I'm putting Casually Obsessed on hiatus while I focus on other projects (namely: The Bi Pod and my revising my novel). I'm hoping the extra space in my schedule will also give me time for more reading and watching and listening (and, therefore, more to tell you about later).

In the meantime, I have a few quick 2021-Year-In-Review type items to share with you.

If you're looking for reading recs, or just curious about what I read last year, you can find my 2021 reading list here (This year is already off to a good start).

You can find my most-listened-to songs of 2021 here. About half the tracks on that list are in my book playlist, which means I listened to them on repeat while working on the book - it definitely skews the numbers, but I guess the fact that I've been listening to those tracks over and over for (in some cases) years now is its own kind of endorsement.

I have a rule that I don't consume content that begins with the murder of a girl. What I'm actually trying to distance myself from is shows like "True Detective", where a dead girl makes for the genesis of a story about a man (see also: fridging). I'm not interested in the meaning men make out of women's trauma; it's boring.

I am interested in how women make sense of a world that is trying to destroy them.* I love girls who are butterfly like a knife not butterfly like a nectar-eating insect. I like seeing them sharpen their hard edges and learn who they can be soft with. These characters feel not so much like a subversion of gender expectations as a natural reaction of them. In a world that wants them to be small so they can be stepped on, they become a thumbtack hidden in the carpet.

There are two whip smart, hard-edged girls that I've been thinking about a lot lately who qualified for exceptions to my rule.

The CW's "Nancy Drew" starts with a dead woman (Tiffany), a teenage ghost (Lucy), and the eponymous Nancy trying to figure out who killed both. Leigh Bardugo's "Ninth House" begins with a murdered townie (Tara), and Alex Stern, an accidental Yale student who can see ghosts. Both Nancy and Alex are told not to look into it, to leave the investigating to the professionals and not risk their comfortable lives, but neither can let it go. The search for answers turns their lives upside down and shakes something inside them loose.

When I first started telling people that I was starting Casually Obsessed, everyone wanted to know when I was going to talk about Harry Styles. I'm sure he seemed like an obvious early subject because everyone knew I loved him. And his second album had just come out, something I enthused about to anyone who would listen. So, I get why people assumed I would be using this new platform to publish all my thoughts about Harry Styles.

Except, being asked to articulate how I feel about Harry Styles is like being asked to tell you how I feel about the ocean. Do you want me to describe the characteristics of the water, or what it's like to be immersed in it? Should I give you a memory of the ocean, or how it exists in my imagination? Should I tell you about the water with the assumption that you've also felt like I've felt, or tell you about it like you've only ever seen a swimming pool?

All this to say: Harry felt like too much for me to capture and so, nearly two years in, I've yet to turn the Casually Obsessed spotlight his way.

But this week, standing in the pit at his Sacramento show — a concert I bought tickets for 723 days earlier — I realized something I wanted to write to you about: Harry’s dancing.

I love books. Reading them and writing them and collecting them. Having them in my house, perusing them in book stores, sending them as gifts to friends.

I will be honest and admit that I usually assume anyone that loves books has a relationship to them that looks like mine, which is a wild thing to assume since a relationship to books is highly personal!

As a nosey person with a newsletter I decided to right that wrong and do a bit of a survey; I ask some of the book people in my life about their own book collections and buying habits. Reading their responses was really delightful and now I'm tempted to send these questions out to everyone I know (if you're so moved, I encourage you to send me your responses).

I've been thinking about the role of the group chat ever since Bad Art Friend (I'll link out for clarity, but if you haven't been exposed to the Bad Art Friend/Kidney Person discourse I encourage you to stay pure). A good group chat can serve so many functions — logistics planning, emotional support, scathing criticism of something stupid, pop culture discourse. If this were a group chat, here are the things I would have sent over the last few weeks.

Pop Pop Pop

Guinevere isn’t Guinevere.

That’s one of the first things we learn in Kiersten White’s “The Guinevere Deception.” The novel is an Arthurian retelling through Guinevere’s eyes. Or rather, through the eyes of the wood witch posing as the princess. Magic has been driven from Camelot, Merlin banished. The sorcerer sent Not-Guinevere in his place, tasking her with marrying Arthur as cover for a secret mission.

The book, the first in a trilogy, has a lot of secrets. Secret identities, secret passageways, and plots. The perfect crucible for a heroine whose deepest desire is to be to be seen and recognized for all that she is. Though sometimes even she’s not sure she is. She's given up everything for this and the deeper she gets into Camelot, into Arthur’s confidence and Guinevere’s life, the less sure she feels.

For the last few months, my tolerance for unfamiliar content has been fairly low. I've been more excited for sequels than new titles; for several weeks the only thing I could even get myself to read was fan fiction; I put off recommendations from friends for shows I genuinely do want to watch. I just didn't have the capacity for parsing through new things.

The fog seems to be lifting now, and I'm remembering how pleasurable it can be to be surprised by something. Not just surprised — confused. I've been thinking about the particular joy of not knowing what's going on.

When I started reading "", I had no clue what was happening. It's the second book in The Locked Tomb series, the follow-up to Tamsyn Muir's "." The first book has a lot of mystery elements, which meant a lot of unknowns, but I wouldn't say that I found it confusing. The sequel, on the other hand, had me disoriented from the very first page.

There’s a particular pleasure in the referential. A well-used allusion can trigger nostalgia, add depth, provide context. A lot of work can be done by evoking other work.

