10 Things: Seeds, Stories, Stewart
All my recommendations for what to plan, read, watch, listen to, cook, buy, and think about this week.
My Loves!
Happy weekend. Behind the paywall is a lot of food-related stuff: a recipe and a must-buy spice. There’s also music. Music and food. That’s the stuff of legends!
Enjoy!
PLAN: Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook by Ron & Jennifer Kujawski
I bought this from SeedSavers when I went to order my seeds this year, because I am often clueless about what I’m supposed to plant when. I hoped that this book would be exactly what it is: the kind of book you can write in, with copious details about what to do every single week of the year. We are already into the garden-planning and prepping season, it turns out — and while I’m a little behind, I’m excited to have an assignment every week. It’s time to start seeding! Which means it’s time to start daydreaming. (Also, I realize I haven’t shared this with you: I buy heirloom seeds for weird vegetables that I would never be able to buy at a store. I live near a pretty good fruit market, so I’m not growing broccoli. But a gourd that looks like a dinosaur testicle and tastes like melon? SIGN ME UP. SeedSavers has lots of these.)
WATCH: Jon Stewart’s return
I’m definitely getting to A Certain Age, because nostalgia is starting to make me cry? Honestly, I haven’t enjoyed many reboots, even when they’re fun; but I’m stunned by how good I feel Jon Stewart’s performance has been since his return to The Daily Show last week. I was a big fan, so I am The Audience — for the record, I am also a big fan of Trevor Noah’s. I read, cover-to-cover, the 480-page oral history of The Daily Show that came out 2016. So, OK, I’m a little Basic. But this is the man who galvanized many people in my demographic and generation to become activists. He made it accessible for us, and it felt possible to affect change. Many beliefs I still hold were formed in the aughts, when Jon Stewart was somehow joking about Iraq.
, who I learned JUST THIS WEEK has a Substack (!!!), is an objectively masterful writer, and she lives in Chicago — and she one time gave her time to talk to my public high school students about writing, so she’s OK in my book! After I read that New Yorker story a few weeks ago, I thought, “I should read her new one,” and put it on hold at the library. I’m late to the party with this, but it’s really good. It’s got to be hard to write a compelling mystery story, and she’s done it here; this book is really hard to put down because you just can’t wait to know what happened and how it happened, and there’s a sense that it’s coming. The premise: a 40-something narrator goes back to her alma mater boarding high school to teach a podcasting class, and starts digging into the murder of one of her former classmates. It’s about gender, privilege, race, and what it means to be living in the 2020s — while also managing to be about aging, remembering, and forgetting.Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to You Are Doing A Good Enough Job to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.