The characters and the settings are so vividly described and have stuck with me for years, like I forget they were fake and not things that I really experienced.
Jul 28, 2024
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If you have the chance, visit. Genuinely surreal place. I love Italy in general but Venice compelled me to write a weird autofiction thing for my book when I was writing it which I just rediscovered but never actually put in the book so:
post Verona a bit of a daze, sure as hell not Shakespeare, but star-crossed enough: the van from the hostel departs, barely makes it to the ferry. Here I am, a confused teenage Tom Ripley, recently eighteen, sailing into the lagoon with all my clothes in a tattered suitcase and a reservation I don’t remember making. I sit above a canal, and I fall in love once again as the water laps at my trainers. The old glassworker indulges my thoughts as the kiln nearly sears my eyebrows off. I dance with visiting English students in a public square and lie about how old I am. I spend much of my time at a restaurant a few blocks from the apartment I stay at petting a cat which I never see again, people watching fellow tourists while acting in denial. Later, I enjoy Italian pop music with someone I share my cigarettes with in a Paris rock club three years later. I look forward to the future.
Mar 1, 2024
Once I got into it I couldn't put it down. Gave me similar feelings to watching A Bigger Splash
Jan 1, 2025
“Oh, that book.” Yes.
I feel like It is thought of more often as a concept of a book/story or dismissed with a “Yeah, yeah” rather than considered an actual thing you can sit down and read. Not that it is generally despised (other than *that* scene, and yes, I completely agree), but I feel as if so few people care enough to try reading it. And with its massively popular adaptation into the 2017/2019 films, the way It as a story is viewed by the public has completely changed, and today’s tweens probably don’t even know who the director of the films is, let alone Stephen King.
Last summer, I read this book. I started it at the beach at home, but on that fateful day, the waves crashed onto my family’s belongings, taking with them a lunchbox of fruits and one flip-flop of mine (RIP). The next day, we left for a five-day trip, so I was stuck with a very old, very waterlogged, engorged, warped copy of the book. On the very long car rides over the next days, I knocked out over half of It, and spent scorching days by the pool doing the same. On the way home, I began to wrap it up.
When I got back, a hardcover was waiting in the mail for me. And with the last moments of my carefree summer days, I sat in the sunset with my brand new copy of an old story, living vicariously through 7 kids experiencing their last summer together. The red light of the fading yet radiant sunset shone onto my face, and the darkness settled in as I turned the last page.
I have never felt so many things at once. With me, I carried a palpable yet arguably unfounded sense of nostalgia endlessly afterward, and I felt as if I had lived through multiple childhoods and adulthoods in just one summer. I felt devastated and content, hopeless and happy. There is no one emotion I could tie to experiencing 1153 pages of It. It’s just It. It amazes me that on my shelf is an entire world, embossed with the proud “FROM THE LIBRARY OF,” expectant, waiting to be reopened, re-experienced, relived.
This summer will forever be engrained in my memory, and although I say this as a young person, the summer I spent in Sequoia Tree Park amidst gargantuan trees and rolling mountainscapes is the summer I grew up with seven Losers, just trying to get by and go forth with their lives.
Jan 28, 2025
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No screen Sundays. If I want to listen to music its CDs or radio. If I want to watch a movie, no I don’t. If I want to see a friend, I will make plans with them on Friday or Saturday to meet up. As a result, I read more, write more, and sit with questions like “did Citizen Kane‘s 50 year winning streak in the Sight and Sound critics choice survey end in 2012 or 2022? When did Stephen Merritt come out? Whats the etymology of Whitsun?“
This is something that I have practiced off and on for many years but I’ve been doing it every week since December and I love the way that it just allows me one day of true freedom and rest.
Jan 22, 2025
Mar 3, 2025
My calendar this year has 52 of these week at a glance pages but I don’t think that way. So, I've been inspired by Ross Gay’s Book of Delighs to start recording the little moments and sensations that bring me joy throughout the day. An analog pi.fyi, if you will.
heres some of what I have so far:
- Waking up to the sound of my upstairs neighbor‘s footstep. It sounded nostalgic. Felt like company.
- Strawberry jam
- feeling tender for strangers: their lips, nail colors, their small wrists. Thinking of all the lives we hold gently.
- A young girl bought an LP at the bookstore just before I left. She stroked its cover with love
- Green tiles —the mint shade always makes me think of Jancie
- Charlie’s little bop and punch dancing to some German language punk
- lunch with Katherine, curry Brussels sprouts
- small talk at the photo studio. The photographer's brother was named after their dad, stole his identity, bought jet skis.
Jan 13, 2025