Bits #65
things to read, watch, listen to, google!
Good afternoon booksenbitters, and apologies for the no show last week. A flurry of freelance jobs, the toddler’s 3rd birthday, a sick bug for the other two, and an ongoing journey with gastritis… all walked into a bar.
Speaking of: I need to carve out some time for a longform project I’ve been trying to break the back of for a while, so I’ll be taking a little break in April to focus. But while I might be ducking offline, Books+Bits is going nowhere.
I’ve been beavering away, commissioning writers I love - best-selling authors, award-winning DJs, comedians and memoirists - and the roster is looking so delicious, it’s more than likely you’ll never want me back. (I’ll still be editing, and popping in and out of the Comment section.) I am so excited to see my guest editors spin their magic!
On with today’s recs.
Under the paywall: books for when it’s all too much; how Gail’s became a political lightning rod; the latest teeny tiny fiddly thing to bewitch my household; K-Pop and the Hybe megalodon; befriending my vagus nerve; Barry Keoghan and social media abuse; why not all celebrity activism is made equal; 3 great things I bought last week (including the best gift for a toddler); and my thoughts on the Louis Theroux’s Into The Manosphere doc (a cool month after everyone else.)
Last week I had the pleasure of interviewing J.R. Thornton, the author of the deliciously compelling new novel Lucien. It’s about two Harvard roommates - charismatic, wealthy, bon viveur Lucien, and shy, working class art prodigy, Christopher (who Lucien renames ‘Atlas’, because it’s ‘sexier’) who collaborate on an art forgery scheme. It’s got shades of The Secret History, Catcher in the Rye, and The Great Gatsby, and it’s fascinating on intersectional privilege (the knowledge barriers and social cues that come with wealth) and absurd Ivy League idiosyncrasies - yes, there really is a club at Harvard called The Hasty Pudding Club and yes, it really does cost $5k to join. I think it’s going to be a beach hit of the summer.
the interview took place in the Jessica McCormack townhouse, which meant we were surrounded by mouth-watering jewels The next evening, I had the pleasure of interviewing Nelio Biedermann, whose novel, Lázár, has been translated into 28 languages. Nelio is just 22, and this isn’t even his first novel - he wrote his first when he was 16. It’s a lyrical, visceral, magical novel - poetic and bawdy; absurd and tragic - about an aristocratic family, the Lázárs, and 100 years of punishing Hungarian history. It’s based on his own family and it has the lushest cover I’ve seen this year. The interview was filmed by a brilliant videographer and I’ll be sharing a video of the interview on Books+Bits later this week.
this time in Hatchards, Britain’s oldest bookshop <3 I was interviewed by Jess Cartner-Morley for her piece on how smart became cool, for The Guardian. It’s a pithy title for a rigorously reported piece, about how despite living in a period of anti-intellectualism (or perhaps, because of) pop culture has become interested in all things clever. She writes:
“The cultural heat runs counter to the general direction of travel. Long-term studies show sustained declines in reading across much of the anglophone world. In the UK, a survey by the charity the Reading Agency found that leisure reading among adults has fallen steadily over the past decade; in the US, the National Endowment for the Arts has reported a sharp drop in literary reading since the early 2000s; in Australia, similar trends show fewer adults reading books regularly, particularly men. Faced with this decline, the book industry is using fashion as a lever with which to exert counter-pressure… And so reading is more visible than it has been in years.”
I’m used to reading podcast reviews by the beady-eyed Times columnist James Marriott, so it was fun to listen to him on the mic for once, hosting an eloquent, pacey, fact-filled jaunt into how reading made our brains for the BBC. The premise of this three-part audio series is that many people are struggling to read (a desperate Marriott even got rid of his smartphone) and that reading has lots of benefits. But what are they? And are they really at risk, if we don’t read? It’s not remotely didactic and has some brilliant talking heads like the novelist Naomi Alderman, who I could listen to all day.
Favourite thing I read last week was this *specific* paragraph from a piece in The LRB by Andrew O’Hagan, sent to me by a reader:
“A couple of hacks I know who worked for the Express years ago were determined to get the words ‘moist gusset’ into the paper. They’d put it into their copy and, every time, the sub-editors would catch it at the last minute and take it out. Eventually, on an especially busy day, they invented a Swedish playboy called Moi St Gusset and wrote a piece for the social diary about his late-night frolics in Mayfair. Bingo. The piece went straight in and everyone got ten years of laughter out of it.”
Adore, obviously.
Incase you are interested in my baking, here is a bunny I made my son for his 3rd birthday. (Last year’s Gruffalo was better.) Two notes: cake bandages are a revelation and modelling chocolate is so much easier to work with (and tastier) than marzipan.
This is a brilliant piece by Zeynab Mohamed on her Ramadan beauty rituals, a pleasurable, bonding activity with her mother and her sisters - which she is also conflicted about.
“In between the layers, we talk, we pray, we laugh, accumulating more hours together. Time not everyone gets. I feel lucky. I feel grateful. I mumble extra prayers under my breath, just to make sure that gratitude is acknowledged. Somewhere along the way, skincare—and beauty more broadly—has become entangled with Ramadan in a way that feels… commercial, and very off. It’s become a conversation about consumerism, about self-optimisation, about having more. “Ramadan skin”, “what you need”, “must-haves”. Entire routines built not around faith, but around fixing and buying. I’ve participated in it myself—written the articles, made the recommendations, sleepwalked into endorsing the idea that Ramadan requires its own curated shopping list. A new moisturiser for dehydration, a mist for long fasting days, an essence to revive “tired” skin—as though tiredness isn’t simply part of the fast. As though it isn’t meant to be felt. As though it’s not a lesson—to come out the other side changed.”
3 things I observed last week that made me feel like my (a) mum:
beige leggings - I did a double take on multiple occasions in town last week, thinking ladies were just prancing around without trousers
a man doing incredibly extravagant leg swings around a lamp post by a pedestrian crossing while ‘warming down’ from his run, almost kicking me in the face multiple times, as I waited for the light to go green
that every single drink from Joe & the Juice costs a tenner. What? WHAT!? Never again will I worry about the price of this Substack.
It’s a slips-down-a-treat 7/10 for Nicole Kidman’s new thriller, Scarpetta. In no particularly order: liked the stuff on AI Griefbots; Jamie Lee Curtis is a stand-out; I thought we’d moved past naked murdered women on screen (tell don’t show, people); I can’t look at Simon Baker without thinking of Andy’s withering line to him in The Devil Wears Prada, “I’m not your baby”. Satisfying in the moment, but might not remember it by next year.
It’s a 9/10 absolutely gripped for Louis Theroux’s latest documentary, Into the Manosphere, which by now you’ve read 87 pieces on, but here goes anyway because this is one of the areas of modern life I am most interested in - and not just because I have two small sons and in my most anxious moments worry that they might steal my mic and start podcasting from their bedroom.
