It’s a strange Thanksgiving for me this year. I don’t normally put a lot of thought into deeper meaning behind the holiday (I like to simplify it down to food + loved ones = good), but it is an odd time for me to think about gratitude. There are obviously many things in my life to be grateful for, but at the moment I’m still stuck on the fact that a thing I want very much is gone. This is very unfair! And yet, I am given to understand that life itself is unfair a lot of the time, and I think it’s probably unfair that no one else got to have my cat because he was mine.

Ugh, I think that’s the closest I can come to expressing gratitude. I am glad he was mine. There. OK, here’s an Oskar memory for this week’s newsletter.

With the greatest of ease

Several apartments ago, when Oskar and I were both younger and more spry, I got an enormous, sturdy clothes drying rack at IKEA. I actually still have it, but it’s a bit more irregularly shaped now because Oskar used to climb all over it. Most clothing racks, no matter how sturdy, are not intended to have a 13 pound cat clambering on them, in addition to a collection of heavy, wet clothes. But he was curious, and he liked climbing, and it was funny, so I didn’t stop him? Usually he would just climb up and then sit across a couple of bars for a bit, even though I cannot imagine that sitting on thin metal rods covered in wet clothes was comfortable. However, on this specific occasion, my roommate had also set up his clothes drying rack. For reasons unclear, his drying rack had been purchased at the Store for Rickety Garbage, and if you breathed on it, it would collapse (I actually think he still has his, too, so it can’t be that rickety). These had been set up next to each other, probably because that was the sunniest room with the most space, and also because we were two humans who did not think there was any reason not to do this.

Enter Captain Acrobat. He climbed up my drying rack, like he always did, but as a consummate innovator, a disrupter if you will, he was immediately seized with the inspiration that he should climb from one drying rack to the other. Unfortunately, the drying rack from the Store for Rickety Garbage was even less designed for One Adult Cat Weight than the IKEA one, and also, you cannot safely distribute your weight across the flimsy edges of things. So he climbed to the edge of my drying rack and put his front paws on the other drying rack, which began slowly collapsing beneath him, but then couldn’t back up onto the first drying rack since he was off balance, and both racks, with half a cat’s weight pressing down on their outer edges, began to collapse inward, away from him. As I watched, he slowly stretched out to his full, long length as the two drying racks moved further and further down and away from him, until the whole thing collapsed underneath him and he fell off and ran away. As a visual aid, here is the IKEA drying rack, and you should picture him climbing out to the very edge of one of the wings.

I can’t remember if it was because of this incident, but at some point my roommate and I started referring to these sorts of choices as Good Idea Cat. Oskar was pretty smart for a cat (the better to plan his carb-based food heists), but he did a lot of Good Idea Cat over the years.

What I’ve Been Reading in Print

Let’s just say I spent a lot of the last couple of months reading and some of it was bad and some of it was good, but here are a few I really enjoyed if you’re looking for something extra to read while you travel this week.

Infamous, by Lex Croucher, is a Regency-era romance about an aspiring writer who gets very caught up in her friendship with a famous and dissolute poet. She can’t surrender the fantasy that he’s brilliant, even as he proves himself less and less worthy of her esteem, and she can’t help pursuing him even as she remains very oblivious about her best friend being in love with her.

The Magician’s Daughter, by H.G. Parry, is about a young woman raised by a magician and his best friend who is sometimes a man and sometimes a rabbit. They all live together on a beautiful, isolated, and occasionally dangerous island, but once she’s a teenager, the outside world starts to infringe, and she starts to question the narrative the magician has told her about her life. In some ways this is a familiar story (young person discovering the truth about magic and their family is a whole genre), but I found it took some unexpected turns along the way, and I appreciated that the magician is pretty flawed but also sympathetic.

Do you like the noble octopus? Then perhaps you might enjoy Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt, about a woman who cleans her local aquarium at night and befriends the octopus living there, who also narrates his own chapters and is very funny. This is one of those stories about lonely people finding each other and it’s a pretty cozy read, which sometimes can be a little too sugary for me but was not in this case.

Probably my favorite book I read this year was Ink Blood Sister Scribe, by Emma Törzs. It’s about two sisters whose father dies under mysterious circumstances. Joanna lives in the family home looking after his collection of rare magic books, but Esther has left the home several years earlier for reasons she has not explained to Joanna. When the book begins, neither of them fully understands what their father was doing, but his death sets in motion a series of changes in both of their lives. It’s funny, the sisters both have good romances, and I always enjoy a book about two sisters learning how important they are to each other.

The premise of this book was so dynamite I picked it up the moment I heard about it, and it didn’t disappoint. Big Swiss, by Jen Beagin, is about a woman in her forties named Greta living in Hudson, New York, and working a part time job transcribing the sessions of a local sex therapist. She then falls in love with a woman in her twenties whose sessions she transcribes, who she starts calling Big Swiss (the woman is tall and Swiss, it’s not that deep). This was probably the funniest book I read all year—Greta is kind of an unimpressive fuckup and yet somehow she’s got game, and wins over Big Swiss even though she lives in a house that seems like it should be condemned and she has no real career. Truly an inspiration.

I am pretty burned out on retellings of Pride & Prejudice, but I got a kick out of The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, by Melinda Taub. It’s all pretty much right there in the title: You see the classic story through Lydia’s eyes, but in this version, she’s a witch. I thought this one did an unusually good job of coming up with versions of these people that felt true to the original novel. Lydia is still immature and loves to flirt, but you can see how these qualities are perhaps not so terrible considering 1) she’s 15 and 2) the original story is told through the eyes of her judgmental older sister. She’s recognizably her, but also given more depth. And Wickham is a literal demon. Fun!

What I’m Reading Online

This might be the most millennial article I’ve shared in this newsletter so far, but The O.C. was a real cultural moment in the early 2000s, and this oral history of the show killing off one of the main characters is interesting both as a time capsule of that moment, and as an exploration of the messy, flawed, regrettable thinking that can go into a decision like that, which is ultimately both a character choice and a very public firing of the actress.

Like a lot of people, I was very sad to see the website Jezebel shut down. I found this explanation of the site’s ad troubles to be very illuminating. The site still had good traffic, but advertisers have become incredibly anxious about their ads appearing next to what they consider controversial topics, and a site like Jezebel, which wrote about sex and feminism and abortion, proved to be a tough sell, even as they could prove that readers were spending a lot of time on the site.

Natalie Portman has a new movie coming out in which she plays an actress researching a role (May December), and this piece dives into her history of playing performers, and what we can take from that, considering that she’s been in the public eye so long.

What a heroic effort to write a newsletter even though I’m very depressed right now! Perhaps they’ll put up a plaque for me somewhere. I hope that whatever you’re doing on Thursday, you have the day off, you eat more than is probably wise, and you wear your soft pants for at least 80% of the day.