I’m starting off the year with a vague goal to read and watch more stuff that predates my own birth, having spent a lot of 2022 reading mediocre books with massive publicity budgets. (I’m sorry! I will never say which books they were!) I’m also really getting into novel revisions, with the side effect that I’m mostly reading books that are either very short or mysteries, which I find structurally comforting.
Reading
I’ve read a decent number of Philip Roth’s work but somehow never made it to his first, Goodbye, Columbus. Sometimes I like to childishly imagine how renowned writers would be received in a writing workshop: why all these tangential conversations?! Why so many phone calls with the aunt?! Etc. Well, I liked it, especially the title novella and the story “Defender of the Faith,” though I am happy to not have been a woman in the 1950s or in Philip Roth’s life. Also delighted to find that the Columbus is Columbus, Ohio: goodbye, Columbus…goodbye! (That will be me in six months.)
I also finally read Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman. What a great narrator, how attuned she is to the motions and needs of the convenience store and how content she is with a life that everyone around her seems to find pathetic and worrying.
I’ve gotten really into Laura Lippman’s Tess Monaghan series since moving to Columbus, probably in part because Baltimore feels so distinct and it gives me a way to briefly feel like I’m back on the East Coast. I owe this all to my friend Sophia who recommended I read them based on the fact that I’m obsessed with my rowing machine and Tess is a rower. As the series has gone on there seems to be more time between the novels, and a lot happening in that time that I would have liked to se on the page. (For example, Tess goes from never thinking about having children to, suddenly, pregnant and on bed rest. It also seems like Lippman briefly toyed with the idea of moving Tess into a new relationship, but that thread was abandoned between novels.) Anyway, the last book in the series came out six or seven years ago so I’m guessing it’s finished its run, and this series has now seen me through two Januarys in Columbus and I don’t know what to do now that I’m done.
I reread Patricia MacLachan’s Sarah, Plain and Tall, which barely qualifies for my “preceding birth” goal. I remember this being a Little House-sized book but it’s tiny and took me twenty minutes to read. It reminds me of a short story in its storytelling efficiency and the way its ending is an opening-up rather than a closing-off. Maybe because there’s this one driving desire at the center of the story (to have a mother again!) the characters felt so strongly drawn.
Watching
I finally made it to A Few Good Men, which doesn’t quite meet the pre-birth cutoff. I thought people were joking when they said “You can’t handle the truth!” is followed by Jack Nicholson’s character screaming about ripping out Tom Cruise’s eyes and pissing in his skull. But he really does say this! There’s a totally unnecessary suggestion of romance between the Tom Cruise and Demi Moore characters, but I have learned an important lesson from this movie, which is that sometimes you can succeed by placing your most irritating qualities before a person inclined to hate you. Good watch!
Also saw First Cow, not having any idea what to expect from it. It felt like an expansive movie despite the 4:3 aspect ratio and close focus on two characters, really interesting and visually striking. I did some nitpicking because I don’t believe the Toby Jones character would ship a cow all the way from “Saint Francisco” and then leave it to stand alone in a field at night, and also baking soda wasn’t yet in mass production but here we’ve got a guy in the Oregon territory with a store of baking soda. Whatever! A slow and meditative type of movie. You’ll have to watch it to understand what I’m complaining about.
The French Dispatch, which I’d been avoiding out of Wes Anderson exhaustion, but whose structure marries up perfectly with the aesthetic. A good movie for short story lovers and people with a dusty stack of New Yorkers next to the bed or toilet.
Corsage, in the theater. Ever since she poisoned Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread I’ll watch Vicky Krieps in anything. This is beautifully filmed, DID NOT end how I expected. Not totally sure I enjoyed it but I definitely found it interesting. The King has fake sideburns which he puts in a box at the end of the day (nice detail).
The Woman King, which I should have seen in the theater. Not a single Oscar nod???
And last of the month, Women Talking, which also amazingly didn’t get a single Oscar acting nomination. If you can see this in the theater I would; I really think it’s a movie that deserves your unbroken attention. I just started reading the book and now I’ll finish.
Eating
Have been going through Smitten Kitchen’s espresso-chocolate shortbread, delicious, easy, soon my body is going to be made of butter. Two different coffee cakes: King Arthur’s recipe using sourdough discard and, uh, King Arthur’s recipe using rye flour and cocoa. I also cooked up my Rancho Gordo black eyed peas, which have been pretty unsuccessful as luck-bringers though I do start getting excited around November to make Marcus Samuelsson’s black-eyed pea coconut stew. I’m frantically cooking through my bean stash, which I like to occasionally build up to unwise levels by ordering in addition to my bean club membership. Lukas Volger’s tiny cookbook Veggie Burgers Every Which Way is sort of a lifesaver in giving me new things to do with the beans, and his recipes tend to be both much shorter and tastier than your average veggie burger recipe off the internet. The sourdough starter is happy though I remain unsure about its future when I’m back in Philly where you can walk a few blocks and buy a great loaf of bread for $7 or $8. This month it’s given me some beautiful boules, sourdough pizza, sourdough biscuits, sourdough crackers, the aforementioned sourdough coffee cake.