Links for December 31st + some books
Bucatini, Star Wars, the Bee Gees, Piranesi, Sense and Sensibility
Hope you’re having a good holiday! And I hope 2021 is a bright one, when all is said and done.
Links
If you haven’t read this piece about the national bucatini shortage, it’s a real delight.
A small-business owner whose real claim to people’s business is that he’s a very nice man.
This is from a million years ago, but if you have ever wondered what order to watch Star Wars in (originals + prequels), this case is incredibly well argued.
If you watched The Crown, this woman doing impressions of each character is highly entertaining.
Not a link but the Bee Gees documentary on HBO is really good.
Light book commentary
As mentioned, books. I read a lot of them this year (25, including three for work). I also read a lot of sort of chaos stories, or ones about apocalyptic situations. Along those lines, if you are looking for classics: The Plague, because nothing is new! If you are looking for deep cuts, and these are both dark books so beware: Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall (a woman wakes up to find herself the last woman alive) and Anna Kavan’s Ice (disorienting thriller where the earth is turning frozen while an unnamed man searches for a troubled woman).
Among the total, I would probably have said that tied for first were The Powerbroker (it really is a banger) and maybe The Plague or Frankenstein (which is such a strange, unexpected book about the Enlightenment).
But then I read Susanna Clarke’s new novel, Piranesi.
Isaac Fitzgerald had really made the case for the book as a puzzle, which is what sold me on actually picking it up, and I’m so glad I did. If you’ve read Clarke’s previous book Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell, this one isn’t much like that, which was more like an 800-page Austen novel about two magicians. Hopefully without giving anything away, though it falls within the realm of a book about magic, Piranesi shifts genres a bit, written in a dryly funny, English style, with a lot to say about isolation, memory, and time. (If any of that’s not your thing but you’re intrigued, this is actually a pretty quick read, so you wouldn’t have to linger on it in the event you didn’t care for it.) It’s a weird, sad, lovely book — but sad in the way that life can be.
In under the 2020 wire, I also just read Sense and Sensibility. I’d picked it up in middle or high school after reading Pride and Prejudice, and stopped reading because I didn’t want to, like, diminish the top tier memory of reading the latter; I suspected Sense and Sensibility wouldn’t be the same. And in fact I liked it nowhere near as much as Pride and Prejudice (or Persuasion). But it’s still a great read, obviously, and practically a screwball comedy next to those other books, devoted to Elinor Dashwood’s terrible year. Elinor herself rules, a sort of prototype for the 20th century novel character who has to tolerate events of comedic but escalating social despair; the actual conflict of the book is whether this character can make it through without alerting anyone how upset she really is. Here she is literally leaving the room so the man she thought loved her can catch up with another woman:
…almost every thing that was said, proceeded from Elinor, who was obliged to volunteer all the information about her mother’s health, their coming to town, etc. which Edward ought to have inquired about, but never did.
Her exertions did not stop here; for she soon afterwards felt herself so heroically disposed as to determine, under pretense of fetching Marianne, to leave the others by themselves; and she really did it, and that in the handsomest manner, for she loitered away several minutes on the landing-place, with the most high-minded fortitude, before she went to her sister.
And she really did it! Stay gold, Elinor Dashwood!
A note on all this
Thanks for subscribing. Hope you enjoy. The goal here is just to offer up some links you may have missed, and maybe the occasional commentary on something in politics or a book I may have read that you, the reader, might enjoy. If you have thoughts on any of this, hit me up at katherinemillernyc@gmail.com or just tweet at me.