Stuff We Like :: 1.10.20

If you subscribe to the newsletter, this won’t surprise you, but I’m changing up the way we do Stuff We Like posts. Henceforth, I’ll focus here on the stuff I like in my own life in these Friday posts; in the newsletter, you’ll find my links roundup. (You can subscribe to the newsletter for free — this is just a way of keeping my own brain fresh and interested in what I’m writing about.)

What I’m Reading

I picked up Best American Poetry 2000 because I wanted to read Jane Bowdan’s “This Year” with my high school lit class (and that poem is impossible to find!), but I’ve really been enjoying reading through it — maybe because 2000 was one of the last years where I was really reading new poetry all the time, and a lot of this work felt familiar. I do okay reading poetry — I have loved subscribing to Matthew Ogle’s Pome (and highly recommend it) and The Paris Review’s Poetry Rx — but this happy feeling reminds me that I need to make more room for poetry in my life. 

I was so excited to read Ruth Reichl’s Save Me the Plums, her memoir of her time as the editor of the late, lamented Gourmet magazine, and then when I finally did read it, I was SO DISAPPOINTED. Reichl is maybe my favorite memoirist — she manages to capture the sensations of being in a given place and time, and while she can be a little judge-y about people who make different decisions from the ones she makes, let’s face it, I am also a little judge-y sometimes, and it makes her seem more human to me. Garlic and Sapphires and Tender at the Bone are two of my all-time favorite memoirs, and that’s saying something because as Suzanne will tell you, I don’t even like memoirs. But Save Me the Plums felt … forced, I guess, in a way that none of her other books felt to me. Reichl has already written twice about the end of Gourmet, which was sudden and shocking for food and magazine people — I remember where I was when I heard about it, if that tells you anything. But it felt new and raw, and there was a bitterness about it that is missing in Reichl’s other books, which are always laughing with you and not at you. Maybe that’s why the book isn’t really about Gourmet — with one (admittedly great) bit about David Foster Wallace’s infamous lobster festival essay aside, the stuff she does at the actual magazine is hardly mentioned. She decorates her office (in shocking bright colors!), eats in the famous cafeteria, goes to so many parties, goes to Paris with her entire staff (!!) to work on a food issue, has endless lunches — but there’s so little about the actual magazine, which, frankly, is what I was excited to read. I’ve read a million stories about ordinary women (though calling The New York Times food critic, with several bestselling books “ordinary” does feel like a stretch here) thrust into a world of privilege and questionable values only to lose it all, and there was nothing new or interesting in that story here. I wanted to read about Gourmet — and about the really wonderful work Reichl did there. And that was glaringly absent, which maybe suggests a lot of things about how Reichl feels about her experience there but which didn’t make good reading for me. It felt, weirdly, like she just wasn’t ready to write about it yet. So I’m a huge fan of Reichl, but unlike all my back issues of Gourmet, Save Me the Plums is headed to donation pile.

I read The Hunting Party because it was billed as a “seven old friends from Oxford travel to a remote Scottish lodge to ring in the New Year, and when the resident Queen Bee ends up dead, everyone is a suspect.” I mean, I think we all know that I am all in for remote Scottish countrysides and friends from Oxford and house party murder mysteries, but this book was just meh. I loved the idea of it being told from multiple perspectives, but it ended up being just five perspectives: Queen Bee, her best frenemy, her new-to-the-group would-be bestie, and the lodge caretaker and security staff, who both have their own Tragic Backstories that come to light over the course of the novel. The problem is that I kept having to flip back to the beginning the section to see who was doing the narrating — except for the security guy, who conveniently thinks in the third person, all four of the women sounded alike a lot of the time — and none of them was particularly interesting. By the time the murder was (predictably) solved with a dramatic assist from a totally random side plot, I was just relieved to be done. Not a hit for me.

What I’m watching

The kids and I have been working our way through Parks & Recreation, and I love watching it with them. (We started it because they loved Making It, and I totally took Suzanne’s advice, which I did NOT take it when I watched it solo, to start with the first episode of season 3 when the show kind of does a soft reset.) The kids love teasing me that I’m like Leslie Knope, which I’m obviously not because I know better than to get a perm, however much my stick-straight hair yearns for one. (I do maybe have a lot of binders, though.)

Jason and I binged His Dark Materials, and I loved a lot of things about it. I definitely recommend it to Philip Pullman fans. I had some problems with it (particularly with the treatment of one — to me — key moment that — for me — turned Lyra from a stubborn, often unlikable girl into true heroine and which is notably missing in the adaptation), but overall, I’m looking forward to my follow-up binge. Lin-Manuel Miranda is (no shocker here) delightful, the armored bear Iorek is really well done, Ruth Wilson just channels repressed evil, and the scenery is spectacular. I love the actress who plays Lyra — she’s perfect. The first season is basically The Golden Compass, though they do weave in Will’s story from the beginning of The Subtle Knife so that the season ends with Lyra and Will walking through their respective portals. I imagine season 2 will start with them meeting up in Cittàgazze, which makes sense structurally for a television adaptation. If you’re a fan of the books, I recommend this series; if not, honestly, I’m not sure all the many, many explanation subtitles will be enough to help you totally follow what’s going on.

Current television knitting: This shawl because I need something to keep on the back of my chair for when I (inevitably) start freezing in class.

What’s keeping me busy

It’s planning season for me, since the hybrid school Suzanne and I run starts back in two weeks. One of my big challenges for this semester has been coming up with a list of contemporary-ish novels to read for my American Voices seminar, a big interdisciplinary class that covers philosophy, history, and literature in the United States. (I always hate using “American” when I mean just the United States, but I was voted down on this one because nobody — frankly including me — liked how U.S. Voices sounded.) We’ll mostly be reading poetry and short stories, but I wanted to include a novel as independent reading, and then I thought it would be fun to let students choose their own novels since they’re reading them independently, and then I thought it would be fun to have them choose their novels from a list of Twitter mini reviews: “It’s the end of the world as we know it, but all the world’s a stage.” I’m hoping this is half as fun for them as it is for me.

I also ordered new highlighters, and these are my favorite, and they never blur the writing, so I am recommending them wholeheartedly and will throw a big set in our summer planning subscription box.

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