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The Private Life of a Cat 1946 | dir. Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid

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𝔯𝔞𝔦𝔫𝔶 𝔴𝔢𝔞𝔱𝔥𝔢𝔯 𝔰𝔱𝔲𝔡𝔶

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𝔰𝔬𝔪𝔟𝔢𝔯 𝔟𝔩𝔲𝔢

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21 January, 1926 The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf (1924-1941)

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old souls

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Reading is political and it always has been. Here are some of the classic books on the banned list that you should definitely check out.

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january 17, 2025 : this year, i want to immerse myself in as many books as possible and write more. i plan to step outside of my comfort zone, savor the scent of flowers and appreciate the landscape. i want to watch more movies, draw more, smile more and love people deeply.

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17 January, 1924 Letters to Véra by Vladimir Nabokov

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Here's your daily reminder that bookstores keep the love of reading alive — but they also keep neighborhoods beautiful. They are places to gather, to celebrate stories, to find community.

Please do your holiday shopping at your local independent bookstore, if you are lucky enough to still have one.

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Gone girl - Glynn Flynn

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Gone Girl – 5/5 ⭐

Boy meets girl. Girl disappears, assumed to have been murdered. Boy is the prime suspect, except: He didn’t do it. But someone clearly wants it to look like he did. So, where is his girl?

1/15/25

(Progress: 30%)

I fucking hate Nick Dunne. No buts. 

That man should kill himself never be any role model for anyone. 

I know this happens. I know people cheat. But, sue me, I don't care why he cheated, I don't care if he thought he was alone. Before this, I didn’t like him. But it was more about not caring about him, seeing his earlier depiction of his personality contrast so harshly with what a cheating asshat he seems to be. 

to quote a row of texts I sent to my friend earlier today when the memory of the new information in the book still stung and made my prefrontal cortex shrivel to half its size:

12:47 i wanna kill the protagonist of the book i’m reading

12:47 for real

12:47 i hate him

12:47 #NickDunneOnTheCross2025

Excuse my violent religious imagery, I really don't know why this passage about him cheating hit me so much. Even though I could puke and keel over at the thought of Nick cheating on Amy with a much younger woman (I don't know where all these detailed images come from), I have no idea why this plot point bothered me so insanely. You have no idea. Maybe it’s just been a long time since a book has managed to give me the emotional equivalent of a stabbing with a dull knife but still right in the heart, just weirdly twisting the thing inside my guts to do as much damage with it (imagery!! oh my god!!) but this? Am I afraid to end up like Amy or like the mistress? Both only loved to a limited capacity? By the same man who could not give less of a fuck about a woman if she isn’t his super cool dudette Bitchass Twin Sister? Am I mad? Can you really tell? Update later. Can’t right now. Need to figure out why men say they like feminine women but whine when they order an espresso martini and dont shotgun five bud lights stacked on top of each other. But if you have parents who name you Nick and Go, which sounds like a damn pickpocketing technique now that I think about it, I too would get my attention elsewhere or maybe open a bar with a name about as creative as the band “The The”. 

1/16/25

(Progress: 32%)

Never mind. I don't actually hate his sister because she called him out on his BS at the end of the chapter. She’s so real for that.

1/17/25

(Progress: 100%)

Okay. Fucking hell. What? 

Looking back on my remarks at about 30% I almost feel silly. I‘m assuming that this trajectory of emotions — confusion, anger, more anger, realization, anger-infused confusion — was exactly what Flynn wanted, and it almost feels disappointing that I fell right into the trap and followed that exact path. But: That also means I experienced this book how it was meant to be experienced! Even though by the end I wasn’t sure why all I’d ever hear about it had to do with the “Cool Girl Monologue”. I mean, her multiple page-ramble about chili-dog-overenthusiastic women was fun to read, but by far not the most important or most impressive of it all. (I did post an underlined passage of this part on my instagram story, the same way you’d tell people your favourite song from The Bends is Just, not because it actually is — it’s actually a close call between Planet Telex and Black Star — but because it’s more likely they know it and all you care about is conveying “Hey, I like this!” by letting them know you like listening to Thom Yorke whine while lying on the floor. No individual song, or, in this case, book passage differentiation needed. The difference isn’t as gaping as it is between people whose favourite Metallica song is The Call of Ktulu and Nothing Else Matters. End of rant. Closing the parentheses now.) 

