I’ve been slacking on my substack lately because: summer. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading & writing & viewing & listening & doing lots of things. While I’d planned to go to the beach & maybe go swimming in the ocean this weekend, apparently that’s not going to happen. This summer’s rip tides have been ridiculous (even for those of us who actually know how to swim) & while I’m not generally shy of swimming in water with shark reports (I grew up near the Pacific), there’s a lot more chomping action out there now that we broke the planet. On a recent long, hot walk through Manhattan, we decided to just GO to a movie theater w/out advance planning or app ticket buying. Most movies were sold out & the next up was The MEG 2: The Trench in ScreenX. Regal describes this format as: “a revolutionary, multi-projection theatre experience that extends the screen to the auditorium walls. This immersive format takes traditional moviegoing a step further, by surrounding the audience with a 270-degree panoramic visual and putting them in the center of the action.” TBH, it was pretty cool for the bottom-of-the-ocean scenes but also reminded me of really early iMAX. The movie itself was exactly what we needed: fast-paced, cool sharks, and ridiculous action scenes. There were even female characters in lead roles (2 of 3 were EVIL, of course). I’ve also been reading a lot of fiction that might qualify as “beach reads” if you read books like those mentioned in Lit Hub’s recent “Best Unhinged Books to Read While Smiling on a Beach.” Some of these aren’t out yet & some have been out for a while but here’s a short list: “The Bird Hotel” (May) by Joyce Maynard (a young white woman travels to Central America & ends up running a hotel near an active volcano), “The Other Side of Mrs. Wood” (June) by Lucy Barker (Victorian London! Mediums & Spiritualists!), “Big Shadow” (May) by Marta Balcewicz (young girl meets aging punk rock poet, discovers NYC is cooler than aging punk rock poets), “Radical: A Life of My Own” by Xiaolu Guo (this is a beautiful book & I’ll write more about it soon - it’s out in Sept.), will also write more soon about the very deep & wonderful “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey (Nov.), Tim O’Brien’s new one “American Fantastica” (hmmm…), McBride’s heavily lauded “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” (worth a read), the deeply creepy “Rouge” by Mona Awad (Sept.) and the also deeply creepy “A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens” by Raul Palma (Oct.), Katherine Min’s “The Fetishist” (out in 2024), Christa Carmen’s well-crafted dark mystery “The Daughters of Block Island” (Oct.), the dark fantasy (female lead!) “Whisperwood” by Alex Woodroe (July), Morimi’s “The Tatami Time Machine Blues” (Nov.), and Brando Skyhorse’s new one “My Name is Iris” (Aug.). Some of these I’ll write about in-depth when time slows down (or work slows down)…Currently, I’m reading Emma Donoghue’s “Learned By Heart” (because: Emma Donoghue), E.Lily Yu’s “Jewel Box: Stories” (which includes one of my all-time favorite stories about bees!), and Pidgeon Pagonis’s “Nobody Needs to Know.” More soon! Or later! Keep reading, watching, living, listening, and BEWARE of SHARKS!
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