Ink Medicine
The personal rambles and riveting conversations of a tattoo artist with their clients, friends, and idols in a homey setting. This is a podcast about culture from a tattoo table perspective.
Ink Medicine
Ep. 78: My 2024 in 32 Books
The books I read in 2024 and what I thought of them!
Books mentioned:
1. A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
2. Death Valley by Melissa Broder
3. Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki
4. Rough Sleepers by Tracy Kidder
5. How Not To Drown In A Glass of Water by Angie Cruz
6. Infinite Country by Patricia Engel
7. Knife: .... By Salman Rushdie
8. Stoner by John Williams
9. How High We Go In The Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
10. The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson
11. A Good Happy Girl by Marissa Higgins
12. Mona of the Manor by Armistead Maupin
13. Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
14. The Palace of Eros by Caro De Robertis
15. Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H
16. I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi
17. Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain On Purpose by Leigh Cowart
18. Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender
19. Kissing Girls on Shabbat: A Memoir by Sara Glass
20. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
21. My Year Of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfeigh
22. All Fours by Miranda July
23. The First Bad Man by Miranda July
24. My Husband by Maud Ventura
25. The Go-Giver by Bob Burg
26. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
27. The Girl With The Louding Voice by Abi Dare
28. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
29. To Shape A Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose
30. The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue by Victoria E. Schwab
31. The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
32. Perfume And Pain by Anna Dorn
Bonus early 2025 mentions: My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante, Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics by Elle Reeve, The Full Moon Coffee Shop by Mai Mochizuki
You can connect with me, Micah Riot, as well as see my tattoo art on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/micahriot/
Micah's website is www.micahriot.com
The podcast is hosted on Buzzsprout but truly lives in the heart of Micah's website at:
https://www.micahriot.com/ink-medicine-podcast/
Hello friends, hello, this is Micah Riott coming to you with my books I read in 2024 episode. I will also post the list in the notes for the episode. I put 32 books on this list. I finished the vast majority of them. A couple of them I did not, and I will note which ones. I will also note which ones I listened to and which ones I read on paper. So let's get going. I hope that if you are a reader, some of these will make it to your list, and if you're not a reader, maybe these will excite you and inspire you to read some. I personally think that having a really good book going just makes my life a bit more joyful.
Micah Riot:My first official book of the year of 2024 was A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers. She's a queer writer. She's a white queer writer. She likes to build beautiful, cozy worlds. Her style of sci-fi is called cozy sci-fi, cozy queer sci-fi. Her stuff is just are really sweet. The worlds she builds are fantastic and kind and curious and engaging. That was the second book in her series that starts with A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. If you're gonna read that series, that's where you should start, and that book was excellent, and then this is number two that I read death valley by melissa broder. Melissa broder is like a queerish writer, she's a weirdo. Um, I love her writing. She is strange and unashamed and just um, I really, yeah, really heartfelt.
Micah Riot:This one's kind of a memoir. It reads like a memoir. I'm not sure if it's a memoir. It reads like a memoir. I'm not sure if it's a memoir, but it reads like one and it's about the main character grieving the not yet having happened death of her father who was in the hospital, and she sort of escapes from the city of Los Angeles and goes to Death Valley and takes a harrowing hike Light from Uncommon Stars by Rika Aoki. Rika Aoki is a queer, trans, lesbian sci-fi writer. She is also a violinist, I believe she's a musician and this is a very another cozy, delightful piece of queer sci-fi with, um, lots of trans and lesbian characters, very heavily asian it's, I think they're all. All the main characters are asian, the main character is trans and then the other ones are lesbian and there's also like an thing, I think, that has to do with selling your soul to the devil and like a big nerd out about violins and how they're made and the history of making violins. Like music, music pieces are beautiful in there and then there's also kind of a really fun angle on being local to los angeles and knowing where all the best sort of hole-in-the-wall restaurants are. So there's musings about food and violins and love, and it's so good.
Micah Riot:Then I went to something a little more intense called Rough Sleepers by Tracy Kidder. Tracy Kidder is a journalist and this is one of his books. I believe he did research for this book for a long time. He found this doctor who, when he came out of medical school in his middle age, he changed careers kind of in his middle age and came out of medical school and got involved with a clinic that was serving the population, the houseless population of a particular part of Boston and he just stayed in that work and did all he could to create a medical system that would serve the houseless population of Boston in a respectful, considerate, courteous way. The book really delves into how they did it, what worked, what didn't. You meet a bunch of the folks that they worked with. You understand more about how houselessness works and how people end up in a situation and how they end up staying in that situation and why housing people doesn't always work in the way that the system tries to do it.
