February 8, 2025

Five Things to Tell You Vol. 10

marriage stories, mystery date with a book, attention, and more!

Before we get started, thanks for moving with me from Substack! Did you miss the news about me moving? You can check that out here.

If you would like to tell all of your wonderful friends about me (pretty please?), you can direct them to my new landing page on Buttondown.

Next month, my husband and I will be celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary. Wait, what? 20? We met in the summer of 2002 when I was 21 and he was almost 30, we bought a house together two years later and got married and had our first baby right after that. It feels like yesterday and a lifetime ago, which I’m sure many of you can relate to.

Because of our long marriage, I’m always looking for stories that portray marriage in all of its complicated and messy glory, and I ended up encountering three novels in January that really just hit my exact sweet spot for marriage stories.

Read Rental House by Weike Wang (2024) if you want a marriage story intertwined with commentary on immigration, in-laws, and vacation houses. I was uncomfortable with this one for a bit but grew to love the main character and the marriage fiercely by the end.

Read Out of the Woods by Hannah Bonam-Young (Jan 2025) if you want a contemporary romance marriage story set on a couples therapy hiking retreat. I adored this sweet and sexy story, and ended up sobbing in bed reading it much past my bedtime so I could see what happened at the end.

Read (or listen to!) The Heart of Winter by Jonathan Evison (Jan 2025) if you are feeling eyes wide open about the fact that we’re all getting older every single day, so are our spouses and children, and the end will come eventually. This tale of a couple and their 70 years of marriage, their farm on Bainbridge Island, and their inevitable decline absolutely wrecked me in the best possible way. It was phenomenal on audio and one of the most perfect depictions of the state of being human that I have ever encountered.

My 7th grader and I just devoured both seasons of XO, Kitty on Netflix over the past month, and we LOVED IT. The way I described it to my friend was, “imagine all the teen drama of Dawson’s Creek, but at a boarding school in Seoul and happier.” And, of course, MUCH more queer and culturally diverse.

Jenny Han is the queen of YA romance and her 2014 novel To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is still a huge hit in my middle school library more than a decade after it came out. The 2018 film had a lot to do with that, of course! This show XO, Kitty is based on the little sister from TATBILB, and was never a book. I’m trying to be okay with that, because if it were in print, it would just be flying off my library shelves!

Yet again, I am a noncritical consumer of movies and TV. If I don’t like them, I don’t watch them or write about them. XO, Kitty was pure dramatic delight for me and my daughter - no notes. I had a lot of fun diving down a rabbit hole afterwards to explore my theory of this show being an Emma re-telling … and look what I found! Reddit FTW.

For the first time ever, I am trying out Mystery Date with a Book in my library! This started just as me asking my principal if we could do a Mystery Date with a Book staff book exchange at an upcoming staff meeting, and then I decided to go all in with books for students too.

The number one lesson I have learned so far is that preparing all of the books is SO TIME CONSUMING, and there is no way I would have been able to prepare for the student portion without a lot of surprise helpers last week. I am very, very grateful I remembered ahead of time to put the barcode numbers on the outsides of the packages, since I didn’t want students opening the books before checkout. I also made them vow to read at least the first chapter of the mystery book they chose!

One of the parts of my job I am putting a lot of time and energy into this year is creating a STAFF culture of reading, so I am very excited to see how this book exchange goes at our meeting! I am planning to bring about 20 wrapped books since I know that many teachers will have “forgotten”. Oh, don’t worry! There’s a book for everyone, even if you didn’t bring one! EVERYONE TAKE A BOOK! TAKE. A. BOOK. READ. IT.

Perhaps many of you are totally aware of this already, but I need to share my love for the Safari Reader View option for the Mac / Apple people out there. As I work to wrestle my focus back onto my online reading, the best place for me to do that is using Safari Reader View on my laptop or iPad.

Just look at the drastically different reading experiences!

Regular browser …

In Safari Reader View …

At work, I also love using Reader View to easily export distraction-free articles to PDF for sharing with staff or students vs. just a regular link. Articles in this format are so much easier to annotate, too.

If you live in the Apple world, here is how to get to Reader View on your laptop and on iPad / iPhone.

Speaking of attention, I listened to The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes after his publicity team managed to get his book onto so many of my podcasts the week before it released. He definitely got my attention!

I loved the background that Hayes provides about the history of media and the attention economy, and was already fully on board with his thesis prior to listening to the book. All those podcast interviews prior to actually getting the book definitely helped!

Truly, this book is one of the reason I finally decided to leave Substack as a creator, and I requested the print version of the book from the public library so I can go back through it for a closer read. I may have more reflections for you in the near future ~ stay tuned!

That’s all for this week ~ thanks for reading! Please reply to this email or use the link below to leave a comment to chime in about any of these things, or to share one of your own ♡

Thanks for stopping by!