Consumption Diaries No. 23: September and October

what I read in the last two months

The Lit List has returned! I took a brief hiatus that turned into a long hiatus from this Consumption Diaries series for September because I was traveling for the majority of the month: 6 days in Seattle, 10 days in Japan, and 5 days in Seoul.

I didn’t read much while in Asia, both because I had better things to do and because I was too exhausted at night to do anything except pass out as soon as I climbed into bed. I was briefly inspired to make an entirely separate post detailing what we did, ate, etc. across Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Seoul, but I think the three people who would want that are already sick of me posting daily updates and pretending to be an influencer while abroad.

So instead, I’m going to keep this newsletter in its original format: Me, rambling and oversharing, and then a list.

Peak fall has come to a close on the East Coast! By that I mean the cute side of fall, where sweaters are an aesthetic, cozy choice and not a necessity against the cold. Pumpkin and squash flavors reign supreme. Leaves turn into shades of red and orange that we expect every year but are awed by as if it’s the first time anyway. By November, the glamour has worn off, the leaves are wet and crumbling and brown, the stress of the holiday season looms.

I happen to not mind late fall, or even winter sometimes, but there is certainly less to outwardly romanticize. But these next few months tend to be when I read the most, too.

These monthly consumption diaries have been a good exercise in reflection, if not dangerously close to the unproductive kind of nostalgia (and navel-gazing), but each month I find myself anxious about what I haven’t said, what Big Thing in the world I’ve thought about over and over but haven’t publicly addressed because I’m too busy contributing to the unnecessary noise.

My anxiety is a direct result of existing too much online; so many of us feel the need to declare that we are on the right side of things, however passively, through our shares and likes. This performative aspect, and then the defense of it as necessary, and the fact that I maybe agree with that to some extent, really gives me the ick.

Someone doesn’t care less about tragedy and injustice because they didn’t repost a cutesy little graphic about it to their instagram story, just as someone who isn’t online at all couldn’t be accused of a lack of empathy. And “correct” behavior online can cover up inaction in real life where it matters.

We feel pressured to post about everything just to prove we’re paying attention, even things we aren’t qualified to speak on beyond a quiet little repost. I don’t have anything profound to say about genocide, racial injustice, or climate change that adds to the conversation because there is nothing profound to say about such horror. There is nothing I need to say about humanity’s proclivity toward self-destruction because language cannot encapsulate all it means to be alive at this moment.

Even still, I did not expect to procrastinate this until after the US election, the results of which were unsurprising but no less devastating. Nor can I ignore the one-year mark of Israel’s war on Gaza last month, how quietly it seems we’ve gotten over our despair as we spread our attention among any other number of tragedies, only one of which was Hurricane Helene wreaking havoc on my home state and shutting down my college campus. The disaster circles closer and closer, and we grow more and more anxious. What else is there to say?

Hurricane Sandy was the last hurricane I can remember coming through Western NC. Because it was late October, snow had already begun, and what would have been torrential rain was a blizzard that canceled classes. My roommate and I built a snowman on the strip of grass outside our rundown apartment building, naming it Sandy, unaware of the destruction that was to come for the Northeast.

That same roommate lost contact with her parents and sibling for days during Helene. I immediately thought about the people somewhere on the outskirts of the hurricane’s path, out of danger, creating happy memories in the face of so much tragedy, too. That’s always how it goes, isn’t it? Time slows down for those facing tragedy, and it becomes unfathomable how life beats on relentlessly for everyone else. Don’t they know? Can’t they see? Do they care?

And of course, what else is there to do than continue the march, no matter the scale of disaster, no matter the doom and gloom? It is necessary for our survival that we retain the ability to keep our feet moving, even if we are walking toward tragedy ourselves. I fear this necessity will let complacency and apathy fester until more and more of us are standing still, dazed, wondering how the world could keep spinning at a time like this.

Earlier this summer I read Julia Armfield’s latest book, Private Rites, in which the inhabitants of a waterlogged, dystopian society collectively shrug in the face of The End. Bridges are gone, homes are washed away, entire buildings are underwater. Things get worse day by day, but the humans keep up this ritual of ignorance all the same. They go to work to pay the bills, they fight with their families, they fall in love. Armfield summarizes this so succinctly in Private Rites: “People think it's just hellfire and brimstone, four horsemen and out, but actually the end times go on and on and on.”

When do we acknowledge that our reality has shifted? That what has happened is going to happen again, and then again, each time rendering us speechless other than “not here; this wasn’t supposed to happen here.” No, it wasn’t, but it is. It is all happening.

