#weekend reads
I had big plans to get a lot done this morning, but I woke up feeling sleepy and instead thought about Julia Pierpont’s Among the Ten Thousand Things and started Caroline Zancan’s Local Girls, both of which I’m reading in preparation for next week’s party at housingworksbookstorewithrachelfershleiser.
I’m pretty sure Local Girls was written for me, friends. It’s everything I love in a book: complicated female friendships, women growing into adulthood, unraveling secrets and histories, a non-hateful view of women who enjoy observing celebrity culture, and a bonus promise of a death (maybe murder?) by the end. I’m only about 50 pages in, so I’m sure there are many more thoughts to come.
Among the Ten Thousand Things is wonderful and sad, too, and maybe wasn’t written for me but I completely understand why people are loving it this year.
The coffee I’m currently drinking is “Snickerdelicious” from Java Dave’s, my favorite local coffee chain in Oklahoma City. I don’t get it too often now that I live 1,500 miles away, so it’s always a nice treat when I have the beans. If you like flavored coffee, I highly recommend ordering a bag. It’s worth it.
What are you reading this weekend?
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Happy Friday from Miss Vanessa! What does your weekend hold (besides books and cat naps, obviously)?
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A shining fours stars out of five, and another winner from my wonderful local library.
Low key, honest, and beautifully formed, Julia Blackburn’s writng walked me through a strange prehistoric landscape collecting fragments of bone, flint and revelation. A walking meditation on lost lands, fossilised footprints and the things we leave behind. As I turned the pages I ceased to hear the storm outside. Find a quiet spot and read this fascinating book.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Jeremy Redmon, Alex Perry, Jeremy D. Larson, Kevin Nguyen, and Egill Bjarnason.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, our Top 5 sets an important and particularly sobering precedent. In the April 28th, 2017 edition of the Top 5, Jason Fagone’s extraordinary Huffpost Highline piece, “What Bullets Do to Bodies” was selected as number one. In light of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, this piece retains a startling relevance. It’s our number one piece this week. Editor Seyward Darby explains why.
Jason Fagone | HuffPost Highline | April 26th, 2017 | 7,799 words
I’m breaking from tradition here and highlighting a story that’s already been in one of these newsletters, and as a top pick no less. The circumstances demand it. On Tuesday, a gunman armed with two legally purchased AR-style assault rifles slaughtered 19 children and two teachers in a single classroom at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. As authorities worked to identify the victims, they asked parents to provide DNA samples. What’s unspoken in this detail is that the dead children were unrecognizable, or so mangled that it would have been an unimaginable cruelty to ask their parents to look at them. I can’t get this fact out of my mind, and it prompted me to re-read one of the best pieces of explanatory journalism in recent memory. Almost exactly five years ago, Jason Fagone spent time with the head of trauma surgery at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia to understand the damage that bullets do to bodies. What Dr. Amy Goldberg had to say about the Sandy Hook massacre could be said today about the shooting in Uvalde: “As a country, we lost our teachable moment…. The fact that not a single one of those kids was able to be transported to a hospital, tells me that they were not just dead, but really really really really dead. Ten-year-old kids, riddled with bullets, dead as doornails.” America is a country where the mass murder of children is followed by mourning and forgetting, but never action: Congress hasn’t passed a single piece of gun control legislation since Sandy Hook. Until that changes, Goldberg’s comment will be relevant again in another community, at another school. It’s only a matter of time. —SD
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Kick off your weekend with five great reads on Eurovision, West Coast road trips, the magic of alleys, the existence of demons, and an 89-year-old working cowboy named Boots.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Kerry Howley, Suzanne Cope, Micheli Oliver, Jeff Mao, and Rob Brunner.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Washington City Paper, Astra Taylor and Sunaura Taylor, Leslie Jamison, Mark Pupo, and Madeleine Aggeler.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Tamara Dean, Samanth Subramanian, Sasha Plotnikova, Steve Edwards, and Caity Weaver.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Paula Lavigne and Tom Junod, Lex Pryor, Sarah Treleaven, Zack Graham, and Laura Jedeed.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Josefa Velasquez, Wufei Yu, Tom Foster, Tim Requarth, and Ellen Ruppel Shell.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Rachel Aviv, Clare Gerada, Fatima Syed, Leslie Jamison, and Deb Olin Unferth.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Mstyslav Chernov, Deborah Cohen, Marina Benjamin, Johanna Hoffman, and Gabriella Paiella.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Sasha Archibald, Michael W. Clune, Victoria Livingstone, Danyel Smith, and Drew Magary.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Jason Fagone, Shannon Gormley, Nickole Brown, Jason Kehe, and Abe Streep.
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