BOOKS
The Twenty Days of Turin by Georgio De Maria
This novel gave me the chills because it's incredibly prescient with regards to our current political and cultural landscape. The story is about a writer researching an event called the Twenty Days of Turin, in which strange things began to happen in the northern Italian city. A group of young men create something called The Library, in which residents of the city are invited to anonymously write down their thoughts and ideas in journals and leave them behind for others to read. This eventually spirals out of control, with all manner of depraved notions being written and shared between citizens, and spreading like poison. The result is terrifying. If this doesn't remind you of modern-day chat rooms, it should. This one was a page turner and shook me to my core.
This was one I picked up after seeing it on numerous "Best of 2016" book lists. It's another disturbing book (hey, I was on a roll!), this time about a woman who decides to be a vegetarian, and the dire consequences of her decision. The story is told in three parts, and not by the woman herself, but by a few people connected to her - her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister. It's a sad tale about what happens to women when they don't conform to society's expectations, told through food, violence, and the body. I found The Vegetarian to be a strange read, because we're rarely inside of the the main character's head. And when we do get a glimpse of what she's thinking, the anger and violence she's repressing is legit terrifying.
This novel was the strangest of the ones I read during this period, but I absolutely loved it and had a book hangover after finishing. Why can't all writing be this strange, wonderful, thought-provoking and fascinating? Taking place in an area between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the narrative revolves around a "gentleman" zombie. He doesn't stumble around with arms out front, moaning, looking for brains. No. He's brilliant - a top executive at a pharmaceutical company, in fact. He's also obsessed with trying to find his "qualia" - his sense of self - through his research at the lab. The book presents itself as a series of writings and notes from the notebooks of one of his co-workers - Isadore - and can be read in the order that it's organized, or in the order presented by the table of contents. Wicked Weeds is so much more than this, but it's difficult to describe it in an accurate way. Honestly, just read it!
MUSIC
MOVIES
If there's one film that I've seen in the past couple of months that I feel actually changed my life (and that's not hyperbole!), it was Get Out. There's so much depth and so much to say about this film that Google and the myriad think pieces that pop up when you search for the film will do a better job than I will on telling you why this is such an important film. Just go see it if you haven't yet. The hype is well deserved.
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