The Ministry of Time
A recap of April, books about time travel and brain dumping
April was a huge improvement on March. For one, I now have a real bookshelf and not a single book on the floor. Though admittedly I do still have a couple stacks around the apartment… but they’re all for specific purposes!
short story collections on my nightstand (maybe if i can’t sleep, i will pick one up! am i good sleeper? yes, but insomnia can come for any of us)
“currently reading” pile on the coffee table (where else am i supposed to put the several books i am between rn??)
books i started reading, didn’t finish but hope to come back to sometime in the near future on my tv stand (one day, god willing, they will find a home on the shelf)
These are my solutions to very me problems.
In addition to it being a great bookish month, it was also a great month at the movies! After the sludge of post-awards season releases, I really made use of my AMC A-list membership and saw some bangers.
Some movies I loved watching in theaters:
black bag (round 2 at the movies with this romp! married spies can’t trust each other, or can they?? featuring tense dinner parties, cate blanchett in amazing boots and pierce brosnan twitching one eye — now streaming on peacock)
drop (you already know this one, what a blast!)
pride & prejudice (2005) (as a person who watched this every night for a week when i got it on dvd, it was absolutely unreal to see this in a theater. my god, the way the girlies turned up for this. the way we all FELT that handflex and cried at how beautiful and moving the whole thing is — that’s CINEMA!)
sinners (TWO michael b. jordans and vampires vamping plus a sequence that really had me like…. you’re allowed to just do that?? see it on the big screen!)
star wars: episode iii - revenge of the sith (a really stellar month for re-releases!! in the month leading up to the original release of this movie, my friends, my brother and i talked about it almost nonstop. just like incessantly speculating about wtf was gonna go down to set us up for where a new hope picks up, and what a ride it was! and still is! at the time of release, this was my favorite of the prequels. as an adult i’m like…. it’s so DARK! it’s BLEAK! there is no real hope in this! like, yeah, the twins are born but a fascist is controlling the empire and a selfish brat brokedown to help him do it L O L! anyway, clone wars is my favorite. i love camp.)
the accountant 2 (listen, he goes line dancing!!!! it’s so much fun and also maybe i almost cried – better than the original!)
May Gray is here now, which is sweater weather in LA (and also when seasonal depression comes for me bc it’s cloudy all day, every day — normally, it burns off in the afternoon but has NOT been doing that and it hurts). Sometimes I love it, currently I hate it. But I've started this month by having some great dinner dates with my closest friends and if this is the vibe for the rest of the month, we're good.
Some Things—
the hamnet adaptation starring paul mescal and jessie buckley is coming out in november and idk how to feel about it bc this book is…. everything?? this can be said of every single literary adaptation but i truly do NOT know how they’re going to translate THAT to the big screen. am i seated for it? absolutely
the mission: impossible franchise is so important, like tom throws himself out of planes for us, that’s special
i’m now on the season of rhoslc where jen shah is being indicted for her crimes and it is SO WILD that this goes down ON TELEVISION!!!! this is really what reality tv is all about
i accidentally went out for pasta two nights in a row and on both occasions, my friends let me talk them into having the wine that i wanted
one of the best parts of the la times book fest, was spotting totes from bookstores i’ve gone to (daunt books, london; hodges figgis, the oldest bookstore in ireland!)
i’m only four weeks away from my libby hold being up on emily henry’s latest book — stay tuned
What I’m Reading
April was a banner reading month for me, by which I mean, I was back on my delightful BS with five reads—
Honestly, So We Read On was such a great reading experience for me, it's gotta be my number one this month. Nonfiction as my number one? Who would have thought!
I’ve been struggling to get to the gym lately (bc of the may gray!!!) but luckily my Libby hold on a romance novel about two former high school classmates who end up in the same MFA program just came up so I now have something to read on the treadmill.
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley - In the near future, the British government has discovered time travel. As a test, it brings several people from various time periods who would have died in war, by disease or circumstance into the present to study the mental and physical effects of time travel. The unnamed protagonist of the novel is a government employee who is recruited to work as a cultural “bridge” for a historical expat from 1847 — Commander Graham Gore, who would have died in a doomed Arctic expedition. The book is mostly told from the unnamed protagonist’s point of view with occasional dispatches from Commander Gore’s final days before being taken out of his time.
WHEW! It’s a lot to set up, but it really just drops you in the middle of things. The protagonist gets the job and off she goes – moving in with Commander Gore, teaching him how to live in this century and reporting on his behavior. It’s a book structured around time travel (and also climate change!!! a very real future in that respect…) but it’s mostly a character study, and oh my god, I loved it so much. I read this book feeling so jealous about the way it was written.
Like sometimes I had to pause after a metaphor to just be like damn, she did that—
I had a feeling like I’d always assumed I was a real girl but someone had flicked me in the eye and it had produced no pain, only a glassy click: I was just a doll, with no more inner intelligence than a bottle of water.
I know exactly what this feeling is, and it was so astounding to see it written down and explained in this way, and also “no more inner intelligence than a bottle of water” is so funny!
I liked it so much that I couldn’t even stop to write passages down like I normally do, because I wanted to write down too much! I just flipped through the book to a random page and landed on this—
I took the slow train back to my family’s house. The vague grays of the long London suburbs gave out onto tamed greenery and dual carriageways, to squat interminable supermarkets at the station edges and the bridges to towns without grandeur. The landscape abbreviated. Then I was home and the feeling of home closed in on me.
The way I can FEEL this language!
I saw a lot of Goodreads reviews that gave it 2 to 3 stars and to those people I say, listen, it’s not always about the plot! Sometimes it’s just about feeling your way through the journey and living with what it’s like to be a person. At least, that’s what reading is about for me.
What I’m Writing
For the first time in a minute, I re-read the first ten pages of Novel 2 before sending them out with another query letter, and I sat there at the end thinking, you know what? These pages are good. Or maybe they’re not, but I love them, and the agents out there not responding to those pages don’t really deserve to sample the rest! You know what I mean?
That’s actually literally what the querying process is all about. If an agent doesn’t feel the opening pages, they know they’re probably not going to vibe with the rest of the novel. My pages only get better as the novel goes on, but if you don’t like the way I’m setting up the story, you’re probably not going to enjoy the journey.
And like I said, the journey isn’t for everyone (there is also a plot tho, things happen!)
I’ve been stuck with Novel 3. I’ve had ideas of scenes to write but no desire or urgency to write them — until I pulled out an as-then unused notebook and brain dumped about why I wasn’t writing. And then of course, I was able to write a new scene.
Sometimes you really just have to drain the mental pipes.
Scenes I’m Working on—
character A falls ill (in a situation some friends will recognize, i maybe too graphically described what it feels like to be having an allergic reaction and needing to puke) and her new resort friend takes care of her (with room for sparks to fly bc perhaps he is also a love interest)
a stream of consciousness introduction to character B and her questionable choices which include the unsuitable person she’s currently sleeping with
Something is happening in writing these characters — one is coming out in first person POV and the other is coming out in third. I’m wondering if I’m writing two different novels or if I will find a way to bridge their gaps on the page…
That’s all from me this week — stay tuned!
I looooved the Ministry of Time! And I so enjoy reading all your updates about your writing process!