Well, so, I’ve written the below words and Joan Didion has died.
I’m sad Joan Didion has died and also now embarrassed that my writing here lacks her cool, detached elegance. But at least I’m not alone in this affliction. To paraphrase an acquaintance, everyone wants to write like Didion but no one does.
Anyway, I like this tribute to Didion’s certain something. Maybe you’ll like it, too.
I hope you’re having exactly the right kind of Christmas for you.
— Ashley
let me tell you about these songs
In my stable of ever-evolving playlists, 🎄Pop & Schlock Christmas🎄 is the hardest to maintain. You have to work a little harder to find new Christmas music than you do regular shmegular new music. Also, everyone is weird about Christmas music, so if you plan on playing the playlist for a room, you’re sort of in a position of having to convince people not to yank the aux cord.
That said, this is my Christmas playlist and I make the rules1, which is why you’ll find so much Kacey Musgraves Christmas Show on 🎄Pop & Schlock Christmas🎄. Is that good playlist-making? Maybe not. Do I care? Ho-ho-no.
The key to enjoying Christmas music (and to not being judgy about this playlist) is accepting that all Christmas music is schlock. Yes, including and maybe even especially all those damn Sufjan Stevens albums.
What I like is how Christmas songs are often a distillation of an artist’s whole Thing. Bruce Springsteen Christmas: jammy sincerity. Ariana Grande Christmas: poppy horniness. Phoebe Bridgers Christmas: 😢. Aretha Franklin Christmas: Miss! Aretha! Franklin!
Anyway, watch the Kacey Musgraves Christmas Show. It’s short, it’s sweet, it’s on Amazon.
let me tell you about this book
The greatest thing about Great Circle is Maggie Shipstead’s world building. Greatest meaning both biggest and best. The nearly 600-page story spans a century and the entire globe, populated with eccentric and tragic characters.
From the publisher:
After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There–after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes — Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles.
A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian’s disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity.2 Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian’s own story, as the two women’s fates — and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times — collide.
The stories are knitted together nicely, particularly because Hadley learns things about Marian much later than we do. Watching her piece together more of Marian’s story feels like letting your friend in on a tasty secret. It’s even more satisfying when you get the big reveal along with Hadley in the end.
Marian and Hadley both thrash against confinement, expectations, and their own desires, and I wanted to shake them as much as I wanted them to succeed. I’m not sure it said anything about being a woman that I didn’t already understand or say it in a new way, but that’s OK. The alternating perspectives and timelines — that old reliable trick — pulled me forward even as I kept telling myself, just one more chapter for tonight. What I wanted more of, if anything, was more time with all the odd secondary characters — the lone wolf best friend, the drunk uncles, the acclaimed actor neighbor who I kept picturing as Patrick Stewart.
People love this book. It was glowingly recommended to me by a book club pal; several book store employees at the checkout raved about it; and a certain culture podcaster I mostly trust called it her favorite book of the year. I’m not quite there with it, and I’m not totally sure why. It might be that I’m tired of rape as means of character development or that I found the heroine-who-is-mannishly-cavalier-with-others’-feelings thing a little cliched. Or it might be that my expectations were too high.
It is very good, particularly if you want to sink into a well-crafted world, and right now I’d bet you do.
let me tell you about these other books
My 10 favorite reads of the year, in soft order:
The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel
Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Arsonists’ City, by Hala Alyan
Uncanny Valley, by Anna Wiener
A Children’s Bible, by Lydia Millet
Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner
A Little Devil in America, by Hanif Abdurraqib
Peaces, by Helen Oyeyemi
Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars., by Joyce Carol Oates
Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead
let me tell you about this cat
T’was the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring. Not even a mouse. This cat killed them.
Or your cat killed them. Someone’s cat killed them.
Frankly, it’s about time cats were recognized for their contributions to peaceful Christmas Eves.
“What about all the trees they knock over?” you ask, like an idiot.3
They knock them over while hunting the mice. The superheroes have to knock over a few skyscrapers and the cats have to knock over a few trees. This is how planets and Christmases are saved, and if you don’t like it, grow up.
This cat’s bandana? Cute. So cute.
And earned by killing 100 mice.
Merry Christmas and happy new year4 😽
Said in the tone of “It’s my money and I want it NOW!!!”
This was Twilight-ish enough for me to picture Hadley as Kristen Stewart.
WhAt AbOuT aLl ThE tReEs ThEy KnOcK oVer?
I think next year I’m going to try something new with the cats. This stopped being fun.