Micah Riot:It was really one of my favorite reads of the year. I learned so much and it was also as intense as the subject matter is was a really easy read. The way that it was written just flowed. It read like a novel, in a sense of that. It was easy to read and easy to understand what the author was trying to explain and to bring across. So I highly recommend this one. It's nonfiction, as I said, but I want to make sure that you understand. It's nonfiction, as I said, but I want to, you know, make sure that you understand. It's nonfiction, excellent nonfiction. I would totally read more of Tracy Kidder in the subject matter.
Micah Riot:Oh, houselessness and houseless folks definitely is something I think about a lot and I'm concerned about. And this was, this was great. Okay, um, this was. This was around my birthday and my one of my closest people, blue um, gave me a few books, and so then I read the books that she gave me.
Micah Riot:Um, so this is how Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz. There's a there's kind of queer themes, there's an older protagonist, there's poverty, there is immigration, folks of color point of views. So this older woman talks to her counselor I believe it's a job getting counselor and so the format of the book is basically just her coming to see this counselor and speaking to her about her life. And this older woman is going through different things with being worried about money and her son and her friends, and there's some kind of gossipy pieces and overall the book reads also really easily. It's a quick read. You kind of like her and then you kind of don't like her and it's that complexity of her not always being a likable character is actually quite compelling. And then I read also from the books that my friend Blue gave me Infinite Country by Patricia Engel. Patricia Engel, it's about a family torn apart by immigration policy and violence of their home country. It's intense, it's beautifully written.
Micah Riot:Okay, the next one I saw that I never read anything by Salman Rushdie and was like, well, maybe I should try, he's such a famous writer. And was like, well, maybe I should try, he's such a famous writer, he's written some interesting things, I guess. So this book came out. It was his memoir called Knife, and it was a story of how he almost got killed by a man trying to assassinate him for writing something that an Islamic government considered blasphemous. So they sent kind of somebody after him and so he talks about the experience of having been almost killed. It was not good. I didn't like it. I listened to it. This was one I listened to. It was the first one of the year that I listened to.
Micah Riot:He's so antagonistic and so arrogant and so self-conscious at the same time. The combination of arrogance and self-consciousness just made me want to gag. He's a narcissist, I think pretty clearly, and the whole book was just tedious, like you'd think. How could a book about you know experiencing almost dying at the hands of somebody else and kind of coming back from that experience, how could a book like that be this tedious and boring and repetitive and narcissistic? But hated it. I'm not going to try anything else by him. I think I'm done. I'm actually you know. This is a thing I thought about the Sierra Bunches.
Micah Riot:I don't read a lot of male authors. There are very few men on this list of books that I read. Sometimes I read queer men and sometimes I read men of color who are not queer, but there's very few white men that I read and enjoy, and sometimes I'll start a book somebody recommended and I'll be like listening to it or reading it usually listening because I don't pay attention to the author's name always when I'm listening and I'll be like this must've been written by a man. And then I'll look and it was. That's funny. I'm talking about this, this right now, because the next book I read was by a man.
Micah Riot:It's called Stoner and it's by a man named John Williams and it's just this like story of a man's life and he's born in the 1800s to some farmers and he gets an education. He's the first one in his family to get an education. He falls in love with academia. He becomes a professor, first one in his family to get an education. He falls in love with academia. He becomes a professor. He kind of doesn't really go beyond. You know, the immediate vicinity of where he was born and grew up and then moved to go to college, which is like a horse and buggy right away. And he, you know, he grows up. He hopes to have a beautiful love story. He marries the first woman he has feelings for. It doesn't turn out the way he would like it to. They have a beautiful love story. He marries the first woman he has feelings for it doesn't turn out the way he would like it to. They have a child. It's just the story of his life. It's from his birth to his death.
