2023 Top Content

January

What Place Do You Call Home? (Cup of Jo)

mmhm. This one resonated.

“We lunged for our twenties and thirties in bigger places that could hold so much more of who we wanted to be. Places that would allow us to grow beyond the selves our city could hold or witness.”

“Last summer I went back to New York for the first time in five years, and there it was: my old life, in those same streets, and yet I didn’t feel at home, not at all, even though it is still where I’ve spent the biggest swath of my adulthood. I peeked into my dilapidated apartment building with my best friends and it all felt like so long ago. A friend who lived through that period saw the pictures of me outside that door — the one I pushed open for nine of the 12 years I lived there — with nothing but a tote bag on my shoulder, and she said it made those years — our harrowing, hilarious twenties and early thirties, when we had nothing but the bags on our backs and the imagined weight of the worlds on our shoulders — come rushing back. Who were those people? What were they running after?”

“What am I getting at here? Perhaps it is this: that “home” now feels like a fractured reality — many cities on a pie chart, each an incomplete sliver of a whole. Nothing substantial enough to outweigh the other parts.”

Everything Everywhere All At Once

I decided to host an Oscars party this year (an Oscar Mayer Oscars party, in fact), and part of my homework was to watch more Oscar-nominated movies. This movie was zany and sentimental, touching and laugh-inducing. I think it could’ve have been taken down a notch or two, but the creativity of it all is astounding.

Book of Acts

I sent this text to my core group of friends after reading Acts:
Reading the end of Acts rn and y’all there’s some crazy stuff. But the community! The on mission, arms linked nature of it, but also the love and life shared. They journeyed through so much stuff — resurrections and jail and riots and just breaking bread — but together. Just thinking about all of that in context of our community and it fills me with desire and hope.

Y’all Don’t Know a Damn Thing About JaMarcus Russell (The Players Tribune)

The design! The tone! The structure! I thought this article was so well done (props to both JaMarcus and his editor).

This is Me

Imma be honest. I cried watching this video. Watching people being physically and emotionally moved by music is beautiful. Watching people let music course through them, who sing from a deep, deep place.

Also smiled like a fool watching this.

Essentially all of Zach Bryan

Lol I discovered this month that when people had been referring to Zach Bryan, they had not been referring to Zach Brown or Luke Bryan.

February

Jacob Banks

Thanks to my blended playlist with my friend Mel, I was introduced to the music of Jacob Banks. I especially love his collabs with other artists (Bang, Our Story, Coolin’, etc.). Soulful / R&B / Hip-hop.

March

“The Case for Hanging Out” (Slate)

This article made me a little nostalgic, a little sad. Thought-provoking.

“We’re all losing the ability to engage in what I view as the pinnacle of human interaction: sitting around with friends and talking shit. …
Take risks, she writes. Create opportunities to spend unproductive, unstructured time doing nothing with other people. That’s why I asked Liming, a complete stranger, if I could fly up to Vermont and hang out for a day. Because she is down to hang, she said sure. So, after dinner, when her husband, Dave Haeselin, asked if I wanted to come over to their house and continue the hang, I said, “Yeah, I can stay out a little later.” …
But nowadays, though hanging out with friends still happens — around living rooms and fire pits, on scheduled and rescheduled college-friend weekends — it’s an effortful pastime that requires coordination of calendars and a flurry of planning texts.

Demon Copperhead

Dang!!! This book! I was in awe of this book after a few pages in. By no means is it a beach read, but when you read it, you feel like you’re reading a literary masterpiece. First half is a bit slow, and the second half raced to a climax and conclusion. I appreciated Barbara Kingsolver’s creative approach to David Copperfield, and how she reimagined it for the Appalachians + Oxy epidemic. Personally I was not a fan of Poisonwood Bible because there were no redemptive character arcs, but this one did have some redemption! A long read, but a worthy read.

April

“In a Stay-at-Home Pandemic, a Sportswriter Finds a Silver Lining” (WSJ)

I first read this article in 2020, after Tom Perrotta had already passed away. And I wept. I wept for this stranger, this kind tennis journalist. I read it again, and loved and felt the weight of it all over again.

“When I was originally diagnosed, in December 2016, I was told I would be lucky to make it three years. Next month, it will be four.

I’m greedy — I want more. But my brain cancer is persistent. …

It is a tough hand, and as I continue to battle this, I am seized by moments of anger and depression. And yet my frustration is balanced by this odd fortune of quarantine, or semi-quarantine, or whatever you want to call how it is we live today.

In ordinary times, I’d be walking my sons — they are 11 and 8 — off to school in the morning, then waiting around at home for them to finish. … Instead, most days, everyone is here — me, my wife (who’s working from home) and my children (who are mostly doing virtual school). We’re jammed up here for hours, in each other’s laps, in each other’s business. It might drive other parents crazy. I think it’s the greatest.

