March 15, 2025

Five Things to Tell You Vol. 15

Korean food, book shopping, muppets and more!

Well, hello there! So happy to see you today! Settle in with your favorite snack and let’s dive in …

You all know I love going down bookish rabbit holes, and my recent one involved … Korean food! 

Amy Allen Clark started it all, with her personal recommendation of a new fiction release that she comped with J. Ryan Stradal. Well, OF COURSE I jumped on that immediately given my deep love of Stradal’s works that combine family and food in such rich and unexpected ways. And while I was reading that book, I was perusing the YA shelf at the public library and saw a book about a cooking show that tied in perfectly with Amy’s recommendation, and then both of those reminded me of a highly popular memoir on my shelf that I had kept meaning to get to, but hadn’t yet. 

This week-long deep dive into Korean family and food was such an absolute treat!

Read I Leave It Up to You by Jinwoo Chong if you love complex stories of families and heritage with food and restaurant life woven throughout. This one was a bit different than I expected, but I loved it so much! Don’t miss this podcast episode with the author!

Read What’s Eating Jackie Oh by Patricia Park if you love cooking shows and unique teenage stories. There may be a lot of YA cooking show stories these days, but this one was a bit sharper than many and really stood out.

Read Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner if you, like me, did not read it when it was EVERYWHERE back in 2021 and want a gorgeous, wrenching, PERFECT memoir about grief and heritage. And of course, Korean food. Check out this new interview with Zauner!

I don’t know if this term is experiencing a resurgence, or why I have heard it multiple times on podcasts in the past month, but “chaos muppet” appears to have been coined back in 2012, and somehow I missed it for the past 13 years? 

I honestly don’t think I would have used this term for myself before recently, but the first thing that popped into my head the other morning when I was trying to describe to a friend the absolute bonkers situation I created for myself before work was, “I’m such a chaos muppet.” I think my current status might simply be a case of trying to do too many damn things, so I’m keeping a close eye on my chaos muppet status.

When I was at my work conference earlier this week, a friend and I were able to make a literary field trip to my very favorite Milwaukee bookstore, Boswell Book Company. Take a look at what I picked up!

• Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

• I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys (she was a keynote speaker at the conference!)

• Max in the Land of Lies by Adam Gidwitz (2nd in a middle grade WWII series)

• Original Sins by Eve L. Ewing

After our gloriously extended book shopping session, we went for a long walk along the Lake Michigan shore and, given the unseasonal warmth, I even dipped my toes in the lake and walked barefoot on the beach. HEAVEN.

In search of understanding the current state of our nation and how the hell we got here, I recently listened to the audio version of Money Lies and God by Katherine Stewart, and am also listening to the ongoing podcast When the Wolves Came.

I may not be able to fix anything by myself, but knowing WHY we are where is are is slightly helpful ~ the answer is CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM. These aren’t for the faint of heart, and I definitely have needed a light happy read or listen to chase them. It’s horribly scary.

My library lesson this week for 7th grade was about using voice dictation on student iPads to complete written assignments, write emails, etc. I made the switch from always typing on my phone to almost-always dictating just last year, and I swear that it has completely changed my brain - I found myself verbalizing the punctuation in a VOICEMAIL I was leaving not long ago and realized that my approach to communication really has fundamentally shifted. 

New to dictation? Here are some tips to get started on an iPhone! Note that theoretically Apple products auto-punctuate, but I tend to still verbalize punctuation since it has been so often typed incorrectly for me when done automatically.

That’s all for this week ~ thanks for reading! Please feel free to 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 things ♡

Thanks for stopping by!