January - Diving into a new book, or whatever
Lupita Aquino, Mouth, 11/22/63, the Lathe of Heaven
DISTRACTIONS
-I got a mammogram because my doctor felt a “hormonal cyst” in my right breast. I think people avoid getting mammograms because of the bureocracy but also how mideival it still is. For some reason I thought you put your boob into a little crevice that fiercely massages you until they find a lump but actually they put your tit in between two plates that slowly mash your tit until it’s 2 dimensional. They do this at multiple angles. I winced and cried at certain moments, feeling like I was about to get slaughtered and served at a farm to table restaurant. Afterward, I waited in a blue gown with two older women in a small room until we were called to get our ultrasound. It felt very short-film-coded: the blueness of the gowns, the florescent lights, the Mariah Carey Christmas song that wasn’t the most famous one playing from the radiologist’s computer; the vulnerability of being essentially topless with two middle aged women on their phones. But I think it felt like a short film because I was doing a mundane, routine thing that could have scary life consequences, like dying. Waiting, I was like, should I read? I should read! But I was too worried about telling my family that I was going to die that I couldn’t. Instead I scrolled and saw more devastating updates from Gaza. The radiologist lathered gel all over my boobs and moved the remote around roughly. “Do you see anything?” I asked, trying to read her narrowed brow. “No,” she said, “You just have really dense breasts.” A few days later they sent me a letter saying everything was benign and that I did, in fact, have dense breasts. My tits are just fat.
-I attended a little library opening for my friend Ryan at Pratt. Claudia read a beautiful excerpt from an essay about him. Friends read gorgeous poems. His aunt read one of his poems. I cried into a new yellow scarf and put his copy of my book Candelaria into the free library. I felt self conscious, like I was just doing free advertising for my book, so I kept saying it was his copy. You don’t expect a library to feel like a grave, or a book to feel like flowers. You don’t know how many times you’re going to say good-bye, or when it will actually start feeling real.
-I combatted my fear of flying with extensive playlists and sorting through and deleting my photos. Truly a beautiful time suck, should you wish it to pass by as quickly as possible. Han says my new fear of flying is an evolutionary response; Puloma says “If you think about it, you’re not even up that high.” Compared to what, Puloma. Compared to what.
-I had readings in LA and SF, rescheduled from last fall. In Los Angeles I had a magical day of meeting with my friend Ben at an extremely bougie cafe (the bougier the cafe, the sharper the angles), hanging with Jamie and her sweet cats in her apartment, crying alone on her couch because I was sad about Ryan again, getting ready in what I am going to say is the best outfit I’ve ever worn, meeting Olivia for prosecco at a french cafe where it felt like we couldn’t stop talking, then arriving at Skylight books to a standing room only crowd. Your girl was spoiled! I’m forever grateful to be in rooms with people who have read my work. It’s truly the luckiest thing. Thank you!
-In Ojai, Olivia and I picked oranges and avocados, something people just do in California, and I kept talking really loudly outside because I’m afraid of bears. “DAMN!” I said, leaving her house, “IT IS VERY BEAUTIFUL OUT HERE. LA-LA-LA!” Her dog barked at me.
-We decided to relaunch Say More because we realized that people listened to it and that we were actually making (some) money off of it and we missed saying our messy ideas out loud. We’re older now and wiser (too tired to be toxic) and we’re ready for some new episodes. Look out for one this February and subscribe to our patreon, which was brand new tiers!
-Her boyfriend’s cat, Soup, brought me a dead rat and a live mouse, as every handsome man should.
-In San Fransisco I stayed in Will’s beautiful apartment and wrote and re-wrote a story. I got distracted by how gorgeous SF is and went for a walk to Dog-Eared books, where I bought a Monica Ojeda book and some postcards. I stopped by a local French bakery and spent too much money on a chocolate chip cookie and wrote post cards to my loved ones. On my way back to his apartment I felt a distinct sadness that that people write about in their diary at a certain age, when you realize that you’ll never live in the places that you visit, and that each time you return to those places, the people inside of them and you are a little different.
-Will’s cat, Sage, scratched me for reasons unknown and drew blood. Still, she and every cat, is a miracle.
