Sacred Musings: November 2024

My gift guide, including a discount!

Bonjour à tous et à toutes,

It’s not lost on me that this month’s edition of Sacred Musings lands on the most holy of American holidays: Black Friday.

As discount emails bombard our inboxes — I hope this one will cut through the noise.

Presenting, to you: my very short, all killer and no filler, holiday gift guide:

There is no better gift than the gift of knowledge, and so of course, the first thing on the list I recommend is a year’s subscription to Sacred Monster. I have big things up my sleeve for 2025, and you don’t want to miss it. Annual plans are $90, this week only; that’s the equivalent of three months on the house.

Few things in life make me happier than a great book. Here are a few I would be thrilled to unwrap, and that I like to give to friends in need of a good read. Note: all of these links lead to Bookshop.org, which is like Amazon without the supervillain CEO (their stock is shipped from a network of small and independent booksellers). If you purchase through these links, I get a small cut.

— Frankenstein: The 1818 Text by Mary Shelley. This is my favorite book of all-time. The original 1818 version is the one you should be reading.

— The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal. I picked this up at the Neue Galerie last winter, read it on the plane home, and have not stopped thinking about it since.

— Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos. My favorite book in the French language, still jaw-droppingly scandalous at 242 years old.

— The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee. An epic of historical fiction that keeps you on your toes the entire way through; almost 600 pages long, I remember getting to p.250 and thinking, but so much has happened already, how can Chee sustain this for the rest of the story? Spoiler alert: he does.

— Collected Maxims and Other Reflections by La Rochefoucauld. Before there were rap battles, La Rochefoucauld and his peers were slinging these bars at Versailles. I love to give this edition to friends, as it has the French and English printed in parallel.

— Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge by Kenneth E. Silver. Missed the blockbuster exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim this year? (Or my recap of it?) Fret not, it’s immortalized in this beautiful catalogue, with essay contributions from Blake Oetting.

à très bientôt,

Chloë Helen America Cassens