What’s Entertaining Me �
� and might entertain you!
Hey there!
As advertised in my 1 May post, now that this is the only place where I am an Author Online, I’m planning to post twice a month. My semester ended literally yesterday, and grades are due early next week, so I’m seriously swamped with day-job work. So today instead of coming up with thinky thoughts for you, I’m going to share some recommendations your reading/viewing/listening pleasure
Books:
Biggest Impact: , by Celeste Ng
This book has been out for several years, but it’s fairly new to me. I taught this book this semester in my senior seminar. I did a theme of “Complicated Women,� and this book fits that bill really well. More than that, it’s beautifully written and heartbreaking poignant. This is literary fiction and definitely not a romance. It’s a story about family love and pain.
BTW: Ng wrote the novel Little Fires Everywhere, on which the TV series was based.
Just Finished: by Chuck Wendig
I listened to this one on my commute to campus. Also very much not a romance, this is a horror novel. I guess I can’t call Wendig the 21st-century Stephen King, because King is still very much writing and publishing, but I can say if you love King you’ll very likely also love Wendig.
I don’t know how to describe this story beyond saying that a group of friends finds a staircase in the woods that seems to lead nowhere but in fact leads somewhere, much to their chagrin.
Staircase has shivers and shudders galore, and plenty of ewwwwws as well, but, like King’s best work, the real story is in the friendship. If you love King and have not yet read Wendig, this is a good one to start with.
Reading Now: , by Emily Henry.
I ADORE Henry’s work. She’s a one-click for me for sure. Her story worlds are rich and lively, full of interesting, realistically quirky characters, lighthearted humor, and sneakily powerful emotion. The chemistry between her leads is intense.
All but one of her romances are 5+ stars for me. People We Meet on Vacation is my all-time number-one friends-to-lovers romance, and Book Lovers is WAY up on my all-time faves list (several students who know my romance tendencies suggested I should have put BL on my Complicated Women syllabus, and they are SO RIGHT. MISSED CHANCE UGH).
I tried to make myself hold off on this one until grades were in and my semester was truly over, but I was weak and started it this week. It’s still early going, but already I love sunshiney Alice and grumpy Hayden. As soon as grades are in, I am face-planting into this story.
Music:
New find:
Shortly before I deleted my Insta, the algorithm offered up a post from this artist I’d never heard of, and I really liked the song in that post, so I looked her up. Everywhere I’ve found her, ILUKA is fully capitalized, and I don’t know yet if that’s her name, or the band name, or an acronym for something, but anyway. “Angry Women� is one of my favorite “genres� of music, and I’ve liked everything I’ve heard of this particular angry woman.
If you’re a fan of the viral song by Paris Paloma, you’ll probably like ILUKA as well.
Movies:
OMG HAVE YOU SEEN SINNERS? This movie is � everything! It’s terrifying. It’s funny. It’s powerful and poignant. It’s absolutely beautiful, breathtakingly shot and performed. And it is absolutely packed to the rafters with layers and layers of meaning and metaphor. It feels like a revolutionary moment in cinema. See it. More than once. Revel in it.
Television:
I’m grouping these two series together because, though they are quite different on the surface, you only have to peel back a single layer to see how similar they are in the kinds of Big Questions they tackle—like “How far is too far?� Watching them concurrently these past few weeks has me thinking a lot about why I write the kinds of stories I write. My musings on that point might turn into a blog post, actually.
Both series are masterful works of art. Andor, IMO, is just about perfect. I have some minor quibbles with S2 of TLOU, but even so, it is close to perfect as well.
Podcasts:
I often listen to a podcast as I “power down� at the end of a day. I don’t do the kind of pods where randos spew their uninformed opinions about politics and culture (blerg), but I kinda love them for short fiction and narrative history. Titanic: Ship of Dreams is a new-ish pod that does weekly deep dives (ugh, I’m sorry for that terrible pun—but not sorry enough to delete it!) into the history of the sinking, from the building of the ship to (I expect) the aftermath of its loss. It’s really well-produced, with lots of perspectives, ranging from academics to descendants of the passengers and crew at every level. Really fascinating.
I was never particularly captivated by the story of the Titanic (and didn’t like the movie) until I wrote about it in Nothing on Earth and Nothing in Heaven, but doing research for that book ignited a spark for me.
So those are the stories I’m turning to when I need to turn away from the world. Have you read/seen/heard any of these as well? Or what are your fave²õ–do you have recommendations, too?
Have a great weekend and rest of May, and I’ll see you in a couple weeks!
xoxo
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