September, or Slightly Less Summer

Consumption Diaries No. 12

My friend and I had a conversation this month, stuffed into the backseat of an air-conditioned Uber shielding us from summer’s lingering heat, about not actually liking summer.

I loved it growing up, or I loved what it meant: swim team, pool days, no school-related anxiety, no homework. Except none of those things exist in your 30s. I actually hate the heat and humidity, it turns out. I like rain and I like colder weather and I want to wear sweaters (I will, however, always maintain my commitment to iced coffee in any season). To be fair, besides college, I’ve never lived anywhere truly cold and I don’t know how to like, shovel snow or whatever. DC is a warm place! Our seasons should more accurately be called Summer, Almost Summer, Slightly Less Summer, and Not Summer.

All of that is to say: September was welcome, even though it’s still Slightly Less Summer here, the trees are all still green, and I have yet to comfortably wear a sweater during daylight hours. I did attempt to wear a sweater at night to the beer garden my friends and I frequent, where we downed pumpkin pie latte shots, so that’s kind of the same thing.

read

books

The Intimacy Experiment by Rosie Danan — This one is about a former porn star who teams up with a young rabbi to bring open-minded sex ed and intimacy classes to said hot rabbi’s temple. It was perfectly fine, but I once again wonder why I keep coming back to romance books when they so often give me the ick. I grabbed this out of a Little Free Library on my way home one night, finished it in a couple of days, and put it right back in.

Cross the Line by Simone Soltani — I was honestly ready to drag this Formula 1 romance novel like Sergio Perez’s front wing during last week’s Japanese Grand Prix. I expected silly fan fiction from one of the internet’s terrifying Charles Leclerc girlies, but Cross the Line was absolutely not that. It was so fun and I’m thrilled it’s going to be a series. The author also clearly knows her stuff because there’s a lot of F1 talk, which I of course loved, but I’ll be really curious to see if they add some explanations or spell out acronyms like FIA now that the book has been picked up by Macmillan and is set to be published next year! (Sorry to everyone who I hyped this book to after getting an advanced copy from the author only for you to have to wait!)

All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky — I thought there were some really beautiful, poignant moments and themes in All-Night Pharmacy, and it’s a solid entrant into the sad girl lit world. It deals with two subjects very important to me — addiction and sisters — but it hasn’t stuck with me as I expected it to.

Women Without Kids by Ruby Warrington — I have a whole separate post about this book brewing. As someone who has decided not to have kids and often feels misunderstood or judged because of it, I’ve taken other people’s decisions to have kids a little too personally sometimes. So, look out for that newsletter later this month, and here’s my goodreads review in the meantime.

ASAP by Axie Oh — I read the first in this series, XOXO, a couple of years ago and enjoyed it despite very rarely being able to make it through a YA novel. I liked this one even more! I gave it a goodreads review since it was an e-ARC, but I am in a very deep hole of Netflix K-dramas right now and ASAP comfortingly felt like the book version of that. It’ll be out in February.

Voyager: Constellations of Memory by Nona Fernández — I very much enjoyed Fernández’s The Twilight Zone but didn’t love her Space Invaders, both of which I read with my girly Shanice, so Voyager was a test. The writing was beautiful, but for such a short memoir, it felt a little disjointed and aimless to me. The theme of stars + the cosmos was perfect for my current astrophysics obsession, though. I want to give more of her books a chance, but I don’t think my Duolingo is going to get me to the level of literary fiction any time soon, so I’ll just have to wait for further translation.

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli — These lessons were indeed brief. To be fair, the author states that the book is written for those with absolutely no background in science, but also to be fair, I thought I fell into that category. Just call me a physicist! Rovelli writes so poetically about science, though, that I’m planning to read more of his books soon.

via Pola von Grüt

misc.

Black hole news! My partner has alerted me to some space drama, Black Holes Are Doing Something Weird After They Eat. Basically, they are burping matter back out, which as we know, doesn’t make much sense. Sending me black hole articles is my love language.

This NYT article on the video game Starfield. I have never wanted to play a video game more in my life, and my PlayStation evangelism has ruined my chances because the developers were bought by Microsoft and it is only coming out on Xbox. The universe according to Starfield is expansive and it’s also cruel, to me specifically. I hope it sucks!

From The Walrus, Goodreads Is Terrible for Books. Why Can’t We All Quit It? Though I use StoryGraph as well, I really can’t explain the hold Goodreads has on me. It’s a fundamentally difficult platform for users, it’s racist and misogynistic, readers behave badly there, writers behave badly there. And yet!

I keep thinking about this NYT article by Carl Zimmer reports that mammals are probably halfway through their time on Earth, meaning they (we) have 250 million years left, which honestly feels generous given our current trajectory.

I guess I just do marketing for The New York Times now because one more from them that I enjoyed this month: What It’s Like to Be a 13-Year-Old Girl Today. It’s hard to be 13 in any generation, but I am so glad I didn’t have to go through puberty online.