And yet: We keep going. We consume, we are consumed, we laugh and cry and hurt the people we love and go to work and sip our coffee each morning, phone in hand. Witnessing it all, forgetting we are part of it too. To quote Armfield again, “It’s exhausting, as it always was, to live with such a breadth of things to take up one’s attention — exhausting, the way there can be too much world, even in its final stages. Exhausting, to be so busy and so bored with no time left for either.”

The following list of things I consumed is a bit condensed, considering it covers two months rather than the usual one. I’ve prioritized books since that is the point of this newsletter, but I spent much more time watching K-dramas¹ than reading.

bonus! me in the Starfield Library in Seoul!

reading

Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress

Literary fiction about private school art kids always has the potential to become pretentious and tone-deaf, but despite my initial reservations, I didn’t think Sirens & Muses fell into the trap even with its many references to artists and art history. It benefited from its timeline: 2011, around the time of Occupy Wall Street, a period that significantly shaped the US and I wish were explored in fiction more.

The novel mostly follows two roommates at a prestigious art school: Louisa, an out-of-place Southerner on scholarship, and Karina, a supposed prodigy and art world nepo baby. Their jealousy of each other quickly and somewhat naturally turns to lust, further complicated by a love triangle involving another student who is the prototype of every artistic dickwad you’ve ever dated and an aging, old-school professor. Because of the stark differences in the students’ backgrounds, they must examine the role of class and privilege in both art and academia. The novel isn’t aiming to say anything groundbreaking about either of these topics, but it gives you something to mull over nonetheless. I found Karina to be exhausting at times with all of her riches and talent and aimless malaise, and don’t get me started on the men, but Louisa was as endearing as the come, despite her sometimes-frustrating naivety.

Sirens & Muses captures the two most urgent and devastating forces of young adulthood: first love, of course, and the desperation to be seen as we are. It takes the world breaking your heart a little to learn how to untangle the two.

The Coin by Yasmin Zaher

What a strange little book. The synopsis from Goodreads: The Coin follows a Palestinian woman as she pursues a dream that generations of her family have failed at: to live and thrive in America. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys in New York, where her eccentric methods cross conventional boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler and the two participate in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags, the value of which "increases, year by year, regardless of poverty, of war, of famine."

I don’t think a plot synopsis does much for readers going in; it is a character-driven novel, and if you’re expecting more action around her teaching job or the Birkin pyramid scheme, you’ll feel unsatiated. I felt a bit of a disconnect between the external action and the narrator’s internal war, mirroring her own movements through life. I liked the juxtaposition, but it felt aimless at times too — though I think part of that is due to literary fiction novel after novel that explains itself as if too scared of misinterpretation to bother existing otherwise. The Coin refuses to partake in the act of holding readers’ hands that authors/publishers seem so committed to.

I love reading about women vs. the void, the way we teeter on the edge of it and peek over occasionally just to see if we could make a home of it. The narrator finds her own void in the battle between her mind and body, becoming obsessed with cleanliness but more so with purity and self-image. She is materialistic and loves her designer clothing, which is necessary to the performance art of her presentation of self. As she examines herself and her life in the US, she unravels. Relatable!

Also, a bookseller in a bookstore I visited while traveling told me someone had come in recently and mentioned that they were looking to turn this book into a movie.

The Most Famous Girl in the World by Iman Hariri-Kia

I needed a fun book in September after a few heavy hitters, and I was so thrilled that Iman Hariri-Kia sent me a copy of her truly fun sophomore novel. It’s silly, but intentional: The whole premise is that a self-destructive, unlikeable reporter, Rose, has destroyed her career after an obsession with glamorous scammer Poppy Hastings (my best description is Anna Delvey sun, Caroline Calloway rising, Elizabeth Holmes moon) leads to said scammer’s rise to fame. When our narrator’s sources begin showing up dead, she becomes convinced Poppy is responsible and sets out on a rogue investigation.

I am not sure what genre I’d classify this book as, and even StoryGraph doesn’t list it with a single genre. It’s thriller-y, it’s romance-y, it’s women’s fiction-y², but I wouldn’t say it’s all over the place even still.

Also, when Iman came through DC on her book tour, she spoke a lot about parasocial relationships and how that influenced her thinking about this novel, which gave it more depth for me. I am so fascinated by how the internet and social media have shaped our relationships with one another, whether that’s feigned intimacy with fellow normies or with celebrities and influencers. I fall into this trap all the time, and while I do think it’s not entirely our fault for consuming personas meant for public consumption, the awareness that we might be digesting it all wrong feels necessary to continue existing online.

