Shelf Life
What I've Been Reading and What I've Been Up To
A few friends and I have started analyzing our personal lives using quarters. For example, “It was a great New Years Eve, a solid start to Q1.” It’s sort of us trolling masculine corporate/tech culture, it’s sort of us feeling like it’s a semi-useful way to track personal progress.
Typically I write this post - my annual Reading Wrap Up - at my in-laws house in the dead week between Christmas and the New Year, usually after a few Keurig coffees wearing a new pair of socks at the end of Q4 for the top of Q1. But, this year I threw out my back when I was there while bending over to get a sock, and then came back about a week later to LA in flames. (We’re all okay.)
So, here it is, my annual Reading Wrap Up for the year, slightly late, but still full of interesting things based on what I did and read in 2024.
It’s now 2025 so I say things like, “I used to post my Reading Wrap Up on Medium, but now I’m on Substack.” But in 2010 I said things like, “I used to post on Deadjournal, but now I’m on Posterous.” So just subscribe to me here so I have your email and we can journey through space and time together: Next Gen Jen on Substack
I have a couple other projects in the hopper as the industry continues to decide what it’s doing and I while I become the default parent to our two year old since my husband is recently, luckily, back to work on a TV show. It’s remote and he’s home and even if it’s somehow the best case scenario it’s still a big change for us.
As we say in Hollywood, I’ve had some good meetings lately. But then again nobody ever has a bad meeting in Hollywood. So, while my career in development goes through development, I’ve got this book manuscript I’m working on that shares industry development advice to aspiring creatives outside of the industry. I’m considering putting a little investment into finishing the manuscript and publishing it myself in the next year or so instead of finishing a proposal to pitch it around and possibly getting rejected for the next year or so. That way I can get it into more hands as quickly as possible, since it’s timely. If so, I might even do a kickstarter so tuned, subscribed, enthusiastic.
I’m also writing a pilot with my comedy writer friend and Ladies Room Show co-creator Jessie Stegner, who wrote one of the final episodes of A Million Little Things and has written jokes for shows like Sunshine Scouts and Inventing Anna. We like to get together and do crafts and recently dusted off getting together to do jokes. The pilot is about two very different sisters forced to work together and is loosely based on the small town I grew up in outside of Buffalo, NY.
So, that’s what I’m writing. Here’s what I’ve been reading:
Solo: Building a Remarkable Life Of Your Own - the author. Dr. Peter McGraw is a friend of mine and I did a quick “punch up” pass at this book when I was newly postpartum which means there could be some of my jokes in there. If I had to guess, somewhere between 0 and 1 joke made it in, since I was getting about 0 to 1 hours of sleep at the time. Peter has been doing research into what he calls the Solo Movement - people who make wonderful lives without partners - many times by choice, sometimes not, but who always live a life that they choose to live. This is presented as a path to a peaceful and fulfilling life, or as he refers to it as - a remarkable life. Because it is actually an extraordinary thing to be able to do. It’s tied very much to the idea of enjoying liberty to me, a hyper-Americanized word lately, but one that has always inspired me.
Solo’s written with Peter’s data and research and also includes letters from different types of people living single lives. It’s great if you’re a person who lives ‘single’ in any way or ever wondered what it might be like to be a Solo, or if you’re close with somebody who is a Solo and you want to know how you can be supportive.
Moving on to some notable fiction: I read Big Swiss and Nightbitch right around the same time. I thoroughly enjoyed both. Great worlds, likable imperfect characters, a few great ‘oh shit moments’ that are fun for book club discussions. Shout out to my book club - it’s been over 10 years and we still make sure we read a few things a year together so that we can discuss things like love, life, politics, and marine biology in great nuance. Or, be dead tied on either hating or loving something after two rounds of margaritas.
Nightbitch was maybe my favorite fiction read of the year. Like the protagonist I’m also a new mom struggling to find the time and headspace to be creative and I also need to run wild in the moonlight sometimes. And, I still need to find the time to watch the film to see how it compares. We had a Nightbitch book club rooftop movie night planned to watch it but everybody here is kind of waiting for better air quality and a good rain (I’ve been asking people in LA: what’s your AQI rn?)
LA is really going through it. This city, and so many of my friends and peers who have made their lives here for a decade or two - who are facing a quite literal existential threat to the lives and livelihoods they’ve built here. It’s so hard to see so many people suffering.
