Cover Your Bases #95: What I'm Reading, Watching, and Lifting To This Spring

Yeah, it’s Spring! This month, I am training for my July weightlifting competition, getting ready to hang out in LA with family, and busily watering my raised beds of cucumbers, tomatoes, mustard greens, and zucchini. I am also doubling down on using AI to get things done (it’s kind of amazing what’s possible) and looking forward to a quick trip back east for a dear friend’s 60th birthday. It’s been a while since I did this kind of roundup, so there’s a lot to recommend.

BOOKS

Five new books, all worth your time. But let me start with the one you may not have heard as much about: Aurora James’s memoir Wildflower.

I knew Aurora James primarily as an LA-based fashion Substacker and designer with strong, original taste. Wildflower offers the fuller picture: her founding of the luxury accessories brand Brother Vellies, which centers traditional African craftsmanship, and the Fifteen Percent Pledge — launched with a single Instagram post in summer 2020, challenging major retailers to commit 15% of their shelf space and buying power to Black-owned businesses. More than two dozen retailers have since taken the pledge, redirecting $14 billion in annual revenue toward Black and BIPOC brands. What makes the book so powerful isn’t the outcome — it’s how she gets there, reframing every setback rather than letting it stop her.

Susan Orlean’s Joyride is ostensibly about how she writes, but what makes it land is the honesty with which she connects the writing life to the personal one. She’s clear-eyed about how her first marriage affected her confidence and equally clear about what the second gave her — partnership and steadiness. The relationship with her son runs through it, too, warm and specific.

Belle Burden’s Strangers is a can’t-put-it-down cautionary tale about a woman with breeding, money, and every apparent advantage whose husband suddenly walks out. Part of the pleasure is the very human satisfaction of watching someone with immense privilege struggle more than you. The catch: a recent New Yorker piece revealed that, at the moment Burden was agonizing over possibly having to sell both her houses, she was independently worth over $60 million. It’s a good read. But jeeze.

Siri Hustvedt’s Ghost Stories is her memoir about the loss of her husband, writer Paul Auster. Hustvedt is thoughtful and unsentimental throughout about their marriage, Auster’s son Daniel’s addiction, and the loss of Daniel’s baby daughter, Ruby. A fantastic and powerful read.

Finally, Emma Straub’s American Fantasy — a novel set on a boy-band cruise ship full of fifty-somethings — is exactly what it sounds like and so much fun. It offers Nineties nostalgia, midlife self-consciousness, and well-drawn characters.

MOVIES AND STREAMING

The Christopers: Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers — Ian McKellen as an aging artist, Michaela Coel as the art restorer who ends up in the middle of his adult children’s scramble to make money from a series of paintings based on his former lover — is the kind of movie where the moral complexity keeps shifting under your feet. Brilliant ensemble acting, and the ending earns it.

Adaptation: Reading Joyride sent me back to Adaptation, which Orlean describes as based on her book The Orchid Thief, though it has not that much to do with it, including a character named Susan Orlean who is definitely not in the book in the same way. A Charlie Kaufman jam, delightfully crazy

Little Forest: We randomly found this movie available to stream and just loved it. Yim Soon-rye’s film follows a young woman who fails her university exams and retreats to rural Korea to regroup — reconnecting with old friends, becoming a farmer, and slowly making peace with a mother who left but also left her a safe place to return to. Unhurried gentle, and wise.

BEEF, Season 2: It took a minute — for me and apparently everyone — to accept that BEEF Season 2 would be a completely different place, cast, and set of themes from the compulsive Season 1. By the end of the first episode, I was hooked. Like The White Lotus, it has biting humor about the haves and have-nots; set at a plush country club acquired by a Korean billionaire, it does a sharp job of showing what massive inequity looks like for everyone involved. Carey Mulligan, Oscar Isaac, Charles Melton, and Cailee Spaeny lead the cast. The scripts are savage in the best way.

MUSIC

I’m using music as a motivator to get through heavy lifting and accessory movements at the gym. The same old playlists had worn out, so I started expanding. Three favorites in heavy rotation: Sofi Tukker, a beloved band I’ve rediscovered; Lunaluxe, whose incredibly catchy, slightly atonal dance music is exactly what you need under a heavy bar; and Noga Erez, whose song “Not My Problem” is just badass.

Sofi Tukker, Woof

Lunaluxe, Future Looks Like Wow

Noga Erez, Not My Problem

Thanks for reading! I am about to share a big download on the implications of AI automation for hiring in the nonprofit sector (not encouraging), and will no doubt return with more Style Granny sagas.

Best, Susan