Hi y’all,
Hope your week has gone well. In case you missed it, I wrote a review of Edith Wharton’s Custom of the Country this week. It includes a very important game of “Marry, Fuck, Kill” that needs your input.
Just a few housekeeping notes to start the newsletter:
An Update in Your Service: Now that summer is over, whenever I publish a review, I won’t publish a “Book Report” for that week. #BackToSchool
Don’t Like These Book Reports? Good news! You can now edit your subscription to only receive my reviews. Instructions here. My reviews section is handily titled “Just Reviews.”
A Message to the Newbs: A lotta new faces around here! I’d love to get to know you. Send me an email and introduce yourself! booknotesblog@gmail.com
Spotted: Detransition, Baby in the climbing gym. Beautiful World, Where Are You on the G train. Second Skin from the Brown University Library, picked up at Yale through the Borrow Direct program. The reader is wearing all black, except for royal blue socks, and she looks decidedly cooler than me. Her skirt has a grid pattern that’s playful, but not school-girlish. We’re on the L train to Williamsburg. The guy sitting next to her is also in all black, but he’s not nearly as cool. I don’t think they know each other. He’s about her age, with a well groomed mustache and his keys on a carabiner clipped to his belt loop. He’s also reading. It’s called something stupid, like “The Consequences of Love.” (I can’t really see it from here because he’s holding it on his lap. I’ve moved around like four times so I can get a in a better position to read the page headers. I’m now sitting next to them, ducks in a row. I feel weird when I do this and a little worried they can tell I’m writing about them in my phone.)
Another woman sits across from us, on the very edge of the seat, and she pulls out a book with a bright red cover. Daniel Cohen’s La Prosperite du Vice. This girl looks French. Her hair is slicked back and she’s in a red floral dress and she’s carrying a Claudie Pierlot tote bag. She’s now furiously taking notes in the margins with a no. 2 pencil. She’s writing on the top of the page before she even begins to read it. I’m going to use a pencil to write in my books too from now on.
This week, I recommend that you hop onto Spotify, search for the book you’ve just finished, and find a playlist that some weirdo made as a personal soundtrack to the novel.
These playlists are usually made by girls, many while writing their 12th grade English essay about the titular book (especially if the book’s by Fitzgerald or Steinbeck or someone that would wind up on your high school summer reading—just search Catcher in the Rye and see how many playlists come up). Some of the playlists are really quite good, like this playlist for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, or this playlist for Annihilation, or this playlist for Bunny. I really like this one for Preliminary Materials for a Young Girl, lmao, even though I have no idea how these songs relate to the book.
Some playlists try to capture the “vibes” of the book, whereas others try to match songs with the story, though the best do a bit of both (here’s an example of both the former and the latter for Mrs. Dalloway, and here’s a mix of both). Most of the playlists feature Lana del Rey or Taylor Swift. All of them wind up showing some strange quirk is the listening habits of the curator. Like, why is the Les Mis soundtrack on the Young Girl playlist? And I personally would never pair ABBA with Mrs. Dalloway, but after listening to the playlist, I get it. Valerie Solanas would prolly roll over in her grave over this break-up-anthem, corporate-pop homage to the SCUM Manifesto.
As George pointed out: like with Reddit, the most obscure the topic, the better the content. Playlists for The Great Gatsby basically all suck. Playlists for the Baron in the Trees are better.
And bc I’ve provided a bunch of links for you to judge strangers with, it only seems fair I let you judge a few of my playlists as well, because obviously I’ve made playlists for books too. Here are the playlists I made a few years ago for the three protagonists of Mrs. Dalloway—Clarissa, Peter, and Septimus. lmk what you think.
Not much going on this week for me
I haven’t done much internet reading this week that I’m ready to comment on. Instead, I’ma leave you with this great Twitter account I recently discovered, and that truly has made my week better:
It’s just screenshots from Columbo! I love Columbo. Who doesn’t?
Oh gosh, I have so much to read, it’s hard to list here. But I’m also desperate to read Gossip Girl: Psycho Killer, which I hadn’t heard of until reading The Dirt this morning. I’ve long said that Gossip Girl is one of the best books about the internet— and the American Psycho-ification of it sounds unbelievably perfect.
Okay, it’s time for George and me to go climb some rocks. Have a nice weekend y’all!
xoxoxo,
Book Notes
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