Happy Friday!

Welcome back. It’s been a few weeks. I’ve been taking some time offline. It takes a lot of energy, evolving into one’s winter form. I don’t have much to say for myself except that, after a long drought, there are finally some articles online that aren’t about the President-elect, or the election, or anticipated outcomes. Here are a few that I thought were worth sharing.

 

–– ARTICLES THAT AREN’T ABOUT D***** T**** ––

Ever thought about your inner speech and how it affects you, day-to-day? Julie Beck looked into The Running Conversation in Your Head. (Though not into it, into it, thankfully.)

Siri Hustvedt is a fascinating listen on the Lit Up show discussing her many interdisciplinary expertise and her aptly titled book, A Woman Looking At Men Looking At Women. [AUDIO, 52 mins]

I miss Sadie Stein’s Paris Review blogs, but she’s over here dropping knowledge with A Professional Homebody on the Best Slippers.

Dan Nosowitz Made A Linguistics Professor Listen To A Blink-182 Song And Analyze The Accent, and the results were informative and amusing.

Just a wee reminder that Men Love Smart Women Until They Actually Have to Talk to Them. Also, this journalist compared reactions to his and his wife’s side-by-side articles about race. People really hate women, man.

Angelica Jade Bastién posits that James Marsden Is One of the Best Actors of His Generation, and the internet seems to agree. (If you’re into film you should follow her on Twitter, too.)

For me, the best part of the Gilmore Girls revival was Mallory Ortberg’s “The Lottery” in Stars Hollow. If this were a spec script, they’d totally have to make it.

Ann Patchett’s Guide for Bookstore Lovers is going in my back pocket for upcoming trips around the States.

 

 

–– ON MY SHELF ––

Pictured: 2 essay collections I purchased on a recent trip to Denver.

It’d been a while since I’d read a novel I really loved, then I downloaded a sample of Night Waking by Sarah Moss to my Kindle and it totally sucked me in. Like her most recent novel, The Tidal Zone, it’s about a parent spinning plates: their kids, their relationship, their job, and their academic project. This one was more of an exploration of reluctant motherhood, which I was reluctantly interested in until the plot thickened and the main character’s frustrations gave way to compromises. It’s a remarkable novel, filled with the kind of interior monologue I really enjoy reading and scenes with such verisimilitude that I felt I was in the room, observing events. Highly recommended.

Far from ruined by it, I moved right on to The Story of a New Name, the second of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, which feels fast and slow in equal measure. (Fast getting through the pages, slow-moving events.) I’m enjoying it.

More reviews on the docket from today, so I have a couple more books to get to before the holidays. What’s on your nightstand?
 

 

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Your turn! Read anything good this week? Hit reply or tweet me, won’t you?

Have a lovely weekend!
Nicola x
 

Adjustments aren’t linear. Knowing this has, in some ways, encouraged my tendency to procrastinate and linger on distractions and less-important tasks. I’m a natural dilly-dallier. It plays into what I talked about last week, about how when I don’t write something down, it doesn’t get done. If I don’t have much to do, I’ll write down as few things as possible to make my to-dos last; even when it does my head in.

It also means that I’ve a tendency to focus too much on the bigger things that are happening when there aren’t smaller things to do in-between. This past weekend, the wait for one such big thing really got under my skin. BUT, come Monday, things were much better, and it’s been a good week. I’ve been offered some work that I’m really excited about and – as ever when freelancing – when it rains it pours.

It’s been a good week for American life things too. This week brought the grand finale of the current baseball season – last night’s game was a real nail-biter. Today I visited a library book sale and relieved them of 6 books for a grand total of $8. Tonight we’re heading to Art Hop and have a couple of dinner dates with friends on the docket.

I hope you’ve been having a good one too! Here, have some links.

 

–– ON ROBOTNIC.CO ––

This week’s new episode of Bookish Blether is all about our Most Anticipated Reads for the rest of 2016! [AUDIO, 32 mins]

 

 

–– WAYS OF LIVING ––

10 Women Look Back On Living Childfree By Choice – and while they described different kinds of freedom, remarkably little was said about careers.

If, like me, you’re looking forward to reading Elena Ferrante’s new book Frantumaglia, Arthur Chee’s review is worth a read. (Be warned: he identifies the author behind Ferrante.) I think I’ll save it for after I’ve read more of her novels.

I very much enjoyed John Pipkin on The Man Who Invented Bookselling As We Know It.

In related, here’s What Barnes & Noble Doesn’t Get About Bookstores. It’s true – there’s a B&N a 1-minute drive from my flat and I find it lacking; everything feels like it’s just been thrown onto shelves without much forethought. I hope they manage to improve.

“No pocketless people has ever been great since pockets were invented, and the female sex cannot rival us while it is pocketless.”

Racked takes a look at The Politics of Pockets.

