I recently posted my Historical Investigation video for The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I finished the book many weeks ago. This is the curse of having to produce creative content as a hobby and having ADHD. Let’s walk through how these Historical Investigations go.
First, there’s the reading. That’s supposedly the easy part, but because I know I’m going to want to say a lot about these books I annotate a lot (but no tabs, never tabs).
And those annotations lead to thoughts and Google searches and somehow or another several more books arrive as supplemental research. At the end of this stretch, I’ve got a ton of raw materials, but no product. All the while I’m thinking, “oh my god, I don’t have anything to say about this.”
Along the way, I tend to start the Substack post that will be the final, polished product. I start dumping in thoughts, quotations, pictures, videos, anything that I think will be useful. And then that sits there for a long time.
I’ll be going to the grocery store when a particular theme or relationship in whatever I read will jump out at me and I’ll wander around like a maniac looking at every kind of olive they have in the store while I process those thoughts.
Hopefully the muttering to myself is not too distracting for the strangers. And, like anyone with ADHD, I won’t write any of that down. It all just seeps back into the ocean of my thoughts, waiting to resurface at the opportune moment.
Finally, I’ll decide I’ve gone too long without doing a TikTok and I’ll focus and bang out the recording. This is one of the most important parts of the process for me. All those annotations and supermarket olive thoughts resurface as I organize everything verbally. Once that’s done, I’m about ready to turn to the essay. I genuinely don’t think I could do the essays without doing a TikTok as a first draft.
Once that’s done, the writing tends to come pretty easily, but I often unearth several sections that don’t appear in my TikTok at all. Presumably they were too sub-nautical at the time of recording. After finishing the essay and pressing publish, I think to myself, “this wasn’t so bad, I definitely could do these more frequently.” And then I pick up the next book and I think, “oh my god, I don’t have anything to say about this.”
On Repeat
It’s hard to believe that Alicia Keys’ “Fallin” came out 22 years ago, nearly to the day. It’s the nature of time to pass, but goddamn does it have to pass so quickly and so much?
Keys released her latest studio album, KEYS, in 2021 and for some reason I missed it. For more reasons, she released that entire album as KEYS II in 2022 and that’s when Spotify’s algorithm did its thing. It slipped “Daffodils” into my Discover Weekly and I… skipped it. I listened to the mix again and… I skipped it… again. I don’t know why, but I didn’t think it was for me.
But Spotify didn’t give up on me and a few weeks later it put “Daffodils” in a Daily Mix and I was driving and just let it play.
It instantly became one of my favorite Keys songs. And with Spring finally springing, it seems timely.
While I prefer the quintessentially Keys ballad version, she also did an EDM version which is interestingly more up tempo but also more minor key.
Finished This Week
Abeni’s Song by P. Djèlí Clark
I’m going to keep my power relatively dry on this one until we get closer to its July release. Abeni’s Song is an extremely strong first book in a YA series. Clark unsurprisingly nailed this one. It was perhaps too YA for my personal taste, and I felt like Clark was operating at a different register than he normally does (particularly overusing exclamation points).
But it’s good and I’d strongly recommend checking this out if you’re into middle grade fantasy or are a big fan of Clark’s already. You can tell this series is going to be a special one.
The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
I’m not going to cave to the massive pressure to give The Anthropocene Reviewed a star rating.
I liked it as much as I like John Green, which is to say, a bit. Green touches on and explores themes that are currently impacting Millennials (and older Gen Zers and younger Gen Xers alike) in his particularly John Green way. This is the part where I say that I’ve never been a big fan of John’s.
I’ve always felt like his way of communicating felt like filling in a sadboy Madlibs of certain niche pop culture references. That feels harsher than I mean it. I do think he genuinely feels terribly deeply and has found ways of sharing and channeling that feeling among a vast collection of people. I just always felt a bit of the artifice, the scaffolding around it.
The Anthropocene Reviewed has that same character. So many references felt rote and thoroughly known to me. The Teddy Roosevelt teddy bear story. I’m pretty sure the Bonneville salt flats was featured in the recent mind-melting horror movie The Outwaters. And beyond the stories that I already knew there is everything I came to know through John’s online presence (I mostly follow him on TikTok).
Inspire of all that, I still think this is a good book. Possibly even a great book. Many of the essays felt profound and even the ones that didn’t touch feelings that most of us feel and give us a way to understand them.
I said I wasn’t giving The Anthropocene Reviewed a star rating. And so I will give it my sometimes used 🍍.
Also, my copy is bigger.
Still Reading
IQ by Joe Ide
An old friend piped up on chat a few weeks ago and asked, “Have you read IQ by Joe Ide? You’d like IQ by Joe Ide.”
One trip to the library and roughly 170 pages later, I can say: I like IQ by Joe Ide.
It’s Sherlock Holmes (which I’m a fan of) in East Long Beach L.A. Our Sherlock is a young Black man, Isaiah Quintabe (IQ), and he makes his way through life solving cases. Sometimes for money and sometimes in barter.
We follow his life in two time periods: present day 2013 where he’s trying to crack a case surrounding an assassination attempt on a famous rapper and 2005 where his life was irrevocably changed following the hit-and-run death of his older brother.
IQ is a bit of a cypher in a good way, the exact way that Sherlock is. But right from the start we get strong reasons for this characterization. IQ is pretty genius level in school and has been riding the fallout of his brother’s death for nearly a decade. IQ’s Watson is his childhood frenemy Dodson who is a perfect sidekick, friendly and loud to IQ’s cool intellectualism.
I’ve been getting back into mysteries and crime novels lately1, and this series is doing for me what the cozy fantasy surge is doing for a lot of readers. This is exactly in my wheelhouse and while the storytelling is on-point, the plot isn't so clockwork and intricate as to make it hard reading. I'm excited to continue this series.
Eldritch Sparks (Shadows of Otherside Book 2) by Whitney Hill
I’m on record saying that Whitney Hill’s urban fantasy debut, Elemental, is one of the best UF debuts I’ve read. About halfway through her follow up and I can say it’s turning into a particularly strong series.
Arden Finch is the kind of capable, but still quite young, private investigator/Air elemental that you love to follow in a UF series. She began things in Elemental completely in undercover (not just to the mundane world, but to everyone as Elementals are seen as dangerous by elves) and a wholly dependent on the local Otherside enforcer, Callista, and her djinn friends (later to be revealed as her cousins).
In Eldritch Sparks, Arden is thinking about turning her FWB situation with local werewolf Ramon into something more official and is at the center of NC Triangle Otherside politics. She is the neutral third party between the elves, djinn, werewolves, and vampires and is organizing them around a Reveal to the normal world. Eldritch Sparks pushes on all those fronts while also introducing a fun new threat: a lich lord who’s summoning zombies. Fun!
I know I’ll be continuing with this series over the next few months — highly recommended.
A Fistful of Charms by Kim Harrison
No progress since last week, I’ve been prioritizing other things.
Frankenstein: The 1818 Text by Mary Shelley
One day. One day.
Largely because of the same friend who recommended Don Winslow’s incredible City on Fire (an Iliad re-telling set amongst mafia families in 1980s Providence, RI).