My Roommate is a Vampire by Jenna Levine

I love a seasonal romance once October hits, but I only managed one this year. My Roommate is a Vampire is about Cassie, a quirky not-like-other-girls art teacher who is desperate enough for cheap rent that she ignores all sorts of glaring red flags to move into a spooky house with a spooky man. But don’t worry, he’s hot, and hot men are never murderers, right! This hot man turns out to be, you guessed it, a vampire.

If you hear the premise and think it sounds like a logistical nightmare to write around, I’m here to confirm that the plot holes are plugged by chewing gum. And of course they are; this wouldn’t be a fun romance if we think too hard about the Bella Swan of it all. I’m personally not reading these rom-coms for their literary prowess, and I’ll take them for what they are.

Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

I’ve been putting off Nightbitch for a while, but with the movie coming out soon I finally got over myself. It’s been buzzy since its release, so I’ll spare you a detailed recap, but if you’re unfamiliar, the main thing you need to know is that the unnamed narrator, struggling with the complicated dynamics of motherhood, becomes increasingly convinced she is turning into a dog.

The metaphor here is extremely obvious throughout, allowing readers to absorb a message without needing to think too hard about what that message actually is. Even still, I think men who have children with women (or are planning to) are the beneficiaries of the message that it’s really fucking hard to be a mother, not necessarily women. Aren’t most mothers navigating patriarchal gender roles? Maybe I’m wrong, considering how many white women in this country just voted against their own autonomy, but of course motherhood is complicated, and the gender imbalance is impossible to completely escape.

However, women do need and deserve to be validated in their feelings that motherhood is gendered, and the shift from working woman to stay-at-home mom is bound to bring about conflicting feelings on gender roles, identity, and privilege. Nightbitch is incredible in its acknowledgment of the isolation motherhood can bring, especially when children are young and needy, and how that isolation can quickly descend into madness. Women, but especially mothers, are always on the verge of something. The line between sane and insane is a thin one. This is why literature is so powerful and full of so many possibilities, which is beautiful!

My biggest issue with the novel is that the ending felt a little haphazard and anticlimactic. It softened how feral and weird the rest of the novel had been leading up to the final action, and it left me wondering what the point actually was. Have I interpreted this all wrong? Is the author suggesting nothing matters? I’d love to dissect this with someone.

My second biggest issue is that there is a lot of violence toward cats; that is obviously personal, as a cat owner, and I understand the logic behind 90% of it. The other 10% just has me convinced the author hates cats and found the perfect outlet for it. Regardless, don’t let that deter you if you feel similarly, but just be aware so you can approach that however you need.

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Y. Davis

The essays and speeches in Freedom is a Constant Struggle are entirely necessary and urgent, made even more so by the fact that none of the material is very new. It is a sharp reminder that while it can feel like public consciousness of injustice is only just awakening, the injustice itself has never gone away.

However, I don’t think the format of this worked. Speeches can be difficult to translate into text to begin with, but a book full of speeches from the same person on the same topics inevitably gets repetitive. It lost some of its impact this way, though someone on instagram told me they listened to the book instead and thought the audio format was much more powerful. I would recommend consuming it that way.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

A quick, strange novel about a woman, Keiko, working at a convenience store, just as the title says. She has never been able to present her humanity in the way she’s expected to — that we’re all expected to — much to the dismay of her family and coworkers. To make her existence a little easier and keep those around her comfortable, she imitates others, piecing together a persona that functions well enough in society. This is sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and frankly, sometimes relatable. Normal emotional regulation or not, we all create a presentable mask, sculpting it throughout the years as we learn more and more about how to move through space in a way we can feel okay about.

As Keiko ages, the people whose orbit she floats in increasingly pressure her to assimilate through a more respectable career, a husband, a family. Exhausted by the barrage of questions about her future and the emotional reactions of her family, she decides to take action — of her own, for once, but still unable to escape the strict boundaries laid out for women.

On a personal note, the whole book made me long for convenience stores in Japan (and South Korea), a trip to which was the perfect way to both begin and end the day. If we had better convenience stores in the US, and especially if they, too, were on nearly every corner, I’d be there daily. The onigiri would hate to see me coming, at 7 am, like clockwork, as the convenience store woman would want it.

watching

I watched 13 movies collectively in September and October, and September’s were nearly all silly companions on the seven flights I took during the month (40 hours, god). I’ll spare you my thoughts on all of them, but stand-outs included Mermaids (1990), The Substance (2024), Conclave (2024), and my annual rewatch of The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993).

