Sacred Musings: July 2025
Some summer reads!
Bonjour à tous et à toutes,
I hope your summer is going well!
I’ve just landed in Los Angeles from another sojourn in Paris, with pit stops in Manchester, England and Palma de Mallorca, Spain sprinkled in.
I’ve been doing my best to actually take a bit of a break — or rather, my version of one — but will resume usual activity in August. Keep an eye out for exciting news… it’s coming!
Anywho…
Summer travel is the perfect opportunity to pick up a few new reads, and I was lucky enough to dig into a few books I’ve had sitting on my nightstand for several months.
Full disclosure: I’ve linked to these books via Bookshop.org, which is a little bit like Amazon, but the money goes to independent booksellers instead of Jeff Bezos. If you buy through one of these links, I get a little kickback. Do with that info what you will!
Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality T.V. by Emily Nussbaum is a haunting recounting of the beginnings of one of the most insidiously fascinating, voyeuristic slices of our current culture. If you’ve ever written off reality t.v. as unserious or dumb, I would still read this book — the leader of the free world is an alum of the form, and one must know their enemy.
Butter by Asako Yuzuki is a very entertaining, unexpected story about a female serial killer and haute cuisine. There are more than a few recipes mentioned throughout that will have you reading with one hand and cooking with the other.
Sister Europe by Nell Zink is a tight little story about a ragtag group of people navigating a single, chaotic night in Berlin. I inhaled it on one puddle-jumper flight and was entertained by the hyper-specific cutting, yet humane insights Zink gave all of her characters, who walk the line between feeling wholly realized and totally satiric in their depiction.
Waiting for Britney Spears by Jeff Weiss is a semi-autobiographical, sort-of true story about Weiss’s role in the early-2000’s tabloid machine. We’ve all been rethinking our treatment of the Princess of Pop, and Weiss’s book cuts down to the bone. I’m still haunted by it.
Still on my nightstand are the following…
Perspective(s) by Laurent Binet (which has recently been translated to English); Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber; Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhiri Vara; and The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin by Daniel Brook.
If you’ve read something you recommend, please drop me a line!
à très bientôt,
Chloë Helen America Cassens
oh I want to get this book on Spears!