Author / Nerdy Spice

Posts by Nerdy Spice

http://advers.io Formerly "kht" I grew up playing Disney-movie-based games with my baby sister. I majored in English in college, got a graduate degree in creative writing, and then found myself earning a living as a software engineer. I'm working on my second novel and querying agents for my first. I eats home-cooked meals only when my husband Keets makes them for me, and he is still trying to teach me how to turn on the oven. Interests: Victorian novels, modern MFA novels and I'm not ashamed of it, super-long novels that aren’t by David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Claire Messud, Henry James, feminism, movies with Robert Downey Jr. in them, TV shows with Connie Britton in them, Pacey Witter, 90s teenybopper movies with training montages, The Good Wife, Homeland, Tina Fey’s entire oeuvre, Mindy Kaling’s entire oeuvre, shows from the WB/CW circa 2004, and JJ Abrams.
by Nerdy Spice

March 2023 Book Rec: Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin

“I don’t know how other people endure the violence and cruelty they encounter throughout their lives,” remarks the narrator of Notes of a Crocodile (by Qiu Miaojin, translated by Bonnie Huie), a young college student named Lazi. She is mourning the end of a relationship with her troubled ex-girlfriend, Shui Ling—only she, Lazi, is the one who ended it. In part this book is about that very question–how its characters (young gay women and men living in Taiwan in the 1980s) hurt each other, acting out their own traumas on each other, and sometimes becoming cruel out of pain and confusion.

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by Nerdy Spice

May 2022 Book Rec: Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett

In the middle of reading Checkout 19, Claire-Louise Bennett’s coming-of-age novel about a girl who really really loves to read, I rhapsodized to Keets that this book had put into words something that had always been true of my reading experience but that I had never noticed, let alone described. 

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by Nerdy Spice

March Book Rec: Oldladyvoice by Elisa Victoria

Janes turned me on to a particular strain of literary fiction of which Ottessa Moshfegh would be considered the standard-bearer: fiction about antiheroines who, rather than rebelling against social norms in a proto-feminist way (as in Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies or even Gone Girl), are simply petty and vain and shallow, while also being darkly hilarious. Elisa Victoria’s novel oldladyvoice answers the question you never thought to ask: “What if Ottessa Moshfegh wrote a book about a nine-year-old?”

Answer: it would be amazing.

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by Nerdy Spice

Netflix/Hulu Holiday Rom-Com Roundup: An Exhaustive Ranked List (of the Ones I Happen to Have Watched)

It is probably not surprising to readers of this blog, given that I have spent a large portion of my adult life writing about Dawson’s Creek twenty years after it ended, but I also really, really love holiday romantic comedies—despite the fact that the vast majority of them end up as disappointments. The pinnacle of the genre (which is While You Were Sleeping, and yes I will fight you on this) is so good that I’ve been left forever chasing the dragon, looking for other movies that are perfect to curl up on the couch with in December with a box of chocolates or an obliging husband, even though it often ends up with me watching some garbled mess of offensive stereotypes, barely-funny “jokes” and (worst of all) no chemistry between the leads.

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