The week felt like summer should be peaking through, but it mostly has been chilly and rainy. The colleges throughout the city are all holding graduations, and the streets and sidewalks are correspondingly packed with confused and frustrated parents trying to figure out Boston traffic.
It’s been a fairly low-energy week for me. Will’s been throwing us a curveball with mid-night wakings and then staying up and energized, crying if we put him back in the crib, for an hour or two afterwards. It’s painful. I don’t think it’s a sleep regression so much as just what he’s like right now.
Here’s what I’m eating and reading this week:
WEEKLY MENU PLAN
Here’s what I’ve been cooking this past week, in case you need inspiration or ideas for dinner tonight. All of these wound up being two-night meals – a lot of interesting recipes and also a lot of leftovers:
Sunday: Kale pesto pasta from Cooking at Home with Bridget and Julia
Monday: Leftovers
Tuesday: Beef stroganoff with sautéed green beans
Wednesday: Leftovers
Thursday: Black bean and bell pepper burritos
Friday: Leftovers
Saturday: Weeknight beef tagliatelle from Cooking at Home with Bridget and Julia
WHAT I’M READING AND ENJOYING THIS WEEK:
I’ve been watching and really liking the latest season of Drunk History (available on Hulu and on the website).
One of the episodes told the story of D.B. Cooper and an unsolved hijaking, and this emerged later in the week.
I baked these brownies — twice.
And this banana cake.
So looking forward to this book.
BOOK REVIEW
Title: The Idiot
Author: Elif Batuman
Date: 2017
Format: Audiobook
I’m not quite sure why this book was so popular. While enjoyable at times, it wasn’t one of the better books I’ve read lately, and I think the parts I liked are a bit idiosyncratic.
Split into two parts, the book spans a college student’s experience of the world both on campus and as she travels to Hungary in the summer after. Awkward and intelligent, Seline navigates the wider world and an emerging, opaque relationship with a classmate named Ivan. The book spans the entirety of her freshman year at Harvard in Part One, then follows her summer work program as an English teach in Hungarian villages.
Her relationships with people, language, and learning weren’t straightforward, and I like how the book was just about whether she gets the guy in the end. However, it was a slow, winding narrative that I don’t think I’d recommend for most readers. Most of the parts I enjoyed were because they reminded me of being a college student in the early age of email and the internet (though my campus experience had more advanced technology than Seline’s) or because it was a look at college life on the Harvard campus (the same square in which my office is located, the same river and roads I pass as I drive to pick the kids up at daycare). The way some of these parts resonated for me certainly won’t be the experience for others.
