Here are a few thoughts on the books I read in form of the often short and possibly not very substantial reviews on Storygraph. Even if I don’t rate book as such anymore, I’ll here share them in order of how much I enjoyed reading them. Favourite first, obviously.
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, Gabrielle Zevin, 2014 If I still rated books, this would have gotten 5 stars. Such a lovely story about real people and their lives, misfortunes and mistakes but also their joys and achievements. It’s also about books and why we love and need them. Sooooo good. This has been the 3rd book I read from Zevin and I enjoyed all of them. They’ve all been unique in their plot, which I also liked a lot because it shows how good a writer she is. I’ll definitely try to read more of her.
No Time Like The Past (The Chronicles of St Mary’s #05), Jodi Taylor, 2015 Another entertaining story from St. Mary’s. There is always so much going and again they are a whirl-wind through history, that I sometimes wish they’d slow down a bit. I mean they do in the plot, but it’s not noticeable in the storytelling as such. I just sometimes feel like I’m loosing track of who’s where/when and what’s happening to whom and all. But maybe that’s just me. (30 June 2024)
The Edge of Lost, Kristina McMorris, 2015 The summary mentioned “skillfully weaving these two stories” and I found that misleading, because it wasn’t really two stories, was it? I don’t know. I kind of enjoyed the story, but it was such a slow burn and sadly enough I didn’t manage to care about neither the main nor some of the side characters all that much. The end comes with a few surprises at least, but by that time I had already almost lost interest.
The Lighthouse Library, Rachael Lucas, 2024 I enjoyed most of the previous Applemore books, but didn’t know this would be a standalone in the series. It was nice enough, but to me it tried to hard to be educational about environment and poverty and all that stuff. It would have needed more substance for me to have any impact, to me this felt a bit performative.
The Wake-Up Call, Beth O’Leary, 2023 I enjoyed previous works from Beth O’Leary, but this just didn’t quite land with me. The writing was fine and the plot idea as such okay for me. I liked the competition angle and miscommunication as a trope often enough works for me, but at least halfway through the story I wanted to knock some sense into the female lead and force her to address what upset her last Christmas. Ugh! The actual reason for the not / wrongly delivered reason was so lame IMHO. All in all… just no cup of tea sadly.
The Guncle Abroad, Steven Rowley, 2024 I guess after how much I enjoyed “The Guncle” a sequel had a lot to live up to. For me this story sadly didn’t deliver as much as I had hoped. Parts of it felt too much like a travel advert for Europe, parts were just a bit silly. I didn’t understand either why Greg and Livia had to marry right now and neither why Patrick had ended things with Emory. I tore through it on a weekend, but if I’m honest a lot of that had to do with me wanting to get it over with.
American Panda, Gloria Chao, 2018 For some reason this book wasn’t for me. I found the writing a bit boring, didn’t find it in me to care all that much about the main character and all in all neither the plot.
Lyrics: “Tough To Be A Dreamer” – Felix Hagan & The Family, 2017
As you can gather from the lack of posts these past few weeks, I still have not quite the idea / plan what to do with this space. It might indeed end up being a place where I archive some of fangirling activities.
Fangirling | Possibly about books and movies but let’s be honest mostly about Frank Turner probably. I’m still working on my post on the other song from the last album, which resonates with me so deeply: “Somewhere Inbetween.” It’s going to take a few more days; hopefully not weeks. I got a bit distracted this weekend because another of my favourite (sadly still not well known) artists – Felix Hagan – did an Insta Live on Friday. Like in the “(not really so) good old days” of lockdown 2020/2021 where we gathered on his Facebook for Felix Friday to hear him play all the songs from everyone. It was nice to do that again and he shared exciting news about a new band and potential tour or at least gigs. If that works out I really hope I can make the trip over to the UK for that. I also had to have a good “listen to all the Felix songs” session yesterday.
It’s always funny in a nice way when my entertainment / media interests collide. I’ve been reading the sixth book in the The Chronicles of St. Mary’s series recently, on of my favourite book series at the moment. And I came across an historical event that sounded familiar! Because Frank used it in one of my (many) favourites metaphors in a song. That needs to be added to my Lyrical History of course.
Funnily enough when I googled to fact-check, the first results lead me to the 1990 movie (and the novel it’s based on) with Bruce Willis, Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith. I knew of the movie, of course, though I hadn’t seen it. But I only knew it with the German title, because back in the day we only knew them with the German titles over here. So I never made the connection before.
