If you’ve not made the yearly Australian winter pilgrimage to Europe (it will be me in August, but my instagram will be different, actually) and are instead reading this: hello! After many requests (two people asked), good chat is back.
To start, here’s a great bop of a song that I’m listening to inbetween Taylor Swift and Noah Kahan:
On the listening front, I’ve also been going on walks and listening to the movie draft episodes of The Big Picture podcast. They’re probably only great if you have a parasocial relationship with the staffers of the Ringer, but a particularly good one is their Robert De Niro draft.
On reading: I have to admit it’s been a busy few months so I haven’t been reading much online recently, but I have read a few books to get back up to speed on my Goodreads goal. Among my favourites over the last little while were books-of-the-moment Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, the cover of which you’ve probably seen a hundred times, and Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, which also sports a cover you’ve also no doubt seen many times. I liked both but felt neither fully lived up to the intense hype. I got Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel from a Vinnies; I really enjoyed it, but as I was reading it all I could think about was how I would have felt about it a) pre-Covid and b) before watching The Last of Us.
I also enjoyed two Australian books recently - I picked up Search History by Amy Taylor at Big W because of the cover design and Diana Reid quote - it was a 3-star read for me, but it was a quick, fun read. I also borrowed Crushing by Genevieve Novak from the library (Libby coming through again) - I thought the ending was a bit rushed and the main character fairly annoying, but I really liked the pacing and dialogue.
Beyond the reading, I’ve also gone back to rewatching pieces of Top Gear, which I first picked up in high school during my watching-late-night-TV phase. I don’t really know what the appeal was here at the time; I didn’t - and still don’t - know anything about cars and rarely knew who the guests were. During this late night TV phase I also picked up:
Cheers - sometimes you do just want to go where everybody knows your name???
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson - I miss Craig Ferguson and Secretariat to this day, actually
Cricket - thanks to the 2009 Ashes series in England, because it was airing on SBS that year and they reeled me in with an excellent set of promos (Wide World of Sports could never)
Among the other phases I had around this time was a serious movie phase (actually sat through Apocalypse Now Redux; to have that kind of attention span again!!) and an REM phase (Leaving New York is controversially my favourite REM song).
Please feel free to tell me your short-lived and/or ongoing phases.
Ok, now it’s time for tweets, but apparently Elon’s blocked the ability for you to embed tweets on Substack, so you’re just going to have to do the work and click:
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That’s it! @ me or email me with any thoughts, good links, books for my trip to Europe!