-In LA I attended a vigil with Jamie for martyred Gaza journalists at Echo Park Lake. Organizers rented out three swan boats and held up signs that said LET GAZA LIVE. My phone died. We held candles and watched them melt.
DISTRACTIONS AS LUPITA AQUINO
Lupita Aquino -- better known as @Lupita.Reads on Instagram and TikTok, passionately spreads her love for books online. Her vibrant platforms overflow with book recommendations and discussions, resonating with readers globally. She has also contributed her insightful book coverage to outlets such as like Today.com, Aster(ix) Literary Journal, She Reads, the Washington Independent Review of Books and many more. When she’s not reading or writing you can catch her visiting local bookstores and libraries with her son and wife.
What was reading like for you as a kid?
I loved reading as a kid but it started more so with an interest in looking through National Geographic magazines that my Mom used to bring me from her white patronas houses that she cleaned for. I remember really being into the images and for a while I thought I wanted to be Nat Geo photographer (I think I still do secretly), but later I discovered stories that went along with the images and I fell in love. I’d read them front to back. Later, thanks to the library, school friends and the book fair, I moved on to the Scary Stories in the Dark series which then led me to the Goosebumps series to later the true crime series that involved babysitters dating serial killers. I was reading all sorts of twisted stuff. Oh, I can’t forget about another series favorite The Animorphs! None of it was what I can say life changing but reading all that stuff early on really got me hooked on reading in general. The art of feeling the gruesome and horror not by watching something but by reading it- that was really impactful and showed me early on the power of reading. I mean true crime storytelling can be so suspenseful.
As a bookfluencer, you are always sharing new books. How the hell do you find the time to read?
This year I’ve taken to telling people that I haven’t read as many books as I normally do and it sort of shocks folks because how can you be a “book influencer” if you aren’t reading books! Well, because I’m not reading as much, I’m definitely not posting as much. The good thing I realized early on about my book accounts was that I wasn’t going to fake the funk. I wasn’t going to post stacks of books that I’ve received for free just to populate an account. That said, it’s been hard to deal with the fact that lately, I just havent had the energy. I’ve been pulled into really cool projects to help promote books I’ve read in the past and thats taken up a lot of time. I don’t mind because I love a chance to amplify a book I love and thats the whole point of “influencing.” I love it when multiple people messages me or tag me in things and tell me they picked up a book (and usually loved it) because of me. When I was reading more in the past though, the way I would find time would be to have set times to read. My set time to read would be when my wife is trying to get our kid down to sleep. On a good day, it could take them an hour and thats an hour I have fully dedicated to reading. But now, he is more inclined to have me set him down to bed and my wife enjoys that much more too, so that small window of reading time is what I have (which is actually a lot of time if you think about it, I mean a person that reads at an average pace can cover 50 pages of a book in an hour! Don’t quote on that, I just know that based on the nerdy fact that I timed myself once. So I’m assuming I’m average lmao). I also used to read all the time on the weekends too. I’d grab a book and take it anywhere we’d go. Grocery story run? Sure! I can read while I’m waiting in line to check out. I would also read while my wife drove us around to whatever destination. The point is that I was reading any second or moment I got. Come to think of it, it was kind of exhausting but I did feel the most productive when I was reading like that.
How has this role changed your relationship to reading, for better or for worse?
I think I might have touched on this above a little but I think it’s deeply impacted my relationship to reading. I definitely find myself reading more for an audience than for myself. I can feel myself comsuming a book and thinking about what angle I could talk about it/post it from. It’s not that I feel like I need to be making content all the time but there is a level of guilt I feel when I’m not creating content around what I’m reading. Theres also the fact that I read a lot of what is new and rarely any backlist. So that sort of have eliminated my ability to just pick up a random book I see. Instead I had a stack of books I keep that I’ve been sent from publishers, which I go pick my next read from. This year though, I tried to give myself breaks to read random stuff not in a stack of books I should be reading. For example, my wife made me read the rest of Angie Cruz’s backlist and while I was a Cruz fan before, diving through the rest of her backlist really made me appreciate the legacy an author of her caliber is leaving behind. I mean she’s making a universe in which all her characters exist together. It’s really mind blowing to be honest. I also said “fuck it” and read The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith which was adapted into a movie called Carol. I can’t say I was a fan of the movie before, though I did enjoyed it, but I was more so interested in reading old queer literature. I read the book and without realizing it, I took readers who follow my IG stories on an emotional journey with me. I was reacting to what the characters were doing and saying, I was OBSESSED AND to date, its my favorite experience reading a book this year. It reminded me that sometimes the “content” just comes organically and thats the best type of “content.”
