🦃 Sunday Sharies: November 2023
an eclectic Christmas music playlist, a campfire candle, the best tinted moisturizer, and more
Happy holidays! We hope everyone had a yummy Thanksgiving. There’s a lot of stuff we’d love to share that just won’t fit in our usual Thursday newsletter. Some of that stuff is here. Read on for a special collection of podcast, book, and miscellaneous other recs from your trusty Double Take duo.
— Jess Spoll and Jenni Cullen
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Jess: I had a few leftovers on my to-read-list from spooky season that I finished up this month. VenCo by Cherie Dimaline is a book set in modern day Salem and follows the origination of a coven of witches. I wanted whimsy and magic, but I found this to be underbaked and lacking momentum (2/5 stars).
The other one on my list was Holly by Stephen King. Although the story was perfectly disturbing in the usual Stephen King way, he made the puzzling decision to make Covid the main character of this book. It was mentioned (not exaggerating) every few pages. While I don’t mind the pandemic being used for temporal realness in works of fiction, I don’t need to know the vaccination status of all the characters in a book about murderous octogenarians (3/5 stars).
Jenni: November started out a little rough for me book-wise — I tried a few newish fantasies that were so disappointing, I had to DNF, including Once Upon a Broken Heart (1/5 stars) — but toward the end of the month, This is How You Lose the Time War and Tress of the Emerald Sea both came up on my library holds and turned things around.
The first is a surprising sci-fi epistolary novel that almost felt like reading a series of futuristic short stories or poems. The prose was refreshing after my disastrous DNFs, and I liked it more than I thought I would (3.5/5 stars). The second is a sci-fi/fantasy adventure story by Brandon Sanderson that feels a bit like The Princess Bride meets Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy meets Stardust. I started it a few days ago and am already nearly done and loving every second.
Jess: The day after Thanksgiving is the day I break out my trusty “Son of a Nutcracker” playlist. I’m a reformed Christmas-music-hater, and this is the perfect eclectic mix of modern fare and the classics, with Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett next to The Lumineers and Kacey Musgraves.
My audiobooks this month included my usual array of thrillers: Drowning by T.J. Newman (5/5 stars), The Couple at No. 9 by Claire Douglas (4/5 stars), and The Golden Spoon by Jessa Maxwell (4/5 stars). I would highly recommend listening to Drowning the next time you need to keep your adrenaline up (say, marathon training, for instance). And The Golden Spoon is for you if you like both murder mysteries and The Great British Bake Off.
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