From Elle, Who Needs Plot When You Have Vibes? The “no plot just vibes” subgenre slots in with the other overused buzzwords that are so nearly devoid of meaning at this point: unhinged, sad girl, chaotic, women’s wrongs. Clearly, I like this genre myself; I’ve read all but a couple of the novels mentioned in this article. I find it interesting, though, that all of the books that fall into this category really do have plots, even if the story isn’t plot-driven. Rarely are these novels truly aimless or experimental in form. No BookTok-approved hot girl novels are.

I liked this NPR interview with Jia Tolentino, whose writing I have loved for a long time, about ego death through religion and culminating in parenthood. The religion-drugs-parenthood mix of this really worked for me, especially as someone who tries so hard to understand other people’s desire to become parents. I haven’t ever experienced that, the biological urge or whatever you want to call it, and I don’t often hear it explained in a way that clicks. Also, this quote: “I'm reminded in those moments that now what I understand as the closest analog to God is the fact that the laws of physics and biology create a world that begets life, human and non-human. And I understand the framework of the devil as the competing forces of entropy.”

watched

The only thing I’ve been able to truly concentrate on lately has been Korean dramas on Netflix, which makes no sense considering they require significant concentration and commitment. But I kind of like that; there are very few forms of entertainment that demand enough of your attention that you’re required to shut everything else off.

Crash Course in Romance — I assume most K-dramas aren’t a super authentic look into Korean culture, but this one looks at the academic pressure put on both students and their parents, which was really interesting. I mostly just want someone who is very good at math to watch this and let me know if the math teacher is writing absolutely nonsense or if those equations are for real.

Romance is a Bonus Book — I watched this one mostly because it’s about employees at a publishing company, and also because the male lead, Lee Jong-suk, is an actor my sister and I keep calling Mr. Lips because for some reason his lips are so lippy? I also appreciated the call-out of workplace culture that makes it virtually impossible for women to reenter the workforce after taking a “break” to raise their kids.

Summer Strike — so quietly beautiful and sad and sweet! I think maybe all my problems would be solved if I spent a summer going on strike from life. I was tearing up at the definition they gave of happiness as “the state of being sufficient” and downright crying by the time Yeo-rum said “I haven’t quite figured out how I should go on, but my life is sufficient.” It wasn’t the best show I’ve seen on like, a technical level, but I needed it.

Start-Up — I liked this one enough but it really offended my Virgo sensibilities. Maybe love triangle tropes just aren’t for me. I didn’t want to take part in Team Edward vs. Team Jacob, I still can’t choose whether I’m team Conrad or Team Jeremiah, and in Start-Up, I want nothing to do with Team Do-san vs. Team Ji-pyeong. And start-up tech culture is toxic enough without complete idiots getting involved. And said idiots have to be continuously bailed out and helped along by one character who they hate in return? Ungrateful!

Doom at Your Service — I was really enjoying this one until around episode 6 or 7 when it starts to get so repetitive: they confess their feelings, they take them back, they date, they break up, they confess their feelings, they take them back… I’m not done with the show yet and this isn’t uncommon in the K-dramas I’ve seen, but I’ll include this in next month’s roundup once I finish it.

I’m also in the process of watching Destined With You, which isn’t fully released yet, but I love it so far.

Otherwise:

Valley Girl (1983) — this is actually pretty decent, and it’s shocking to see such a young Nic Cage. This movie was regularly mentioned in my household growing up because my parents’ bathroom, designed in the late 70s, had the same wallpaper as the bathroom in the movie’s party house.

You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah (2023) — suddenly, I love nepo babies. This was very cute.

Bottoms (2023) — this is best gone into with no expectations, because oh my god. It just kept getting more ridiculous and unserious, which I loved. It was very funny and entertaining and sometimes that’s all a movie needs to be.

Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is back, and this season is going to be GOOD. I wondered where this franchise was going to go after Jen Shah got locked up for defrauding old people, but Bravo went and got someone who snitched on her and added them as a housewife. Meredith’s so close to snapping. I don’t understand why Mary is even here. Also, the other housewives need to be going to Whitney’s surgeon/esthetician because she looks incredible.

bought

I impulsively bought the new iPhone this month, so I’ve tried to limit my spending otherwise because lifestyle creep is my absolute most toxic trait. To prove that, I present to you this Unreliable Narrator baseball hat from Sunny’s Book Truck that I decided I needed, despite never having been to Yuma in my life (and I am from Arizona). I also bought Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe by Brian Greene because I’m still fixating on this cosmos shit. We’ll see when I read it!

Thanks for sticking through to the end! Tell me what you’re reading or watching or not reading or not watching this month. I’m going to lean into spooky season, if I can tear myself away from K-dramas and pick up a book.

Before you go: Find me on instagram, goodreads, storygraph, or letterboxd to keep up with my obsessive tracking habits in real-time.

If you missed last month’s Consumption Diaries, you can find it here, or the full archive of these roundups here.