February was another locked down month with a curfew in Quebec, and I was at home going nowhere. It snowed a lot. I saw a total of three other human beings in the whole month. The prevailing mood of this pandemic for many of us is “other people have it worse, but this sure sucks.” I read a perfectly reasonable seventeen books, and many of them were really excellent, which is always cheering.
This is the story of a young man with enough money to live on in London for a year and try to write, who entirely fails to achieve anything. It’s a comedy, though it is very sad, and you can see here the beginnings of the class consciousness which will make so much of Sharp’s later work so excellent. I enjoyed reading it, though I wouldn’t call it good, exactly. It also surprised me that it was 1932; it’s much more a book of the 1920s in feel. For Sharp completists, I suppose. Don’t start here. But I am excited to have so much new to me Sharp available as ebooks.
Julien Baker: I had to unlearn the idea of recovery being linear
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Julien Baker - Little Oblivions | Reviews
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Summary
Rating
“Gay religious trauma music” is the most accurate description I’ve ever heard of
Julien Baker. The 25-year-old American singer and multi-instrumentalist has been on a slow but steady upward trajectory since ‘
Sprained Ankle‘ dropped in 2015 and blew up on Bandcamp, with things going into hyperdrive off the back of
Turn Out The Lights‘ in 2017, one of the few records that I’ve given a perfect score to. (And was my AOTY for that particular year.) As for ‘
Little Oblivions‘, it honestly isn’t on the same level as its predecessor; it’s not the same record. But nor should it be! ‘