Reading/Watching/ Listening
Reading
Books:
I finished a lot of books lately. Mostly because I deleted my Twitter account. Or X, as it’s now called. I feel so much calmer now that I’m not wasting hours of my day arguing with strangers on the internet about complete nonsense. So. I finished two more Sally Hepworth books, The Mother-in-Law and The Good Sister, both great page turners that I read in a couple of sittings. Also read James Scott Bell’s book, How to Write Short Stories which was a good refresher. The second half of the book was short stories and one of them, Common Denominator by John D MacDonald published in 1951, reminded me that I want to read more classic science fiction short stories so I’ve been looking for a good anthology. I also read The Villain Edit, a memoir by a former Beachelor contestant who was one of the villains of her season. I had to google a lot of the drama and past contestants to make sense of the stories. I didn’t realise this was a memoir when I started but it was fine. I’d still love to read a book going deep into the experiences of people who get the villain edit and what it does to their lives. That would be a great story.
Articles:
Ages ago, when I first got onto Twitter, Naomi Wolf was one of the first people I looked up. I’d been impressed, years before, by her first book, The Beauty Myth, although less so by the follow-up, Fire With Fire, which seemed to mostly be about how difficult it was to be a best-selling, internationally famous feminist. I was surprised to see she was mostly posting pictures of clouds with captions like “SEE THESE CLOUDS? NOT LIKE THE CLOUDS WE USED TO GET IN THE OLD DAYS. THESE ARE BAD CLOUDS,” and realised something very odd had happened to Naomi Wolf. All this to say, I very much enjoyed this article by Helen Lewis about Naomi Klein’s new book, which discusses the experience of being continually mistaken for Naomi Wolf. The Atlantic
Watching
I’ve been rewatching The Rings of Power just because I love the immersive feel of it.
Listening
I’m listening to the Girls Next Level podcast where Holly Madison and Bridget Marquardt react to episodes of their former reality show, Girls Next Door, in obsessive detail. And I mean obsessive. Sometimes it takes them two hours to talk through a 25 minute episode. I like hearing them deconstruct the experience of being turned into a reality show and the darkness of the Playboy world. It’s also great hearing them explain the olden days of the early 2000s to their listenings (“Dial up internet was this thing where…”).
