The Week In Recommendations 8.21.24

A Kamalanomenon at the DNC, summer reads, Emily (still) In Paris, and travel essentials!

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Claire has been reading… 📖

“Help Wanted” by Adelle Waldman, the novelist’s long-awaited follow-up to “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.” Her first novel was a smash hit, situating her, in the eyes of many readers and critics, as a sort of modern-day Jane Austen, gently satirizing the love life of a certain type of Brooklyn literary guy who presented himself as evolved and sensitive, yet treated women no better than his less feminist male forebears. It took the literary world by storm just as I was pivoting from my entry-level position at HuffPost to covering books, and navigating dating in New York as a Midwestern transplant with a soft spot for writers. In short, it was the right book for a formative time in my life. I haven’t read it in years, but “Nathaniel P.” has imprinted itself on me in the way that books you read as a child often do. 

It was a good, psychologically engaging book, but I didn’t remember being struck by the writing, so I was a bit ambivalent as I opened her latest, which is set in a big box store that is recognizably Target, though it’s called “Town Square”: a ubiquitous but declining chain, which positions itself as a more upscale alternative to Walmart despite offering a similar shopping experience. The novel focuses on the team known as Movement, which unloads and breaks out truck deliveries to restock the store, as they band together to help their incompetent boss get a promotion to store manager in hopes of opening up a team manager position for themselves. Waldman tells the story through a host of store workers – the bosses and the hourly workers – as they all scheme toward their hoped-for promotions, or toward securing enough hours to get health insurance, or toward getting hours that work around their available childcare or second jobs.

This kind of labor and economic precarity is underrepresented in American contemporary literature, and that’s largely, I know, because so many people, like Waldman and myself, enter the publishing world from elite colleges and middle-class to wealthy backgrounds. I appreciated the book’s nimble depiction of the world it depicts, how it traces the webs of social connection and tangled motivations and unseen hindrances. But it did end up feeling a bit flat to me – mostly, I think, due to the prose, which is more clean and unobtrusive than stylish. Michelle Goldberg, in an NYT column about the book, called it “breezy and almost sitcom-like,” which feels right (though the “almost” is important). I could see a good TV show coming from the book, but I wanted a bit more zip from the writing to hold my attention on the page. Maybe if I reread “Nathaniel P.,” I’d find the same. Waldman has pitched both her books so fortuitously to the political moment — from the pop feminist “the guys I’m dating are Nice Guys (TM)” moment to the pop Marxist “late capitalism is killing us” moment — and perhaps in a way their non-style makes them feel even more as if they’re artifacts of a cultural moment rather than works of literature. “Help Wanted” wasn’t quite for me, but if they ever make a movie of it, I’ll be first in line.

Emma has been reading… 📖

Honestly, nothing super notable this week. However, I’m leaving tonight for a 10-day vacation in Portugal and Spain, which means that I’ll finally get some quality reading time by various bodies of water. (I do my best reading on a pool/beach lounger.) I picked up a copy of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s “Long Island Compromise” at my neighborhood bookstore — I absolutely adored “Fleishman Is In Trouble,” so have been dying to read her second novel — and downloaded a bunch of books onto my Kindle in anticipation of this Euro trip, including Ashley Poston’s “A Novel Love Story” and Alison Espach’s “The Wedding People.”

Claire has been watching… 📺

Season 4, part 1 of “Emily in Paris,” everyone’s favorite hate-watch. Our girl Emily or, as her latest ex-boyfriend Alfie calls her, Cooper, is still in Paris and she’s still doing the damn thing. She’s having emotional entanglements with her dear friend’s longterm, if somewhat off-and-on, boyfriend and then getting huffy that she’s catching heat over it! She’s sighing heavily over her self-defeating tendency to be SUCH a good person that she never goes for what she really wants (footage not found)! She’s wearing shiny micro-mini dresses and clashing accessories to a weekday coffee date, then to spontaneously cook her ex breakfast, then to the office! She’s coming up with tired marketing ideas for French fashion brands on the fly, mid-meeting, to cover her own ass! And yeah, she’s doing it all with increasingly frizzy bangs and a dark red lip! Can’t wait for the second half of the season to drop.

Photo Credit: Netflix

Emma has been watching… 📺

It’s been a real high-low mix of media consumption this week. My highlights? The DNC and the “Love Island USA” season 6 reunion! Because women contain multitudes!

On the DNC front, it’s been kind of extraordinary to watch the way that the Democratic Party has rapidly transformed from slowly death marching into another Trump era, to enthusiastically and joyfully fighting for Kamala Harris’ campaign. (I mean… Lil Jon during the delegate roll call???? Deceased.) The energy is contagious — even through a TV screen — and I feel a will to get involved and fight leading up to November’s election in a way that I haven’t since 2016. I was particularly struck by the deep bench of talent we have in the Democratic party, and highly recommend watching Raphael Warnock, AOC and Jasmine Crockett’s speeches. Hope… it’s a weird and foreign feeling?

