Voting for November reads are now live! As always, I think these are some pretty banger choices… I hope you guys are just as excited as I am! Voting will end on 10/31 and everyone will get two votes, one vote for fantasy and one vote for thriller/horror!

I'm not looking forward to all the ACOTAR fever this week. If you too would rather read a book by a marginalized author than the latest release from an author who has unapologetically used a Black woman's death to promote her work, here are some recommendations!

She Isn't Herself Tonight by Hailey Piper 4.5/5 stars

Put this on your TBR if you enjoy weird girl lit with horror elements. This was my first Hailey Piper, but it definitely won't be the last. I loved the exploration of how we are pushed to become who others want us to be instead of being loved as we are.

Venus Vanishing by Rebecca Birrell 4.5/5 stars

Put this on your TBR if you enjoy sapphic historical fiction. Our main character is an artist who is just trying to live and make art in a society that is increasingly hostile to her (1930s Germany).

Scorpion Deep by CG Drews 4/5 stars

Put this on your TBR if you enjoy gothic coming of age stories and/or stories with asexuality rep. I think this was actually my least favorite CG Drews books, but that's just because so many of their other works were homeruns for me.

First Generation by Meghana Karanjkar 3/5 stars

Put this on your TBR if you enjoy stories about being an outsider. I really enjoyed the first story that featured a character trying to make it home for a family holiday but being forced to keep up with the daily grind as her coworkers don't celebrate that holiday. The other stories weren't as memorable for me.

And a few that I can't wait to get my hands on:

Public Access Afterworld by Jane Schoenbrun

Why this interests me: it seems to be technology horror and also queer.

Savage Lake by Nick Medina

Why this interests me: it features a haunted cabin in the woods.

You're No Better by Andrew Joseph White

Why this interests me: it's an Andrew Joseph White work...that was enough to get me to preorder. This one features the child of a serial killer trying to outlive that legacy.

I have seen YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING and I am here to add to the discourse. This will be full of spoilery thoughts, and I do think that if you're planning to see it, you should try to go in as fresh as possible. Save this and come back when you've seen it. This will probably be a bit rambling, as I'm still gathering my thoughts. Let us explore them together!

I spent a lot of the runtime of this film trying to square the Elizabeth Holmes on the screen with the one I knew from dozens of interviews and profiles about her as the founder of Theranos. Previously, she leaned in (lol) to the girlboss aesthetic that was on the rise at the time. Here, she's a naive, misunderstood girl, exactly the image she and her husband Billy want to project. Or is she?

The movie starts off as a fairly standard documentary, out to answer the question "Is Elizabeth Holmes a liar?" However, it very quickly starts to feel like you are stuck in an M.C. Escher drawing. Absolutely every scene has you trying to figure out if she's for real or not. There are many shots of Nathan Fielder visibly trying to do this math in his head, which then cut to an extreme closeup of Holmes smiling, wide-eyed, back, inviting you to scrutinize her for any minute tell. You won't find any. The first thing I told my spouse after leaving the theater was, "I think she believes she did nothing wrong."

And that's the key. SHE believes it, so you believe in when she's telling you so. Then you leave that conversation and you wake up again in reality, where there's no possible way that's true. But she believes it so openly! Maybe I'm wrong? Let's talk about it again.

All this, however, turns out to not really be the main point of the documentary. Well, it is, but it isn't (do you see what I mean about Escher yet?) About an hour and a half in, I discreetly looked at my phone and wondered how we could only be halfway through. What more could there possibly be to show? And that is basically where the beat drops in this film.

Throughout the first half, there were glimpses of Holmes' husband, Billy Evans, and how deeply engrained in her life he is. At first he seems like a random chud, but as the movie rolls on, it becomes clear that he is in control.

At the same time, we discover that that Fielder has been keeping some important information from the audience. He shares the details with Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in "The Dropout." (We'll get there in a minute, I promise!)

Now, we have not one but two men trying to steer Holmes' life story in a way that will best suit them. But only one is presented as a villain. Certainly, what Evans is doing is orders of magnitude worse. Yet Fielder seems shocked when Seyfried points this out to him, though not in such direct words. He asks why he would try to protect Holmes, in nearly a mirror image of the shot where Holmes asks him why she would lie to him.

Holmes has been publicly paired with a man for the entire time she has been in the public eye. We already knew about Sunny Balwani, her former romantic and business partner at Theranos, and the questions about how much of Theranos was under his control vs Holmes'. Midway through the documentary, Holmes' father rather casually says everything went off the rails when Holmes was raped as a young woman, and this is never referenced again. Now, we have Evans and Fielder vying for narrative control.

