The world continues falling apart, more on that in a bit below, and I’ve had no choice but to resort to the ultimate in self care - elimination style reality television. Specifically I’ve attached an IV of The Traitors directly from the television into my veins. The Traitors is a kind of torture show, Dutch in origins, that puts many people who cannot process context cues into a castle and asks them to figure out which ones of them in their group are Traitors (assigned by a sinister host - in America, Alan Cumming in high Hibernian drag having the time of his life.) If you’ve ever played Mafia, it’s kind of like that but with more baseless accusations and higher production quality.
The Traitors is an incredible show. You get drama, gamespersonship, quotable quips, and memes galore. What it is not is a very good game. If you’re watching for any kind of strategy that sets winners apart, this is not the show. Folks are “murdered” by Traitors, often for silly reasons, and the whole group can banish a player, hoping to find a Traitor. The latter happens, often, for even sillier reasons. (I still haven’t decided if this is brilliant or not, making folks perform strategy on camera when the rules don’t allow for any strategic incentives.) The challenges have no real impact on the outcomes, and the time clock is the game’s biggest liar. It’s a game with so many holes in it and so many ways to improve it, but it still makes for an excellent show, placing it in the upper right hand quarter of my Elimination Reality Show Matrix.
I love it. My husband and I have mainlined our way through both seasons of the American version where they use reality tv stars because our civilians are not as interesting as anywhere else in the English speaking world. They tried a season in which they employed 10 civilians and 10 reality stars, and the charisma-lacking civilian folks were just an impediment to entertainment. We also tackled the first season of the Australian version and the second season of the UK version where no ringers are needed for entertainment. Their ordinary citizens are full of enough borderline insanity and delusion that professionals are not required.
But what about books, you ask? Here are some good ones below!
Also, welcome to the herd of new subscribers from the Tournament of Books. Say hi!
THE LIBRARY IS OPEN
Beautyland
by Marie-Helene Bertino (2024)
I’m always eager to pick up a book set in Philadelphia. Heck, I’m eager to pick up a book set anywhere but an apartment in Brooklyn, but I’m extra eager to be able to compare real life to the book’s world. And like any Philadelphian, I’m ready to judge whether the author got it right. I’m not talking about exact locations or shoutouts to folks; I’m talking vibes. Does the author get the feeling of Philadelphia right? Do they really give us that specific grit and charm?
In this case, we have a winner. Beautyland is about a young woman born to a young woman in Northeast Philadelphia, and she may or may not be an alien communicating to her home planet as its inhabitants are looking for a new place to land. Naturally, she communicates through an old fax machine (look it up, kids!) through which she scans her thoughts about her life in essays and receives feedback from the mothership, as it were. Her observations are wise and witty as we follow her journey from birth to coming of age to moving to New York to set off on her own. No one’s perfect. She even writes a tell-all book about being an alien. She’s supposed to be my age exactly, so the pop culture references were all pitches down the middle for me. Are there queer characters? Late breaking, but yes!
This book for me was a slow starter that pulled off some sort of magic trick along the way. Just when I was ready to give up, I started finding myself moved to the point of tears by our heroine. I couldn’t put the book down after that, and by the end of the book it felt less like a coming of age story and more a treatise on the miracle of life. Maybe we’re all aliens on this planet, trying to make it. Maybe our inability to love someone back they way love us, or our fear of not being a good friend, or our guilt in never being able to pay back our parents for all they’ve sacrificed are alien behaviors. If you’re looking for a witty, life-affirming character, pick this one up.
Read it if you like: aliens, Northeast Philly diners, mother/daughter love, friendship, potential asexuality?
Greta & Valdin
by Rebecca K. Reilly (2024)
Speaking of books not set in an apartment in Brooklyn, Greta & Valdin takes place as far away from that as possible - New Zealand, a place I don’t get to read about very often. For that reason, I read this book as if it were part of The Birnam Wood cinematic universe, and you know what? It actually kind of fits in an absurd way. We meet a complicated and funny Maori/Russian/Catalonian family that’s pretty open about all of the intimate personal details of their lives as they all try to put their lives together in this great big messy world.
