Here are three things I’m digging this week 🫑
1. Publicly funded documentaries/docu-series
My little household (consisting of my husband, myself and my cat) are all ill this weekend, so I’ve been spending a lot of time zonked out on the couch while soft-spoken narrators lull me in and out of sleep.
Publicly funded documentaries/docu-series are a wonderful service for the rest of us, and I will happily argue with anyone who disagrees. When they’re done well, they are colourful windows into the lives of interesting or unusual people. When they’re done REALLY well, they provide the context of how these people ultimately represent or influence us all, and what we stand to learn from their lives.
Here are some personal favourites (note - these are all Canadian, so it’s possible that if you’re watching from outside of Canada, you might hit an IP block):
North Shore Rescue from The Knowledge Network - A docu-series about search and rescue volunteers in BC’s busiest mountain range. Great for lovers of nature, sports, or helicopters.
You need to create an account to watch, but it’s free.
High Grass Circus from NFB - This follows a Canadian travelling circus in the 70s, with all of its highs and lows. Kind of sad, kind of cute, and kind of dream-like. Recommended when you’re feeling light-hearted but introspective.
No account needed, and free.
De Garde 24/7 from Télé-Québec - A typical hospital show, but I dunno, there was something about this show that I really liked. Maybe because it was one of the first show that I watched in French that I connected to when I moved to Québec, maybe because the doctors are all very different from each other… not sure you’ll be able to watch this bad boy in English, if that’s important to you, but if you’re a bilingual folk, it’s a riveting watch.
No account needed, and free.
I could probably list more if I really sat down and combed through the archives, but the point is - if you like weird little stories and people (especially weird little people) it’s worth your time to take a good hour to comb through your public TV offerings, especially since so much stuff is put up for streaming these days. And if you know of any great ones, please send me your reccs.
2. General-audience book series that feel like childhood favourite series
This is a long headliner that feels like one of those translations of Japanese words with no English equivalent, but stay with me.
Austin Kleon wrote a newsletter recently where he talked about doing things in the summer that make you feel the way you wanted to feel like as a kid, and that got me thinking about my summers when I would visit my family in Edmonton where I would roll around on my grandma’s carpet for days at a time, power-reading through some book series.
Around the same time, I’ve been reading Josiah Bancroft’s series Senlin Ascends, and it hit me that reading those books as an adult feels EXACTLY the same as it did to read Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events books as a kid. Which is not to say that they are that they are interchangeable - I find The Series of Unfortunate Events basically unreadable now, and the ending was unsatisfying and opaque to my little child brain - but the feeling of questing and searching, the quips of dry humour, the backdrop of mystery, the foreground of tragedy, the nearly-but-not-quite whispers of steampunk, the Greater-Forces-Beyond-Our-Control-Or-Understanding… it’s all there, baybee, but with a depth and gravity that would only really appeal to my adult self.
I know a lot of adults read and enjoy YA or children’s literature, but unfortunately I am just not one of them.
Here are a few aged-up feeling series that come to mind (I’m going to keep adding to this if I think of more in the future):
If you liked A Series of Unforunate Events by Lemony Snicket —> try Josiah Bracroft’s Senlin Ascends.
Read it for the questing and searching, the quips of dry humour, the backdrop of mystery, the foreground of tragedy, the nearly-but-not-quite whispers of steampunk, the Greater-Forces-Beyond-Our-Control-Or-Understanding.
If you liked Inkheart by Cornelia Funke —>try The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Read it for the Mediterranean textures, the love of all things book-related, the threatening forces in the shadows, the dead parent, the mystery, the coming-of-age story.
If you liked Goosebumps by R.L. Stine —> try literally anything by Junji Ito
Read it for the quickness, the subversion of tropes, the unexpected elements, the feeling of growing dread, the spectacle.
And here are a few white whales that I would love to find adult-feeling equivalents:
Warrior Cats by Erin Hunter. A domestic cat runs away and joins a tribe of feral cats. I remember this series being political and violent (again, when I was a child), but most of all I was taken in by the world of following an animal narrator, which is hard to pull off in serious literature.
Likewise with Brian Jacques’ Redwall series, which was meant for even younger children.
Likewise with Guardians of Ga’Hoole by Kathryn Lasky.
Encyclopedia Brown by Donald J. Sobol. These were fun books that provided short mysteries that you solved at the end. I’m sure versions of these exist now, but I haven’t found anything that felt as equally intellectual and immersive as it did when I was a kid.
The Harry Potter series. I’m not even going to link or credit or bold this one because it’s so embarassing to even be mentioning these frigging books in 2024, but it’s true that they captured the child imagination in a specific way that I haven’t seen in other books yet. I’ve heard people compare them to The Magicians by Lev Grossman, but other than magical students and magical school, they really don’t do much to replicate the feeling.
3. Unusual, healthful cooking tips
I’m listening to an audiobook right now called Eating on the Wild Side by Jo Robinson that I found after a bender of trying to cook up weeds in my back yard in dinner recipes, and it’s really scratching the nutrition enthusiast and the fun-fact enthusiast parts of my brain. The book is over 10 years old now (which could be a long time in nutrition research years? I’m not actually sure), but there are lots of cute little tidbits that I’m going to remember for a long time.
Canned tomatoes are more nutritious than fresh tomatoes
Because they usually can them at their freshest and most nutritious.
Dark-leafed, and loose-leafed lettuce is better than tighter, lighter lettuces
Carrots are most nutritious when cooked whole
Boiling vegetables usually leeches some of the nutrition into the water, which is fine if you’re making soup, but a little less fine if you’re throwing the water away
Onion and garlic skins can be added to soup stock to imbue extra vitamins
Purple and blue varieties of things (corn, potatoes, lettuces) tend to have more benefits than green varieties - except cauliflower, where white is still the best