When does reading suck for you?
Uff. Honestly, if I’m being honest honest, when I feel like I’m doing it for “work”. That hasn’t happened too often this year because the projects I have taken on are books that I really loved and could talk about/making content about for days. But there were moments this year when I realized I was reading a book because everyone else was reading it or because I felt expected to say something on it. Thats when reading felt like it sucked the most.
How do we keep people excited about reading? In other words, how do we make it sexy?
OOO I don’t know that I make it sexy as much as people tell me they are really drawn to my excitement around books and reading. I think the only way I keep people excited about reading is if I remain excited. Which I why I feel very protective of my time and energy. I get asked a lot to do free work around books AKA to make content because I received a free copy of a book — that always squashes my excitement because it makes me feel like a platform rather than a reader. Though I do enjoy getting compensated —and theres the whole conversation around not all hobbiess needing to be a hustle or requiring compensation — I see the paid projects I do take on as a gift for the excitement I’ve already had around the book I’m promoting. If thats not real, I don’t take the project on. All that to say, I’d rather not be asked to make content in exchange for a free book. Just sent it and if it happens, it happens! Leave me to discover it on my own <3 But also, if theres a budget for a book (emoji eyes), send the title name and summary plus a copy and I’ll see if I might be interested lol
You're a parent of a child who will live in the future and you're also on TikTok, a social media form of the future. From your perspective, what is the future of reading?
What a banger question tbh. I want to remain hopeful for the future of reading. For a while when I first joined TikTok I felt really deflated by what things typically went viral on there. My goddaughter who was on TikTok well before I was on there but who also grew up loving books once text me if I could buy her a series of Colleen Hoover books. Receiving that text was devastating. I was prepared to write her paragraphs back about how she shouldn’t be reading that and instead dropping off some YA BIPOC books she might like. But then I realized that any reading is good reading? I mean, it’s taken me a while to get to where I am in what I am reading. It’s been a journey but I see that I read what I needed at that time. When I was a kid, I needed a gripping story, something that interested me. But now, as a parent, I gravitate to try and understand how we all connect. How hard it is to live this life with everything we’ve experienced. How are we still good to each other despite that all? I don’t think teen me was interested in that, let alone emotionally ready for all that. So I want to remain hopeful that everyone will experience some sort of journey with their reading and it will change based on what they need. I don’t get a lot of views on TikTok pushing BIPOC and queer books but I get some and I’m hopeful those some might inspire a matrix of future readers ready and yearning for the books I’m talking about. I’m also hopeful I’ll try to remain patient with my little and his personal reading journey. The biggest thing for me is I don’t want to police his reading.I want to occasionally guide it and share books with him but mainly meet him where he is. So if TikTok guides him to Colleen Hoover some day (oh dear universe please don’t let this happen), I guess we’ll both reading her for the first time.