Fun fact: The last half of this book had me in an insane chokehold. I came back home from the dentist, half of my mouth anesthetized and everything, an accidental devious smirk gracing my lips every time I try to smile, and I sat down in an armchair, started reading, and the next time I got up I had both finished the book and inadvertently waited out the anesthesia. Life hack time: if your mouth is numb but you're hungry and seriously debate eating a roll despite probably biting raw the entire inside of your cheek while doing it, just inhale 300 pages of an amazingly insane character and her asshat victim hubby. 

In the span of a month, Nick Dunne goes from “Where’s my pretty princess of a wife? Anyone seen her? Hey, this ottoman’s kinda heavy.” to “iwannakillmywifereallyreallyreallybadplzzz.”.

In the past month, I did interesting things such as:

A) Sleep.

B) Read.

C) Eat.

D) Go to class.

E) Run away and frame my husband as a murderer only to realize that, from my perspective, our fucked minds fit together like an insanely difficult jigsaw puzzle and I kill my ex instead and pretend he held me hostage and tortured me which he saw as an unconventional display of affection through his beast eyes.

The answer is: All of them except for E. (And A maybe, but it can all be accredited to this book.) Crazy, right? Okay, I’m gonna get my thoughts in order now.

The first hundred or so pages were good, but you could really feel that they were leading up to something truly fucked. And I had my suspicions about how fucked this was going to get, but I wasn’t even close. The constant switch between him detailing gruesome discoveries about her disappearance that somehow all led to him and her drawing this picture of fate bringing them together, everything being a perfect,  beautiful New York life really did it for me. Especially as her diary entries begin to bring along this acid aftertaste over time. There was a point at which I asked myself if he really didn't do it. Because how couldn’t he? She was Amazing Amy after all! 

The first point at which I raised my eyebrows concerningly high was when it was revealed that, yes, she did in fact come to the abandoned mall. But it wasn’t by force, it was to buy a gun. A damn gun of all things! The reaction of the guy who recognized her basically foreshadowed her “actual” personality. I could feel the weight of that “Oh shit, her?” through the pages when they showed him the picture. Other than that, nothing to report. Until we reach the 200-page mark, obviously. 

Andie. The perfect girl to blame everything on. The whole thing. The entire affair. All her doing as a twenty-something year old seductress. He just couldn’t resist. God, I want to shake her. On one hand, she’s a grown adult. She knew he was married, she knew his sister was literally down the hall when she tried to have sex with him because the disappearance of his wife doesn’t have anything to do with her because to Andie, Amy was always a distant character. Present enough to have questions asked about her but apparently not present enough to be seen as an actual obstacle when her husband was right there, being the poor, mistreated man he was, serving her drinks in the bar Amy’s parents’ exploitative business paid for. Andie is the manifestation of someone that the stereotypical wife-character would cry herself to sleep over. She’s younger, more attractive, probably even bakes for Nick. She craves attention in a way she could only ever really get in a real, official relationship with an available man, and still, she’s dumbing herself down to this. This belief only deepens when you think about how she’s sacrificing another woman’s happiness for her obsessive fling rooted in the small flicker of hope that he might one day leave his wife. Who would in turn take the bar, so that’s not happening, I guess. 

And yet, even after all that, if you told me you genuinely despised Andie, I’d think you haven’t actually read the book. It takes two to tango, in this case it’s a married man with a house and the wish to be a father someday and a college student who has nothing to lose in the love department. The playing field wasn’t exactly even. Like putting a cool sticker onto a surface it just won’t stick to. If you hadn’t tried putting it there, it would still be sticky enough to put somewhere else. But now that the protective paper’s off, you’re mad because you just wasted a sick sticker and also glad you did try to put it where it doesn’t belong so you now have certainty over the surface and won’t try again. Except that Andie’s palms are already rubbed raw from trying to make the sticker stay in place. Okay. Andie is not seulement to blame, we got it, no more stickers now. 

I’ll admit it now: I did not care for her time in that Hide-A-Way Cabin. I understand its importance in relation to her development and the need for her to be there, without money, because it’s an essential part of the plot, but I just couldn’t find it in me to really give a shit. Sorry, Jeff and Greta. Continuing. 

The Desi twist was something I really didn’t expect. I guess it wasn’t that far of a stretch for her to go from manipulating people and making them out to have done horrible things to her to actually killing someone. Still, didn’t think she had it in her, was all I thought while following the events of the last hundred pages. 

Amazing Amy wins once again, they all shouted from the rooftops in unison, unaware of the silenced husband reduced to an obedient dog in the corner of their home soon to be filled with baby cries while his possible writer epitome Psycho Bitch rots in a recycle bin on his laptop.