Hi there,
It's been a minute, in part because I've had a hard time finding new stuff to watch and read that I like enough to recommend. For some lucky enough to live in places with reasonable temperatures, summer is a time for outdoor fun, though for others, it's about finding somewhere cool to relax.
Watch
I feel like it's been really hard to find good, new TV lately, so I was pleasantly surprised with Netflix's Ripley series, based on the 1950s crime novel. I found the all black and white filming annoying, but it was enjoyable, despite being a little dark, and is a nice little mental escape to Italy.
Lately I've been watching documentaries that in some way explore the depths of human cruelty and try to untangle it. Hulu's The Contestant was truly mind boggling: it tells the story of a Japanese man who was tricked into doing a reality show in the late ‘90s in which he was starved and locked in a room for more than a year — and the show was one of the most popular in the country at the time.
And finally, yesterday I stumbled across Expedition from Hell: The Lost Tapes on HBO. It's a docuseries about an extremely ill-fated expedition in the early 2010s to cross from the Pacific coast of Ecuador to the Atlantic coast of Brazil on foot, cutting across the Andes and the Amazon. The expedition was led by an Israeli “survivalist,” a former special forces soldier living in Florida. He gathered a group of people utterly unprepared for the journey and made several people film the entire time; he verbally abuses every member of the group while seemingly enjoying the suffering of those he convinced to go with him. I'm not sure I've ever hated someone so much in a documentary, and I watch a lot of them.
Read
The Husbands is a perfect summer read. It's about a woman in England whose magic attic suddenly starts producing an endless series of husbands, and each time a new one arrives, her reality changes completely — her apartment looks different, she sometimes has a different job, and she can see the history of her relationship through her photos and text messages. Somehow the scifi part is pretty seamless, and it's a fast read.
Every Rising Sun is a modern retelling of Shaherazade that took the writer more than a decade to complete. It's not 1,001 nights, but rather a story of Shaherazade's life and what became of her kingdom. The amount of research into the medieval Middle East and incredible level of detail about the food and clothing is part of what makes it such a fun read.
See the full list of recommendations here.
Follow
Two soothing dog accounts I've followed in the last few months: Elvis the Lab, a dog in Sweden who gets a weekly spa day, and a family in the Pacific Northwest with a pack of rescue dogs that are endlessly patient and cute when they get a bath.
Do
Lately I've discovered the merits of nutritional yeast, which smells terrible but really adds flavor once it's mixed in. I've enjoyed it in this lemony leek orzo recipe and the miso beans recipe I recommended last time. Speaking of beans, I loved this creamy spicy tomato beans and greens recipe.
Also, after nearly three years of living through hellish desert summers, I finally realized a spring/summer comforter was in order, and I really like this super light comforter from Rest, which is relatively reasonably priced.
Until next time,
Rachel