Cataloging

Happy Sunday, gang! I thought I’d check in with a quick roll call of the best media I’ve been consuming recently.

First of all, there’s a motherfucking Ab Fab movie, and it is glorious. It’s all about Joanna Lumley’s dirty laugh and filthy sneer. I was SCREAMING in the movie theater. Must see.

Now for some books. I’ve been reading an unusual book about the social behavior of trees called The Hidden Life of Trees, by a German forester named Peter Wohlleben. (Read a lovely NY Times profile of him here.) It was a bestseller in Germany for several months and has been optioned for translation into several languages; Greystone is bringing it out in English this fall. There are a lot of touchy-feely and yet scientifically-sound ideas in this book that I’ve been enjoying thinking about. I have a feeling I’ll be telling you more about it as I go.

Mark Haddon is a writer whose previous books I truly loved. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: If you haven’t read this, you really ought to. As a friend (who is a good poet himself) said about it, “It would be hard to find a single word in that book that wasn’t just right.” I also deeply enjoyed A Spot of Bother and The Red House, his other novels for adults, so I was excited when I found out he had collection of short stories coming out. I found this book to be a mixed bag and a bit of a disappointment, though on the whole I think it’s impressive. I reviewed The Pier Falls for the Philadelphia Inquirer last week; have a look.

Also! Guys. Last week I was poking around a small indie bookstore I like in Doylestown, Pennsylvania when I discovered that Europa Editions has rereleased Bilgewater. Score! I fell so in love with the heroine in A Long Way From Verona last summer, and I’ve been meaning to read Bilgewater next, which also has a teenage girl protagonist. I keep meaning to buy it secondhand since it’s long out of print, or get it from the library downtown, but it’s been so miserably hot I haven’t felt like taking the bus there. You know how it is; I just haven’t gotten around to it. But then one day out of the blue, in the clean cool serene bookstore, there was a beautiful new edition of the book, just begging me to buy it. It looks like this:

Pretty, huh? So far it’s good, too.

Other stuff I like right now: Simpsonwave makes good getting-ready-to-go-out music. Sushi Cat is an excellent game to play when you need to decompress. The U.S. version of the show “Shameless” is just as rousing and cheesily entertaining as the British version was. That’s all I’ve got for now.