Show & Tell: A Slow Week?
Unstacked Digest for the week of February 17 -23
This is Show & Tell where I tell you some things I loved from the week and the one thing I hated, plus round up everything else going on around these parts. The first half of Show & Tell is free to all. The adoration and hateration are for paid subscribers only.
I’m not sure what is going on this week, but I feel like I didn’t have any thoughts or opinions this week. I barely even hated anything. Am I going soft? Or maybe the week just felt slow because aside from the SAG awards there wasn’t really a big culture event like there has been the last few weeks. Either way, I am glad to have a slow week in hot takes. Even I need a break from myself being so damn opinionated.
I wrote this whole thing and then watched Jane Fonda’s speech at the SAG Awards and logged back into Substack to just say she is a legend and I am so thankful she said all the things that no one else is saying in these rooms and with these platforms. Thank you, Jane Fonda. A leader every damn day.
This Week in The Stacks
Love is Blind is back (barely) and so I went there.
Rebecca Nagle, author of the fantastic book By the Fire We Carry came on the podcast to talk about tribal lands and indigenous erasure.
I launched my latest project, a nonfiction series called “The Nonfiction Files” and kicked things off with my very own taxonomy of nonfiction books. I’m so jazzed about this series, even if I have no clue what it will turn out to be.
Books I Read This Week
The Real Lolita: A Lost Girl, an Unthinkable Crime, and a Scandalous Masterpiece by Sarah Weinman
In 1948, Sally Horner, an eleven-year-old girl, was abducted, moved around the country, and sexually abused for over 21 months by a man pretending to be her father. Sound familiar? This story was one of the inspirations for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. This book tells the story of both Horner’s life and the novel she inspired. This could have been an article. I was interested in the story, but there just isn’t that much information here for Weinman to draw on so instead she just drags things out. She is reaching to flesh out this book with speculation, enhancing the importance of minor players in the story (like family members who barely knew Sally and police officers who fielded tips). The structure is wonky and feels all over the place, which I attribute to throwing anything and everything the author could find about the case into the book. I loved learning about the similarities between the novel and the real life case, but then again, it could’ve been an article.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
In a country called Panem that keeps their outlying districts in order by forcing one boy and one girl (ages 12-18) to fight to the death in a televised event call the Hunger Games, we meet Katniss Everdeen the girl tribute from District 12. I don’t know how to say this, but I love this book so much. I read it for the first time in 2010 and devoured it, I did the same thing this week. It snapped me out of a reading slump to the point I was up at 3am reading it. Collins has made a YA book that doesn’t feel preachy but still has a message. I was more sympathetic to the trauma in the book this time around, but it never felt like too much to bear. I really just love this book and can’t wait to reread the other books in the main series and check out Collins’ forthcoming prequel, in March.
Fave of the week!
Homebodies by Tembe Denton-Hurst
A novel about Mickey, a Black writer who has her whole world flipped on its head when she is fired from her publication and writes a searing manifesto about racism in media. I am a Tembe fan, and loved moments and scenes in this book. When she writes into the mess, she is at her best. And lucky for her reader, she does it a fair amount. I was less enthused about the more moody and brooding scenes where Mickey is thinking about what to do next and evaluating how she is feeling. I am not a character novel girlie, and this book is much more that than the aforementioned chaos. I did find myself losing interest in sections. This is a perfect novel for folks who like a little drama, but not in an intense or unsettling way (what I like) but in a slow burning sort of way.
Housekeeping
I have been writing a column at shereds.com for a few years now, and every year or two we shake up the routine. This year we’re calling it “Required Reading” where I will be giving book recs to people around pop culture moments. This first installment is book recs for the different type of Super Bowl viewers1.
Things I Love…
Pop Culture
I started watching the comedy TV series, Mo, about a Palestinian-American refugee in Houston trying to do life against the constant fear of ICE and his own immigration status. The show is pretty funny, and feels timely as hell. I am only on the first season’s third episode, but its funny and charming and I love Mo (both the character and the actor). I kept seeing people talking about it on social media, because the second (and final) season just came out. I totally get it.
Politics
Yosemite National Park workers hung an American flag upside down as a protest sign of distress. Brave. Brilliant. Resistance. This comes in response to Trump’s firings of National Park workers. This is so brave and powerful. I love that all the tourists at the park will have this in the background of their photos.