Micah Riot:Um, it's slow, not a ton happens like things definitely happen, but not a whole lot of things happen. It's very contemplative, almost meditative, and I really, really, really, really liked it. Honestly, it was one of my favorites of the year too, and probably like the only straight white man writer that I read. Number nine on our list is how high we go in the dark by sequoia nagamatsu. Um, I didn't realize this was a collection of short stories. They, they all kind of fit in together, but I was reading it on paper also and got through probably half and then stopped. I just he takes them a little far in certain ways, in the ways that didn't please me, and I ended up stopping. Yeah, short stories are not usually my thing. I like a long story. I'm kind of like if a story is good and the writing is good, please just let's keep it going. Give me 2000 pages, give me 3000. I'm down.
Micah Riot:After that I read the Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson, and this is another piece of like dystopian sci-fi, kind of young adulty literature and the main character is a Black lesbian. It's a kind of a world building time traveling not time traveling so much, but the sort of metaverse experience that the main character goes through being able to travel between different realities of similar worlds, and I like that type of thing a lot. So I really liked that one. I bought the second one immediately, actually didn't read it, because when I buy books sometimes I don't read them Because, as you all know, those of you who read and buy books, reading books and buying books are different interests and different hobbies. They can overlap but they don't always. In fact, if I don't get the book from the library, I almost never read it because it's just at my house available to me. But when I have to bring it back to the library I read.
Micah Riot:After that I listened to A Good Happy Girl by Marissa Higgins. This is in the category of books that I consider similar in the sense of that there is a damaged main character, usually a woman, because I read books about women, you know, written by women and such, and she is kind of like a bad person, you know, and it's because she has all this trauma or whatever, but she's just kind of like a bad person. She makes bad decisions and she hurts people and most of the book is like a description of how this person is kind of a bad person and how messy their life is and how messy they are. And at the end there's a bit of a redemption arc. And I feel like I read like four or five of those books last year and I'm mostly annoyed by them, but sometimes I've just like invested too much so I'll just finish them, and this was one of those.
Micah Riot:I would say that the difference in this one was that it was a lesbian book. There was kink and sex in it um, not the type of sex I like to read about, but maybe the type of sex you like to read about. It felt really realistic, very organic. The main character gets involved with a lesbian couple and that's a big part of the storyline. Then we have another queer book, mona of the Manor, by Armistead Maupin. This is the last in a really long series called Tales of the City. If you are queer and have been reading for a long time, and maybe even Californian a Californian queer you will probably know about this. They also made Tales of the City show like limited series that had Elliot Page playing one of the main characters.
Micah Riot:This series I read the series in high school. It's really sweet, it just has. I read the series in high school. It's really sweet. It just has so much heart and so much soul. The really quirky characters, lots of like lesbians and trans people and gay men. They're all living together like a community, like a family, and that's sort of what I was hoping for from queer community when I was that age. Anyway, mona of the Manor was the last book he's written of the series Tales of the City. I recommend the entire series. This last book was so sweet and a pleasure to listen to.
Micah Riot:Okay, then I read Beautyland by Marie Helene Bertino. This one smashed my heart to smithereens. It really was one of my favorites. It has a vibe, a very dusky, purplish sort of vibe. The cover is dusky and purplish, so maybe that's part of why it feels that way to me. But it's about this girl who is born and when she's a little kid she realizes that she's actually an alien that was sent here to observe humanity and send her observations back to her superiors. But it just has the most melancholy vibe and it is painfully beautiful. I will start crying if I think about it too much. It's about coming of age, it's about being a human. It's about mental health. It's about being a woman in this world Book really got into my heart and I highly, highly, highly recommend it.
Micah Riot:This next book was not something I liked, so let's go through that real quick. It's the Palace of Eros by Caro de Robertis. This is a queer, local Bay Area author. It's a rewriting of some of Greek mythology into like a more queer context. It was supposed to be very sexy and subversive and it read very mainstream to me. I was expecting sexy and subversive and unique and interesting and real and authentic, and it didn't read that way to me. It read mainstream. After that I read Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H. It's a memoir about being a Muslim immigrant and being a queer person and coming out and how difficult it is to come out for some folks because of where they come from. It's really raw and real and painful and worth your time. Next one was a piece of self-help, and I listened to this one. It's a really cheesy title.
