low-level brooding
Hello there.
It’s been another nutty week in the hellscape, and this time all because of a video game franchise I haven’t thought of — well, ever — and its singular, head-on crash against the world of Wall Street. (I see some of your eyes glazing over already).
Initial story here. Overview here. Update here.
You just never know what’s next, but thankfully I just may have the Twitter handle people need.
Other things:
Books I’m Reading
In 2021, I have been reading. Firstly, I loved Susan Orlean’s The Library Book, a nonfiction book ostensibly about the April 29, 1986 library fire at the Los Angeles Library, but actually a book about books, people, and wild living. Recommended. (And no, I had never read The Orchid Thief, and yes, I have seen the error of my ways and corrected my library hold list in concordance.)
I also re-read one of my favorite novels this week, Rules of the Wild: A Novel of Africa, which is less about Africa in general and more about some crazy white people in Nairobi. I’m pretty sure I first read this book before ever stepping foot in, and ultimately living for a spell, in Kenya, although memories can deceive.
Romantic, often resonantly ironic, moving and wise, Rules of the Wild transports us to a landscape of unsurpassed beauty even as it gives us a sharp-eyed portrait of a closely knit tribe of cultural outsiders: the expatriates living in Kenya today. Challenged by race, by class, and by a longing for home, here are "safari boys" and samaritans, reporters bent on their own fame, travelers who care deeply about elephants but not at all about the people of Africa. They all know each other. They meet at dinner parties, they sleep with each other, they argue about politics and the best way to negotiate their existence in a place where they don't really belong
At the center is Esmé, a beautiful young woman of dazzling ironies and introspections, who tells us her story in a voice both passionate and self-deprecating. Against a paradoxical backdrop of limitless physical freedom and escalating civil unrest, Esmé struggles to make sense of her own place in Africa and of her feelings for the two men there whom she loves--Adam, a second-generation Kenyan who is the first to show her the wonders of her adopted land, and Hunter, a British journalist sickened by its horrors.
I then hunted down another book by the same Italian author, The Other Language, and then wondered why I haven’t read her other two books.
Articles I Liked
The Korean Dad we never knew we needed.
Optimism leads to long-term health. (Dense; you’ve been warned)
College costs are less terrifying than you think (from the awesome Ron Leiber!)
On being in the right room, confidence, and taking action (alert: James Clear)
‘We’ll Never Make That Kind of Movie Again’: An oral history of The Emperor’s New Groove, a raucous Disney animated film that almost never happened.
Things I Looked at
A neoclassic chateau in Houston
Finally, I had a birthday, and someone smacked me in the head. Again.
Claire