying cry I expected, so maybe that’s on me! Still, it’s a nice summer read.

• Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital by Elise Hu — I listened to this book thanks to Spotify’s audiobook feature for premium, and though I did enjoy the book and it gave me a lot to think about, I am most excited that I was capable of listening and paying attention to a whole audiobook! I might do a separate newsletter on this book; I have so many thoughts on beauty culture in general and K-beauty specifically, and Hu’s journalistic background put it all so well. I’m also going to Seoul in the fall, and I’m trying to examine my relationship with beauty and the rat race toward it. I have made it no secret that I get baby Botox injections in my forehead every few months, and as problematic as I know that can be, I am fascinated by the procedure being so normalized there that it is only a fraction of the price I pay. It’s both hard and easy to imagine an America with the same sorts of beauty expectations. I’m so glad I read this book before I travel.

• Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa — this book, about a Palestinian woman displaced and then imprisoned, is heart-wrenching and infuriating, as you can imagine. Though it is fiction, the author gives readers a story that feels incredibly realistic thanks to her research into Israel’s occupation of Palestine and her personal experiences as a refugee.

movies

These are the movies I saw in theaters this month, shout out to my Alamo season pass.

• The Fall Guy (2024) — Ryan Gosling is a movie star. It’s so delightful to see him doing silly goofy little roles that require car-crying to Taylor Swift’s All Too Well. He kind of carried this movie, which is to say it isn’t great otherwise, but it was very entertaining and fun.

• Challengers (2024) — absolutely fucking obsessed. Zendaya isn’t that girl, she is THE girl.

• Civil War (2024) — I knew this movie would be rough, but I’ve never been more upset and physically uncomfortable while watching a movie. I wish I hadn’t seen it in theaters; the sound mixing was intentionally “immersive,” meaning the gunshots, explosions, and general noises of violence feel incredibly real. I spent the last 30 minutes fantasizing about getting up and leaving, and then crying. It might be personal — I live in DC and struggled to see the city like that, and my partner is a political journalist — but I didn’t feel like a movie whose point is “see, civil war can happen in the US too!” in the year 2024 really needed to exist. At least, not in this form. It could have done more, or even just differently. As a moment of levity, though, I was hung up on the fact that this chaotic girl was shooting film through all these war zones and then developing the photos on the go. Sure!

• Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) — Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) is an excellent movie. I didn’t get it when it first came out, but I have since come to appreciate it. Furiosa is even better. Anya Taylor-Joy is so compelling, and Chris Hemsworth played the himbo villain Dementus surprisingly well. It was also a great theater experience.

I also watched Napoleon Dynamite (2004), which holds up and is very funny, I stand by it; Castle in the Sky (1986) because my sisters and I are embarking on a Studio Ghibli rewatch; and The Meg 2 (2023), which was somehow worse than the first.

bought

I’m back on my book-buying bullshit, which I’d responsibly halted when I came to terms with the fact that I just don’t read 10 books a month anymore. And then, the promise of summer got me! I bought two books, Chlorine by Jade Song and Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress. I’m looking forward to both, but particularly Chlorine to really re-live my high school swimming trauma.

I tried to avoid that trendy Vacation sunscreen brand because I’m sorry, whipped cream sunscreen in an aerosol can is so ridiculous. But I am a sunscreen lover, so I tried their classic sunscreen lotion in SPF 50 and I do like it, I fear. I like the smell of sunscreen anyway, but this one smells nice. I also bought the sunscreen face mist for reapplying at the pool or beach, but the smell is a bit overwhelming when it’s sprayed right on your face and up your nostrils, and it leaves you a little too shiny for regular day use. Maybe I really will have to try the whipped cream, for research.

I embarked on a mission to try every Olipop and Poppi flavor out there (within my taste preferences … I hate orange!) which is proving to be quite expensive. The Barbie-branded peaches and cream flavor tastes like candy, but I think Olipop’s watermelon lime flavor is my favorite. I know the healthy gut promises are basically a scam, and now that The Law is involved things are serious, but look, nothing is fixing my IBS, so let me sip my stupid little fiber sodas in peace.

currently reading

I’m making my way slowly through Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers, which is immediately sad and I feel like I’m about to be A Little Life’d every time I turn the page. I’ve read one other book by Makkai, and I didn’t love it, but I’ve been hearing about The Great Believers for ages. I’m also listening to the audiobook of The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality by Amanda Montell, whose book Cultish I enjoyed. Mostly I’m just excited to have found not one but two audiobooks that I’ve been able to concentrate on with my ADHD brain. I don’t think the answer is just all nonfiction, but the research + personal anecdote formula seems to be working for me. I also started Anna Karenina, and I don’t want to give up on her but I keep getting excited about other books. I think I’m going to stick to a disciplined approach of 10 pages a day, which means I’ll finish it in approximately one year.

As always, I appreciate you! Keep your eyes out for some bookish newsletters that have been swirling in my head — or don’t, as there’s not always a high likelihood of me following through with the writing part. There’s a reason I’m an editor and not a writer.

Before you go: Find me on Instagram, Goodreads, StoryGraph, or Letterboxd to keep up with my obsessive tracking habits in real-time.

1. it blows my mind that I grew up this way — in a house surrounded by woods but also all the noises of nature — and swore I belonged there, could never live in a city with its noises and chaos. Now I’ve lived in a proper city for six years and I catch myself spooked by how quiet my parents’ house is at night, or looking out the sliding glass door of the cabin, which opens into all-green, lush foliage as far as you can see, and expecting to see something sinister staring back.