The Week In Recommendations 4.19.23

Transitional shoes; buzzy, twisty novels; and the teen rom-coms that made us.

This is the free edition of Rich Text, a newsletter about cultural obsessions from your Internet BFFs Emma and Claire. If you like what you see and hear, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Our latest podcast was about the disastrous reunion of “Love Is Blind” season 4. Rich Text is a reader-supported project — no ads or sponsors!

We’ve been reading…

I got my hands on an early copy of Jessica Knoll’s third novel, “Bright Young Women,” and I am racing through it. (It comes out in October.) The “Luckiest Girl Alive” author’s latest is a fictionalized version of a true story, centering on the sorority women at Florida State University who were some of Ted Bundy’s final victims. But Knoll takes pains not to focus on Bundy at all, referred to in the novel only as The Defendant. Because this story is not about him at all. It’s about the young women whose stories were lost amidst a rush of media attention for a destructive, mediocre white man. -Emma

Rebecca Makkai’s latest book, “I Have Some Questions For You,” a novel about a podcaster who heads back to the elite New England boarding school she attended as a young girl and ends up helping her students reinvestigate the shocking murder of her classmate, who was killed not long before their graduation. (I’m… sensing a trend here.) Makkai is an excellent writer, and the world she’s building leaps off the page. The first half of the book kept me absorbed through a distractingly torrid Miami afternoon this weekend, and I’m still turning the pages. But there’s a tendency to slip into careful think-piece boilerplate — boilerplate I tend to agree with, about the ethics of true crime media, the ubiquity of violence against women and girls, the injustices of the criminal justice system, etc. — that drags the book down at times. It’s not that I don’t want to read novels that address urgent issues like these, but I do crave a bit more inventiveness and panache in doing so. That said, I still have about 30 percent of the book left, so I’m keeping an open mind! -Claire

We’ve been watching…

Teen rom-coms! We’ve had so much prep to do for the podcasts, that I honestly haven’t really been able to watch much else. Luckily that work is a delight, because on Love To See It we are currently doing a series of deep dives on classic teen romances, like “Love & Basketball,” “10 Thing I Hate About You,” and “Easy A.” I love my job. -Emma

I did a plane watch! Thanks to my flight to Miami (I love vacation), I finally watched a movie I couldn’t get my hands on when it first came out: “Mr. Malcolm’s List,” a Regency romance starring Freida Pinto and Zawe Ashton as girlhood friends who team up to avenge Julia (Ashton) after she is publicly snubbed and made a laughingstock by the most eligible bachelor of the season. Mr. Malcolm, an excessively wealthy if untitled gentleman, has a rigid list of requirements for a future bride. After a conversationally inadequate outing with Julia, he decides she doesn’t make the cut. She is deemed unmarriageable after being so publicly found wanting, and she solicits Selina (Pinto) to play the perfect maiden and win his love so that she can turn the tables on him.
The cast is a delight; Pinto is as luminous and winning as ever, Ashton is perfectly bitchy and arch, and Sope Dirisu and Theo James are appropriately delectable as their love interests. The concept is frothy and absurd, less Austen than period romance novel (and what’s wrong with that?). But I was still left more underwhelmed than I hoped, with neither romance proving all that swoony and the script littered with more blatant anachronisms than laugh lines. Nevertheless, I’m all about the golden age of the Regency romance adaptation, and this was pleasant plane viewing. -Claire

We’ve been listening to…

Marshall Glaze’s interview with Nick Viall on “The Viall Files.” I’ve been in a post-LIB season 4 stupor, so this felt like the only content I could truly ingest. And frankly it was far more revealing than the actual reunion. The perks of having people conduct interviews who actually know how to conduct interviews! -Emma

The lefty Supreme Court pod “5-4” recently did a disturbing bonus episode about the well-documented segregationist beliefs of the former Chief Justice William Rehnquist, which was, sadly, extremely illuminating about his broad and deep history of right-wing zealotry and bigotry. As always, I recommend learning about the deeply rotten history of this country while laughing at dumb jokes and folding laundry; it softens the despair just a little. -Claire

We’ve been buying…

The perfect pair of slingback pumps! I got the PEDRO Icon Denim Pointed Slingback Pumps after doing a lot of casting about for comfortable slingbacks that would be casual enough to wear with jeans or dressy enough for a night out. I didn’t want a super high heel, and I wanted a pointed, elongated toe. These PEDRO ones fit the bill, and they come in a bunch of different colors and materials. They finally arrived and they are true perfection. Comfortable enough to walk around in Brooklyn, which is always the test. -Emma

Nisolo cross-strap sandals in bone (it’s shoe week, apparently!). Every summer I live in their huaraches, and this spring I decided I needed a sleek, white sandal option. And I’m a loyal shoe-shopper — because I have wide, stubby feet, most shoe brands simply don’t work for me — so I decided to try another style from Nisolo. (Their shoes don’t run wide, per se, but they’re very soft leather that shapes beautifully to your foot without a long, painful break-in period.) They are extremely comfortable, classic, and gorgeous — and sadly, the back straps tend to slip off my heel (the curse of stubby feet) but they’re otherwise so perfect that I’m determined to make them work. -Claire

If you liked reading this, click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack!

Give us feedback or suggest a topic for the pod • Subscribe • Request a free subscription