Greta and Valdin are queer, biracial siblings living together in Auckland trying to get their love lives in order. Greta is a translator with few professional aspirations working part time at the University where her father teaches. Side note: What a year for Gretas. Gerwig, Lee, and now the fictional Vladisavljevic herein. You can’t spell great without Greta! She’s a dating disaster who meets an interesting prospect, as long as her family doesn’t chase her away. And Valdin is her older brother who’s adjusting to life after his soulmate has just moved to Argentina after their breakup. Greta and Valdin are dangerously codependent, and fractures occur as each tries to rekindle love in their own way.
The book extends to being about far more characters than just Greta and Valdin. The entire family gets involved, with them and with each other, in some wild ways that I won’t spoil. There are long lost cousins, a missing nephew, another sibling named Casper, and a patriarch who descends to check on everyone in a rather imposing way. And everyone is actually funny. I giggled a lot while reading this novel, like actual laughs. We do gently straddle the line of quirkiness overload without ever crossing it. I was so envious at the globetrotting lifestyle of the family, but I guess this is what happens when your multicultural family lacks for no money somehow. No explanation is given about that. There’s not much plot exactly, more like connected vignettes that culminate in a grand event and proclamation of love. It’s a debut novel that really impresses in its wise insights into family, parenting, queerness, sibling relations, and cultural identity. I can’t wait to see what she does next.
Read it if you like: Aotearoa, gay siblings, light comedy, grand romantic gestures, imagining things happening up the road from that settlement in Birnam Wood.
Grief Is For People
by Sloane Crossley (2024)
I usually try to get multiple iterations of this newsletter out per month, but in March that just simply wasn’t going to happen. In the past few weeks, my mother in law passed away after a short, sudden illness, two friends have been diagnosed with cancer, and an acquaintance of mine, beloved by the community, died by suicide on the Walt Whitman Bridge. On top of that, the Board of the organization I run lost our president amidst an unrelated scandal, and one of our Board members was brutally beaten by a police officer - an act caught on video for all to see. Our local LGBTQ+ community center had support for an appropriation withdrawn by senators after a viral post from a conservative monster spread lies about activities there. It’s been a season of personal and professional grieving.
I don’t say any of this to elicit any of your sympathy (thanks if you’re thinking that though!), but rather to illustrate how once in a while the library will send the right book when you need it most. In Grief Is For People, Crossley lays out the facts about a rotten stretch in her life where in a matter of days her apartment was robbed of family jewels she held close to her heart, and then her best friend and former boss died by suicide without any warning. If she can solve the robbery, will she be able to turn back time? No, of course not. But, she posits that when horrible things happen in close proximity, we can conflate them into a targeted grief attack that can lay bare all of your vulnerabilities.
I just wish I could be as funny as Crossley is in letting it all out. She sets up the book in five parts to correspond to the Kübler-Ross stages of grieving. (My favorite part is anger, and that happens to be the best section of the book.) She paints a picture of a special friendship and realizes that grieving the physical things she lost cannot compare to the person she associated them with. The book also contains some fun publishing industry gossip, as that’s where she worked with her friend. The book doesn’t offer any tips for dealing with grief - I’m not sure I’d use them even if she did. But it does show that in a world full of grieving, we’re never alone in our quest to use literature, laughs, and memories to get through it.
Read it if you like: The Year of Magical Thinking, mental health, revisiting the James Frye controversy, wistful wit, atypical grief stories.
LIGHTNING ROUND
Blackouts, a piece of art I’m still wrestling with, was the (strange and unexpected) winner of the Tournament of Books.
So many of the judgments were great this year, but only one featured my pets at the mascots of the day. Archie and Ollie were peaceful for a few seconds once they heard.
John Warner writes about the amorphous concept of taste so well.
Until next time…happy reading!
I have yet to even start reading the ToB this year (fortunately, I don't care about the results, just the discussion) but I scrolled through to see your pups, who are the cutest thing ever. I am so sorry to hear about your awful month.
Blackouts has been sitting on my shelf forever and I am sort of terrified of it.