… I hope there are other people out there like me, finding silver linings amid a pandemic. This situation has caused tremendous stress and difficulty, but it has also provoked new awareness of what’s truly important. It’s brought me closer to the people I love, and I feel loved. I am grateful forever to my wife; I wouldn’t have gotten this far without her. I’m grateful to everyone in my orbit who continues to reach out, text, or manage a socially-distant visit. These interactions are reprieves. I want all of them. I may be the last person excited for Zoom calls.

I don’t want to sugarcoat a pandemic, or my own personal situation. It sucks. It makes me mad. It makes me crazy. It makes me cry. I’d give anything to be back at Wimbledon one last time, watching Federer and Serena on that perfectly-manicured grass. … But I don’t just miss the big things. I’d give anything to do even the mundane things I used to do before.

I’m not sure I’ll get back there. What’s next for me is unclear. I know that I’m still fighting, trying to stay in this match, amid a crisis that’s unsettled for everyone. But I also have a strange sort of gratitude for what has happened, how it altered our lives, and gave me an unexpected chance to spend almost every minute with the people I love the most. These past few months have underlined an obvious truth: parenting is hard. Family life can be hectic. It’s meant a lot of chaos around the house, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. For me, chaos is life.”

Hello Beautiful

Loved it. Of course, I love anything with multiple POVs and beautiful writing that sucker punches you. Def bookmarked a couple of quotes that I just adored. I kept wanting to psychoanalyze all the narrators. I loved the element that community played in the book — the community that you’re born into and the community that you choose (or chooses you). I find it interesting that the author’s last book Dear Edward dealt with grief/loss/etc and this one had some overlapping themes. Definitely got choked up a time or two.

Adored the Little Women tie-ins because any girl with sisters knows that she’s tried to sort herself and her sisters into their four personas. And perhaps I loved it because I saw a bit of myself in Sylvie (also Cecelia).

Having read quite a few of these multigenerational, family saga books (ex: French Braid; Ask Again, Yes; We are the Brennans), I’ll say that this one tops the list and executes the category in a compelling, attention-grabbing way that keeps you reading it until midnight in the bedroom closet because you’re at the beach, sharing a room with your sister who’s asleep 🤪

A Heart That Works

Damn. This book. Grief is messy and comes in snippets of memories. Memories that make you laugh and cry all at the same time. That is this book. One moment you are laughing at a funny story about Henry, and the next, your heart is sinking at the reminder, the gravity of his absence. I have not lost a child, but I have lost someone. While Rob might not like this comparison, his words reminded me of A Grief Observed.

P.S. I cried when I read Rachel’s response.

June

The Wishing Game

What a darling book! I teared up at the end. Maybe because I finished reading it at 2am on a Tuesday night. Overall — would read again in a heartbeat. In some ways, it felt a la Mysterious Benedict Society. My one critique would be that it was too short. Or rather that there were so many characters and plots that the author could have explored further, but didn’t. Like Jack’s backstory! Or Hugo’s! Even the other competitors. I think it would have made it richer.

August

2021 Braves Postseason

Did I rewatch almost the entirety of the Braves 2021 postseason on Youtube? You bet. Comfort food but make it sports. What a time to be alive.

No Two Persons

I started and finished this book on a beach in southern Portugal. It was charming and reminded me why I love books. The same book will speak to two people differently. Mulling on it some more, I realize there was this intentional vagueness of the book this book centered on. What mattered was the people, and how the book met them where they were at.

Of course, I have edits I’d make to this book, but when I’m so charmed by a book, I can’t help but give it 5 stars.

October

Chris Renzema

November

Catherine, Called Birdy

The story you didn’t ask for, but I’ll tell. It was a Friday night, and my bestie Mel went with me to get my cartilage pierced (!!!). Mel was about to move to NYC (sob) and this was a last huzzah of sorts. Alas, they wouldn’t let her go in with me, but she provided moral support from the car. But, post-piercing, we went to her parents’ house, down to the basement, and pulled up this darling movie to watch. It is witty and irreverent and charming in all the ways. We laughed so hard watching it over mugs full of tea. Highly recommend it, and I think I partly loved it because of the person I watched it with.

The Ogress and the Orphans by Kelly Barnhill

December

Unsolicited Advice via Lisa Hensley

I adore these kinds of lists. A few faves:

“5. Be a superfan of something. Right now, for me, it’s Taylor Swift. Next year, it might be something else.”

“7. Pray for your community when you are walking, or even driving, your neighborhood or town. Try it in the mall, on the sidewalk. You’ll see differently.”