The memoir of 1950s starlet Barbara Payton who went from leading lady to alcoholic and prostitute by age 35.
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• !Tea alert! She's spilling. Nothing to lose & naming names.
• The Lana Turner + Ava Gardner + Barbara ménage à trois is iconic. Emascusculating Frank Sinatra had to feel awesome.
• Her rapid rise and jagged decline told with breathtaking flair and honesty. Damn. RIP.
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I know you won't or can't understand this but believe me if I didn't give in to my little whims, I'd die. That's the kind of cat I am.

I'm an old coot now – almost thirty-five – dragged out, wine-soaked, prey for men's five dollar bills, but I can still write poetry

A series of essays (or "confessional novel") from Eve Babitz, a tastemaker and fixture in Los Angeles' 60s psychedelic scene.
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• 'To be an adventuress' is a dope aspiraiton.
• Is Eve's dazzling hedomism even possible now? Her Hollywood died many rent increases ago.
• So many beatniks / counter culture icons were right-wing assholes, ops, etc. Insidious cultural moment. Gotta wonder at Eve's level political awareness.
• A nice view of a city not yet overrun by conglomerates. A fun, fucked-up paradise.
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Like scents, certain songs just throw me. And I wanted to be thrown into that moment of perfume when everything was gone except for the dazzle. It doesn’t last long, but in order to have everything you must have those moments of such unrelated importance that time ripples away like a frame of water.

I spent the [Watts] riots in the penthouse of the chateau Marmont with this ex-philosophy major from Stanford whose family owned all the more oily pieces of land in Arizona, Mexico, and California.

Following a Gen X artist, we explore Silicon Valley psychosis and how the internet's true purpose is upholding capitalism.
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• Set in 2013 when AI was a twinkle in some San Fran sicko's eye.
• His schema of the internet stays relevant. Internet is still controlled by evil creeps hellbent on more money and control :(
• Kobek got me sayin "Get their ass!" every few chapters.
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The illusion of the internet was the idea that the opinions of powerless people, freely offered, had some impact on the world. This was, of course, total bullshit.

A young woman marries Maxim de Winter, a wealthier, older widower. The legacy of his dead wife Rebecca becomes unbearable, igniting insecurity and distrust.
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• Named our narrator 'Dolly' because Rebecca is Jolene coded.
• This book is extremely bisexual.
• Rebecca forcing me to reckon with internalized misogyny.
• Maxim so scummy. He wanted Rebecca to conform, to be malleable and weak. Makes sense he re-married an ingenue half his age.
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Men are simpler than you imagine my sweet child. But what goes on in the twisted, tortuous minds of women would baffle anyone.

A Black woman living in 1970's California is sent to 1800's Maryland to save her White slave-owning grandpa and enslaved ancestors.
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• Flight or fight response as portal to the past is a cooool trick. To be 'triggered' is to experience a kind of time travel. Flashbacks are rifts in the continuum.
• Literalizing the figuratively short distance between racism of today and of the antebellum.
• Lowkey this is about epigenetics??
• Every Octavia book feels prescient as prophecy. She had a telescope pointed at the future!
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Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.

I got caught up in one of Kevin's World War II books—a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred.

A pseudo-memoir spanning 1941 to 2006, told non-narratively through a nonstop stream of "abbreviated memories."
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• Random and relentless structure. Feels like opening an existential junk drawer.
• No first person. All of our 'I, me, mine' will be subsumed into the cosmic whirlpool.
• She texturizes time. Kinda like sandpaper, I s'pose. Little moments accumulating, making this abrasive thing that erodes life's hard edges and vivid memories.
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All we have is our history, and it does not belong to us. — José Ortega y Gasset (epigraph)

There is something too permanent about “I,” something shrunken and stifling, whereas “she” is too exterior and remote. The image she has of her book in its nonexistent form, of the impression it should leave, is…an image of light and shadow streaming over faces.

In the humdrum routine of personal existence, History did not matter. We were simply happy or unhappy, depending on the day. The more immersed we were in work and family, said to be reality, the greater was our sense of unreality.

A collection of prose poems, essays and musings about nature (plants), creativity, and more nature (human).
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• Mary is so Mother. Has anyone noticed this?
• I love my smooth brain. I love not having snobbish hang ups. I enjoy basic-b*tch poetry and I feel incredible!!
• Appreciating her freakish talent for observation.
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Come with me into the field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here, and the sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them.

One tree is like another tree, but not too much... Doesn't anybody in the world anymore want to get up in the middle of the night, and sing?

A collection of poems from America's beloved nature poet.
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• My therapist reccommended this (lol)
• Poems sticking to my brain like the friggin burrs fused to my pants after a hike.
• Mary and I had a bad meet cute- a stuffy function where someone recited Wild Geese mid-speech. I thought, 'How dull and trite.' And maybe it is? But reading this alone, in private felt kinda spiritual.
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Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
one boot to another—why don't you get going?

For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.

And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money,

I don't even want to come in out of the rain.

Part memoir, part historical reenactment, part essay: an attempt to chart our collective awe and fascination with mountains.
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• Read this while backpacking the Sierras. I'm calling it mountainmaxxing.
• One gripe: his lens is Western civ, especically the Romantics. Very little on the sherpas. British guys suck up all of the air. Literally and figuratively!
• Occult geology!! Neat!!!!!!
• His description of coughing up & choking on a frozen larynx will haunt me!
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Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.

Sprawling story of New Orleanian and archetypal NEET, Ignatius J Reilly, a profound slob and failed academic forced to jobhunt when his mom threatens to evict him._

• Laughing at Ignatius feels so pure and uncomplicated. Had me cracking up. Haven't cracked up like that in a long time.
• Truly wild how so many scenes have the tenor of a gamer chat or reddit post.
• Absurd. Gross. Unsettling. Mean-spirited, but in a complicated way. Extremely *my shit*.
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I refuse to "look up." Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man's fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery

Your total ignorance of that which you profess to teach merits the death penalty. I doubt whether you would know that St. Cassian of Imola was stabbed to death by his students with their styli. His death, a martyr’s honorable one, made him a patron saint of teachers. Pray to him, you deluded fool, you “anyone for tennis?” golf-playing, cocktail-quaffing pseudo-pedant, for you do indeed need a heavenly patron.