Micah Riot:I will teach you to be rich by Ramit Sethi, and this is a man who is Indian. Man influencer, money influencer, financial influencer. I heard about him through Maestro the movement Maestro on Instagram, my friend Shante, dr Shante Cofield. I followed Ramit and I was looking at his posts and I was. I found out he has a podcast. I was listening to his podcast a bit, then I rented his book so I could read it and I feel like it was a really, really good primer for really anybody who wants to take their financial health to the next level.
Micah Riot:He explained a lot of stuff that I didn't know before and he made me feel like I was not as far behind as I thought I was. And also there's work to do financially. A lot of the techniques he offers is around investing. How to build wealth is investing. You know, the sooner you can do it, the better it is for you. He does not say that you should be buying a house. He doesn't say that you should not drive a nicer car or that you should not buy avocado toast. His advice is essentially like prioritize what's really important to you and let go of the rest and save, you know this amount so that you can be comfortable and have choices and options and spend your time and money in the future Now and also in the future really living your best life Sounds really simple, but there's a lot of really good practical advice. I recommended this book to a lot of people in my life and I think they all got something out of it. Number 17 was another listen and it was another nonfiction and it was called Hurts so Good.
Micah Riot:The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose by Leigh Cowart. It was a recommendation from a client and it was so good. It's a journalist going into different subcultures where people experience pain on purpose. She talks about somebody in the super intense body modification community getting their tongue splits. She talks about ballet culture of ballet, about people eating hot peppers, about marathon runners, and so each chapter is about this specific subculture where people experience pain on purpose as part of their interest in the subculture presented. It was so good, it was so well-written, kind of bringing home the points that we all seek out pain on purpose because it's part of our human experience and desire and range of experience to want to experience pain and we do it in different ways. It's not just the kinky, submissive pain sluts, it's everybody, and I really, really, really liked it Especially really enjoyed the chapters that had to do with the hot pepper eating and the running. Her descriptions of, you know, being a part of these competitions were so good.
Micah Riot:Next one was a quick little young adult read called Felix Ever After by Kacen Kalender. It was a queer, trans POC young adult little novel, sweet little read with a nice ending. Number 19, kissing Girls on Shabbat, a memoir by Sarah Glass Painful, intense. It was one I listened to. I kind of was at the edge of my seat, metaphorically, the whole time, since I spent a lot of time walking when I listened to it. It's about a woman, the writer, leaving her religious cult, hasidic Judaism, which she takes a long time and a lot of sort of steps and back and forth to finally leave it completely. Meanwhile she marries twice, marries men twice, has a few kids, and this book is really honest and it's really good. Um, if, uh, leaving religious cults to truly be yourself is something you enjoy queer memoirs, if you really enjoy that, you will like this one.
Micah Riot:Number 20 lessons in chemistry by bonnie garmas. I really enjoyed this one. It was a novel. It was about a woman scientist in the 50s figuring out how to survive patriarchy and raise her daughter by herself. And there's a really great dog in there and I did not want it to end Very nice, well-written leaves you wanting more kind of book. The main character is neurodivergent.
Micah Riot:Okay 21, my Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfe. This is another one of those like self-indulgent bad person main character with trauma and like not very well explained trauma. Just sort of like this kid lost her parents but also they had all this money and it had a more interesting premise than the other bad main character person. This person is very selfish and self-centered and it's unpleasant to watch them live in the world with other humans. But there was kind of an interesting bit of the book in the last quarter of the book. I don't want to reveal it, I don't want to spoil it, but yeah, I would say this one's probably worth a read, especially if you like this type of this type of structure of a novel. Okay number 22, all Fours by Miranda July.
Micah Riot:Miranda July is queer and is a filmmaker and a writer and this was my first introduction to her work and I loved it. I mean, you will see this book in every bookstore right now. It's very popular. I think it made it to like best of 2024. It's kind of autobiographical, essentially about a woman having a midlife crisis in her own way and making a series of really interesting, very wild decisions. But everything makes sense to me, it feels very relatable and I think it was a really beautiful, well-written adventure of a book Some really hot, sexy moments that I did not expect at all. But it's essentially about losing yourself as a middle-aged woman as society starts to notice you less and as you feel like you don't have any more chances to feel alive, and so the lengths you'll go to continue to feel alive in your life is what this book is about.
Micah Riot:Then, because I really enjoyed that Miranda July book, I looked up what else she has written and listened to the first bad man, which is one of her earlier novels. I don't she doesn't have a whole lot of. She has a lot of projects she did with other people, but this is and like art projects and also a couple of films, but there's only, I think, two novels. If you consider all fours a novel or memoir, I don't know, but the first bad man is a novel and this was also up there in, like my, in one of my few, very, very favorite reads of the year. This is one that I fell in love with little by little. And then all at once it starts with this very neurotic, very quirky main character and at first you're like, oh my god, can I really hang with this? And then bits get revealed and another character gets introduced and you start to fall in love with the whole book and the tenderness of it and the vulnerability of it and it's so strange and it's so weird and quirky. But also there's this beautiful love story and you just can't help but completely fall in love with everything about it towards the middle and end Gay and weird and neurotic and neuro-spicy and have a giant heart. You might love this one as much as I did.
Micah Riot:Number 24, my Husband by Maude Ventura. You know, another one of those self-indulgent female bad person, mental character, mental health issues and there's a little to an end that did make it kind of worth it. But overall I did listen to it. So at least you know I was doing stuff while listening to it. So it wasn't a total waste of time, but it was close, okay. Number 25, the Go-Giver by Bob Berg, which is a little self-help book. It's like a couple hundred pages I think it takes about two hours to listen to. I listened to it in this one day when I was hiking and then going to Costco driving around a little bit. It was, you know it has a little, some little life lessons about business and being a good person and it was nice. A quick little easy read.
Micah Riot:Belcanto by Ann Patchett. I read this one because it was on that list of best 100 books to come out of the first quarter of the century. It had a really lovely description. I mean it wasn't bad writing right, but it just it bugged me. I forget where she said it. I don't think she said it in Lima, peru, but the real situation happened in Lima, peru. There was a hostage situation. Basically, a bunch of rebellion force, anti-government fighters who live in the woods, took this house over that belonged to a politician and there were all these fancy guests there and so this was an ongoing I think it went on for a couple months hostage situation. And so she took that premise and wrote this novel about basically an opera singer and all the ways in which she's admired, and so this book really is much more about opera and love and people falling in love and people at odds in a context that is not very favorable to love. So she romanticized this thing that happened, this real event that happened, this hostage situation in a country with political turmoil, and didn't really touch upon it at all. It was super, even though not every character in there was white. It was just such a white intelligence book and I read it, kind of enjoyed the writing style, but it just the whole thing just kind of bugged me and then I started reading more about it after I finished it and understood why. And I think I'm kind of done with Ann Patchett. This is some white, self-centered bullshit.
Micah Riot:27. The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abider Odare Not sure how to pronounce the last name. It's spelled D-A-R-E. There are themes of poverty and feminism. It's set in Nigeria starts in a small village where this girl grows up and her mom passes away and she basically gets sold to a man into marriage because of poverty and machismo, essentially. And she has such a strong personality and such a strong voice and this is something she says I want to have a loud voice. I want people to hear my voice. She wants to be a teacher and the character was really built in such a complete way. Like you, just you can fully imagine this character. You can fully imagine talking to her. She's such a cool human and such a great spirit, and so you know she's in this marriage. This horrible thing happens, with somebody dying, and then she ends up in the big city serving at a wealthy house, and so the book sort of shows you how women's fates are intertwined and how similar the experiences of women can be, even if their class is vastly puts them in a vastly different category of access.
Micah Riot:I think my favorite thing about it was there's such a specific, particular voice that the main character has. Yes, there is a way that she talks. When you're reading it I read it on paper. So there's a way that she talks that feels so particular, gives her specificity. She's not just anybody and I really love that. I love that in writing and reading. Good writing is when characters have such a specificity and such a fleshed outness and they're so believable. But you know if you're going to read it, just know there's a lot of difficult themes. There's violence, there's death, there's abuse, there's women hurting other women and also it's a very powerful story and I would totally read more by this writer.
Micah Riot:These next few books were kind of like the wrapping up of the year and they were all so good I was happy to end on a good note. So number 28 was the Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. This was recommended to me by a client. It's a dystopian, japanese sci-fi type of book. You have to suspend your disbelief when you're reading it. The premise is that there's this small community on an island in Japan and every so often something disappears from life, and when it disappears the people are expected to also let go of that thing and forget about it. It's mundane things at first, like photographs and flowers and perfume and some foods and people can sort of deal, but then things become less bearable. It's got a really beautiful flow and a really intimate sort of closeness to the main character and also feeling like you're watching a movie, like you're not in their head, you're watching a movie. It's sort of a combination of dystopian and absurdist and I really, really enjoyed it. Very thought-provoking Lingers with you for a long time afterwards.
Micah Riot:Number 29 was To Shape a Dragon's Breath by Maniquil Black Goose. This was sent to me by a friend of mine who is a big reader and over the last year my partner read it after she was recovering from her surgery and then I read it as I was recovering from my surgery and it's such a comforting young adult sort of fantasy that has dragons in it but also like is it the best? Type of allegory and commentary on society and class and whiteness versus folks of color, in this case very specifically Native people? It sort of centers on this one Native community and this one Indigenous woman, and their whole mindset and philosophy around dragon keeping and dragon nearing is completely different from how she and her people have related to dragons over the course of millennia. So it's kind of like a Harry Potter type of idea, except there's no transphobia. In fact it's the opposite. It's an indigenous girl who is bisexual and polyamorous and it's beautiful and so fun and I really, really wish Monocle Black Goose would write another one, and maybe Monocle Black Goose is on their way of writing another one, maybe it's coming, because this book came out in 23,. So I'm hoping a second one is in the works because this is clearly marked as first in the series. So yay, okay.
Micah Riot:Number 30 was the Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by Victoria Schwab. It's kind of a fantastical, really epic novel. Really long I listened to this one. The main character is bisexual in case that makes you be more interested. Is bisexual in case you? That makes you be more interested.
Micah Riot:And, um, it's about this woman. Who's this young woman who is born to poor folks in a village, a small village in france, and I believe it starts in the 1600s and maybe the 1400s and she does not want the life that is set out before her, like marrying a man, having a child, staying, staying in this village, not traveling, not experiencing life. She wants to be out there in the world, she wants to experience things, she wants to be an artist, she's into drawing and so, out of desperation, she makes a deal with the devil to have the ability to live life. Because she makes a deal with the devil, she doesn't really realize what exactly she's doing, but what happens is that the devil makes her absolutely forgettable to anybody who meets her and gives her immortality. So she lives for hundreds of years and whenever she meets somebody, the second they don't see her anymore. The second she's out of their line of sight. They forget that she exists. She is able to survive, like she can steal fairly easily, because people don't remember her face and don't know that she took something. But also she can't, um, have a place to live and she can't have a job. So she can't make money and she can't stay. You know, she has a regular human body, even though it's immortal, so she still needs to live and she can't have a job, so she can't make money and she can't stay. You know, she has a regular human body, even though it's immortal, so she still needs to eat and she still needs to sleep somewhere and she still needs to stay warm and those things are really difficult to do. But she gets to live for hundreds of years and she gets to experience everything and she gets to. She ends up going from place to place in interesting ways and it's just beautifully written. It's beautifully written. It's about not wanting to be forgotten, wanting to leave a mark on the world, wanting to have love, wanting to have somebody love you truly, deeply, continuously.
Micah Riot:Number 31, elena Ferrante is a pseudonym of a writer in Italy who grew up in Naples, and her books are often seemingly about a community of kids growing up together in Naples. It's a poor community, very working class. She's extremely detailed in the way that she gets into someone's, the main character's thoughts. It's like reading someone's innermost thoughts, their diary. It's incredibly passionate. There's a lot of things about feelings, strong emotions. That's sort of the confusion of being a teenager growing up without a lot of guidance, just kind of, you know, growing up with your, your own self only as a resource. And the lying life of adults by elena ferrante is was one of my favorites of the year. It's about that time in your young teenage years when you realize that your parents are not gods, they're not perfect, they're just humans. They're fallible and they are imperfect, and they did not do the best job at raising you and they made mistakes, and so it's about that time when you, when you go from from believing they are perfect and they're gods to seeing that they're not right.
Micah Riot:After I read this, I requested from the library the first book in her neapolitan series. It's a four book series I believe that got into the best books of the first quarter of the century. That's how I found out about her, about her name and about these books is from that list that New York Times put together. Okay. And then the last book I read in 2024 was Perfume and Pain by Anna Dorn, and it's a.
Micah Riot:It's like a trashy pulp novel about a lesbian in LA who's a writer and she's messy and she's into drugs and she doesn't want to face her own feelings or her own life and she's very judgy and she goes after toxic women and at the end she sort of redeems herself. But you know, in that sort of category that I spoke about earlier of bad person main character and you just sort of watch them be a bad person for most of the book and then maybe the last few pages is them them having a redemption arc. It just bores me. I don't like. I don't like watching bad people be bad people. It's just, it's boring. I think there's enough of it in the world.
Micah Riot:I like the idea of there being perfume content in it, since it's called Perfume and Pain and like, if you read the description, it says that the main character has a perfume collection and is obsessed with it. I got the impression from reading it that the writer did a little bit of research, probably on like Reddit boards, but isn't actually like a perfume hobbyist, not a perfume obsessed person, which is what I was hoping for. I feel like when you read about something and there's like a hobby in there or some sort of like a side quest about, you know, creation of something like, for example, in Light from Uncommon Stars that I spoke about earlier by Rika Aoki, there's like this whole theme in the book of making of the violin and violin making culture and like the types of wood and glue that they use and like how a violin gets put together and made and fixed and like what is required. It's like so detailed and it's so delicious to me, like I love a good nerd out. So I was hoping for that in Perfume and Pain but alas I didn't get enough for it to be satisfying. And that was the last book of 2024 that I read in full or tried to start and did not finish. I also mentioned those as a bonus, since you listened through almost an hour of me yapping about the books I read.
Micah Riot:I will tell you about the couple of books that I read, since it's two weeks we're two weeks into January of 2025. And I also got through my Brilliant Friend, which was the first one in the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante. I really liked it, got the second one immediately and I'm reading the second one. It's about this friendship between these two girls. The main character is really obsessed with her bestie and she talks about their friendship from just having met as little kids. I think they're about probably five or six years old when they first meet and then they're students together and they're both brilliant at school. But her friend is made to stop studying because of the poverty of her family and the main character. I guess her family is a little bit better and she's slightly more encouraged to study by a teacher and so she stays in school and she observes her best friend and her life and how it goes after she leaves school and it's so intimate, it's so very intimate. I love that obsessive, intimate, detail-oriented type of writing. You can just clearly see how the presence of each other in their lives really had so much to do with how their lives went. So I'm looking forward to see what else happens Now that the girls are like late teenage years as opposed to kids.
Micah Riot:And then the other book I listened to was Black Pill how I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet, come to Life, poison Society and Capture American Politics by L Reeve, and this was scary and unsettling and interesting and I kind of wanted to stop and I didn't. Um, I kept reading it. Investigative journalism about what happened and what is happening with the battle between the right and the left. Um, that is coming out of the corners of the internet that are not the social media that the rest of us are on. It's about these young men who are really into coding and really into computers, creating these spaces where they outright can breed and thrive and be supported by each other. And there's kind of a lot in it and she introduces us to various characters in that world and lets us see how much influence and power they have had because of the internet with other young men and it all sort of. What I understood is it stems from their feeling frustrated with young women becoming empowered not to just settle for any man and not to have to marry if they don't want to. They're lonely and they feel entitled to female attention. I mean, this is intel culture, but this is kind of where a lot of this alt-right stuff started and continues to grow from.
Micah Riot:Very interesting, scary. I recommend if you're interested in this topic. It was really well written. Elle Reeve is fantastic.
Micah Riot:And then I read this super silly little book called the Full Moon Coffee Shop from a Japanese writer, mai Mochizuki, and it's about these different folks who are kind of lost in their lives and they don't really know what to do next, just how to, you know, be happier. And they come upon a magical cafe with talking cats that serves them beautiful treats and shows them their paths through astrology, and it's super cute and very much of a departure from my usual reading, but very cute. It was a nice little break. And that's where I'm at, uh, with all the books. If you got through all of this, congratulations. I am impressed, very impressed, um, and if you found some books that you hopefully will love also, then my job here is done.
Micah Riot:And the thing that's been making me happy lately is I'm doing a little bit of sewing. I'm using a quilting sort of technique to create my little bags that I like to sew. I'm still making things for the people who gave me money when I was healing from my surgery and they'll be my little gifts to people. So I've given out a bunch, but I still have a lot to make. That's it. That's what's making me happy lately is doing my little bits of sewing from little quilted squares. Okay, bye, thank you.