Looking back know I feel like I chatted with another fan about that metaphor once and they mentioned the historical Bonfire of the Vanities to me, but it’s a very vague memory and it obviously didn’t come to my mind, when I first compiled the Lyrical History list.
Books & Language | I’ll try to post the “Books I’ve Read in June” post this evening, probably while watching the football. For some reason I planned to finally start with “James” by Percival Everett, which is a retelling of “Huckleberry Finn” from the point of view of the slave Jim, who is part of that story. I don’t always like retelling of classic stories, but this sounded interesting enough. I thought I should probably read the original first, because I have never done that. Now while I do, I vaguely recall some of the plot from what I now believe to have been a German translation for children (in a condensed form) of both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finns stories. Anyway, I started and am still reading Huckleberry Finn at the moment, but admit that I’m struggling with Twain’s writing a bit. I struggle with the meandering boy’s voice of the narrator and the – what I’ve learned from Wikipedia – vernacular language as the “informal, spoken, dialect” language. I admit I also struggle(d) with the regular use of racist terms, like the N-word, which I consider to be offensive even in the context of this “masterpiece of literature” (some call it). I know it was commonly used back then and I don’t say this novel should be revised to exclude the word now. I’m just telling you how I feel about it. I do think some (childrens) books could / should be revised thought to not use those offensive terms any more or at least should come with an explanation why they still do. But that’s just woke little me, I guess.
Football “Experts” | I’ve been watching the Germany – Denmark match last night with a bunch of guys in the room. I don’t care about football all that much to be honest and realized my main entertainment was hearing those armchair experts comment on the game, the moves, the players, the referees and so on. They had an opinion on everything and of course they were always right. To be fair, they also weren’t dead serious about it and knew their limits. But I was wondering if that is a football fan thing or a male thing? Do female football fans act the same in a group? Do fans of other sports do the same when they watch a game? I used to go to icehockey games for a while and it was similar: the men always had something to say about the the teams, the players, the moves etc. So maybe it’s a gender thing after all.
Mental Health | I’m doing mostly ok at the moment. Trying to practice a lot of self-compassion. Listening to some podcasts to help me get back on track with a more healthy behaviour or to just recap things I’ve learned before. Meditation. Self-care in form of doodling. One of the many postive aspects of that is, that I’ve learned to live and accept and just don’t give a fuck about imperfections. Mistakes. Messing up. We all do.
Ever since Frank Turner’s “Undefeated” album came out in May I had been planning to write some kind of review. Part of the idea was to not to do a song by song review this time but focus on those songs that resonate with me more than others and to delve into why they do.
Each of Frank’s albums has some of those songs, which after more than a decade of following his career still baffles me a bit to be honest. Because we’ve both changed – and grown, I hope – in various ways. You would imagine that the paths each of us are on – emotionally in life – might have diverged to some extent and thus his songs might not speak to me as much as they did. But they still do! His way of writing about his experiences and his emotions still often feels congruent with my own experiences and emotions; sometimes eerily well so. It does help that Frank is comfortable with people coming up with their own interpretation of his work, because sometimes his words when I hear them might mean something different to me than they meant to him when he wrote them. In this instance though I think I don’t veer off too much from what I think Frank wants this song to mean.
That was a bit of tangent. Anyway, it’s in my nature to be too often and too easily
paralysed by decisions
and overwhelmed by perfectionism (and no ‘perfectionism’ actually is not a positive character trait). While I thought I might have to say a lot about some songs I also knew that an album “review” post shouldn’t turn into an essay of indeterminable length and how on earth would I be able to reconcile those two aspects? So I didn’t even try. Until the penny dropped and I realized that I do not have to write a post about the whole album, just because I did that for all the previous 9. I do not have to write about all those songs in one go. Duh!
It needed a trip to the mall yesterday to finally sit down and start typing.
But I didn’t use to be this agoraphobic
I had to pick up something at a store at that mall and while I expected Saturday shoppers, I obviously underestimated the amount of people out and about. When I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by the sheer amount of people around me, I was reminded of how since March 2020 any kind of crowd made me quite anxious for a long time.
This might need some context: I’ve always been easily anxious and worried about things. Due to a chronic neurological illness (Multiple Sclerosis) I’ve also been and still am part of the high-risk group for a COVID infection. Anxiety prone and especially vulnerable to a potentially deadly disease? Of course that would affect my mental health! I didn’t realize that for a long time though.
