Ursula K. Le Guin took readers to imaginary worlds for decades. In the last great frontier of life, old age, she explored a new literary territory: the blog, a forum where she shined. The collected best of Ursula’s blog, No Time to Spare presents perfectly crystallized dispatches on what mattered to her late in life, her concerns with the world, and her wonder at it: “How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.”
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Rating: 4.5 out of 5.
I’ll be honest: this wasn’t exactly a voluntary pick. I usually never choose books like this for myself, being a fiction lover all the way, but as things go, it was an accidental selection from the NYPL ebooks page. I’d been impatiently looking for Wizard of Earthsea for weeks, saw a Le Guin book scroll by, and without thinking, checked it out. Then I opened it up and – surprise, it was actually a collection of her blog posts from the later years of her life! Quarantine being what it is, I gave it a shot and settled in.
HAPPY WEEKEND! I’m having a hard time believe it’s May already?! April just zoomed by and I can’t believe we’re already 1/3 done with the year.
Feeling a bit wistful this week…I was supposed to go on vacation starting Wednesday – to Greece, which I’ve dreamed about visiting for years and was so excited about that I planned out everything in spreadsheets – but we all know that didn’t happen. I’ll replan the trip for whenever things go back to normal, but it’s a little funny thinking about how different the two situations are – where we should be vs. where we actually are. Still amazing to me that life around entire world can just stop like this.
Anyway, here’s what I’ve been up to this week!
What I’m reading
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino – This was weirdly exhausting to read because it’s so dense. But it’s good – Tolentino is a very sharp writer, even though I wish she’d cut down her word usage by 25%.
In Five Years by Rebecca Serle – One of my most anticipated reads of early 2020! The blurb sounded really fresh and interesting but it actually turned out to be kind of disappointing – after the glimpse into the future, it became dramatic and predictable.
A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen – This is criminally underrated in today’s reading repertoire I think. It’s very short (you can easily finish in 1-2 hours) so it’s quite snappy, and I’m impressed at the feminism throughout (even if Ibsen didn’t intend it)
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston – More of a back burner read for now, but it’s a mix of Chinese folktales and Kingston’s experiences growing up Asian in America during the first half of the 20th century. Very interesting so far.
Chef!! One of my all-time favorite movies. It came out in 2014 and is one of the most wholesome, feed-good movies ever – if you’re at all into food, it’s an absolute gem (and even if you’re not, it’s a plain fantastic movie). Also it’s obnoxiously star-studded 😆
The Crown – Finally finished season 1! The acting is spectacular.
And on the other side of the spectrum…Too Hot to Handle. OMG this is truly the trashiest show I’ve ever watched, and I’ve watched all the trashy reality shows so far – Love Island, Love Is Blind, The Circle, etc. Vulture had an amazing description of the contestants: “The people featured on Too Hot to Handle are, to put it as kindly as I can, the sweetest collection of gentle, hot dummies this show could find.” LOL
Is anyone doing puzzles?!
So, I recently finished this 1000-piece puzzle from The New Yorker and jokingly complained the whole time about how puzzles are way too hard and tedious and should count as unpaid labor…and now I’m kind of obsessed with them. Yes, they are still tedious and slow, but also they’re perfect for quarantine. And apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so! It’s hilarious that almost every single puzzle on The New Yorker’s site is sold out, so I’ve been looking for other good puzzlemakers. Lantern Press takes artwork and photographs and turns them into 1000-piece puzzles – I’m really eyeing the Florence and the New York starry night. (above is the Venice starry night, also a possibility)
Around town
And finally, just a few fun links that made me smile this week.
I’ve been keeping this panda cam up. Looking over every now and then and seeing pandas trundling around and eating bamboo without a care in the world is just the cutest.
A fun and weirdly accurate quiz on which fictional character you are. I got Nelson Bighetti from Silicon Valley, which I’m ambivalent about 😆 Take it and let me know who you get!
Might sound odd, but I love following the editors at Bon Appetit on social media because they’re fun, knowledgeable, and relatable. They put together a roundup of their favorite snacks and now I have the munchies.
