The Last Word On Nothing

We’ve done this before, talked about the books and films and everything else we’ve liked. Here are our lists from years gone by. And if you should be so moved, we also offer books we ourselves have written.

Ann:  I like lemon ginger scones.  They are buttery, a tiny lemon bite and a bigger ginger bite, and a quiet antidote to you-know-what. 

Christie:  Fat Gold is genuine California olive oil and it’s delicious! It’s made by independent producers, and each shipment comes with a delightful little zine, and each batch is unique. 

Kate:  I’ve been telling everyone about these easy but cosmically delicious beet, arugula, and goat cheese grilled cheeses. You could roast your own beets, but you don’t have to; I get mine pre-roasted in the produce aisle. Prepare for a life-altering experience. 

Ann:  Oh Kate! You’re making me remember the cosmically delicious beet and halloumi recipe which consists of cooked sliced beets and sauteed sliced halloumi, the slices of beet and cheese alternating in a stack that falls apart as soon as you try to cut it.  But I don’t see halloumi in the store any more; of course, I don’t go to the store any more either. 

Ben:  Does “everything” refer to food? It seems like that’s where we’re heading. Well, I recently attended a dinner/book-signing event here in Spokane featuring the chef Hank Shaw and nabbed his new cookbook, Hook, Line, and Supper (bet you’ll never guess what it’s about). So far I recommend the salmon piccata.  

Cameron:  I am breaking from food to say that it is my new favorite thing to run while listening to podcasts. This is not something I’d ever thought I could do–I thought I needed music! Exciting, loud (but not too loud), upbeat running music! But it turns out that podcasts are also really great in a different way, it’s like running with a great conversationalist who won’t notice if you’re breathing hard. Old favorite: Emerging Form, co-hosted by LWON’s own Christie Aschwanden. New favorite: Otherppl with Brad Listi. Just today I did a long run and listened to his conversation with George Saunders and came home feeling much better about the world. And also wanting to eat a huge breakfast. 

Helen:  Sewing. I really like sewing these days. It’s so much faster than knitting. Oh, is this supposed to be about buying things? Well, here’s my favorite source of fabric: Swanson’s Fabric, a specialty thrift store in western Massachusetts. Follow the owner on social media for many strong opinions about textiles, clothing, and capitalism.

We’ve done this before, talked about the books we’ve liked. Here are our lists from years gone by. And if you should be so moved, we also offer books we ourselves have written.

Cameron:  Maybe this is boring, but I liked a lot of the new seasons of Netflix series this summer. Especially Lupin (Omar Sy!!!!!!!) and Never Have I Ever (high school love triangles, which I love almost as much as Omar Sy as Lupin!!!!!!). Also: Loki. I guess I’m a target audience? Or several target audiences?

Ann:  Yes, I liked the Netflix series too.  I watched The Two Popes twice because those actors are such that I am totally convinced I’m watching Benedict and Francis real life; I’ll watch it again.  I also watched Queens Gambit twice, mostly for the impeccable visual artistry in the colors, costumes, wallpaper, and the main character’s makeup — which somehow work together to create the unreal, intense, windowless focus that must be a chess champion’s mind.  Plus, The Dig which I’ll watch again to see if those actors can make me get obsessed with the Anglo-Saxon treasures all over again; and the book is just as good.

Ben:  I recently watched Squid Game, and was disappointed to learn that it was not, in fact, another captivating documentary about cephalopod play-behavior. I didn’t love it; Hunger Games has a similar plot but more heart (not to mention better games!), and Parasite explores class warfare in South Korea much more cleverly. One thing I did appreciate about Game of Squids, though, was its careful attention to the role of labor on its little island. We see the infamous pink-costumed guards sleeping in their cubicles, stirring sugar into big vats, washing away blood, and disposing of bodies. It’s all gruesome, of course (well, not the sugar part so much) but it does seem like the show’s creators put a lot of thought into the mechanics of their grisly world. 

Jane:  Forgive me if I’m being presumptuous, but I would be willing to bet that the esteemed readers of LWON are not the kind of people who are into reality television. But did you like Bad Art Friend? If so, I invite you to join me in watching terrible shows like The Bachelorette and Selling Sunset. At heart, they deal with the same theme: people treating each other horribly while trying to make meaning in their own, silly lives — all while the story is told through a seemingly omniscient, “objective” lens, but one which is in itself biased and telling about its creators and about US culture in general. I particularly enjoy looking for moments of accidental authenticity in the show; if you get sucked in, too, let’s discuss the rich text of these reality stars’ Instagram accounts (as some sociologists have done!).  

