Are we in November……for sure but I’ve had a lot going on.

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Hello my dear friends!! I had originally promised myself that I was for sure going to be able to send out one of these things at the end of each month and then I promptly had the most insane month and a half of my life. It’s been awesome, but I’ve never been so tired in my life. That said, here’s the sitch:

October Books:

First and foremost, we are using StoryGraph and StoryGraph only for stats and things. In the month of October, I read three books, and true to form they have absolutely nothing in common with each other.

Apierogon by Colum McCann – Probably one of the best books I’ve ever read. It takes the real stories of tragedy from Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan and the loss of their children in the Israel/Palestine war and puts their interviews and public speeches in the context of the wider conflict, through history and tangentially related stories and statistics. I was really worried this was going to be an “all sides” story – but it was not. Rami and his family are staunchly against the conflict, though I will note not enough to move out of Israel, and though an Apierogon is a theoretical polygon with an infinite number of sides, this book is not making that point about the occupation of Palestine. Instead, it is taking two tragedies and showing the infinite facets of grief the loss of a child because of the actions of a government creates.

Homecoming by Kate Morton – I listened to this audiobook, which is read aloud by Claire Foy, honestly that did a lot of the heavy lifting. This is a novel about a family tragedy in Southern Australia, linked to the future. It is presented as a mystery, which it is a little bit, but I was able to guess the plot twist about three-fourths of the way through. It was a very compelling book to listen to on an insane drive to New Jersey in the dark.

Butterfly Yellow by Thanhha Lai – This was probably my least favorite book I read this month. It is the story of a young Vietnamese woman who tries to follow her younger brother to America after he is taken and adopted by an American family in Texas following the war. It is a compelling story, but in my opinion, relied too heavily on stereotypes of Vietnamese people and Texans in order to highlight the differences between the groups of people when that could have been demonstrated without cheapening the experiences of the two. It does discuss the difficulty faced by refugees in their journey to America and in the acceptance of them in the communities they arrive in very well.

October Trips:

I spent the month of October setting a new personal record on number of hours spent out of my own house. I was in Philadelphia with some dear friends to see our champion, Gritty, cry listening to Orville Peck live, and I personally got to yell at Eric Johnson of the Philadelphia Flyers. I then went to New Jersey to see Seventeen pre-enlistment, sprinted back to Boston to then fly to Istanbul to spend five days on a business trip where I escaped to go to one of the nicest book stores on the planet and pet some kitties. I then went to Toronto for a weekend to shower my friends who are expecting babies. Friends. Paolo is exhausted. I plan on parking it until Thanksgiving.

October Faves: Some random shit I’ve been loving

• compression socks
• my October playlist
• my cats
• calling my friends on my commute home to talk with them
• lying on the floor