[Music intro]
Hi everybody, and welcome to the Little Oracles podcast, an oracle for the everyday creative. I'm Allison Arth.
[Music break]
Hey, welcome back! So today we’re doing something a little different: it’s a minisode! A lil shortie! And it’s all about books!
So I catalog everything I read over on Instagram (at) little oracles, and I thought it would be nice to bring those microreviews over to the podcast; one, because I love talking about books with all of you, and two, because Instagram is a cop, and it severely limits character counts, so I can’t really dig in very deeply when I list all the books that I read every month, and I figured we could do that over here. So I’m gonna reflect on just a few books – like I said, these are minisodes; these are little bite-sized pieces – and if any of them sound cool or interesting to you, then I invite you to check them out, and if you think I’m completely off-sides in what I think about them, then let me know!
We have a burgeoning little Discord for folks who want to talk about the ABC, or what they’re reading, or watching, or making, or listening to – any kind of creative thing that they’re doing – and if you wanna join, come on over; all you gotta do is follow (at) little oracles on Instagram, and shoot me a DM to say that you want to join the Discord, and I’ll send you a link.
So without, uh, further cartwheels and candy apples – as no one has ever said before – let’s get into this little minisode! I’m gonna share some thoughts about two books today: One’s Company by Ashley Hutson, which was the core book for January’s book club and The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón.
So, let’s start with One’s Company by Ashley Hutson – that was my first read of the year, and I’ve really been going back and forth about it in the sense that I don’t know if I liked it. I mean, I liked it; I loved the premise and what it explores on a deep level: post-traumatic response, feelings of isolation, dissociation, um, loneliness, the striving for human connection, parasocial relationships; and I also really loved the wrapping paper, too – and, just to recap, this is a book about a woman who wins the lottery and builds a replica of the world of Three’s Company, like, the ‘70s sitcom Three’s Company … or so we think. So, there’s so much unreliability in this book that I’m still left wondering what happened, plot-wise, and what was our main character’s imagination.
And, really, don’t get me wrong, here: I love a good unreliable narrator, (laughs) I think they can really open the veritable can of worms on the human condition, or the equally veritable can of whoopass on our – and by “our” I mean the reader’s – expectations of what a “novel” is or a “story” can be. So I think they’re great; they can be amazingly effective and affecting; some that come to mind are the unnamed narrator of Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh, Merricat Blackwood from We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, and, you know, Humbert Humbert from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. I do love a good storyteller that I can’t trust.
But Ashley Hutson, as the author, casts so much doubt on our main character Bonnie that I’m honestly confused; I’m– I’m wondering, you know, what’s veneer? What’s meta narrative? What’s going on, like, for real?
And my friend Sean made some incredibly astute comments about this book over on the Discord: he said “what if the only person who could ever make her feel at peace and content and loved was a fictitious one?” So, that got me thinking: maybe that’s the whole point of this novel. It’s a portrait of a person who’s so fed up with society that she’s ready to just throw it all away, like, completely, and live in a world of her own making – and, you know, shades of The Vegetarian by Han Kang, here, which I broke down back in episode 2, about those mountaintop reads for me of 2022, so if you’re interested in that, maybe go listen to that episode – but, really, like, back to One’s Company: this book remains a head-scratcher for me, and I keep thinking about it, so, for me, all signs point to a re-read, if for no other reason than that would make me more equipped to talk about it cogently with my friend Sean (laughs), or maybe one of you all someday if you wanna join the Discord and hang out.
But that’s my armchair review of One’s Company, and I would love to know, if any of you read it, I would love to know what you thought about it too, because, really, this one has got me thinking a lot.
So next up is The Hurting Kind, by Ada Limón, it’s her latest poetry collection, and, oh, heavens to Betsy, what a collection! I’ve waxed like a true stan about Ada Limón before, and I’m here to do it again – and, fyi, she’s the current poet laureate of the United States, which I think is pretty radical.
So, The Hurting Kind is split into sections, it’s delineated by the seasons, and it does concern itself lightly with the natural world – or I shouldn’t say “lightly;” it does concern itself with the natural world – and seasonal phenomena, it isn’t, you know, a catalog of seasonality in the basic sense; it’s not a Farmer’s Almanac. The observations of the natural are more like gateways to the seasons of being human, and, let me tell you, Ada Limón is an absolute sledgehammer when it comes to tying nature-nature to human nature. She brings this cosmic gravitas to the mundane, the everyday, the things you can observe from your front porch or your favorite park bench, and she threads those things together with these deep and resounding moments of emotion, and while her expressions of those emotions are abundantly clear and pictorial and precisely rendered in language, she doesn’t write poems that are concerned with clarity, necessarily. She doesn’t ever lead the reader into perfect resolution or solutions; and her poems can be, you know, messy and sad and unresolved, and, I mean– just– wow, I love everything she does, and like I said, I stan, so maybe I can’t be trusted to talk about Ada Limón anymore, but if you want to read more poetry this year, just give yourself the gift that is Ada Limón’s work. This would be a great place to start, but she has a bunch of other collections that are equally moving and meaningful, so just go seek her out. And Google her; you can find poems by her on the internet; you can find great interviews with her on the New Yorker Poetry Podcast, or interviews with other poets who talk about her – so maybe consider those, too, because, like I said, it’s possible I can’t be trusted – speaking of untrustworthy narrators, right?
And that’s it for this little baby minisode. I’ve got more big book energy minis on the make, but until then, thanks so much for listening; don’t forget to subscribe wherever you get podcasts so you don’t miss an episode, and if you’re interested in more creative content and books and good times, then head on over to the blog at little oracles dot com, and follow along on Instagram (at) little oracles. And, as always, take care, keep creating, and stay divine!
[Music outro]