10 Things: Nuts, Nightingales, and Newsletters
All my recommendations for what to find, read, watch, listen to, explore, contemplate, and break up with this week.
Hello My Loves!
Thank you for being. Here are some suggestions! (First three are free; the rest are behind a paywall, including a good recipe, and a fun role play exercise.)
FIND:
on Substack
Every Wednesday, I meet with two other writers (
, a novelist; and Jill Riddell, the inventor of a mushroom) and we discuss composition, editing, creating, and writing. Last year, we hosted a writing workshop in our space on Michigan Avenue, and a good number of the readers of this newsletter came! We are in the early stages of putting together a whimsical, nature-focused writing collective, and we’ve launched a Substack, which for now is just very short writing-based missives every Friday. There’s also a free Zoom co-write meetup that’s been running for years. If you’re at all interested in writing or composing, you should subscribe to the Substack! We’ll have lots of games, ideas, videos, and more in the coming months. Get in on the ground floor.READ: Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll
Another novel recommendation from Kat, and man, I’m really tearing through her picks. GoodReads says this is “an extraordinary novel inspired by the real-life sorority targeted by America's first celebrity serial killer in his final murderous spree.” Friend, I didn’t know this was based on a true story, but of course it was. Personally, I thought it was a great meditation on community and care facing the undertow of horrible men (so, so many horrible men; always all these horrible men!) — and a book that manages to be addictive, even though the reader ostensibly “knows what happened.” But you still really want to know what happens. I loved it and read it in three days. Which is too fast. You gotta slow down, Sophie.
WATCH: Elsbeth on CBS
While we eagerly await a new season of Poker Face, Luke and I are often searching for a great howcatchem procedural (I just learned that word last week; doesn’t it rule?), and this scratches the itch. It’s technically a The Good Wife spin-off — this character played a quirky attorney on that show, and now she’s left New York to see if she can find corruption inside the NYPD. In the meantime, there are a lot of novel murders that she takes it upon herself to solve. This is the fun kind of mystery where even a novice gumshoe can Spot The Thing — each episode exploding with simple little puzzles that tickle the brain. It isn’t good, but it’s fun.
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