Rose over at Novels & Teacups recently posted this book tag and it seems so fun! I liked reading her answers, and now here are mine below…
Would you rather read an amazing book with a disappointing ending, or a book that is lackluster but gets really good at the end?
I have to go with the amazing book with a disappointing ending. At least the majority of the book still holds up! Who wants to suffer through a majority-bad book just to get to the good stuff? Ain’t nobody got time for that.
I was a voracious reader as a kid, but there were some notable books and series that somehow slipped by me – we couldn’t always afford new copies so my reading was limited to my school library and whatever we picked up at local yard sales (a surprisingly great source of books, and usually only 50 cents each at the time!). And so while I had a pretty wide variety of books under my belt, these were three that I never got around to reading and wish I had…
One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but.
As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients’ lives — a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can’t stop hooking up with the wrong guys — she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell.
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Rating: 4 out of 5.
What a great read! Lori Gottlieb is a columnist for the New York Times and The Atlantic (she’s the therapist in their Ask a Therapist series); I’ve been loosely following her writings there for a while and have always really appreciated her intelligence and empathy, so when she came out with a full-length book about being a therapist and going to therapy herself, I knew it had to be interesting.
Happy weekend! Can’t believe it’s yet another week in the books. It feels so strange that on any given day I feel aimless and not in the mood for any more books/Netflix/walks/quarantine activities, and yet the week as a whole just zooms past. I guess I’m not complaining…every week that passes is a week closer to normalcy 🙂
The highlight of my week was taking part in this online trivia night. This week was my second time joining and it’s a ton of fun! The trivia is a good mix between easy and challenging questions, the host is a lot of fun and changes up each round, and I’ve really been looking forward to Monday nights because it’s such a blast! It streams weekly at 8pm ET if you’re interested too.
What I’m reading
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo – I’m around 15% in and honestly not sure if I’ll continue…it’s a very different style than I’m used to and none of the characters have really caught my attention so far. I haven’t read a lot of works by Black authors before so the perspective is refreshing, but story-wise, I’m kind of bored with it.
Other than that, reading has been slow this week. There are a LOT of books around the house that I never read, so maybe I’ll pick up one of those. Just so uninspired lately!!
What I’m watching
The Bon Appetit Youtube channel! I’m OBSESSED with the videos they put out and the cast of personalities on the team. Brad is pure chaos, Claire is an anxious perfectionist, Molly is Cali millennial to a T, Alex is charming and gets along with everyone, Sohla is sanity incarnate, and so on. My favorite video is a recent one where Brad and Chris tried recreating Andes mints. As one commenter put it, “Brad’s golden retriever energy, and Chris’s unreasonably expensive cat energy is giving me life” and I can’t think of anything more accurate 😆
Yale’s online course The Science of Well-Being, informally known as the happiness course. Usually I’m not interested in vague concepts like this but I’ve been hearing about and seeing this everywhere so I gave it a shot. And I’m glad I did – I’m on week 2 currently but there’s already been some really good information about what does and doesn’t make us happy. The Cut also wrote a great article summarizing the main points of the course.
Little Fires Everywhere on Hulu is really good. I just finished episode 4, and the pacing and acting are both amazing. I didn’t read the book but I’ve seen reviews that say while the show made some notable changes, it still really holds up to the original material. Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington seriously carry the show!
Home workouts
I never thought I’d say this, but I haven’t been outside in literally a month. A MONTH! We’ve been fortunate enough to get our groceries delivered, and I haven’t left the house even for walks. The Nike Training Club App has been a godsend in terms of keeping me active. It has hundreds of different workouts that you can filter by length, body area you want to target, equipment you have, etc, and every workout has videos of all the moves. It’s also super sleek and easy to use (and makes you feel like a badass for exercising with them). Best of all, everything is free, even the premium content! This is not an ad, I just really love this app 😆
Around town
And finally, some links from around the web that made me smile this week…
Can you believe the photo above is actually a painting?Elizabeth Geisler is insanely talented. I want to feel as tranquil as this water looks.
Absolutely love love love this directory of female artists! So many styles, ethnicities, and body shapes represented.
Mossflower Cove 