Hey y’all! I’ve taking my own advice about relaxing, and when I wasn’t beating my head against my textbooks in hopes that the words will somehow get from the page into my brain, I managed to get a little pleasure reading in! Here’s a quick rundown of the books I’ve managed to finish off since January, and I’ll include links to their Amazon pages for any interested parties:
Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube, by Blair Braverman
Calling all #UglyDogs! In her nonfiction debut, Braverman, a California native, chronicles her journey trading the warm weather of the west coast for the harsh Arctic climes of Norway and Alaska, as she learns to be a musher. I won’t deny that I shivered from the “cold” while following Blair’s story of navigating unfamiliar and often hostile environments— and the threats aren’t limited to the wilderness. Braverman takes her readers on a journey to, among many other locations, a small, remote Norwegian farming and fishing village, crafting her profiles of the villagers with such care and attention to detail that you feel acutely their joys, sadnesses, and the generally opaque yet good-natured state endemic to Norwegian culture. If you enjoyed the book, or want to get to know Braverman a bit more before you take the plunge, I highly recommend perusing her Twitter. There, she has mastered the art of the narrative tweetstorm: you’ll find insights into musher life, loving (and often hilarious) word-portraits of her amazing dogs, and tales about life on the trail. She’s also managed to create a loyal following: her fans, called the #UglyDogs, recently supported her in her rookie Iditarod run, cheering her on while raising money for rural Alaskan schools and charities.
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find The Good Death, by Caitlin Doughty
Spooooooky! Like with Braverman, I’ve actually been a huge fan of Doughty’s for some time. I eagerly await new episodes of her Ask a Mortician series on Youtube, and I devoured her first book, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: Lessons from the Crematorium, so I knew that I would enjoy From Here To Eternity. I wasn’t wrong! Doughty espouses the philosophy of death positivity, rejecting Western culture’s alienated and corporatized stance towards death while encouraging people to engage with their mortality in healthy ways. To this end, Doughty travels to countries like Indonesia, Bolivia, Japan, and many more, to observe other cultures’ ways of dealing with death, like a morbid Margaret Mead. Doughty’s humor and introspection help her readers gain insight into death rituals that might otherwise seem gruesome and barbaric to Western sensibilities, and invites us to ask how we can continue our own journeys toward a better relationship with death.
The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson
This one is a bit of a cheat: I first read this book at least 10 years ago, and it’s one I like to revisit at least once a year. Hill House is, in my opinion (and lots of other people’s), one of the greatest gothic horror stories and psychological thrillers of all time. It’s a classic with a twist: a spooky old mansion comes with terrible stories and mysterious happenstances. Could it be ghosts? An academic comes to experiment and study Hill House’s activity with three assistants. They realize, perhaps too late, that it’s not ghosts that are plaguing them, toying with their psyches… I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll leave it there, but I will quote the opening and closing paragraph of the book, and if you don’t want to devour the whole book right this very minute after reading this, then stop lying to yourself:
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continue upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
Right?????!!? And since Netflix’s excellent, and very, very, VERY loosely adapted miniseries was released (the day before my birthday, no less), Jackson’s work has enjoyed a revival of interest. In fact, another of her novels, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, has been adapted into a movie that will be released in just under a month. I’m saving Castle for when I finish the semester, but Hill House is like an old, spooky friend that can always be revisited.
What do you think of my selections? Do you have any recommendations for me? Leave a comment below and let me know!
Isobel Robinson-Ortiz 