Friday Reads 11.24.23
It’s Friday, friends, and you know what that means… let’s talk about what we’re reading!
I hope you’ve had a good week, and all my American friends had a delightful Thanksgiving! Mine was slightly different this year, as I celebrated with a different branch of the family, in the country of my roots instead of birth. It was a wonderful day with my cousins and aunt and uncle and my parents and brother, visiting our favorite vineyard and having a typical Italian meal with many dishes including lentils for good luck, a special local salami warmed and drizzled with olive oil, salami and prosciutto and speck with many cheeses, pepperonis, (which here are actually roasted peppers, not the small round salamis for pizza we know from home) breads and dried fruits and peanuts in the shell (!), plus several bottles of wine (I sadly still can’t partake properly but had a taste or two just for instructive purposes.) I have found as always the Italians do gluten free with no issue, and I have a new favorite special treat, gf biscotti. Molto buono.
My Italian is very rusty, but it’s been sufficient to get us around. Most Italians speak at least a little English, plus they do nice things like drop all the formative words in a sentence and use their bodies and hands and circumstances to indicate what they mean. So you don’t need to know complete grammatically proper sentences. You can break it down into the basics, say a simple word and point, and they get it. So long as you say Grazie all the time, and you fit right in.
All this to say, between brushing up on the language, the jet lag, the visiting, and the Iron Flame hangover, I haven’t done much reading. But I did bump into Heather Gudenkauf’s latest THE OVERNIGHT GUEST in the grocery store here, which was fun, and I’m reading a terrifying but beautiful horror novel by my friend and cohost Jeremy Finley, which is giving me nightmares but I can’t help but want to see what happens. It’s not out yet but when it is my Stephen King fans will LOVE it. Tori Eldridge has a new Lily Wong adventure, THE NINJA’S OATH, and my old friend Michael Sherer has a new Tess Barrett thriller, BLIND TRUST.
That’s it from me this week. How about you? What’s on your reading plate this weekend?
PS: A new craft post is coming for paid subscribers on Sunday…. Check it out here: https://open.substack.com/pub/jtellis...