"Only Murders in the Building" — the new Hulu mystery-comedy starring Martin Short, Steve Martin, and Selena Gomez — runs on invocation. It's a murder mystery, while also commenting on murder mysteries (true crime, specifically). You know how I love a good 'is the thing and is commenting on the thing.'

The premise is that the trio all live in the same building, The Arconia. Martin Short plays a washed-up theater director, Steve Martin is a one-hit-wonder actor hiding away from the world, and Selena Gomez is a secretive, hard-edged millennial drifting through her own life. They're brought together when, by chance, they learn that they all love the same true crime podcast. They're united when a murder in the building prompts them to start an investigation (and a podcast) of their own.

This week I'm thrilled to be bringing you an essay from the brain of one of my most favorite people — Christina Brown. Christina is a pop culture scholar and a breakup art expert. She's especially obsessed with one particular breakup album and I'm stoked to share some of her thoughts on it with you! Enjoy.

The first time we see Charlize Theron in the blue light of "Atomic Blonde" she's emerging from an ice bath. The bruises across her pale white skin look like the veined marble of the bathroom. One eye doesn't look quite right— like the blood vessels were recently burst. When she flips on the vanity light, we're taken from dim twilight and thrust into a clinical whiteness. The bruising on her face and throat, her split lip, the eye. It all makes her look more like one of the undead than the heroine of an action film.

It's a striking image— stark and brutal. It might also be one of the only times I've seen a woman on screen looking truly trashed as a result of something other than intimate partner violence.

It's Labor Day here in the US, so I'm celebrating other people's labor by sharing a few pieces of my favorite cultural commentary - old and new-ish.

Cause célèbre

There's this episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" called "The Body." It's one of those episodes that always gets mentioned when talking about the show because it's so well done, and so impactful. It, and many of the other commonly-mentioned-by-name episodes ("Hush"; "Once More With Feeling"; "Tabula Rasa"), stands out in part for all the ways it breaks from the regular format of the show.

In every generation a Slayer is chosen, a girl called to defend humanity against vampires and demons, gifted with incredible strength and agility. "Buffy" is a show about the supernatural. The fantasy elements are usually allegorical, standing in for some challenge of young adulthood, but it's still a show where people come back from the dead and soulless ex-boyfriends get sent to hell dimensions. It runs on the mythological. But in "The Body" Buffy and her friends have to contend with something they're not equipped for — mortality. Buffy's mother, Joyce, dies. Not from a vampire bite or a ritual sacrifice, but a brain aneurysm. Unpredictable, unstoppable, mundane.

All the show's characters struggle with the loss, but it's Buffy that really gets thrown into the unknown. Part of the conceit, and the appeal, of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is that being the slayer takes its titular character from what's usually depicted as the ultimate position of weakness (an attractive young woman - always the first to die in the horror movie) and puts her a position of power. She's nearly invulnerable and always an agent of action. But her mother's death renders Buffy intensely vulnerable to forces outside her control.

From the second she discovers her mother's body, Buffy is off balance. “Mom, mom, MOM,” she shouts— like she'll be able to wake her from her motionless, blue-lipped state. Buffy spends the episode largely directionless, her eyes wide and searching. Death has a particular finality, a kind of discontinuity, that action heroes rarely have to deal with. For action heroes, there's always someone to avenge, some big bad to chase, some shadowy organization to topple. A mission, a revenge quest, , are what masculine (and ) paragons run on. But Buffy's robbed of that drive. She can't conquer natural death, not really. She doesn't know what to do without a mission.

One of the ways I know that my interest in something has crossed into casual obsession territory is when I can’t stop thinking about some small detail. It could be a special line or a motif, could be something in the color palette, but it’s the fixation on things that maybe don’t really matter that tells me I am absolutely hooked.

With “In the Dark”, the hook was the way one character touches another. It’s probably not a surprising hook given my interest in , but it’s the kind of minutiae that I doubt other people think about continually.

Have you ever noticed that the sex on television all kind of looks the same? “Game of Thrones” or “Riverdale,” “Bridgerton” or “Grey’s Anatomy”, the shows change but the sex choreography stays the same.

Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. The shows might be in different settings, or the characters might wear period costumes, but it’s still the same moves, the same angles, same same same.

I’m a recent convert to the church of Carly Rae Jepsen.

I wish I had a good explanation for why it’s taken me this long, but I really don’t. If you’re not a member of the CRJ congregation, you might know her best as “the ‘Call Me Maybe‘ girl”. That’s the song that propelled her to notoriety in the States. I was in college at the time and, characteristically, the song was everywhere. I vividly remember a sign one of my roommates created for a party that said, “Hey I just met you / and this is crazy / but I brought vodka / so party baby.”

I knew all the words to “Call Me Maybe” but I couldn’t have told you anything about CRJ or what the rest of her music might be. The song faded and Carly was summarily assigned One Hit Wonder status. Then, three years later, she had the audacity to put out her third album - “EMOTION”. Pop enthusiasts went wild.

I recommend Carry On by Rainbow Rowell early and often.

It’s a book (a trilogy, actually) that doesn’t have any business being as good as it is. I went into it with low expectations - I was just looking for something to read and Rainbow Rowell was a big enough name in YA that I felt like I had to check out some of her work. I didn’t even bother with getting a physical copy; I downloaded it to my Kindle.

I stayed up all night and read the book in one sitting.