Books! Bears! Battlestar Galactica!
IYKYK
Hi!!! We did it! We made it to another weekend!!!!!
Can you believe it’s already August?!? It has been Far Too Hot in Chicago, the sort of temperature where I start really seriously longing for sweaters and socks and shivers. But the show must go on, or whatever!!!
Anyway! Here’s some stuff I’m into these days, which you might like too:
Rainbow Rowell’s Slow Dance and Jessica Anthony’s The Most both came out this week, and they are two of my favorite books of the summer! (You can find those, along with several other fun titles, in my list of summer favorites at bookshop.org! If you buy books through my shop, you’re supporting indie booksellers and giving me a lil commission. In the end, I just want you to read the book, but I always encourage you to support indies if you’re able! Libraries are cool too!!!!!)
I’m excited to check out A Good Girls’s Guide to Murder, which is giving me British Veronica Mars vibes.
I have a giant jar of curried pickled cauliflower stewing in the fridge, and I can’t wait to eat it!!!
Book club updates!
The votes are in, and y’all pretty resoundingly voted for Liz Moore’s phenomenal novel The God of the Woods! It’s the one book on the list I had already read, so I might just try to spend my August reading the other three, but I’m super excited to hear your thoughts about this one. I know many of you have already read it — I’ll start a spoilery discussion thread here later in the month. In the meantime, if you want to share thoughts IMMEDIATELY, or even as you’re reading it, send em over!
Speaking of sharing thoughts! Pretty much every single one of you who read Margo’s Got Money Troubles raved about it. So many of you weighed in about what a good mom you thought Margo was and what a delightful character Jinx was.
A lot of you also seemed to agree that this book was one of those magical surprises that covers a lot of narrative ground, embraces many different (and potentially uninteresting!) topics, says a lot of interesting things about narrative and storytelling, and is also just A PLEASURE TO READ. (Someone did point out that the romance storyline was a bit far fetched, which is fair, but I loved the sweetness of it all! MARGO DESERVED THAT.)
Delights!!!!
This week’s absolutely LUSCIOUS delight comes from Susan, who shared this note:
“I’m lucky enough to have inherited dozens of dahlias from my husband’s aunt. We live in New England, which means we do have to dig the tubers and store them inside over the winter. (So I spend a lot of time worrying about them—they have to be kept above freezing, but below 50 degrees.) But I think of—and thank! Aunt Marilee tons and bunches.”
HOW BEAUTIFUL AFRE THOSE???
I’d love to hear about what’s delighting you, too! Just email me about something that’s making you happy these days.
Homework from Julia Phillips!
Julia is the author of the phenomenal novel Bear, which came out in June and I’ve raved about approximately one million times this year. It’s mossy, it’s intense, and it’s a beautiful and devastating meditation on expectations, ambition, and reality. I was so excited when Julia said she’d give GRETAGRAM readers homework! Here it is:
Do: Watch some bear docs!
“If you want to get up close with a gorgeous beast, I recommend doing so by watching Land of the Bears, a French documentary about the enormous brown bear population on Russia's Kamchatka peninsula. Everything about the movie is quiet and clean and serene, without a person to be found, which makes it the perfect way to decompress at the end of a day spent deep in the human world. That said, if you want to get even closer to one of these animals—and if you want not to chill out but to seize up with tension and horror—you should instead watch Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, which brings the human world into the Alaskan wilderness to tragic effect. Both movies show the bear's captivating power, but exert that power in very different ways.”
And my extra credit is to watch the bears in the Brooks Falls webcam at Katmai National Park! They literally just sit in this river and wait for the spawning salmon to leap into their open mouths. It is truly awesome!!!
Also! I have a copy of Bear that I want to mail to a paid GRETAGRAM subscriber. To be included in the drawing, just upgrade your membership. When you pay for my work, you are helping me figure out how to make a living as a freelance journalist, which is a new endeavor for me.
About ten percent of the people who subscribe to this newsletter help pay for it, and I am so grateful for every single one of you! Your support is such an incredible vote of confidence during a deeply unsettling time.
(If you’re already a paid subscriber, you’re in this drawing, and all the ones I’ll do in the future, too!)
Ok, that’s it for this week! Talk to you soon.
P.S. Do you like this email?! Spread the delight and forward it to a friend! (Or spam an enemy, lol!)
The Brooks Falls webcam is mesmerizing! I already read The God of the Woods - it truly is the perfect summer read - so I’m going to add some of the other August recs to my TBR. Happy weekend!
Hi! It’s me! At least I think I’m the one who sent you feedback about the romance storyline feeing a little far fetched. I have raved about Margot’s Got Money Troubles to anyone and everyone who will listen, and think it’s my favorite book of the summer so far. I admired the nuance Thorpe brought to all of the characters, and I fell in love with every one of them….except maybe the professor and his family. I was totally immersed in the plot as I read it, but I found that when I was describing the details to other people, it seemed a little fantastical when it came from my mouth and not the page. Particularly the storyline with JB, and how they end up starting a consulting business together. I agree that Margot deserves all the happiness, and I was not upset at all when I read it, but I had a strange feeling of “huh, maybe this story wasn’t quite as realistic and believable as I thought it was when I was reading”. I absolutely loved the experience of it, and all of the conversations I’ve gotten to have about it!