Helen:  The confluence of a large selection of great TV and a freaking pandemic means that I’ve enjoyed many series over the last year and a half. It’s hard to even know where to start. So I’ll just stick to my most recent love: Only Murders in the Building on Hulu. It stars Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez as New Yorkers who decide to create a podcast when someone in their building is murdered. It combines cozy mystery and physical comedy and avoids the obvious jokes about young people these days. (Selena Gomez: 100% holding her own.) Nathan Lane is in it, and Sting, and Tina Fey. It’s just a delight. Worth a one-month subscription to Hulu. 

We’ve done this before, talked about the books we’ve liked. Here are our lists from years gone by. And if you should be so moved, we also offer books we ourselves have written.

Helen: The most entertaining reading I’ve done lately is a pair of young adult novels set in the near future: Catfishing on CatNet and its sequel, Chaos on CatNet. In the first book, a teenage girl keeps getting moved around to different small towns by her mom, who’s trying to hide them from her dad, who may or may not be evil. Since she moves so much, all of her friends are on the internet – specifically, on a website devoted to cat photos. The friends have real-life adventures with danger and cats. A sentient AI narrates some of the chapters. The high school’s sex ed class is taught by a robot. I started the first book out of a sense of obligation, because I went to college with the author, Naomi Kritzer, then raced through it in a few days and immediately got hold of the second one.  

Jane:  My favorite way to read is to receive a recommendation and then resolve to know absolutely nothing about the book before I start reading. This is how I came upon Beth Morgan’s A Touch of Jen, so I will do you the same favor: just dive in, because it’s much better if you know nothing to start. The only thing I’ll say is that at no point did I know where the book was going, and I dropped everything for 48 hours to finish it. Morgan is darkly funny, and her characters are so deliciously hateable, yet uncomfortably relatable. Just be prepared to make little noises of surprise or disgust as you’re reading and set aside an hour to process once you’ve finished reading. 

Ann:  I just read Colm Toibin’s The Magician because I read all his novels. His range is rangier than any writer except maybe Penelope Fitzgerald: he has Brooklyn/Ireland novels, antiquity novels; and now with The Magician, novels whose main characters are novelists telling not other peoples’ stories but their own real lives.  The other novel like this is The Master.  In these two, master and magician, the characters are Henry James and Thomas Mann, respectively — and Toibin is good enough to get away with this.  But The Magician, the Mann book, seemed rote, as though Toibin was working card by card through his research notes. So I reread The Master, the James book, to see if it was also rote and no, it’s not, not a bit of it.  Now I have a theory that Toibin crawled inside his characters, and the Henry James character talks with James’ real voice — wordy, over-subtle, way too perceptive, personally reserved. And the Thomas Mann character uses Mann’s real voice which is also wordy and reserved, but not subtle, not perceptive, plus self-impressed, pontifical, and pedantic, like he’s talking from note cards. Or maybe Toibin just got tired, sometimes a person can get tired.  Still, both books are fascinating and I like them better than I do the biographies that satisfy the same need: who are these people, these authors?

Rebecca: Giving birth and then raising a baby is the most primal thing I’ve ever done, twice. So many times in the past few months, I have held my infant daughter and thought, “Look at this primate.” That’s what she is, just another in the chain of primates, repeating the cycle. I have felt in my bones that I am a mammal. I realized that all of the mammals who have gone before me have held and beheld their children in just the same way that I do. Nothing has changed through all of human evolution, except maybe the clothing. We are all just mammals. So I was drawn to the concept of this book Nightbitch, which, I thought, was about a mother who turns into a werewolf. Nightbitch, by Rachel Yoder, is actually about much more than the animalistic experience of becoming a mother and raising a baby. It’s about expectations, the patriarchy, solitude, fear, love, dogs, meat, despair, anger, mommy cliques, and the necessity of art. I don’t want to give anything else away; I’ll just say that I bookmarked every other page until I finally gave up and just started telling every mother I know to read it, as soon as possible.