Ropography 10.23.24
Inputs
The Borrowed Hills by Scott Preston: Is about murder on a sheep farm in England, and a less cozy book has never touched shelves. You’ll feel dried God knows what under your nails and in the creases of your hands for days, you’ll be surprised every time you look outside and it’s not raining. If you’ve been watching GBBO and you think that young man with the neckerchiefs made being a farmer seem fun, please read this book before you make any big life decisions!
The Cliffs by J. Courtney Sullivan: A woman deals with some dark family stuff in a nonoptimal way and has to go slinking back to her childhood home in Maine, and about a nearby house to which she has many connections, some of which are revealed gradually over the course of the narrative. There’s a light supernatural element which I thought was kind of distracting from a story that was otherwise very good at depicting humans and all their frail and glorious multitudes. I was on a little bit of a Tumult by Water tear the past few months and I liked this one best of the bunch.
Coincidental pairing with Sex, Lies, and Sensibility by Nikki Payne: An m/f take on Sense and Sensibility that’s also set in coastal Maine and also, more directly here, focuses on the Abenaki people who live there. It was very fun and the overlay onto the original text was clever. There’s another book in the series based on Pride and Prejudice which I didn’t enjoy quite as much. People love going to that P&P well, but it is actually very tricky as a beat-by-beat redo: super plotty, lots of characters, and the more elements you take from the original story the more contortions are necessary to get around the question of “What if middle class women just got jobs?”. That said, her version of Mary Bennett was one of my favorites out of all the P&P spawn.
Outputs
I have recovered. It turned out that I had COVID and strep throat simultaneously, a fate I must implore you with greatest urgency to avoid if you have the means to do so and extend my deepest sympathies if you do not. There was a three week fog where T was gone, then he was home but isolating because he had COVID, which I still obviously managed to get (children totally unscathed btw, anti-miscegenationists take note), culminating in the day I got my amoxicillin and slept for about 20 hours. That was October and now I guess Christmas is tomorrow? If anything fruitful came out of this confluence of events, it’s that I always felt whenever T was traveling that life was just kind of temporarily on pause while he was gone and that I’d catch up when he got back, and now I know there is no pause and there is no catching up, there’s only living, living, living, over, and over, and over.
Condiment Corner
To the extent that there is a cost to this exercise, it’s that instead of just buying the Trader Joe’s Bomba Paste that is my beshert chili paste, I keep trying new ones just for the novelty. This one is OK? Not very hot, some sediment that is nice texturally but not much kick. Maybe this is the year that I pivot to a deep dive on salad dressing and let myself just love TJBP.