The month of May has come and gone; where does the time go? In addition to the regularly scheduled programming found on this blog, I thought I would take time at the end of each month to share a little more about me and what I’ve been up to.
If you’re only just now joining the community, check out my first two posts below: A welcome post outlining the thesis of this newsletter as well as three tips that have helped me find long-term success when embarking on a self-taught learning journey. Enjoy!

May 2021 Post Roundup
#1 - Welcome
#2 - Creating Your Self-Guided Learning Regimen: 3 Tips for Long-Term Success
What I’ve Been Reading
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott and The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
I typically try to have two books going at once—one fiction and one nonfiction or work-related—but after I finished Marie Kondo’s Joy at Work, I somehow ended up picking up a second fiction book. I’m quite a slow reader, so Little Women is more of a slow burn I’ve been working on since January while I managed to finish The Midnight Library in just two weeks’ time.
Little Women, of course, needs no introduction as a classic piece of 19th century American literature still revered today and was recently brought into the fore through an Academy Award-nominated 2019 film adaption. The 2019 film was my first experience with Alcott’s masterful story of the iconic March sisters, but I understand many grew up reading the book as children.
Although it is a thick, intimidating tome, I find the text itself isn’t a slog to work through at all. In fact, the story is a delight to read and I’m trying to savor it as long as I can. Considering its setting deep in the throes of the American Civil War, one might expect contemporary readers to have difficulty relating the ”old-timey” protagonists, but Little Women holds up remarkably well in 2021.
Although presented to the reader in 1860s window dressing, upon closer inspection, the tales of Jo, Meg, Amy, and Beth contain familiar subject matter still applicable for young girls and boys coming of age today—whether it’s Jo and Amy getting into a classic sibling argument leading to mischief, Meg feeling inadequate after being the victim of gossip at a social gathering, or Beth building up the courage to confront her fear of the neighboring old man Mr. Laurence1.
Most of the chapters I’ve read so far are told in almost self-contained vignettes recounting the adventures and sometimes the more mundane happenings of the March family, often capped with a well-timed moral or lesson from “Marmee.”
Little Women is one of my favorite fiction finds (yay for incorporating some alliteration in a passage about literature) in years and I highly recommend it to any lover of classic fiction—male or female.
On the other hand, my feelings about Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library are much more mixed. Set in the present-day United Kingdom, protagonist Nora Seed lives an underwhelming, depressing, and regretful life. Readers absorb just how miserable her existence is as she lives arguably the worst day in human history: She loses both her job at a music store and her last piano student, her parents have died, her brother and former bandmate are not on good terms, her best friend lives thousands of miles away in Australia and is incommunicado, and to top it all off her cat dies.
Without going into too many spoilers, Nora suddenly finds herself in purgatory, halfway between life and death trapped in a building called the Midnight Library where time is frozen at 00:00:00. The library’s books are in fact windows into alternate realities, allowing Nora to imagine how life could have turned out had she made different choices in life.
The bulk of The Midnight Library’s story follows Nora constantly sampling these alternate lives where she decided to follow one of her dreams—opening a pub with her ex-fiancé, becoming an Olympic-caliber swimmer, pursuing a career as a glaciologist in Norway studying climate change, living a life of fame as lead singer of a rock band, et cetera. While these lives contain flashes of excitement or at least a change of pace from her dreary “root life,” she often finds that her dreams don’t live up to expectations and frequently come with drastic downsides.
The Midnight Library’s unique plot device was interesting enough to keep me reading to the end, but I ultimately felt the book stagnated in the middle chapters and could have been more effectively conveyed as a short story or novella. But perhaps the redundancy was Haig’s desired effect for the reader all along? No matter the author’s intentions, something wasn’t quite right here.
What I’ve Been Watching
Top Chef Portland (Bravo) and The Woman in the Window (Netflix)
My go-to comfort television or background noise is pretty much anything on the Food Network, especially cooking competition shows like Iron Chef America and Beat Bobby Flay, but the best reality TV cooking contest happens to be stuck on Bravo and not the Food Network2: Top Chef.
Before I became a food television fan, I think in my head I thought that Top Chef and Iron Chef were the same thing, but they are two very different shows. With sky-high production values and a captivating cast of hosts and celebrity judges, Top Chef is a highlight of the spring TV ritual for my wife, Jess, and me. With fewer than ten “chef-testants” remaining in the competition, it’s coming down to the wire and we’re rooting for either Shota or Maria to win the title of Top Chef at this point.
On the opposite end of the television spectrum, we gave Netflix’s The Woman in the Window a try this month. This title is getting mixed reviews in my social circles but I liked Amy Adams in it and found it to be a perfectly fine movie overall. Though, it might not be the best thing to watch right before bed if you’re even a little sensitive to thrillers. It’s probably not something I’ll ever specifically seek out to re-watch again, so Netflix seems to be the correct landing spot for a film like this, though I bet it would have released it in theaters in a pandemic-free world.
That’s all for now; let’s make it a great June everyone!
See Chapters 8, 9, and 6, respectively, of Little Women for the full references.
Honorable mentions for the best non-Food Network food shows: Anything Gordon Ramsay, but especially Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares.