Sunday Salon: 9/11, College Update, and Some Seasonal Reading
Flight 93 National Memorial, Shanksville, PA ~ October 2011 (photo taken by me)
This weekend has been focused on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, rightfully so. I wrote some reflections about that day in my previous post. I’m finding it more difficult than I expected to watch the coverage and be on social media. The Husband mentioned the possibility of watching a 9/11 documentary last night and as he was describing it, I knew that even two decades later it would be too much for me. We wound up watching a few episodes of Schitt’s Creek instead.
Today’s a lazy Sunday. My stomach was out of sorts last night and I have a headache, so I’m feeling kinda blah. Football’s back, though! First NFL Sunday of the season. I traditionally make a big pot of soup for dinner on Sundays, beginning with the first football weekend. There’s just something I find super comforting about this ritual. Given how I feel, however, I’ll probably just do a bowl of gluten-free ramen for myself and pasta for The Husband.
It’s been a busy month since my last Salon post. We moved College Girl back onto her campus on August 21. She’s only 40 minutes away and 5 minutes from my work. She was there spring semester year but in a single room and with all kinds of COVID restrictions. This year she has a roommate; they seem like a great match. Her classes are going well, she’s working at the campus library, and she’s joined the Cold Case Club. (They work on real-life cold cases and she’s not allowed to talk about them.) The day after moving her into her dorm we had brunch downtown with our very good friends from Philly who were in the ‘Burgh moving their daughter to Pitt. It was so, so great to see them.
College Boy’s move-in was August 27-29. Since his school is 3.5 hours away, we made a weekend out of it. He likes his classes and his professors, his roommate seems like a nice kid, and the food is amazing. (His college is known for its superb food — seriously. In 2020, the Princeton Review ranked them #11 in the country for campus food. We’ve eaten there; it’s delicious.) He’s getting into a routine. He applied for and was accepted to a strategies of leadership seminar (non-credit) that meets three times during the semester. Despite all those positives, he’s had a rocky adjustment. He was fully remote last year. We’re hoping that he’ll feel more acclimated as the semester goes on and gets to know more people.
We’re planning a visit next weekend, then he’ll be home for a few days in October, and then we’ll be back for Family Weekend at the end of October. Send positive vibes for a good semester, please.
My current reading is all about Readers Imbibing Peril (RIP XVI). Over Labor Day weekend I spent considerable time on the deck reading When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2020).
(This image looks gigantic on my end and I can’t figure out how to fix it. Sorry about that.)
It’s supposedly a psychological thriller, but the majority of the novel didn’t feel that way, in my opinion. Sydney Green is a Black woman in her thirties who has lived in Brooklyn all her life (except for a few years in Seattle with her divorced husband). Everyone knows and cares about each other in her neighborhood which is rapidly gentrifying. One of the newcomers is Theo, an unemployed white man in a dysfunctional relationship. When Theo volunteers to help Sydney with a historical tour she’s planning, the two become enmeshed in the many strange occurrences (and coincidences?) happening in their community.
I appreciated the message and themes of the novel (even if they felt a little heavy-handed at times) and found myself interested in the story, but the last 1/4 of it leading up to the ending of is just downright…bizarre. A bit too far-fetched. Other reviewers have criticized the pacing as being “off,” and I can see how that’s justified. 3 stars out of 5.
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019) is my current audiobook (actually, more like a read/listen combo). Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary-Jane, all killed in 1888, are known as the five “canonical” victims of Jack the Ripper. There’s a common belief that they were all prostitutes or “fallen women,” but as Rubenhold effectively shows in The Five, this is not true. By portraying a vivid picture of their lives and not their deaths, she dispels these false accusations and shows how assumptions of their character by the media and law enforcement led to them being labeled as prostitutes. The Five is also a fascinating historical look at Victorian life. I’m halfway through this, but I would guess this will be a 4 star read.
Is that not the creepiest cover ever? It’s befitting The Seventh Mansion, Maryse Meijer‘s debut novel (FSG Originals, 2020). I don’t even know where to begin with this. Xie is a teenage boy and fastidious vegan living in the rural South with his father. He’s been kicked out of school after getting caught breaking into mink cages on a nearby farm and freeing the animals. (His accomplices were his best friends Jo and Leni, fellow environmental activists who identify themselves collectively as FKK, but Xie was the only one caught.) One evening Xie is wandering through the woods (as he does) and stumbles upon a church where he discovers the skeleton of Pancratius, a martyred Catholic saint. He steals the skeleton and that’s when shit gets real in this wild novel. I have about 70 pages left of this (it’s very short, only 171 pages but written in a very unconventional style) but this may turn out to be one of my favorites of the year. Maryse Meijer is a freakin’ literary genius — I loved her short story collection Rag (reviewed in Shelf Awareness) and her novella Northwood was a 4 star read. The Seventh Mansion will land her among my favorite authors.
How’s your September going?