What’s Making Me Happy: January 1

Every year I do something a little different on Fridays. One year, I spotlighted authors and went through every single book they’d written. Another year I focused on book-to-film adaptations.

This year, I’m taking a page out of the Pop Culture Happy Hour Book and Gretchen Rubin’s email newsletter and doing a “What’s Making Me Happy” post each Friday. My goal is that this will keep me actively engaged in this blog–instead of doing all the movie posts at once and scheduling them in advance–and that it will give me something to reflect on at the end of the year and remember what I was reading, watching, and listening to.

This will be a pop-culture based feature–books, music, movies, television shows, podcasts. I hope you like it!

So…what’s making me happy on this, the first day of the year, January 1st, 2021?

I just started a new audiobook that I’ve been ITCHING to start–We Keep the Dead Close by Becky Cooper.

I was so eager to listen to it (I love nonfiction audio) that I re-enrolled in Audible, and here we are. I put off the book until the New Year because it’s 15 hours and I worried I wouldn’t finish it in time and throw off my book tracking, but here I am, 2 hours into the book, and totally drawn in.

When she was a junior at Harvard, Becky Cooper heard a story about a grad student murdered in the 1960s–and supposedly, forty years later, the professor who did it still taught there. This led Cooper on a ten year journey into the archaeology department, the history of Harvard’s academic culture, and into solving the crime.

I’m only 2 hours in but I’m intrigued! Anyone that knows me knows I love true crime and academic elitism, but this book is SUPER special to me because my low-key dream goal is a podcast on a a similarly unsolved murder at Yale–a student murdered, a professor supposedly did it, no conviction or arrest ever made.

Will this book inspire me to finally do something about that goal? Maybe…

It feels weird to say that a book about a murder of a woman is “making me happy” but I am enraptured by this book on this rainy first day of the year, and therefore, I’m calling myself happy to be lost in a good book as we start the new year.