Speaking of my love for LA, in the past year or so I’ve had the absolute luck and privilege of being able to make new parent friends in my neighborhood. It’s been awesome, 9/10, and I wish the experience for everybody, truly. (9/10 because being a neighbor is sometimes inconvenient but that’s kinda the point.)
I recently lost a lifelong neighbor, a man named Jack Skinner who I had the blessing of being able to grow up next door to. He loved nature and looking upward - birds, planets, planes and he showed me the joy of pursuing curiosity. He was a good neighbor. Recently, he’d sent me a Facebook message in reply to a post I’d shared. He said, “Knowing you has been a joy in our lives.” Same. We will all miss him.
His interest in birding definitely sparked something within me - I love birds and I love the idea of birding (I take the hobby very slowly but somebody I’ll be hardcore.) I also love the general pursuit of astronomy. Basically, I love space. I have a couple telescopes. I read pop science. I keep up with the space industry and space news. I accidentally had a space-themed wedding. I’m mostly trying to brace you for the next book I read which is Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk. We started it as an audiobook on a road trip to Vegas in November where, to reiterate on the Internet once again, I did three nights of comedy shows and my face and name were in lights on the roof of the hotel which brought me great joy. Having your 10ft face on a roof is like getting Nitrous Oxide for the first time at the dentist - you may never want to do it again any other way.
Anyway, I borrowed Elon Musk from the library. Via Libby a couple times because I didn’t get through it in one ‘borrow’ and as it is “always available” via LAPL I was able to renew it a couple times. So what I’m saying is, I didn’t pay for a copy and I utilized my library to access it. I think these kinds of small things we can do to counter the consolidation of wealth and power aren’t nothing.
So I’ve never read a Walter Isaacson biography and I don’t know much about how he operates. I mostly know he’s like, the biography guy. He did Steve Jobs. The Steve Jobs Biography. I might read it next. The Elon book is chronological and it’s almost 100 chapters - when we were already to the year 2020 and only around chapter 50, I was like okay what’s the rest of this huge book about, guy? Then around 2021 Isaacson is caught up with Elon on the life timeline and writes what he sees from there. So we learn about his mean dad and wild mom and his lonely-ish childhood and then join Walter with Elon circa 2021 as he shouts eureka a few times about new ways to do stuff that’s cool and useful, and some other stuff that’s just to win.
It’s interesting to get this up close with Elon, but ultimately Issacson is a man writing about man and not really seeing anything who is not a man might see.
So. I guess I still need to know what kind of car seat Elon buckles his beloved toddler, X, his light and joy, into. Or, if he forgoes a carseat entirely? Does he buckle him in a seatbelt himself, or does his nanny? Oh and, what’s she like?
Currently this man Elon is letting the intrusive thoughts win and he has the power to either kill us all or be useful. I think Elon sort of accidentally built a world that is making him miserable. Like, this guy is a gamer at heart and now he’s so important that he has to pay people to play video games for him? If you’re a gamer just think about this unique form of torture! You’re the richest person in the world, but you can’t afford time to play video games? If that were me I might send myself an email and offer myself a payout to resign from myself.
As an answer to this, I suggest a new book by my husband, a gamer. It’s a memoir with career and life advice about playing video games called Hey Everybody Let’s Quit Our Jobs and Play Video Games, which I hope I helped him complete last year. (No spoilers but it’s about when he quit his job to play video games.)
Back to the beginning of 2024, when a new neighborhood mom friend let me borrow her copy of The Happy Sleeper. My son had just turned a year old and it was finally time to sleep-train. Sleep training. A hilarious idea. Picturing my baby in a little Adidas footie pajama tracksuit and me with a whistle around my neck. Drop and give me 20!
I love sleep. I’m a big ‘sleep hygiene’ person - a majority of the time I sleep 8+ hours, mostly straight through. A majority of nights I sleep in total darkness, a little chilly, with a white noise machine, no alarm, and emerge generally well rested. In the morning there’s a pot of my favorite coffee freshly brewed, and a cuddly baby in footie pajamas waiting for me in a clean diaper who says, “Mommy!” Then jumps into my lap. So, how do I sleep at night? That’s how. To be fair, I do have some occasional sleep “regressions” like they call it with developing children, where I’m awake from like, 3-5 am, worried about murder hornets or some shit.
