So, summer happened, huh?
I didn’t mean to take a long break from this newsletter. I didn’t read a ton in June, filled with deadlines and work I can’t talk about but I read one really good book that I was going to write about … and then I got distracted. It happens a lot, I’m afraid.
This summer, I’ve had roughly sixty million deadlines (or 15ish) and everything has been done almost last minute. It’s all gotten done but I haven’t been so great on time management and, alas, the newsletter got a little bogged down.
Oh, I also fell so hard I gave myself a bruise that looked like a tail but we’ll cover that after the book recommendations~
The Best Books I Read June - August
One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway - Åsne Seierstad
I read this back in June and I loved it so much, I’m just going to leave the notes I took right after I finished it that I think tell my thoughts better than any write up could do.
so well written, it made me cry, the way it built up stories of the children as well as the killer, short chapters that let you get to know the children until finally the long, unbreaking chapter just called Friday that gnaws at you, you knew this was going to happen and yet. Then how it went through the trial and finally the actual impact on the families. The epilogue where she talks about how she wrote the book and the proceeds going to charities that the kids’ families think they’d support. Just how it’s the all around best true crime book I’ve possibly ever read
Murder in Postscript - Mary Winters
As you all know, I’m a sucker for the ‘historical woman solves mysteries, potentially falls in love’ genre. I actually discovered this one shelving it as a hold for a patron and immediately put it on hold for myself. The first in a new series, its not radically different from other books in this genre but it was pretty fun. The set up is our heroine, Amelia, was the daughter of the owners of a country inn who married a count… who turned out to be dying of a terminal illness and wanted to marry someone to look after his orphaned niece after he passed. Now rich, widowed, and bored, Amelia does her best to raise her niece (who is lovely and adorable) while secretly being the agony aunt for the local newspaper a childhood friend runs. There’s a fun mystery, there’s an intriguing new gentleman, and the household of Amelia, her niece, and her late husband’s aunt who is just trying to keep the family’s honor intact, is a fun dynamic. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder - David Grann
I’m a huge fan of Killers of the Flower Moon and also a huge fan of boat books so I’d had this thing on hold since it was announced. And I was ultimately a little let down? I don’t really know why; the writing is as good as always, the story is incredibly dramatic (shipwreck! mutiny! cannibalism! multiple trials!) and there’s even a famous relative (Byron’s a celebrity to me.) But somehow the whole thing felt rather staid to me. I think I may be the only person that felt that way so please take my opinion with a grain of salt. I was also very hurt and thus, very sleepy when I read it so that may have played a hand in it. I must be true to myself~
A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens - Raul Palma
This doesn’t come out until October but sometimes I get to read things early~ This is a debut novel that’s about a man trying to exorcise the house of a man he hates but it’s really about debt and trauma and colonialism and Miami and a million other things. You know his wife has recently passed when it starts but finding out what happened to her is a slowly unravelling mystery that made me actually gasp and go ‘Jesus Christ’ out loud in my office when I read it. And there are actual ghosts and demons, too, don’t you worry. I really enjoyed this and I highly recommend it.
And here’s a book about ghosts that, while I don’t know if I’d say it was great, it was at least interesting enough that I was locked in and speed read it. Set over one day, it follows several different people in a small Ohio town when ghosts start appearing to torment the living. It did a lot of interesting things with different perspectives, different relationships. Sometimes it was slightly too wordy for its own good and I kept seeing sentences where I would shave a little bit off if it were me. There are definitely some heavy-handed points made (did Karen really have to exist?) but ultimately, it was an interesting story that I really could not have guessed where it would go and for that, it deserves a mention.
So the good news is that I went to New Orleans with two of my best friends back in July. My beloved friend Katy lives there and I had never gone so me and our other good friend Heather flew down for a long weekend. It was absolutely lovely. I got to meet Katy’s new dog Maple (who is my favorite dog, sorry to all other dogs), see the Mississippi River for the first time (I exclaimed something like “I’ve heard great things!” when I saw it), went on a Ghost Tour that also had a beignet stop (A+++) and just generally got to hang out with two of my favorite people for several days. Cannot recommend enough.
