Friends! Hello. Happy New Year!
I had a lovely, low-key Christmas with my family and honestly the most glorious week afterward, doing absolutely nothing. I read, I knitted, I listened to records and did a thousand-piece puzzle, I took afternoon cat naps with my actual cat, I watched a movie every night. I needed a break and it was so good to get one.
This week I’m back to work, but trying to allow the feeling and practice of rest to stay with me in the off hours. Some years I’m eager for the fresh start of the new year and go running into January, but this year the holidays are hanging on and it feels like the right thing—I’m even still listening to a bit of Christmas music. (Note to self for next year: Should I lean hard into Christmastide? Leave the tree up, save a Christmas present for Epiphany? We’ll see.)
I hope that if you celebrated a winter holiday of any kind, it was warm and lovely (and if you didn’t, that that was warm and lovely too), and that you’re finding some ease in the new year. There’s plenty of time to take more on later. I think you’re doing great.
What to Read: State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett
Last year was a weird reading year for me. I read 28 books, a handful of which were wonderful and a lot of which were…OK. I thought I would love them! Many of them were good in various ways and I don’t regret them! But I didn’t love them.
But right at the end of the year, Ann Patchett—and Friend of Heart Eyes Allison, who delivered a whole stack of her books to my doorstep—swooped in and saved me. Allison and I had been to see her in conversation at our local arts-lecture series, where I instantly developed a huge crush and resolved to read all of her books right then, right that second. (I had enjoyed The Dutch House but had not gotten any further in her considerable backlist.)
I began with State of Wonder, from 2011. I had never heard of it, and it blew me away. I cannot stop telling people about it. And now it’s your turn! It’s the story of a doctor-turned-drug-developer who travels to the Amazon to investigate the death of her officemate, and that is all I can say about it except that it is lush and suspenseful and compelling and surprising. It’s changed the way I think of Patchett as a writer, the kinds of stories I expect her to tackle and pull off and the emotional places to which she’s willing to take the reader. I loved it so much. Maybe you would, too?
What to Cook: Stratas for January (or Anytime)
I’m sure you’ll be surprised to hear that part of bringing the holiday lifestyle into this first week of January has been figuring out what to eat. Am I planning a second round of cookies for this weekend, just because I didn’t get to them before? MAYBE. But also, I turned my New Year’s Eve fondue leftovers into a strata, or savory bread pudding: dumped all the dippers—cubed bread and bits of potato and broccoli and salami—into a casserole dish and baked them with some eggs and milk and dijon and a little bit of sharp cheddar, as a little homage to where they came from. (The fondue cheese was long gone.) It’s been a gift, something cozy and filling and not entirely without nutritional merit to chip away at at whatever time of day I need it.
Maybe you’d like to do the same?
I guess you could say my gateway strata was Deb’s fantastic Corn, Cheddar, and Scallion Strata; I’ve been making it for over a decade and tend to make it on weeks when I don’t want to think about feeding myself, but have also found it to be a consistent potluck or dinner-party hit. (Is it breakfast for dinner? Is it just a vegetarian crowd-pleaser? Truly, who can say.)
But the corn-cheddar strata didn’t come out of nowhere; it’s a variation on this spinach one, which I have also made and which is also very good. And that, of course, is the joy of the strata and all its eggy, bready cousins: what doesn’t go well in a strata? All you need is some eggs (8 or 9) and some milk (2 cups or a little more) and some bread (or not, just pivot to a frittata, equally perfect), and a filling if you want one. You probably have something in your house right now that could be dunked in egg and milk and baked to give it new, brunch-adjacent life. I think perhaps you should.
Blockbuster Review: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
What a script, what perfect execution, what excellent performances, what terrific jokes, interspersed with just the right amount of Coen-ian brutality. I wonder whether it’s been overshadowed over time by the influence of its (also excellent) soundtrack? But it holds up beautifully.
State of Wonder was so good! Ann Patchett is one of my favourite authors; her entire backlist is a delight.
Liz Gilbert shares the most wonderful story about State of Wonder in her book, Big Magic.
From Maclean's magazine:
Gilbert frames the creative process as a relationship: “I’ve had a visitation by something that wants me to work on a project, and I’m going to engage in a relationship with this idea and, together, we are going to make something out of nothing,” she says. Ideas are like molecules floating about, waiting for someone to seize upon them, she writes— they’re “disembodied energetic life forms” with “consciousness” and “will.” In the book, she shares the story of working on a novel set in Brazil about an American middle-aged woman, but being distracted by other things. She believes she transmitted the idea to novelist Ann Patchett, whom she met at a book event, via a friendly kiss; later, she learned Patchett was working on a eerily similar plotline that became her 2011 novel State of Wonder. They had never discussed Gilbert’s half-finished novel. “My idea had grown tired of waiting, and had left me,” Gilbert writes.
Happy New Year, Liz! I have a book for you if you are interested. You do get a shout out in the credits. ;) Email me at the Smart Factory.