Winter Reading, Watching, & Wandering

Getting Lost, a new epic novel, Joan Didion's Le Creuset, tobogganing with dinosaurs, and a brief Paris mystery

As we head into the holiday season, I thought I’d share a few things I’m loving this winter. I’ll be sharing reading, watching, and wandering recommendations, plus brief notes on writing, once a month.

Reading

Memoir - I’ve been reading Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. A wonderful companion to the book is this reading and interview with Ernaux at Shakespeare and Company in October of 2018 following the English language publication of The Years. I kicked myself when I realized the event happened when I was living in Paris, so I could have attended! At the time, I knew nothing of Ernaux. I didn’t buy a book by her until 2021, when I was back in the US and picked up a copy of The Years at Green Apple Books.

Ernaux grew up in Normandy, and it’s evident in this interview that she didn’t grow up in Paris—simply because her speech is slow enough that I was actually able to understand much of it, which was rarely the case when talking to Parisians. You don’t need to understand French, however, to enjoy the Shakespeare and Company recording; Ernaux’s translator appears at the event with her and translates everything. Because I’m a little bit obsessed with this book, I’ve written a longer post on Getting Lost, including some of the quotes that spoke to me and commentary; you can read that post here.

Essay - Completely at Sea, by Pamela Paul for the New York Times, about the writer’s fear of cruises. The author shares how her fear of cruises (primarily social) is quite different from that expressed by David Foster Wallace in his essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” I once went on a cruise. I, too, will never do it again. I used to think maybe I’d do an Arctic cruise, just to see those beautiful glaciers before they’re gone, but after the rogue wave incident, I’m crossing that off my to-do list. (I did once take a boat through the Beagle channel off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, but that was not a cruise, and that is another story.)

Fiction - Winter is a wonderful time to sink into a deep, complex, beautifully written novel. To that end, I was lucky to get my hands on an advance copy of In the Time of Our History, a gorgeous novel by my friend Susanne Pari, author of The Fortune Catcher. The novel, which comes out on January 3rd, is a multi-generational saga described by Rabbi Alameddine as “a kaleidoscopic look at what it means to be an Iranian-American, what it means to be an American – what it means to be human…a must-read tile in the new mosaic of American novels.” You can pre-order the book here.

Biography - Shirley Jackson, A Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin

Like everyone, I read Jackson’s classic short story “The Lottery” in high school. But we had been living on the Bay Area peninsula for several years before I realized Shirley Jackson spent her childhood in Burlingame, less than a mile from the home where my husband grew up. Jackson gets a nod in The Wonder Test, which is set in a fictionalized version of Burlingame, because it would be impossible to write a suburban suspense tale set in Burlingame without mentioning Jackson!

Jackson memorialized Burlingame in the novel The Road Through the Wall, described by Penguin Classics as a satirical exploration of “what happens when a smug suburban neighborhood is breached by awful, unavoidable truths.”

Lit news and notes from around the web

Items from Joan Didion’s estate were put up for auction, and someone paid $11,000 for a few untouched notebooks still wrapped in cellophane. Meanwhile, her well-used set of Le Creuset cookware, with which she clearly had a much more intimate relationship than with the unused notebooks, went for just $8,000. Her iconic Celine sunglasses went for $27,000. The Cut called the entire affair a “clusterfuck of bidding madness.” Meanwhile, we regular folks will have to make do with our heavily read, dog-eared, and much-written-in Joan Didion books.

In LitHub this month: who knew this was a thing? A column called Life Advice for Book Lovers, by Dorothea (the columnist goes by first name only), featuring topics such as “finding solace in the sad and sapphic.”

Watching

White Lotus, Season 2: Imagine a satirical thriller set on in a lush tropical resort. That’s season 1 of White Lotus, starring Jennifer Coolidge and Connie Britton. Season 2 is set in Sicily. My family visited Sicily in the early spring of 2019 while we were living in Paris and in search of a little sunshine. Instead of sunshine we drove our rental car into a blizzard, then hunkered down for three days in a stone house on the top of a remote hill. But the second season of White Lotus is not set on a remote hilltop in a blizzard. It is set in sunny Palermo, which we did not visit…so that’s a new destination on my travel list. The second season is even better than the first. If you haven’t started it yet, I’m jealous!

Weird: The Al Yankovitch story: I haven’t laughed this much at a movie in ages. It’s a well-structured, clever, delightful movie that will make you revisit what you thought you knew (or didn’t) about Weird Al. Much of the movie is intentional hyperbole, but one piece is very much true: every time Weird Al parodied a song, the musician he parodied saw a big spike in sales, a phenomenon that came to be known as the Yankovitch Bump.

Writing

It’s been a while since I had a new book out—July of 2021, to be precise. That was The Wonder Test, a suspense novel about a Silicon Valley suburb on steroids. It’s the first in a series of three, and I’m working on book 2 now, but it’s going more slowly than anticipated. Sometimes writing is like that. I’ve also been writing about travel and the writing life over at The Wandering Writer, where I’m attempting to coalesce my ideas about a memoir-in-progress. You can listen to Les Oeufs, a brief Paris mystery, here. This long period of transition in our lives (a move overseas and back again, our impending empty-nestedness, the loss last year of a beloved member of our family) has been a transitional period in my writing as well. I’ve been burrowing into the short essay form in writing and in reading, taking things slowly, trying to see what sticks. It’s not the most efficient way to write, but it’s the way that feels most natural at this particular moment in life.

I wrote a very short story, “Tenderest,” exclusive to subscribers to this newsletter. You can read or listen to it here.

Snow Visit

My family and I spent three days in Bozeman, Montana, last weekend. We were there to tour the film program at Montana State University for my son. Bozeman is a friendly town with a happening Main Street, plenty of food options, and the biggest, most well-curated Ace Hardware you’ll find anywhere. It reminded me a bit of the old Cliff’s Hardware in the Castro district of San Francisco.

The ski resort closest to town was closed, and we weren’t up for a long drive over icy roads, so we opted to toboggan instead. Tobogganing is the dilettante’s way to enjoy the snow. Both cheap and convenient, it’s a nice alternative to a long day renting skis and skiwear, putting on those uncomfortable suits, and getting oneself onto a terrifying ski lift only to have to get oneself back down the hill at speeds not meant for human bodies. We picked up three toboggans for twenty bucks each at Target on the way to the toboggan park. We wore our own clothes—no snow pants needed (although we were the only people there not wearing snow gear). We happened to be at Dinosaur Hill on the day of the annual dinosaur toboggan race. We watched the dinosaur race, then spent a couple of hours sliding down the hill in fresh powder. It was delightful.

That’s all for now. What are you reading, watching, and listening to? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Michelle Richmond