Happy Friday,
Cue the music, brew that pot. The humidity’s finally left Minnesota, and I’m so excited to wear pants, listen to new Phoebe Bridgers, and enjoy the end of summer with pizza and tequila old fashioneds.
Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:
- I love staring at people’s bookshelves, so this list of David Bryne’s books (which he turned into a public lending library at a 2015 art festival) was fun to read through. Unsurprisingly, lots of music books I’d never heard of.
- The “How I Write” podcast has so, so many interesting writers on the show, and the Anne Lamott episode was packed with great advice on writing and living. I especially liked her note on using a thesaurus: “You have to amass a kind of battered old toolbox if you’re going to get anywhere with writing.”
- I finally saw the Odyssey last week, sneaking out on a Friday afternoon with a huge bucket of popcorn. The movie’s based on Emily Wilson’s translation (I liked both “The Odyssey” and “The Iliad” from her! More fun than Fitzgerald), and her new book out next month sounds great.
- I’ve been reading about the Transcendentalists this year — it started with Robert D. Richardson’s “First We Read, Then We Write,” then Bruce Nichols’ new “The Emerson Circle,” and now I’m reading Laura Dassow Walls’ Thoreau biography, and I’m giggling at the story of that time Thoreau started a wildfire and felt bad about it for years and years.
- “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” Thoreau’s very popular amongst young adult Chinese readers. I read Walden in my freshman-year J-term course in college, a wonderful one-month, one-class “mini-semester” that I usually filled with books and coffee.
- Phoebe Bridgers has a new album out, and I’m a sucker for the vocoder on the very first track “The Outside.” I first loved vocoder from Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek,” but fell in love with the sound in Bon Iver’s vocoder-adjacent “715 - CR∑∑KS,” and more recently Lorde’s “Clearblue.”
- As much as I yearn for deeply experiencing each season as it comes and goes, it seems I like to read out-of-season — because I started reading Dan Simmons’ “The Terror” last night after a Barnes & Noble employee recommended it to my “I’ve been reading too much Stephen King” query, and I was immediately transported to the cold, frozen north pole when an 1840s steamship (same decade Thoreau started his wildfire!) is trapped — and haunted — by something sinister on the ice.
- Loved this person reading “The Count of Monte Cristo” in one sitting (21 hours). I don’t think I have the attention span for marathon-reading, but this one for “The Power Broker” this fall could change my mind.
- As if I needed another reason to read more Le Guin. (I just got her “Steering the Craft” this month and am excited - and intimidated - to work through it.)
- Been following Ed Roberson’s Mountain and Prairie podcast for years. Very excited he’s putting together a book club for folks who love public lands and the American West.
See you on down the dusty trail,
Isak