November was exhausting. I didn’t do much reading outside of power point slides and a textbook. November was the month of short fiction and short shows. I consumed around 11 crime docuseries and one short story collection. I also read a ton from magazines.
The short story collection that I ended up reading was called “You Think It, I’ll Say It”. I went into this book pretty excited because I picked it up on a whim from the bargain section of the bookstore. I honestly can’t resist a good deal. This would be my first short story collection so I was pretty excited going into it. From the summary of the book, I was expecting to meet some pretty heart breaking or inspiring women but honestly, the book did the exact opposite. I didn’t really care for any of the characters in the short stories. I don’t know why certain characters did certain things and some passages/paragraphs felt a bit unnecessary to include, and the whole experience fell pretty flat. Since this book is a collection of short stories, I missed that feeling of closure we usually get from characters in full-length novels. It wasn’t the most enjoyable of reads which is pretty disappointing because I really wanted to get into short stories and now I’m thinking that it may not be for me.
The magazines I dove into is a Breathe Magazine Issue a New Yorker Issue.
I didn’t get to far into the Breathe Magazine but what I have read I really enjoyed. This magazine went into the topic of “The Power Hour” and slow living which I talked about in an earlier post. It’s pretty ironic that I was reading this magazine during a month where I did the exact opposite.
I also finished my first New Yorker! I have so many of these magazines and I know that they keep up with the times and it’s kind of counterproductive to read the earlier issues but I’m determined to make a dent in my collection.
The magazines are surprisingly dense and each article takes me a good bit of time to get through.
I read two very interesting articles from this issue of the magazine:
This article follows the adoption system in America and one particular lady named Tara Lee who worked to connect women looking to give up their babies for adoption to people looking to adopt. It’s kind of shocking to see how something like what’s discussed in this article got as far as it did. It makes you think of where else things can go wrong and how many people and babies are losing potential families and tons of money. It’s also alarming that a system that involves humans can get away with what it did. In a way, it’s kind of legalized human trafficking and making sure good people find their perfect baby should be something that’s non-negotiable. Also the mothers or women who are giving up their children need to be taken care of and valued in this familial transaction.
This article did a deep dive into Lovett Fort-Whiteman’s life and his fight to use communism as a weapon to bring equality for Black people in America while toeing the line with the Communist party line. Fort-Whiteman wasn’t shy about talking about how the color of one’s skin plays a role in equality and that was a message that went against Communism’s core beliefs.
The article about Communism in post Civil War Black American society was more than just eye opening and interesting, it was riveting. The pacing of Yaffa’s article paired perfectly with Fort-Whiteman’s rise and fall in his Communism journey and it had the perfect rhythm that had you hooked from the first paragraph.
I’m such a history lover and the thing that gets me is how far the human race advances all around the world in so many different yet similar ways. For example, when Fort-Whiteman was in Russia to immerse himself in the study of Communism, so was Ho Chi Minh, Stalin, and Palmiro Togliatti. It’s crazy to think that during that moment of time, three if not more historical revolutions were at its early stages of developing and so many countries were on the brink of mass turmoil, change, growth, and fall.
As for TV shows, I watched almost the entire crime docuseries section in Netflix. I didn’t have time to watch proper tv shows so crime docuseries, famously known for their short episode count, became the perfect weekend watches. I’m going to come out with a post on all 11 of the crime docuseries I watched so keep an eye out for that.
One big thing I did this month was that I went back to my college campus. It was…. an experience. It’s only been two years since I graduated and up until I set foot on campus again, I felt like I graduated just yesterday. After revisiting my campus, I felt the exact opposite. It felt like so many years had gone by and I felt so old and out of place from looking around and seeing how young everyone was on campus. It really scared me and pushed me further into my mid life crisis which I’m sure is going to get worse with my birthday approaching in a couple of weeks. It made me think about how subjective time is and how it moves to its own beat no matter how you interpret it. Simply put it, you may feel like you were in college just last year but it’s actually been almost three years since you’ve set foot on campus. When you catch up with how fast time’s moved, you start to panic about what you did in the past three years and how many more years you have left in your current life chapter before you’re looking back to where you are now thinking “wow, that was just yesterday but it’s actually been seven years”. It’s a never ending painful circle that births many a life crisis but it’s okay, because time is time, and life is life, and we all end up finding a way to somehow cope with it.
For a month with very little reading content done, this ended up being a pretty lengthy wrap up. Comment down below something that happened in the month of November that left you thinking in a deep philosophical way. Did you watch anything cool? Reading anything wonderful?
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