Fellow Brit-in-America Ruth Whippman has written a book about how America is obsessed with happiness — and it’s making us miserable. I had a wry chuckle at a couple of the parts about Americans vs Brits. To wit:

American problems are routinely rebranded as “opportunities”; hence the filthy bathroom in our local supermarket displays a sign saying, “If this restroom fails to meet your expectations, please inform us of the opportunity,” as if reeking puddles of urine are merely an inspirational occasion for personal growth.

and

To an outsider, it can sometimes feel as though the entire population has a nationwide standardized happiness exam to take and everyone is frantically cramming the night before to get a good grade. Like a stony-faced “that’s hilarious” after a joke in place of laughter — another mildly unnerving staple of conversation in this country — it appears that somewhere along the line, the joy has been sucked out of American happiness.

 

 

–– ON MY SHELF ––

My capacity for half-finishing books appears boundless these past few months. I read 40-55% of each Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty by Ramona Ausubel, Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple, The Trip to Echo Spring by Olivia Laing, and The Sellout by Paul Beatty. I always like to think I’ll go back to an unfinished book but experience tells me that I most likely will not. (Though the latter is still in the safe zone as I’ve moved on to read other things more pressing!)

Meantime, I’ve a short deadline to read two novels for review. I’ve begun the novel Swing Time by Zadie Smith, which is very promising thus far. The second will be the recently released The Wangs Versus The World by Jade Chang. I’ll have opinions on those for next week.

So, what’s on your nightstand?
 

 

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Your turn! Read anything good this week? Hit reply or tweet me, won’t you?

Have a lovely weekend!
Nicola x
 

When I don’t write something down, it doesn’t get done. Even after 120 near-consecutive weeks into this project, that personal maxim holds true. I even spent a couple of hours today at a coffee shop reading my Pocket list before almost forgetting to write to you this evening. Flattering, I’m sure. But anyway.

October skies have looked like the above until today when it rained off and on. It’s the first real Autumnal day we’ve had, and with the clock change impending I’ve been thinking a lot about changing scenery and how many little adjustments it takes to live in a new country. In Glasgow, the length of a day shortens by 2.5 hours over the course of October. Coupled with the shift from evening light to morning, it’s always been rough going for me; sometimes it’s a worse feeling than getting a meagre 7 hours of daylight in December. Here, we’ve lost a mere hour of daylight over the course of the month. But it’s all relative. Having successfully extended my summer by 6 weeks, the overcast skies and rain feel like more of an imposition than they ought to. I laughed when I overheard a girl sound incredulous at the iced-drink sippers at Starbucks today, yet I felt the chill. It was 24C.

This is my way of warning you that I’m on track to become one of those people.

Enjoy your links and your weekend, and don’t forget to say hello – you can hit reply anytime.
 

 

–– ON ROBOTNIC.CO ––

With October hurtling to a close, I’m prepping some gift ideas for you. This time, it’s 3 Book Subscriptions.

Over on my YouTube channel, I did a perennial BookTube favourite, the Reading Habits Tag [VIDEO, 7 mins].

I also shared my Autumn Haul & TBR [VIDEO, 7 mins].

ICYMI, on the latest Bookish Blether, Holly and I looked at our progress with the Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge [AUDIO, 35 mins].

 

 

–– DREAM JOBS ––

Racked invited us to Meet the Woman Who Smashes Makeup For a Living. Sounds pretty fun.

Wouldn’t you like to be A Film Technician Who Discovers Gems in the Outtakes? I would.

Two contestants on the Australian version of The Bachelor went onto the show and fell in love – with each other.

 

 

–– ON MY SHELF ––

My reviews of The Lesser Bohemians and The Comet Seekers are live on the Big Issue website. Isn’t the accompanying illustration (above, by Dom McKenzie) excellent?

I’m currently reading this week’s Man Booker Prize winner, The Sellout by Paul Beatty. His manuscript was rejected by 18 UK publishers, but more interesting is his take on Lionel Shriver’s recent comments about cultural appropriation. He says that, “all the examples she cites are white writers appropriating other cultures. And it’s not just a top-down thing. It goes in other directions… That’s the thing that I find really hurtful about her perspective: the notion of who’s allowed to take what from whom.” and elaborates by describing reactions to his love for Japanese literature.

This past week I also finished The Road Through the Wall by Shirley Jackson and Hold Back the Stars by Katie Khan, which I cricked my neck reading (this is either a compliment or an indictment of my anatomy – I haven’t worked out which).

What’s on your nightstand?
 

 

–– OTHER CONCERNS ––

In a(nother) response to Lionel Shriver’s opinions about what white writers are “allowed” to write about, Sarah Schulman wrote about one White Writer who was able to capture the lives of a number of characters of different races, creeds, and abilities: Carson McCullers. Schulman also has an interesting theory as to why McCullers was so able.

I’m 29 and I never learned how money works. It’s time to fix that. Tim Herrera calls upon his financially-minded colleague for advice. (It’s a pretty blatant piece of crossover content, but still useful.)

This one is close to the bone: I finally own my first house – so why do I have buyer’s remorse? Poor guy. The writer’s name is Stuart Heritage, which strikes me as funny because it reminds me of the word inheritance, and it seems he didn’t have one.

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Your turn! Read anything good this week? Hit reply or tweet me, won’t you?

Have a lovely weekend!
Nicola x