Easing Off + Summer TBRs + art theft
May I recommend
Easing Off
For a long, long time (still?) I thought to exist was to be productive. To accomplish. To tick the to dos. This served me very well for quite a while, because I am good at getting stuff done. I am too neurotic to procrastinate; I am a quick study (except at the rules to Euchre) and I respond very positively (cravenly?) to external validation.
However, the longer I drag my aging, frizzing, increasingly lumpy body across this planet, the more I realise that the point isn’t to get gold stars or tick all the boxes or achieve the big win. I don’t actually know what the point is (friendships? Kindness? Two-bite brownies?) but I know “productivity hacks” is not it.
Anyway, all this middle-aged insight has allowed me to relax a little more (maybe?) and this is just a long-winded way of saying I am taking the summer off from the newsletter… Yes, the summer has only just started for me — here in Doug Ford’s Ontario, the children were in school until June 29th, so the start of my favourite season — the one where I am free of school lunch-supplies stress and am instead blessed with bored-13-year old-anxiety — is upon us.
Anyhoots, I shall return in September. Meanwhile, if you wake up on a Sunday morning pining for some of my insights or the days when Twitter would let me embed tweets, please revisit my back catalogue, which has gotten pretty extensive.
Here are my most popular posts from the past 12 months…
And just for fun, my first newsletter post (good God, I was talking about focussing less on productivity back then — is that all I talk about? Am I ever going to actually move on? No, it’s fine, human beings are works in progress and life is about the ebbs and flows of existence. We’re all just doing our best and we need to be kind to others and ourselves. It’s fine. It’s fine.)
Amy Sedaris, chilling out and Bernie as a Bat
Like we need MORE books added to the To Be Read…
Fifty of the Greatest Summer Novels of All Time
I have not read as many of these as I would like. I was pleased to see one of my all time favouritest books listed, though:
A Room with a View (the first Forster novel I ever read), was the first book I thought of for this list. The thing is, I don’t remember if it literally takes place in summer (although it partially takes place on Summer Street!), but it feels like it, to me. It’s about a group of Edwardian British tourists on an excursion to Florence where some of them (the younger folks among them) wind up feeling things and become changed, and then wind up having to confront all this when they return to real life in England, later on. So… discovering one’s passions while on vacation in Italy? Seems like a summertime story to me. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads associate editor
Guide to art theft
Two of my four novels refer to art theft (The Honeybee Emeralds and The Foulest Things). I’ve done a lot of reading about it. This is a great, interesting and funny article with hot tips from a very successful (until he wasn’t) thief.
Skylight entries, smoke bombs, and shootouts may be cinematic, but unless you want to go to jail, these are terrible tactics for stealing art. Violence and destruction in a museum only minimize your odds of success. Art crime, according to Stéphane Breitwieser, is best accomplished when no one knows that it’s happening.
Ooof, teenage girlhood is tough
I reread my teenage diary for a dose of nostalgia, instead I was horrified
A lot rang true here — especially about how one can be both bully and bullied.
I own nine of the most devastatingly embarrassing books ever written. They might be the only books that attempt to algebraically prove the existence of God 14 pages after the words, “I don’t want to touch his penis.”
Buy my books!
TikTok
My new fave TikTok series
Run free
Winston Chuchill’s yacht
Teaching robots how to chat
Camping with the family
Closet cleaning
First swim
Thanks for reading my weekly newsletter.
You can follow me on Twitter here and Instagram here and Facebook here. Also, check out my website