books – Media Shower

Reader’s Block: When a Book Becomes an Endurance Test

This post almost broke my blog.

I’ll confess, I’ve long since run out of prewritten content, so now this site just idles between updates. Looking back, I could have bought myself some time by publishing my earlier stuff at a slower rate, but I thought my blog would gain more traction if I appeared to be a frequent poster.

Algorithms are fickle things, though—so fickle, in fact, that I actually got more traffic after months of inactivity than I did during some periods when I was trying to steer people here. My dive into Curly Howard’s proto-moonwalk appears to be the most favored by search engines (probably because it doesn’t contain swearing, trash talk about AI, or summaries of movie scenes involving graphic human dismemberment).

But I digress. It’s time to discuss the biography of Louis Wain that took 7 years for the author to research, and what felt like 7 years for me to read.

I love cats and I love art. I should have loved Catland.

Why, then, did I struggle so monumentally just to finish it?

Heritage Month Double Feature

Every single sliver of the Gregorian calendar, it seems, has some sort of theme. I’ll open a social media app, and 17 accounts I don’t even follow will clog my homepage with posts about, like, National Pizza Day, or International Sock Day, or Milky Way Galaxy Pizza Sock Day.

While I mostly ignore novelty holidays, I appreciate the month-long observances that honor the contributions of the many cultures comprising the modern United States. Even if acknowledgments in the media are largely performative, I usually end up learning something new.

Death of the Living Author

Look, sometimes I need to reassure myself that majoring in English wasn’t a total waste.

“Death of the Author” is the literary criticism theory that writers ultimately lose control of their work, and a reader’s interpretation is valid no matter how far it deviates from the author’s intentions. Apart from helping generations of students bullshit their way through book reports, this school of thought opens the floodgates for fans to share their wildest hypotheses and desired shippings, often in the form of fanfiction.

Your favorite characters didn’t get together? No worries—you can just expand the story so they fall in love and live happily ever after, even if it means making their canonical partners cartoonishly evil. It’s not like their creator can stop you, especially if said creator is deceased in both a literal and figurative sense.

Of course, many authors’ corporeal forms continue to operate, and they frequently make their own statements on what is, isn’t, and can be canon. Certain online platforms have given fandoms unprecedented access to these writers, and their ensuing dialogues can have universe-altering implications. Consequently, I believe the social media age has ushered in a new lit crit variant: Death of the Living Author.

Why I Started Writing Jewxicans

They say—whoever “they” are—to write what you know. This poses a challenge in genre fiction, since most of us don’t have personal experience time-traveling, riding dragons, or navigating a romance with a 3,000-year age gap. Still, creators of all stripes incorporate aspects of their lives into their stories.

As a half-Jewish, half-Mexican woman, I encounter the world in a particular way. It’s not always a smooth ride, but my mixed background is instrumental to my cultural awareness, open-mindedness, and sense of humor. During my childhood, though, I was a lot less conscious of my identity, and I tended to default to implicitly WASPish characters in my works of fiction.