#finalgirlfall

I do! Here are some that I've enjoyed + a quote from the blurb, they're all highly recced and I hope you find something that speaks to you!

Calcio: A History of Italian Football (2006) by John Foot

'Calcio' tells the story of Italian football from its origins in the 1890's to the present day. It takes us through a history of great players and teams, of style, passion and success, but also of violence, cynicism, catenaccio tactics and corruption.

Loving Sports When They Don't Love You Back: Dilemmas of the Modern Fan (2020) by Jessica Luther and Kavitha Davidson

Triumphant wins, gut-wrenching losses, last-second shots, underdogs, competition, and loyalty--it's fun to be a fan. But when a football player takes a hit to the head after yet another study has warned of the dangers of CTE, or when a team whose mascot was born in an era of racism and bigotry takes the field, or when a relief pitcher accused of domestic violence saves the game, how is one to cheer? Welcome to the club for sports fans who care too much.

The History and Politics of Motor Racing: Lives in the Fast Lane(2023) by Damion Sturm, David L. Andrews, and Stephen Wagg (editors)

Written by a group of international scholars and motor racing specialists it discusses the sport's origins, the relationship of motor racing to nation building and modernity (noting its links to fascism and dictatorship), the links between motor racing and the automobile industry, motor racing and the politics both of gender and of race, motor racing, the media and postmodernity, and motor racing, the spatial and globalization.

There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (2024) by Hanif Abdurraqib

[Hanif Abdurraqib's] lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tensions between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with memoir.

Ultra: The Underworld of Italian Football (2019) by Tobias Jones

Italy's ultras are the most organised and violent fans in European football. Many groups have evolved into criminal gangs, involved in ticket-touting, drug-dealing and murder. A cross between the Hells Angels and hooligans, they're often the foot-soldiers of the Mafia and have been instrumental in the rise of the far-right. But the purist ultras say that they are are insurgents fighting against a police state and modern football. Only amongst the ultras, they say, can you find belonging, community and a sacred concept of sport.

yes! iirc i sent you the ms so you can look, but the premise is something like.

it's 2014. Mumu, an anorexic dyke in #hermidtwenties, is failing at everything, including her ghostwriting job, and also basically about to lose her shit bc of her horrible weekly group therapy that meets in the library. she has this parasocial nemesis who got very famous writing bullshit toxic positivity ed recovery books + has a huge social media presence, who she learns in group is going on book tour - and visiting the library where they meet. this drives mumu to nuke her very fragile relationship w/ food again, stop going to group, and seek out increasingly self-destructive technologies of self-understanding, not the least of which include writing a semidelusional, intertextual "countermemoir" objecting to the subordination of her knowledge/experiences under both carceral psychiatry and within the recovery industry. she undergoes batshit insane amounts of trauma and, as the reader goes on, we gain a better understanding of how the fuck she got here - including an ill-fated relationship with her now-ex who also attends Group, and a now-budding crush on a different groupmate.

then, we have Florie, Mumu's de facto QPP and longtime roommate/friend. Florie's basically on the knife's edge between embracing a nascent but vapid "body positivity" logic popular at the time, and trying to understand & contextualize themself within a reality of constant medical and interpersonal anti-fatness. they're seeking top surgery, immanently, and with Mumu's help researching surgeons who may actually be fat-friendly - with little success. Florie's also caught up between her love for mumu and her disdain for that they view as Mumu's messiness, immaturity, and lack of self-preservation, resenting both having fallen into the role of 'mom friend' and, in so doing, having been compelled to act carcerally with few other options at multiple times in their friendship. florie's a happy slut, albeit one who is acutely aware of what it means to more through sexual situations with a body that doesn't comply with social convention, as well as one that was roundly rejected by their ex-parental figures at a young age.

all of this ultimately culminates in alexa's actual visit, but reaches several other acute crisis points throughout the text. i view Inside Story as quite a recursive narrative and also somewhat like an onion. we move from point of tension to point of tension, and with each progression, delve one layer deeper into the actual material circumstances and affective commitments undergirding the story, the characters, the metanarrative. we also get more intertextual interventions as the book goes on - eileen myles, michelle tea, italo calvino. the book is a novel of characters but also a critique of Story as hegemonically understood w/in psychiatry and within "recovery" AND literary discourse, and mumu's countermemoir is in many ways the picture within the frame of a counter-fictional text.