Panic attacks in the dentist car park, Losing my temper in a Jersey sports bar – Safe to say the twenties have been weird.
There were so many moments in 2020 / 2021 where I got anxious about and also pissed off at people. Back in the very early days when we thought every close contact even outdoors could be dangerous and we didn’t have the “several minutes / indoors” risk assessment yet, I always got so angry at all the runners who passed me without a wide berth when I was out walking on the rail path. In hindsight I know I was overreacting, but in that moment, I felt vulnerable and I was angry about the lack of consideration from other people.
Leftovers of the pandemic years
I’ve got similar memories of trips to the supermarket, where I once got angry at a guy who I thought was pushing his cart to close into my path. Outrage when the pizza delivery staff didn’t just put the box on the stairwell as I had asked them to with my order, but rang the doorbell to hand the box over. In hindsight I know (again) that I was overcautious and not at any risk by that behaviour. But we didn’t know that in the early days, did we? And it made me so anxious and angry.
It’s not just you and it’s not just me That has pandemic PTSD.
Post traumatic stress disorder Is characterised by persistent trauma Caused by severe psychological shock or else physical injury.
I know in general PTSD is more used for “Big T traumas” like having been in a war, accident, abuse of any kind. And I probably wouldn’t call my experience of the pandemic years PTSD as such. But the pandemic sure did a number on me to some degree. Many experiences but also the strangeness of these past years are still somehow seared into my brain and still pop up quite often when I return to some locations. Up until late 2022 / early 2023 those flashbacks to previous experiences were accompanied with the visceral reaction of feeling anxious. The latter lessened over time by now, but the memories as such still pop up from time to time even now another year later. Often just little things like being in this one particular mega store, where the checkout queue at one point went all the way to the back of the shop (40 metres or so). The checkout in another supermarket I regularly frequent is next to the entrance to the pharmacy where I had to get my first vaccination registered in my vaccination card in spring 2021. Returning to department stores which you were only allowed to enter when you had current proof of a negative COVID test. So many snapshots, which have quite faded by now but have not disappeared from my memory yet. I sometimes wonder if they ever will. And will I mind if they don’t?
Until it’s OK to admit that I don’t know how to feel About the shit that we just lived through – it was kind of a big deal.
And one day it seemed like everybody decided They were tired of trying and bored of hiding it, Ready for the next adventure, next news cycle, next catastrophe. [….]
As you can gather from what I wrote so far it definitely was a big deal for me! It didn’t help my mental health that there was other negative stuff going on in my life in 2021. But I also was baffled and disappointed and pissed off how so many people wanted to move on from this very traumatic experience too soon for my taste. Moving on in the quite practical sense of not wearing masks and not keeping a distance anymore right away when any rules about it were lifted. Of not being considerate to take a test / stay home when they feel sick. Not to mention the blatant disregard of potential long term risk of repeated infections or the many, many people already suffering from Long COVID. I just recently read a magazine feature about two women (early 30s and early 40s) whose lives shut down because of that and about their struggle to get any kind of decent care and support. It’s horrific!
And we stood in the wreckage trying not to claim That we had more than our fair share of the pain,
Part of the wreckage I stood in obviously was my anxiety gone through the roof due to my own personal health situation. The other part was, how I lost quite a bit of faith in my fellow human beings. Faith that most people in general are decent and have some common sense and empathy for others. My outlook on society might have been a bit naive / optimistic before that, but something definitely broke for me in 2020/2021. I’m aware that society has started to be more divisive even before that (culture wars and all), but I didn’t expect it to go as far as it has been during the pandemic years and since. I was baffled / shocked how people with a university degree (in science!) and especially health professionals decided to blatantly ignore science and instead shared misinformation and conspiracy theories. How toxic and violent the whole debate quickly turned online and offline. How ordinary people ignored rules and advice, because they either didn’t believe COVID was serious or because they just didn’t care. How our government and we as society so easily brushed over what 2 years of distant learning and contact restriction did to a huge part of children, teenagers, young adults.
I don’t have a solution for any of those things, which have been broken. I still struggle with the mental health side of it sometimes. But at least now I’ve got a song I can scream along to when my frustration with it all gets too overwhelming. And at any other time as well, because it’s a great song in general!
