A buffet of holiday reads...
Good articles...random reads...everything you need for the break.
I hope you’re enjoying this very strange time of year where you’re hopefully not working (shout-out to my mates in retail who are very busy!). If you’re lucky enough to have a break (like me) I thought I’d share some good reads to enjoy.
I’m still in a bit of a Covid fog but tomorrow I’m going to house sit in Auckland which I’m really looking forward to. We will be by the beach so the kids will get to have a try-again holiday, after our last one didn’t work out so well!
I’d love to know what you’re reading. My sister bought me The Other Side Of Beautiful by Kim Lock and I loved it so so much! It is just gorgeous. A great, light holiday read. I’m also enjoying Her Majesty’s Royal Coven by Juno Dawson. It’s on audiobook so I haven’t been able to read it as fast as I’d have liked.
Anyway - if you’re on your phone, here’s a wee menu for you. Pick your fave snack or meal!
Ice cream reads - fun, funny, silly, or light. Perfect for summer.
Avatar 2 is finally here – and it’s like being waterboarded with turquoise cement
This great review of a Christmas movie on Netflix - “My rule for Christmas movies is that they either have to be good, or they have to be insane.”
The Most Random Celebrity Couples of 2022 - The little boy from 'Love Actually' is all grown up and he's dating Elon Musk's ex-wife.
Benoit Blanc's silly little bathing suit could (and should) murder me.
‘Wednesday’ And The Enduring Appeal Of The ‘Anti-Cool Girl’
Daphne And Ethan Obviously Had Sex On That Island
I Love My Partner, But I Wish We Didn’t Live Together
An update on the emu conspiracy:
Roadside burgers - sometimes perfect, could give you the shits and make you sick.
Meghan Markle is getting the Amber Heard treatment - Online trolls are using a familiar playbook
They’ve lost the plot’: leading cosmetic doctor says under-30s are overdoing Botox and fillers - Instagram generation views ‘tweakments’ as a status symbol says King of Botox, but safety concerns won’t go away
Violent Delights - The serial killer media industrial complex rages on, but what has it taught us? Very little about the crimes in question, and much more about ourselves.
The unbearable lightness of BuzzFeed - BuzzFeed built a digital media empire in part by aggregating viral content from social media. A decade later, what’s next?
Obsessed with the idea of haunted houses so I’m into this (CW: Sexual assault): The more we pulled back the carpet, the more we saw’: what I learned when I bought a house with a dark past.
For $11.99 a search, DiedInHouse will trawl through more than 130m police and court records, news reports, obituaries, death certificates and credit histories. For belt and braces, his team then perform a manual search to “try to fill any holes the algorithm might have missed”.
They Were Labeled Witches. They Just Had Dementia.
A delicious meal - Your favourite comfort food or something you’ve never tried that you now absolutely love.
Making Magic in Times of Loss - "Burning down my old life meant I was free to build a new one. The gift of loss is that you can fill that emptiness with something new.”
All too often, we just take on the traditions we inherit. In the beginning, these traditions can feel like gifts, moments of continuity from one generation to the next. But after years and years of working to keep them up, to bake, wash, wrap, smile, dress, shine, sparkle, and then clean, they can become generational curses. The burdens of our mothers passed along to us. And we hold to them because we love our mothers and our grandmothers, or we want to try to love them at least. But I’ve come to believe that love should be about freedom. What are we holding onto these traditions for if they aren’t giving us joy? Why can’t we let them go?
My Biggest, Fattest Year Ever - “…But I tell you what I couldn’t have done: I couldn’t have done it all while waking up every day and deciding to declare war on my mind and my body. I’ve done it before. It takes up so much energy. It is a full time job. And it doesn’t even pay well.”
Constraints: A Hometown Ode: “When I was in high school, ambition meant two things: escaping my hometown and becoming a writer. I’d planned to be worldly in a blurred sense that included handbags, passports, and publications. I never planned to move back to my hometown, until at thirty-three I did.”
A touch of moss - Inside a rainforest or on the city pavement, moss asks so little yet offers so much: a tactile encounter with time itself
Embrace the whakamā, embrace the mamae -“The reo journey is hard and confronting, and a lot of the time you just have to push through. There’s no skirting around it, especially if you’re Māori and carrying the language trauma that many of us do.”
A really fancy meal that challenges your taste buds, isn’t always easy to swallow, but is an experience.
The Safest Place - An incredible piece of journalism from The Oregonian. Reporter Noelle Crombie spent the past year at Rosemary Anderson High School in Rockwood, visiting most weeks, sitting in classes, walking the halls, attending assemblies and talking to students, teachers and staff. Her work, alongside photographer Beth Nakamura, continues The Oregonian’s effort to delve deeply into the toll of record violence, mostly shootings, that has left more than 200 people dead in Portland and Gresham in the last two years.
The Demon River - “On the night of November 15, 2021, British Columbia’s Nicola River sounded like thunder.” On the one-year anniversary, J.B. MacKinnon recounts an extraordinary flood that laid waste to homes and lives—and the idea that we can control nature.
Haunting the archive - The media's obsession with my mother changed my relationship to grief.
I kept searching for my mother's name in her own obituary for years, as if I'd just missed it, like it was a typo. I realize now that this was the terror. This is the condition of slave-making: To be obliterated in the text that makes you its object. To be obliterated even in death, but also reanimated.
Surviving in America - A beautiful comic on the aftermath of anti-Asian attacks in America.
In this piece called Swamp Boy - a medical mystery, Kris Newby retells a family’s horrific 18-month ordeal to uncover the cause of their son’s psychotic break down. It’s illustrated with comic book art by Mado Peña - an incredible way to tell this powerful story.
An American Girl - At 10, Caitlyne Gonzales survived Uvalde’s school shooting. Then she became a voice for her slain friends.
What have you been reading? Share your favourite links and book recommendations!
Want more?
The Spinoff’s most-read stories of 2022.
And of course - my most read posts of 2022!
Enjoy the reads and have a Happy New Year!
x Love Emily x
Excellent recommendations, the fattest but happiest year resonates with me and was a good reminder to pull my head in - the togs need to make more appearances! A book I read in almost one sitting just recently is The bookshop at the end of the world by Ruth Shaw. She runs an amazing and cute bookshop in Manapouri and her life story is incredible. So shocking, so many heart wrenching moments but a happy ending! One of the best autobiographies I've read.
Happy new year Emily and Emily Writes readers (I think we need a collective nickname, like EW-ers or Writes Sprites or the E Dub Club).
This buffet is not helping my resolution to read more books and fewer internet articles, heh.
I'm currently reading a non-fiction book by Chris Hedges called War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. It's extremely grim, but it sure puts the problems in my life into perspective.