February 2026 – Chrys Buckley

Resuming my weekly tour through favorite books of 2025 after a bit of a hiatus. I’d love to say the break was just because I was so busy with grad school and book stuff and that was definitely part of it, but I was also in a doomscrolling pit for weeks, because of course I was given all that’s going on.

Today we arrive at my favorite journalistic nonfiction. This category was a tie between two very different books that are both examples of excellent reporting:

Blazing Eye Sees All by Leah Sottile
Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow

cover of Blazing Eye Sees All by Leah Sottile

Both books mix a bit of first-person narrative into their reporting but keep the book focused on the main story.

Catch and Kill is about Ronan Farrow’s reporting on the Harvey Weinstein story, and it reads like a spy thriller. I never thought a book could be so equally enraging and entertaining. I couldn’t put it down because the writing was so compelling. There are personal asides and anecdotes that add just the right flavor of touching and funny, and there are terrible tales about what powerful men will do to keep their power, and that is by no means limited to Weinstein and his immediate circle.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that so deftly manages to be equally enraging and entertaining at the same time.

Blazing Eye Sees All is about the Mother God cult and also about the history of new age cults in America. It will make you sputter how? and why? and what the actual fuck now? It will make you so angry at the people that propagate cults and lies, and it will also make you feel some empathy for how and why people get sucked into this sort of thing. Leah Sottile does such a good job, in all of her work, in threading that needle.

As a bonus, I got to meet Leah Sottile at the Portland Book Festival with a classmate of mine. We went to her pop-up reading, then went to have our books signed and had a nice chat with Leah. I was internally freaking out bc I’ve long been a fan of her work in both podcasts and books, but I think I held it together enough. We talked about cults and writing and the Crime Writers On podcast and tarot cards.

Congratulations to Leah Sottile for her Oregon Book Award nomination for Blazing Eye Sees All!

a silhouette of a person with hair flying like they're head banging, with music symbols in the background, including treble clefs, bass clefs, sharp symbols, flat symbols, and music notes.

If you know (and everyone you know knows) you talk about music too much . . .

If you ever had the urge to cover a driveway or sidewalk with chalk drawings of band logos, song names, and lyrics . . .

If you credit music for getting you through your toughest times and hardest heartbreaks . . .

If you frequently have the urge to blast music while driving (or while riding in a car if you’re like me and can’t drive) and sing along at the top of your lungs . . .

If you remember your life by what albums you were listening to when and understand your life through lyrics . . .

If you were the kind of kid who answered parental questions about how the latest visit to the doctor’s office went with what songs you heard while in the waiting room . . .

If you love the 60 Songs that Explain the ’90s podcast (now 60 Songs that Explain the ’00s) or would listen to a similar podcast for your specific favorite music decade . . .

. . . then my forthcoming debut book, INVISIBLE VIOLETS: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays is a book for you. It’s a memoir in 7 essays with a few different themes running through its tracks (essays).

One of the strongest themes is disability (see this post about the disability aspect of the book), and as I write in Track 3: The Caduceus and the Muse:

Not all my writing, not even all my more personal writing, addressed albinism or disability, but I was constitutionally incapable of not writing about music.”

Music is all over this book. Obnoxiously so, even. Music was such a saving force in my life when I was young, and I hope my book evokes that particular sense of connecting with music as a teenager and how that resonates and evolves long after adolescence. How music can reach you when you’re an isolated and outcast kid in a way nothing else can reach you. How music can buoy you when you’re in your twenties and finding your way in the world. How music will always be with you, through all the ups and downs of adult life, as your tastes expand over time. I hope I’ve done a decent job of capturing something that feels beyond and before words.

Your particular favorite genres might be different from mine, and I hope that what I’ve written, while deeply specific, speaks to feelings that transcend genre. Still, you might be especially drawn to this book if you are or were a fan of ’90s rock, especially any of the many musical projects of Chris Cornell, to whose memory the book is dedicated. Almost every band that was on the Singles soundtrack is in the book. The artists and genres mentioned lean grunge and heavy and rock, and there’s also modern pop, singer-songwriter girlies across the ages, classic rock, and weirdly mentions of two very different artists doing covers of Joni Mitchell songs.

Again, though, my hope is that even when our specific tastes and faves differ, the feeling of the primacy of music that infuses this book will still resonate with you as you read.

I’m working on book playlists based on musical references and allusions in the book. One is a maximalist version that’s over the top, excessive, and 1.3 days long. The other is an abridged version that I’ve so far only been able to whittle down to 100 songs, which seems long for an abridged version but might have to stand as is. I’m also working on a word cloud of all the music in the book. So those will be incoming at some point before my book launch on March 13th!

Music as a theme is over-the-top, excessively prominent in these essays:
Track 3: The Caduceus and the Muse
Track 5: Can’t Change Me: An Unnatural History of My Names
Track 7: Distant Lights
Acknowledgments

Music as a theme is central in these essays:
Track 4: August is a Burnt Burgundy-Violet Haze
Track 6: Reasonable Doubt

Disability is present but more peripheral in these essays:
Track 1: Invisible Violet: On Seeing and Not Seeing
Track 2: Blue Alchemy

Cover image of Invisible Violets: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays by Chrys Buckley. Words are green against a textured background of different shades of purple. Near the top of the cover, there is an author blurb that reads, "A fierce manifesto about claiming your own story. This book will change you and linger long after the final page." This blurb was written by Tarn Wilson, author of In Praise of Inadequate Gifts.

~~~

For all the book details, check out the INVISIBLE VIOLETS page!

This post is part of a series, published the second Tuesday of every month, where I think about who my book is for.

~Chrys

Image Description: a silhouette of a person with hair flying like they’re head banging, with music symbols in the background, including treble clefs, bass clefs, sharp symbols, flat symbols, and music notes.