As far as shows go, “English Teacher” has been quite enjoyable; it almost leans too earnest, but it never reaches cringe and is genuinely funny. Considering I also love “Abbott Elementary,” I guess this subgenre of endearing teacher comedy is for me. I also devoured “Nobody Wants This.” I’d be curious where a second season goes because by the end, it’s getting into “just make a decision" already” logistical nightmare territory, but Adam Brody and Kristen Bell have undeniable chemistry!

And lastly on the watched front, I think my Venn diagram of a love of both books and K-dramas has quite possibly no overlap in this space, but it is my newsletter after all so we’re going to talk about them, again. I started “Love Next Door” in South Korea (after a night out that left us all in bed well past noon) and was so hooked I downloaded the remaining available episodes to watch on the plane home. It’s the first romantic K-drama that has hooked me since “Queen of Tears,” and I have to admit it’s partly because the lead actors are rumored to be dating, and it’s easy to believe. Overall, it wasn’t the best I’ve ever seen or even the best of the four I somehow managed to finish. “Lovely Runner,” a new drama, takes the top spot, and I also enjoyed “True Beauty” from 2020 — though the beauty standards are wild and I need a whole essay on that.

buying

I shopped in Japan and Korea with no abandon because other countries’ currency feels like fake money (it isn’t), so October required more frugality that I did not give it. I could write a whole essay on middle-class lifestyle creep, but for now, I’ll leave you with what people have expressed the most interest in: skincare products. This is not an extensive list, which I’m sorry to admit, but these stand out the most to me.

• SKIN1004 Madagascar Centella Double Cleansing Duo (an oil + foaming cleanser combo. I always compare double cleansing, especially after makeup, to an electric toothbrush; once you try it, you’ll wonder how your skin ever felt clean before!)

• SKIN1004 Madagascar Centella Hyalu-Cica Blue Serum (an alternative to the popular Torriden hyaluronic serum, which I also like)

• Round Lab Birch Juice Moisturizing Sunscreen (my favorite sunscreen, so I stocked up on this one. I also want to try the tinted version, which I didn’t know existed, and I bought the stick version because that format is easiest for tattoos and reapplication)

• MEDIHEAL Tea Tree Trouble Pads (for my acne-prone ass skin)

• AESTURA A-Cica 365 Calming Cream (really liking this so far, and I also love the Atobarrier 365 Cream when I need something heavier — which I brought back for a couple of friends)

• LANEIGE Cream Skin toner (a restock for me, I love this weird milky toner)

• Dr.G Red Blemish Clear Soothing Cream (recommended by both my and my sister’s estheticians)

• Abib Collagen Eye Patches (I know people care more about eye cream in their 30s but patches are about as far as I go, and these are nice)

• rom&nd Glasting Color Gloss (I can’t find a product with the exact same packaging on this one, but I assume it’s the same product … or it could be the glasting water tint, who knows! The names are all similar! I love a lip product and these are immediate new favorites. I also like the juicy lasting tint)

Book shopping is a hobby entirely separate from book reading, and while it might not be one I’m particularly proud of, it’s one I am passionately devoted to nonetheless. September and October were over the top, but I’m going to hope this is a safe space! Instead of judging me, tell me which of these books to prioritize!

• God of the Woods by Liz Moore

• Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

• Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas

• Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

• Human Acts by Han Kang (I’ve already started this one)

Other loves of the month that required my money:

• My sister and I became obsessed with banana milk while in Korea, especially while making a little ice-cup convenience store coffee in the mornings. I can’t recreate that experience, but you can buy the same brand of banana milk in the US, just packaged differently, either at H Mart or other Asian grocery stores or just on Amazon. My partner and his sister and my sister’s partner all hated the banana milk + coffee concoction, but it is extremely popular and we didn’t come up with the idea so don’t blame me for having good taste.

• I’d been trying to rent this damn Lisa Says Gah cardigan for ages, and it finally became available on Nuuly. When it arrived new with tags and with a decent discount for purchasing, I took it as a sign. I got the red, but I really love the blue too.

I know we’re halfway through November already, but try to have a good, mostly sane month anyway. For better or worse, we keep going.

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

1. If you’re one of the two people reading this who also watch K-dramas, please tell me so we can write each other essays about them.

2. Trying to reclaim the term “women’s fiction” because it’s horrible but maybe leave the men out anyway!!