For music lovers, a pick from the host of how to make a good playlist:
“Let breathe new dawn - this art is dead / No sense of original thought in the mainstream” goes a lyric in the opening track of Against Me!’s first major-label album – one I (wrongly) thought sucked before ever having heard it, simply because it was on a major label. In Sellout, Dan Ozzi examines this intersection among bands trying to make a mark in the world, music labels hoping to make a buck off them and fans feeling betrayed by their idols. Even if you never spent time on punknews.org arguing about the taxonomy of “folk punk,” it’s a question that exists in every art form: How much is it worth to get paid? — Andrew Limbong, reporter, Culture Desk
For sci-fi fans, our visuals editor offers a lush future fantasy:
Humans screw a lot of things up. If you need a break from that, read A Psalm for the Wild-Built. You’ll enter a world (not our world) where people have managed to dial things back from the brink. Centuries earlier, humans and robots agreed to part ways, and now the humans are living in harmony with nature – existing on clean energy, eschewing consumerism and working with their hands. But as good as things are, our protagonist, Dex, just isn’t content. The novel opens with the traveling monk abandoning a seemingly good life to seek out cricket song, long vanished in this world – which is when things start to get really interesting. Because that split between robots and humans? It ends when Dex runs into a chipper robot called Splendid Speckled Mosscap.
— Beck Harlan, visual and digital editor, Life Kit
For fun-loving fiction, our NY-based producer offers you nights on the town:
Marlowe Granados A manifesto for party girls everywhere, Marlowe Granados’ debut novel, Happy Hour, glistens and charms. It’s 2013, and Isa and Gala are in New York bopping around with starlets and It Girls, scrounging up cash to fund their summer of good outfits, chance run-ins and exclusive parties. Granados’ prose is painless and quick, her characters glamorous and assured in a city that unfolds to them at their every turn. In Granados’ world, beauty isn’t frivolous or even fleeting – it’s the truth of youth, the thrum of the city, the luxury of life. — Clare Marie Schneider, associate producer, Life Kit For graphic novel seekers, a pick from the host of how to start a creative habit: Award-winning cartoonist Keiler Roberts’ My Begging Chart is a collection of hilarious and, at times, surreal autobiographical vignettes about parenthood, the mundaneness of life at home, and illness – as the pandemic looms in the backdrop. Roberts has the amazing ability to slow down time and focus on the smallest of moments – wiping down a smelly air mattress, making a batch of brownies and then realizing the ingredients are expired, lounging with her daughter in bed. It’s a refreshingly intimate portrait of family life.
— Malaka Gharib, deputy editor, Goats and Soda, author of I Was Their American Dream
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And there’s so. much. more! If you want to keep the book train going, make sure to check out NPR’s Book of the Day podcast, read some more 2021 roundups, or just head into your local library — this one even made a page just for books recommended by Life Kit experts! (We love it, Palo Alto!)
Happy reading, friends. No skipping to the last page!
— Andee Tagle, Life Kit producer
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