My good sleep is partially due to reading Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker a few years ago. Basically a big game-changing book for me. His argument is that we actually know so little about why we do something that we need to do for a third of our lives that it’s kind of embarrassing. Some guys, perhaps even Elon, think they’re a new model of human that has upgraded their battery power to not require as much sleep because we’re kind of all brainwashed to problem-solve for time efficiency and not consider alternatives. So, what might better and more sleep do for our ‘output’ instead? These biohacker boys haven’t considered what prioritizing and exploring sleep and rest might do for our brains, which is silly because they’ll take drugs to think differently or sleep better but never just try to actually sleep better. To be the BEST SLEEPER. To WIN at SLEEPING. (What if we voted for a president based on a qualified person who also tracked the best sleep?)
To be PERFECTLY clear on my intended word play I am suggesting people might sleep better by being better people. Not perfect people, or the best people, just better people. (I’m currently reading How To Be Perfect, more on that next year.)
All to say that when we were deciding how to make sure our son slept safely and well: I read many different sources, spoke to many experts and used all of that info to make an informed and caring decision. Just kidding, I literally read one book about sleep training the day I needed to do it that my neighbor gave me and I just did it and hoped that it was the very best thing that I could do at the time.
The Happy Sleeper is a very simple and good way to think about putting a baby to sleep. I think the general idea is that you want the overall good, the ‘mean’ of the household to be how you prioritize how the baby sleeps. You need to be nurturing and caring, but they also need to know how to self-soothe and you also need to sleep to be a good parent. Everybody needs good sleep - you, your baby, and your partner least of all lol. No but they do, too. And I’m happy to report we’re all doing pretty well with sleep and it’s been one year following the book’s guidance. Vote for us for President.
In the Spring I read Cantina Confidential by my comedian friend Solange Castro’s late mom Rafaela Castro, who was a Berkeley librarian and lecturer. I really loved it - one of my favorite types of a character journey. It’s a fictionalized story loosely based on her family history, following a community college instructor solving a family mystery in the town where her parents were once migrant workers. It’s such a great piece of California travel fiction and beautifully depicts the humanity in migrant life. Solange might even be cooking up something with it so stay tuned.
Some quickies: Romantic Comedy was a great way to tell a modern and more nuanced rom-com tale, set sorta in the world of SNL, I enjoyed it! I also loved Sloane Crosley’s Cult Classic. Ugh it’s so good. She’s been a favorite writer of mine for a while. I think she’s always so goddamn funny and this book is hilarious and so smart.
Marrying the Ketchups is a very fun and warm family restaurant story set in Chicago. Instantly I loved it and although my family’s from Buffalo and we’re Bills fans, there is a lot to relate to with big families, big dreams and being from a hard luck sports town. Red At The Bone was another great book club read. It’s a rich family legacy story across generations and social classes. Loved it. God Of the Woods was a great mystery, kept me guessing and left me satisfied. A cautionary tale for what happens when you only have men run stuff. Probably the fastest I turned pages all year! Also, The Ministry of Time had so much imagination and really helped pull me out of a reading rut.
I read Steve Martin’s memoir about standup comedy, Born Standing Up. My favorite idea in it was that if you’re given a slight bit of energy from something that some people might consider a delusion, just go ahead and use it. He wasn’t afraid to experiment and he worked at being vulnerable and was rewarded for it. This is going to sound so millennial of me but I don’t think of Steve Martin as a stand up, I think of him as the funny dad in all the movies. So this was fun to read as a standup myself.
Perhaps 2025 (The start of Q2 of the 21st century) will hold some new and good developments for us to nurture any optimistic delusions we still might have. Thanks for reading about my reading and I’ll have some more interesting ideas for you in Q1 and for the rest of the Q’s this coming year.
Some reading adjacent highlights from the year:
I helped plan our Library Friends 40th Anniversary celebration and we got a great writeup in the Argonaut about it. Plus, I got to speak on a panel about it at the LAPL Citywide Friends Symposium. We had four successful book sales raising funds for the library and I also hosted a Friends summer gathering on the roof!
I had two margaritas and accidentally fell out of the booth at a Mexican Restaurant at bookclub.
I published a book for a client - interviewing a handful of people and compiling a beautiful coffee table book about the rise and impact of a popular style app.
I read my son Corduroy and I swear I saw all the little synapses firing in his brain afterward. He woke up in the middle of the night and pointed to it until I read it again. It was the first time I could see that he really understood a narrative and he was moved by the book. What will happen to Corduory? Will he find his button? Will the girl ever come back? I’m clutching my heart just thinking about it again.
That’s it! I tried to find a picture of me reading but here’s the best I got - me on the roof in my unhinged bird lady watermelon visor. Enjoy.
