Literary Obsession, Boundless Narcissism, and Not One, But TWO Orange Cocktails
Plus: The return of Sarah's new favorite YA author
Hello friends!
First off, in a wildly original move, I can highly recommend going on vacation for a few days. Spain was delicious, both in the culinary sense (València’s markets are things of gastronomic beauty) and in the it’s-hot-and-sunny-and-why-do-I-live-in-England-again? sense. I also got some prime reading time sitting in the Jardín del Turia and (less romantically) on EasyJet, so I have some excellent recommendations from my vacation reading for you.
Also, the next edition of the newsletter will be coming to you from sunny (I hope) California, so any recommendations of books I should buy while I’m haunting East Bay Booksellers, Omnivore Books, and Green Apple Books would be more than welcome!
Recently I read and loved…
The Bookseller’s Tale by Martin Latham
I feel like it’s a whole new level of obsession that I enjoy reading books about books and the people that write, publish and sell them. But just like when I spend an hour swapping book recommendations with a friend, there’s a real pleasure in going so deeply inside baseball with another equally-obsessed reader.
This is a truly nerdy book, for sure. It’s also an argument for treating books less like sacred objects that must be read in reverent silence and kept in as untouched a condition as possible, and more as containers for our own thoughts and emotions. Latham is for scribbling in your books (his chapters on annotations and marginalia are fascinating and bawdy in equal measure), and for treating books as the comfort objects they are. He’s against snobbery and censorship, singing the praises of booksellers across the centuries who defied the law and prevailing mores to get books into readers’ hands. If you need another reason to feel good about walking into a bookstore despite an already teetering to-be-read pile, this is the book for you.
(If you’re curious about other great books-about-books, my other two favorites are Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman and The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee.)
The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson
This book was shortlisted for the Comedy Women in Print Prize, and when I heard the author lugubriously read aloud a hilarious list of the central character’s dislikes (a short sample of which includes “wallpaper; exercise; English people with good French accents; umbrellas; ‘health food’; tomato-based pasta sauces”) I immediately had to read it. And The Exhibitionist is technically a comedy, which on the surface is making fun of a certain kind of bohemian upper-middle-class north London milieu. But my God, this book is dark, too. Ray Hanrahan, formerly famous artist and he of the extensive list of dislikes, is a black hole of narcissism, a pill-addicted bundle of neediness and contempt for most of humanity. The contortions and contradictions that his family, particularly his equally talented but extremely traumatized wife Lucia, maintain to prevent Ray’s tantrums and rages are brutally painful to read. Mendelson’s characterizations are perfect, in that I felt both like I knew these people and also wanted to scream at them to run away a lot of the time.
A Single Thread of Moonlight by Laura Wood
I wouldn’t ordinarily write about two books by the same author in back-to-back newsletters, but when insomnia struck before 5am one day this past week, I needed a read so genuinely pleasurable that it wouldn’t make me resent being conscious for hours before sunrise. A Single Thread was exactly what I required. It’s set in the same universe as An Agency for Scandal, but is a stand-alone story - Cinderella, but with a grumpy, snarky Prince Not-So-Charming and a heroine with hands equally deft with an embroidery needle and a knife who’s out for revenge against her evil stepmother.
One of the (many!) things I love about Laura Wood is that while she writes a good fairy tale, she doesn’t really do soft heroines whose hearts are brimming with goodness. Her female main characters are spiky, smart, with a strong sense of right and wrong and the will to actually do something about it. Her good guys do find love, but they vanquish the bad guys, too. Extremely satisfying.
I also enjoyed…Eclipse the Moon by Jessie Mihalik (who continues to be the queen of feminist space opera romance)
And I mixed…a Marmalade Hanky Panky and a Tom St. Clements.
You know all about my obsession with Plantation’s Pineapple Rum, but this week I got my hands on my other favorite flavored spirit: Tanqueray’s Seville-orange flavored gin, called Flor de Sevilla in the UK and Sevilla Orange in the States. To celebrate my lovely citrusy acquisition, I made two quite different drinks.
A barman friend on Instagram years ago recommended that I try stirring a Hanky Panky with this gin, and the half teaspoon of black, bitter Fernet Branca does bring out both the bitter orange peel taste of the gin (hence Marmalade) and the spice of the sweet vermouth. It’s amazing how so such a small quantity of a liquor can make such a delicious difference.
At the much more straightforwardly refreshing end of the spectrum, orange gin makes for an extra fruity Tom Collins. Oranges and lemons are a classic British flavor combination (called St. Clements after a nursery rhyme about the bells of London churches, in truly eccentric fashion), and my campaign for orange-lemon to replace lemon-lime as a default soda flavoring begins here.
Tom St. Clements
2oz (60ml) Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla/Sevilla Orange Gin
1oz (30ml) fresh lemon juice
1/2oz (15ml) rich simple syrup (2 parts sugar to 1 part water, dissolve and leave to cool)
Soda water
Shake the gin, lemon juice, and simple syrup over ice, then double strain into a large ice-filled glass (Collins glasses are designed for it, but I used this instead) and top with soda water.