This is Show & Tell where I tell you some things I loved from the week and the one thing I hated, plus round up everything else going on around these parts. The first half of Show & Tell is free to all. The adoration and hateration are for paid subscribers only.

We’re halfway through October, which means we’re about to hit full on chaos holiday season. Are you ready? Did you gird your loins? You’re going to look up in like 38 minutes and people will have their Christmas decorations up. I am never ready.

This Week in The Stacks

Last week was a big week in books — Kirkus, Nobel, and the NBA shortlists.

Speaking of NBA shortlists, Jordan Thomas’ book When It All Burns is on the nonfiction shortlist this year and I got to talk to him about wildfires and how they’re impacted by socio-political factors.

I always say I am going to talk about more pop culture on here, and last week I finally did. Inspired by my sick1, I shared my top 10 Sick Day movies.

Books I Read This Week

What a Time to Be Alive by Jade Chang
Lola Treasure Gold is a 30 something whose best friend dies in a tragic accident, her viral speech at his wake launches her into online guru influencer status. I liked this book. I was expecting a satire of online culture and ended up with a much more interior meditation on grief. In some ways this book suffered from not being able to blend these two parts together, but in other ways I was pleasantly surprised with Chang’s choices and the ways she found the pleasure in grief.
Fave of the week!

The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism by Deborah Baker
The story of a Jewish woman from New York, Maryam Jameelah (formerly Margaret Marcus), who converts to Islam, moves to Pakistan, and becomes one of the most celebrated and influential voices in Islam’s argument with the West. I picked this book up to satisfy a prompt for the Mega Challenge2, and knew nothing going in. The book is well crafted — relying on letters, research, and the author’s interviews — but lacked a clear point of view. I never quite knew what Baker was saying or why, she never grabbed me. The book came out ten years after