Has Holmes' entire life and career trajectory been shaped by controlling, abusive men? Is that on purpose, using them as a shield? We are back in the Escher drawing. There's a woman-to-woman urge to tell her to get the fuck out, and there's a (feminist?) urge to insist she is actually playing them all. Again, when she is speaking to you directly, you 100% believe what she is saying. Then the scene cuts, and you aren't so sure anymore.

Back to Seyfried for a minute. Seyfried and Holmes don't actually look all that much alike, but when she is doing reenactments with Fielder, you can practically feel reality slipping, two lenses coming in and out of focus. I had to actively remind myself who was on screen. In the non-reenactment scenes, she is not letting these men off the hook. No matter how defensive and evasive they are, she pushes. She doesn't always make headway, but her astonishment - and occasionally anger - are a relief after Fielder's stone-faced approach.

Oh my god, this is already so long and we haven't even talked about the "Who's on First" scene. I am gonna think about that scene for the rest of my life. Fielder shows Holmes and Evans the classic comedy routine, and Holmes simply...doesn't get it. But that can't be possible, right? It's so simple, that's why it's funny. But Fielder has to explain it to her, and she seems to just accept the explanation without grasping it.

This scene ties back to one where Holmes is trying to explain that everything that went wrong at Theranos was a misunderstanding over the word "can." As in, everyone thought she meant the machine can do all these things right now, and she meant it theoretically can do all these things. Like, Holmes and Evans really want us to believe that this misunderstanding persisted through hundreds of interviews and profiles and no one spotted it, no one tried to correct it. Holmes mind "just works differently," they insist. They are trying to ask why you would punish a neurodivergent person, but without actually using that word. So, there's another layer on the question of how in charge of her own life Holmes is. Maybe she doesn't understand that these men are taking advantage of her, if she's autistic? They let that hang there for you to grapple with, along with all the other concerns about her agency.

At the end of the film, however, the biggest question for me was, why was she the one who was punished for this? Out of every Silicon Valley CEO who has made big promises that turned out to be half truths or complete lies, why is she the only one in jail? Why is she the one who lost control of her narrative and her life? Everything we saw in the film answers these questions and also evades them entirely, making this all perfectly Elizabeth Holmesian.

Okay, on to the book reviews for the week. As always, books marked with an * were gifted to me by the publisher.

Punished by Ann-Helén Laestadius, translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles* - This is a story about a people I know nothing about - the Sámi people indigenous to what is now Sweden. It is told in dual timelines: the 1950s, when Sámi children were forced to go to a "nomad school," and the 1980s, when those children are adults grappling with the abuse they faced at school. The prose is pretty stark, leaving the reader nowhere to hide from the pain. Although the characters are all from the same village and went to the same school, they had different experiences and drastically different reactions to it. Nearly a week later, I'm still thinking about particular scenes - not necessarily the most violent ones, but the most emotionally complex ones.

Espíritu by Aiden Thomas* - Yay, we are back with Yadriel and Julian, yay! I loved how this book expanded on Cemetery Boys, both in terms of the lore of the world and in the emotional fallout of the events in the first book. I particularly liked new character Angel. Let more queer characters make bad choices! Let them be messy! My one concern with this book is that the characters felt younger than 17 to me. I can't recall if Cemetery Boys felt like that or not, but I was definitely reading thinking they were like 14 or 15.

Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher* - A perfect Halloween season read. What a great twist on existing lore, bringing in the creep factor of the post-Civil War rural south. It is pretty intense on the gore - I had to do some deep breathing to get through a few passages, as I always find body horror worse on audio than in print. At the same time, the descriptions of the critters and the MC Sonia's paintings of them were often quite lovely. I liked how Sonia was depicted as smart and capable and still way out of her depth (I mean, who could possibly be in their depth in these situations, really). I thought the mystery element was pretty obvious, but I still wanted to know how they were going to get out of everything.

There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm* - How do you fight an enemy you can't remember? Repeatedly, it turns out. At first, this book seems like lightly connected vignettes, but then everything coalesces into the big bad and we're off to the races. I loved our no nonsense main character Marie Quinn and her commitments to both bureaucracy and refusing to let humanity die. Unfortunately, the story got confusing toward the end, and the final battle was kind of anticlimactic.

One Good Thing

Washington Spirit vs Gotham FC

The Spirit are in the playoffs! We've now entered the time of year when an unhealthy percentage of my mental health rests on how well 11 women kick a ball around. Yay sports!

Anyway, here's Donut trying to claim my latest order of mica pigments for himself.

Donut the orange and white cat laying on a pile of small bags of powdered pigments.