The “Love Island” reunion was both too long and too short somehow. There were way too many ancillary Islanders present — truly could have cut half of them — which made it drag at parts, but also by the end I felt like we had barely scratched the surface. Watching Nicole and Kendall try to negotiate their flailing relationship in real time in the wake of a lie and a revenge porn scandal was truly painful to watch, and it felt like Ariana Madix (who to her credit did a great job given that it was her first time hosting a reunion) should have intervened earlier. However, I did enjoy watching Kaylor finally tell off Aaron in a way that felt final, and I loved how much of a united front the OG girls + Liv seemed to be. PPG for life!

Claire has been listening to… 🎧

“Hysterical,” previously recommended by Emma, which I’m just getting around to.

Emma has been listening to… 🎧

Our soon-to-be new Bachelor, Grant Ellis, on The Viall Files. ABC’s rollout of the news felt… last-minute. There was no GMA interview, no live segment during the show itself, and not even a custom social post ready to go. (That last part is truly insane.) So I’ve been eagerly listening to Grant’s podcast rounds to fill in the gaps about who he is in a way that “The Bachelor” franchise simply failed to do. I really warmed to him after listening to his conversation with Nick Viall. Grant seems mature, thoughtful, sweet, charming and ready for a long-lasting relationship. Here’s hoping they do a hell of a lot better for him than they did with our first Black Bachelor, Matt James.

Claire has been buying… 🛍️

This Amazon dish drying rack, which replaced an Oxo drying rack that had become the bane of my existence. Oxo is celebrated for developing kitchen products with a touch more thoughtfulness to actual user experience, coming up with design tweaks to common tools that make them more comfortable or effortless to handle. And then there’s this drying rack, a collapsible center-hinged drainer that, unlike my old bamboo drainer, had no edge on either side to discourage glasses from simply rolling off the side and shattering. (RIP to one of my last remaining wedding registry wine glasses.) It also drained into a pan instead of onto an absorbent mat, which seemed like an excellent idea, except that the only way to drain the pan was to totally empty the rack and tip the whole thing over. In practice, it just collected cloudy water. So I went looking for something with edges and a drainage spout, and I found this two-tier beauty. I beam whenever I see it next the sink, and I take genuine pleasure in both filling and emptying it. When I catch a stream of water trickling into the sink from the drainage spout, my heart lifts. When I put a glass in it to dry and don’t immediately have to lunge to catch a water glass tumbling toward an ignominious end on the kitchen floor, my soul sings. More than any other recent purchase, it has made my life concretely better.

Emma has been buying… 🛍️

Travel-size hair and skin products for my trip to Portugal and Spain, because hadn’t restocked my minis since I went to Paris in February. I snagged mini versions of JVN Air Dry Hair Cream (this stuff is truly a godsend when you don’t want to bring a bunch of heavy hair tools on a trip) and Blowout Styling Milk, Thayer’s Rose Petal Toner and Vanicream Facial Cleanser. Also made sure I have enough blister pads and pimple patches. That ~glam~ life!

Claire has been making… 🧶

Sheet-pan chopped salad with chicken, a hearty summer salad recipe from Kay Chun. I love a sheet-pan recipe, especially given the way I typically cook now. It’s funny to look back at mother-of-one Claire, who waited until the precious babe was asleep for the night to break out the pots and pans for the parents’ dinner. Though we had exactly enough adults at home most nights to divide and conquer — one to cook, one to go mano a mano with the kiddo — I felt too much ambient stress to focus on cooking while he was awake. Now we eat as a family, or the grownups wouldn’t eat much at all. When Greg is slammed at work, I throw marinades together and roughly chop veggies while the preschooler demands that I “watch this” every 30 seconds and the baby scoots around the toy-strewn living room until he gets bored and crawls over to gently latch his wet, newly toothy mouth on my ankle. That’s how I made dinner the last couple of nights, including this warm salad. It wasn’t too exciting, but it also wasn’t too difficult, and it didn’t demand too much of my over-taxed attention. The saltiness of the feta is essential, so we used vegan feta. A very nice, very simple summer supper.

Emma has been making… 🧶

Since I’m leaving town on Wednesday night, I haven’t been cooking much. There’s nothing I hate more than buying groceries that you then have to throw out or leave to rot two days later. Such a waste! I have however been making dinner reservations at a couple restaurants in Porto and Comporta. If anyone has recs for Porto or the Duoro Valley — I was in Comporta in March so I have a better sense of the area — please drop them in the comments! I’m so ready to drink a bunch of delicious wine and gorge myself on seafood.

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