The bad news is I had a bit of an accident on my way home. There was a cloud burst before I needed to go to the airport and it began pouring rain. Katy ran to get the car to pull it around and I just needed to go down three steps and hop into her car. That was, apparently, asking too much.
My foot went out from under me on the first step and I landed hard. The kind of fall where you just sit for a second (in my case, in the pouring rain) and go “…am I okay? Am I going to throw up?” Poor Katy was in the car, though, and I didn’t to worry her or miss my flight so I got up, got in the car, and assured her I was fine.
Spoiler Alert: I was not fine.
I got to the airport, checked in, and made it to my gate all feeling relatively okay, though, in retrospect, it was probably the adrenaline. I had a flight from New Orleans to Salt Lake City, an hour layover, and then another to Portland. As I sat waiting to board my first flight, I realized that I was maybe more hurt than I’d let myself realize but it was too late: it was time to fly.
I was in a window seat with a five year old in the middle seat and his mother on the aisle. He spent most of the flight watching Paw Patrol and Transformer cartoons. About an hour into the flight, I was feeling worse for the wear and I pushed the button for a flight attendant and asked for a pain killer which he brought to me sans water to take it with. I mentioned offhand to the mother that I had fallen on my way to the airport and it was starting to hit me but I decided to wait until drink service for water and sat, clutching the pain killer in my hand.
Several minutes later, I started feeling bad. Unsure what to do, I asked the mother if I could get past her to head to the bathroom. And then … I woke up to a bunch of faces looking down at me, asking if I was alright.
I was only dimly aware of the fact that I had fainted in my seat as several flight attendants got me up and whisked me to the tiny airplane bathroom, handing me a bag and saying good luck. It wasn’t until the tiny door closed behind me that I realized that not only had I fainted, I’d been sick all over myself while unconscious. It was incredibly gross, I was just wearing a dress and had no change of clothes and, again, only an airplane bathroom to clean myself up in. There’s not enough room in an airplane bathroom to exist, let alone attempt to wash your clothes and your body. I did my best, put my clothes back on, and spent an hour just zoning in the back of the plane and drinking the never-ending cups of water the flight attendants plied me with until returning to my seat just before we began our descent.
To shorten the rest of the tale, the mother I’d sat by was a nurse and was very concerned I had a concussion though I assured her I hadn’t hit my head. I hobbled over to my next gate and was given an aisle seat, just in case. I texted my supervisor I wouldn’t be in to work the next day and scheduled an appointment with whatever doctor in network could see me and flew home from Salt Lake City where my parents let me stay in the guest room (my old room) so my mother could take me to the doctor in the morning. I still didn’t know what my injury looked like, having been on the move the entire time so I had my mother look when we got home. Her immediate response?
“Jesus Christ, what did you do to yourself??”
It was bad, friends. It was so purple it was black, it was large, it curled so it looked like a tail. It’s now been almost seven weeks and I still have a huge bump on my rear that has only stopped hurting in the last few days. X-rays showed I hadn’t broken anything but they also didn’t send me that information for two full weeks. I couldn’t sit up for a month. It’s … been a time.
All is mostly well now. I’m down to only three deadlines, I have some projects picking up steam, and I’m headed to Bristol in a week and a half for a tiny Our Flag Means Death fan convention with online friends which will be lovely and I’ll write about next month.
I promise that I will not take this long to write again, next month’s newsletter already a draft. A big thanks to this newsletter’s subscribers! You are all lovely! Remember that if you’re a subscriber ($5/month or $35/year, what a deal!), you get to pick a book for me to read and I’ll devote a whole newsletter to it. Give me something good, bad, weird! I’m here for it!
But until next month, I hope you had a lovely holiday weekend (in the US) or a lovely regular weekend (anywhere else)! See you soon and happy reading!
What a harrowing tale. I am glad you are on the road to recovery, but that has to have been a nightmare. Did you ever get a diagnosis of what you did to yourself?