I’m doing it— I’m going in for the low-hanging fruit that is recommendations delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday. I’m pretty sure I have adult ADHD so can’t say how long this sub-category will last or if it’ll find any love amongst you all but it’s better than writing to you once every three months. Oh, also I finished the second entire restructuring of my novel today so everything feels good and effortless. For now. I also made a cover photo for it! Please appreciate my abysmal design efforts, hugely improved by Isha. I also rate everything out of 5 because why the hell not.
Let’s get into it.
What I’m reading
Animal by Lisa Taddeo
I finished this book last month and I have to say, for somebody who didn’t like her debut nonfiction book Three Women, Taddeo’s really hit a home run with this one. Story of a young, barely-hinged, 30-something narrator, Joan is voracious and obsessive. She is addicted to love and its analogues — in particular, the adoration of men who happen to be married to someone else.
The novel opens with an actual bang: Joan’s married boss, with whom she’s had a protracted affair, bursts into a restaurant where she’s having dinner with another man and shoots himself in front of her. (No spoilers here: It literally happens in the first paragraph.) The dead man is Vic, the avuncular creative director of the Manhattan ad agency where Joan works, a besotted sugar daddy who mentored, promoted, bedded, spoiled and stalked her. The memory of their affair hangs like Spanish moss over the first half of the book.
“I can tell you a lot about sex with a man to whom you are not attracted,” Joan says. “It becomes all about your own performance, your own body and how it looks on the outside, the way it moves above this man who, for you, is only a spectator.” After Vic’s death, Joan sets off on a cross-country road trip, pausing briefly for a one-night stand with a traveling salesman she meets in Texas, whom she seduces simply because his name is John Ford. “Along the drive I had been wanting to sleep with a real cowboy, someone without social media,” she explains.
Her journey ends in Southern California, where she rents a house overlooking Topanga Canyon. Joan, a quintessential New Yorker, is comically immune to its charms.
In Los Angeles her days are filled with ruminating and shoplifting. She gets a job as a barista and meets a variety of men who want to sleep with her, including Lenny, her senile landlord, and River, a 22-year-old dropout who lives in a yurt. She pops pills and answers text messages from Vic’s angry widow, and goes out of her way to befriend a woman named Alice — a celebrity yoga instructor she spotted on a magazine cover back in New York, “one of those aspirational magazines for people who make more than five million dollars a year.”
This, it turns out, is the entire reason for Joan’s West Coast odyssey: Unbeknown to Alice, she is Joan’s half sister, the product of their father’s extramarital affair. Their growing friendship prompts a reckoning, and a shocking revelation about Joan’s past.
I am interested in what a writer like Lisa Taddeo has to say, what she has to tell us with her debut novel. By all indications—the book jacket, the blurbs, the marketing—Animal is a feminist revenge killing tale. To a certain extent, it is, but it also feels reductive to label Animal as such. Yes, there is revenge, there is a reckoning, and there is a killing, but they seem secondary. Unlike other pieces of pop culture and art that revel in the what (the violence, the rage, the revenge), Animal is concerned with the why—it is a novel that is concerned with making us aware of all the reasons the what happens.
Towards the third act, the plot overtakes the character but it’s so deliciously done, the character is everything I want to be but won’t allow myself to be, that I had a hard time putting it down.
4/5
What I’m Listening To
Ambient Resistance
This playlist has 17 hours and 10 minutes of uninterrupted ambient bliss. With favourites like Huerco S., Jan Jelinek, Susumu Yokota, Actress, Oneohtrix Point Never, E.M.M.A, Car Culture, Max Richter, Mica Levi & Yves Tumor— this playlist is delicious, weird, sad, ethereal and sometimes, downright fucked up. It helps me sleep, it helps me during yoga, it helps me feel sadder when I’m sad and most importantly, it helps me focus & write!
My favourites?
Mica Levi’s Love - original soundtrack for Under The Skin, that super creepy Jonathan Glazer sci-fi film about an extraterrestrial disguising itself as a human female, driving around Scotland attempting to lure unsuspecting men into her van.
Isao Tomita’s Suite Bergamasque: Claire De Lune No.3 - the brilliant Japanese composer does a rendition of Debussy’s in pure synthesizers, for which he won a grammy. A lot of you will vilify me for this but an upgrade on the original, if that was even possible.
Jan Jelinek’s Do Dekor - From his 2001 album, Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records, second album by the German producer. As the title suggests, this is exactly what the album does and it does it very well. Minimal, heavily textured, with a rich sound, the bulk of Loop-finding-jazz-records is given over to a more idiosyncratic pulse, which sheds more light on what Jelinek is doing with his peculiar mixing ideas.
Yamaneko’s Shaped Like Kaladeiscopes - UK born, Japan based producer, he does it all— ambient, new age, techno and 8-bar grime. From his 2020 album, Spa Commissions 2. Get ready for hypnotically arranged vocal samples, aquatic chime pieces and wind-swept harps to create some of a distinctive soundscape.
5/5
What I’m Crying To
I hate explaining poetry so I won’t even try 5/5
What I’m Watching
Taylor Tomlinson’s Look At You Netflix special
Dead mothers, therapy, antidepressants, bipolar disorders, fingering & Jesus— nothing’s off the table in this slightly unhinged stand-up special 5/5
Internet Moment Of The Week
Ranbir kissing Alia’s maang tika during #ralia - a wedding I didn’t need to know anything about ever.
My current icon, Julia Fox calling her book “not a memoir but a masterpiece.” An oldie but a goldie nonetheless.
5/5
See ya next Sunday!
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