to understand little women’s wovens incest subtext one must understand the reason why jo march is so angry. is it because of her role as a woman? certainly. because of her longing to have a male body to move around the world as she pleases? surely. but above all, jo is angry because she is aware of the inherent tragedy that moves her own story: which is how the profound familial bond between girls is being ultimately disrupted by a variety of mostly forgettable men. jo alone understands what brian connolly calls the “erotic excess” (domestic intimacies: incest and the liberal subject in nineteenth-century america) that permeates the 19th-century american family unit as it makes a point to nurture the love only within the home circle.

as jo puts it, if they were “all boys, then there wouldn’t be any bother,” given that both homosociality and marriage rules would be on their side. but being girls come with the specific caveat that their love must be fashioned only to be exported outside the family unit to cater to the emotional enrichment of men. yet jo knows that the story in which she’s contained is truly a love story between her and her sisters, and most of all between herself and meg. in truth, louisa may alcott isn’t new to incest subtext (and even text) in her stories. under the pseudonym a. m. barnard, she has published several gothic romances whose trait d’union is indeed the incestuous nature of their romances (relatedly, there is even a play about jo confronting alcott on the presence of incest in her story, alongside with her repressed sexuality).

the crux of this subtext, as mentioned, rests on the dynamic between jo and meg. the two older sisters, the ones who inhabit the mother (meg) and father (jo) roles when marmee and mr. march aren’t available. in the novel (and in the 2019 movie version the most) jo is constantly remarking how meg gets “prettier every day” and how she is “in love with her sometimes”. these are frankly not figures of speech, if one truly lines all of them together. “i just wish i could marry meg myself,” tells jo “and keep her safe in the family,” a sentiment she clearly doesn’t express when it comes to her other sisters, signifying a difference in the way she perceives meg compared to them.

in this already layered situation, the figure of laurie adds an even deeper layer to alcott’s masterful deception. when laurie declares his love to jo and she rejects it because he is “a brother” to her, the most superficial reading could be that to her brotherly love is sexless, yet in the context of alcott’s other novels where incest is more overt, it could be argued that it is only a reinforcement on how erotic love should exist within the bounds of the family, not outside.

(Linked post was about Pride and Prejudice's intertextuality with Clarissa)

The terms of the conversation in which Pride and Prejudice is engaged about marriage and liking/affection/inclination, about what it means for a young woman to reject a proposal which her family wants her to accept, have been perhaps not fully set by but certainly shaped by Clarissa.

I wouldn't go so far to say that Mr. Collins' courtship of Elizabeth Bennet is Mr. Solmes' courtship of Clarissa Harlowe cast in a comedic vein, but they are most certainly related; the emphasis in both novels on Elizabeth and Clarissa's experiences of distaste/repulsion for a man who has shown himself unpleasant but not villainous is marked. The force which Clarissa's family imposes on her to try to induce her to accept Solmes' suit lies in ghostly potentiality behind the sublime comedy of Mr. Bennet's moment of unexpectedly lending his support to Elizabeth's refusal.

Austen is always concerned with specific material considerations about wealth and class as shaping her protagonists' lives; the way Pride and Prejudice is built around the particular dynamic of the entailed estate functions as an interesting reversal of the way Clarissa's inheritance from her grandfather and her family's resentment of it sets the events of the novel into motion, except that for Clarissa (and for Richardson as opposed to Austen), the relational takes precedence - Clarissa's possession of the dairy house does not, ultimately avail her in the way it might if she were an Austen heroine. (This use of the novel and specifically the marriage plot to open out very precise specificities about wealth and class will, to be my mind, be brought to its apex a few decades later by George Eliot.)

i am, though i took a pretty long break from it! :) here's a peek at my dashboard, and here's a post where i scroll through and explain the function of each section in more detail!

main sections include

daily tasks

habit tracker

overview of monthly goals and projects

overview of yearly goals

home section with chore tracker, grocery list, and plant water tracker

physio exercises

meal planning calendar + cookbook

project manager

upcoming deadlines for submissions