Introduction
So, it seems everyone is making Substacks now. I’m a little late to the party. You can imagine me scrounging in close to midnight with a drink tucked in the crook of my elbow, mysterious, etc. Or just swanning in rudely. Depends on your perspective, I guess.
(I already can’t take myself seriously. Throwing up as I write this.)
Reader, this will mostly be stream of consciousness. You can probably tell and will have to forgive me. I need more places to relax where I write. My journals are full of tense handwriting — when I flick through the pages I measure my stress by tightly I was clutching the pen. That’ll be useful for future palaeographers (scholars of handwriting) but less so for me. Side note: were those parentheses condescending? I had to look the word up when I saw it in a module description so I just figured I’d save you the trouble. If you already knew it you’re smarter than me. Which, to be fair, is not hard. Anyway, back to the journals.
I like to look back on myself. Check up. What is the point of the diary if you can’t spy on yourself. The me of yesterday is already an enigma. I’m forgetful. And, when I don’t have to look you in the face, horrendously, pathologically, pretentious. Apologies.
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Anyway — the point. I’ve been playing with the idea that I’ll use this to send out my favourites of the month at the beginning of the next one, like some kind of youtuber. Except all my favourites will be scraps of poetry you’ve probably already seen floating about online or the life story of some niche guy from early modern London (mostly London, because that’s where British printing is happening in that period) I read about for uni. I don’t know if that’s especially interesting but it’s what I spend most of my life reading about so it’s what I have to draw on. Also, I’ll do a mini-review of every book I read in a month. Goodreads is not enough. I have to tell everyone everything or I’ll be frothing at the mouth.
I have no idea how long I can captivate a reader for but honestly, I’m just going to write until I run out of steam. It’s 20:44 currently. You can imagine me at my desk in the evening now properly. Pitch black outside, with the harsh white streetlamp picking out only the dark tree it’s next to. Last year they changed its bulb. My whole life it’d been a warm orange and then one night I came home from uni and couldn’t sleep because someone was shining the bat signal into my bedroom. Still heartbroken. Anway. You get the picture, you have the ambience; you can fill in the rest. Extremely intimate. You know it all.
No spoilers for January so I think I’ll just do a brief foray into my fave reads of 2021. Not to be confused with my fave reads that came out in 2021, because I rarely read new releases. It’s not that I hate them (but I do hate hardbacks), I just have a long backlog okay!
I’ll pick three, three’s a good number. I’m not even certain they are my faves because my brain is like a sieve. But they called to me… Not in any particular order because they’re all (I think) my best girls. I can’t choose. I’m not perfect.
Okay, I’m kidding. Pachinko is number one for sure but the rest are equal. Pachinko, Pachinko, what can I say about you. My heart sings for you. Have you ever realised there is a specific frequency that authors can tune into which makes you feel like your skin is being peeled off from the inside out? Intergenerational cradle-to-grave novels are that for me.
Pachinko follows multiple generations of a Korean family living in twentieth-century Japan. Love & loss & heartbreak & family tragedy. Etc. Actually devastating.
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
Can’t dwell too much on this one because it makes me feel too seen and it’s embarrassing. Lots of fun though. Shapeshifter travelling across the USA. Blurring gender lines. The fun stuff. My cover is actually ugly though but nobody’s perfect.
You may know her from your favourite apocalyptic pandemic Shakespearean novel soon to be Mackenzie Davis HBO Max show, Station Eleven, but Emily St. John Mandel is back to ask the question: what if you could read an emotionally devastating novel about a failing Ponzi scheme? The Glass Hotel has it all: estranged siblings, a Succession-esque corporate hellscape, ghosts and/or drug-fuelled delusions.
It’s very fun. But I also read it under a tree eating cherries in June, so that could have contributed a lot to the overall experience of the thing.
We don’t talk enough about how much your environment influences the enjoyment of a book, but that could be a me-thing. I read 90 pages of 1994 erotica for housewives and had a better time than when I read I Who Have Never Known Men, and I’m certain it’s because I read Maggie and Her Colonel in a sunny April spell rather than October.
Time to depart, I think. I’ll leave you with some poetry! Some of mine, some of someone else's.
A tiny excerpt from something I wrote the other day:
I read about love and become a conduit. I read
about love and become a visionary. I read about
love and become an empty hotel. I read about
love and become harder than granite. I read
about love and listen to the sound of statues
being erected eighty years from now.
Not too original I know, but pretty fun I think.
And for the “someone else’s”, who else but Mary Oliver. I leave you with an excerpt from Dogfish, from her collection Dream Work.
I wanted
the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I wasalive
for a little while.
It is evening and no longer summer. I hope you are staying safe.
Yours,
SJ.
@21:32.