What I Actually Read:
This book is 830 pages. Why? I still don’t know. Stephen King gets to do whatever he wants and I think his fans like the challenge of chugging through long-as-hell books that don’t need to be that long. 11/22/63 (I don’t think a book title should ever just be numbers, personally) is about a high school English teacher whose friend Al has found a wormhole (they call it a rabbit hole) in the pantry of his restaurant. The wormhole goes into 1958, where Al buys burger meat for extremely cheap and then sells it at a discounted price in 2011. This is a hilarious premise for time travel: your friend goes back in time just to buy discounted beef. Each time you go through the wormhole, whatever you did the first time around —carving your name into a tree, saving a girl from being paralyzed in a car accident — get reset. It’s like erasing something on a white board and then starting over. So yes, people at Al’s Diner are eating the same meat over and over again. When you return, only two minutes have gone by. You can be gone for years and years, but when you return, everything is still the same. You don’t even have to worry about feeding your cat. Al becomes obsessed with stopping the JFK asassination, but gets cancer on one of his adventures in the past, so leaves it up to Jake Epping to save JFK. Jake is like “I don’t think I can do this,” then Al is like “Too bad, I’m killing myself!!” So then we follow Jake for five years while he buys time before that fateful day in Dallas. What else to do while you wait to keep the president from being murdered but put on Of Mice and Men at a local Texas high school and fall in love with a beautiful librarian? Anyway then 500 pages go by. I listened to half of this on audio, which was fun for walks and train rides. The actor who does voice work makes some really interesting (?) choices, especially when he’s playing women or anyone who isn’t Jake Epping. When Jake’s having sex with Sadie Dunhill I was so distracted by the breathy, Ms. Piggy-like audio of “I came!” that I ordered the book online. I couldn’t handle it anymore. Despite all this, I have so much respect for the King, his hamminess, and how much he loves love stories. It makes me think that he’s so good at horror because he loves love so deeply. I also have been thinking about the lessons of time travel, which are often about how you can’t change the past or there will be disastrous consequences. Often, historical tragedies cause a lot of change really quickly. The book argues that there would be no civil rights movement without JFK’s death (hhmmmm okay, Stephen King), which got me thinking about other tragedies we’ve lived through: 9/11, COVID, school shootings, Kendall Jenner & Bad Bunny dating, etc. If you could go back in time to stop it, would you? I fear of what else would happen. However, there seems to almost be a fascist argument to it. Like, don’t even try to change the world. It won’t change. It doesn’t want to. Keep your head down, etc. A time traveler can still go back, carve his name into a tree, then go back to the future, see the tree older and larger, with the engraving still there. A small change. Social change happens in reaction to global disaster, but perhaps before the global disaster happens, we can make small changes within our own communities. Think small, I guess is what I’m saying. Smaller than 830 pages.
I read this on a Kindle, which I’ve never done before, and I really feel like E-readers are such lovely tools of the future. Something about the way the screen looks and the way you can turn the page makes me feel like it really is 2024 and I’m about to go water my indoor garden. Anyway, this collection doesn’t come out until June of this year, but you’re gonna want to pre-order it now! Puloma Ghosh is one of my favorite writers and also my best friend, so I am obviously biased, but this bitch has an extremely refined, clean voice (no typos in any literal or metaphorical sense) and a very sharp sense of time that I don’t witness her possessing in real life (sorry, Pooj). Carmen Maria Machado WHO, Mariana Enriquez WHO — respectfully.
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K Leguin
After reading 800 pages of Stephen King and 500 or so pages of Bolaño I simply needed prose written by a woman. No offense to those dudes, who still rock. The Lathe of Heaven is about this man named George Orr whose dreams can alter reality. He hates that this can happen so he starts taking drugs to suppress his dreams. Instead of going to prison for taking drugs he’s commanded to take part in these therupeutic sessions with Dr. Haber, who starts to have nefarious intentions with Orr’s abilities, manipulating him to changing the world into what he thinks is for the better. I didn’t go into this thinking it would be a love story, but it feels like it could be a Charlie Kaufman movie, and honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if he was inspired by this while writing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Dr. Haber tries to fix the overpopulation problem, which alters reality so that there’s a plague that killed billions of people. Dr. Haber tries to find peace on earth, and then aliens land on the moon. Le Guin seems to be telling us that utilitarianism is not the answer; there is no one, vast solution that will help all. The most you can do is remember that you part of it all, find somebody who’d like to be by your side, and make the most of every day.
POEM
everyone should have amount of anxiety on planes
Because it’s weird we can do that and one day we’ll all die
Same with people because some of them can hurt you.
Getting older I check my boobs and say less about my process.
There are only so many who deserve to know what I’m thinking.
I cry at a movie from 2007 so I think that means it aged well.
I didn’t know cats were an invasive species and that makes me think they really are aliens. There’s a chip in my tooth so I think we should get married.
I think I have to hold some kind of trust in the skies
And the man eating pretzels and watching golf next to me.
I think I have to get up and see all the heads dreaming and the attendants checking their phones. and I know the jets blast open the atmosphere & make it harder for kids to grow up but im happy
there’s a way for me
to get to you so fast.
Until next time. I’d love to answer your questions about reading and writing also … email me at mlopoetry@gmail.com
xoxoxo