Volume 1, No. 38: The Power of Threes + Greek Sesame Twists

Welcome to December, friends! It is my favorite month. My Christmas tree is up, and I’ve filled every possible surface in my house with candles and winterberry. Cookie Extravaganza has begun. I wish I could record the way my kitchen smells and send it out to all of you.

I’ll be taking a three week break from the newsletter starting on December 20th. This means you’ll be getting three bonus issues over the next three weeks, starting this Friday. I’ll be sharing my favorite books of the year, as well as some (more) of my favorite cookie recipes.

I started this project to celebrate two of the things I love most: food and books. It’s been a lot of fun, and a lot of work. As I think about what Books & Bakes will look like in 2022, I’d love to hear from you! What do you like about this newsletter? Why do you read it? (Do you read it?) Which parts do you look forward to and which do you skip? I welcome any and all opinions—just reply to this email. I also made a survey, if you’d rather share your thoughts that way. I appreciate all your support and enthusiasm so much!

This week, we’re talking threes. Books told in three parts. Trilogies. Trios of friends. Triptych POVs. There’s something powerful, seductive, alluring, about the number three. (See what I did there?) Maybe it’s the asymmetry. Or the elegant simplicity of beginning-middle-end. Or the fact that so many things come in threes. (I did it again!) Whatever it is, I absolutely love these three-part, three-POV, three-friend books.

The Books

Backlist: O Human Star by Blue Delliquanti (Speculative Graphic Fiction)

This is a Books & Bakes first—I’ve never written about a webcomic before! This comic is free to read online and you can also buy paper copies of the three volumes from Delliquanti’s shop (linked above). I read the first volume of this comic back in 2017. It was one of the first comics I read after falling in love with Saga, and to this day, it’s one of only two comics that have made me feel the way Saga does. (The other one is Finding Home by Hari Conner.)

O Human Star is an incredibly nuanced and complicated story about trans and queer lives—parenting, coming of age, falling in love, the many things and people that transform us over the course of a life. It’s about robots, but it’s really about humans—or at least what it means to be a human and who gets to decide. It’s about sentience and family and how identify shifts across time and bodies. It’s about the joys and challenges inherent in building families—identities, people, relationships—from scratch and outside of the norm.

Alastair Sterling is a brilliant inventor and robotics scientist who wakes up in a robotic body after being dead for 16 years. Confused, Al goes in search of former lover/scientific partner Brendan Pinsky. Brendan is just as surprised to see Al alive as Al is to be alive. Even more surprising is fifteen-year old Sula, a robot Brendan is raising as his daughter. Sula’s mysterious origins start to become clear as Alastair, Brendan and Sula tentatively work out how to be a family.

This is a deeply intimate story about two people trying to work out what they mean to each other, and a teenage girl struggling with where she comes from and who she wants to be. It’s a beautiful and specific story about one queer family living in a future in which robots are commonplace and sentient, and thus what it means to be human is constantly changing.

Delliquanti raises so many questions of identity and belonging in the sparse, beautifully drawn pages of this comic. What makes us who we are? Our bodies, our brains, our memories? Where and how and why do we find belonging? Is there some innate quality of humanness that resides inside us, and can it be replicated?

The narrative is masterful, alternating between the past, starting with Alastair and Brendan’s first meeting, and the present, when Al wakes up in a new body. The two-color art is both gorgeous and comfortable. It’s inviting. It somehow manages to be familiar and foreign at the same time, which is also true of the story: our world, but not quite our world.

And that’s just a taste of the first volume. I’m not going to tell you about anything that happens in the second or third volume. You’ll just have to read it for yourself. I promise you won’t regret it. I reread the whole thing earlier this year (Delliquanti finished it last summer) and it was even better the second time around. It’s still one of my three favorite comics of all time.

Frontlist: Thirsty Mermaids by Kat Leyh (Graphic Fiction)

I read this a few months ago as part of a spontaneous queer graphic novel marathon, in which I checked out many, many graphic novels from the library and read them all over one weekend. This one was my favorite.

Pearl, Tooth, and Eez are three mermaid besties who together have made their own pod. They look out for each other, support each other, and have a whole lot of fun together. One night, while drunkenly cavorting around an old shipwreck, they decide it would be fun to transform themselves into humans for a night. They do just that, and have a wild night dancing and drinking their way through the bars of a seaside tourist town. There’s only one small problem: when they wake up, hangover, they realize they have no idea how to turn themselves back into mermaids. They’re stuck in the human world indefinitely…and they have no idea how to live above water.

This is absolute delight of a book. It’s outrageously funny in this unapologetic, bawdy way that I love. Pearl, Tooth and Eez each have their own distinct personalities, but they all like having a good time. There’s a lot of eating and drinking. There are some bad jokes. There are a lot of hilarious missteps as the friends try to figure how to do things like have jobs, walk on dry land, and navigate pubic transportation. The whole book has this feeling of looseness. It’s about women enjoying themselves. They’re not neat or polite or reserved. They’re loud. They have cravings. They’re curious about everything. They take up a lot of space.

I devoured it in an hour or so and cackled my way through it. But it’s not just a good time. It’s also surprisingly moving and tender. The mermaids befriend a bartender, Vivi, who takes them in to live with her when they realize they’re stuck as humans and have nowhere to go. They become friends with Vivi quickly, but it takes them a while to figure out how to communicate with each other. They’ve been each other’s everything for so long that none of them really know how to let someone else in. It’s a joy to watch them—painfully and awkwardly—figure it out.

There’s also this lovely found family dynamic that becomes more pronounced as the stakes get higher. Pearl and Tooth adjust to life on dry land quickly. But Eez is a sea witch and longs for the ocean. She feels cut off from everything she knows, and from the magic that sustains her. She retreats into herself, becoming more and more reclusive and unresponsive. While the overall tone of the book is fun and lighthearted, there are some dark moments where Eez feels like she is losing herself entirely. Pearl and Tooth (and Vivi) respond to her distress with so much care. It’s such a relief to watch it all unfold.

This is a quick read full of whimsy and magic and a few terrible puns and a lot of raucous adventuring. It’s also a tender story about how scary it is to show your true self to other people, about the many kinds of caretaking that exist in the world, and about the homes we carry with us and the homes we leave behind.

Upcoming: Nobody’s Magic by Destiny O. Birdsong (Contemporary Fiction, Grand Central, 2/8)

Sometimes I love a book easily and unconditionally, fall in love with the characters, want to immediately shove it into the hands of everyone I know. Sometimes I finish a book and go “huh” and I’m not really sure what else to think, but I find myself still thinking about it days later. This book is the second kind. I enjoyed it, certainly. I was interested in the characters and their lives. But I didn’t rush to pick it up each time I put it down. I finished it and went “huh.” But it’s been on my mind ever since. I can’t stop thinking about it, in fact, and the more I think about it, the more I like it.

It’s a triptych novel, told in three distinct parts. Each part focuses on a different character, three Black women with albinism all living in (or from) Shreveport, Louisiana. The first section is narrated in the first person by Suzette, a twenty-year old who is just stating to discover who she is outside of her overprotective parents. She’s lived a sheltered life, spoiled by her wealthy father, but also constrained by him. She’s never been on her own. When she falls for a sweet mechanic who works at her father’s shop, she begins to imagine possibilties for herself outside the limited narratives about her worth and abilities her parents have always told her.

The second section is about Maple, a young woman grieving the murder of her mother, a sex worker who was beloved in her small community. Maple and her mother had been extremely close their whole lives. After her death, Maple struggles with her relationship with her grandmother, who wants to pretend Maple’s mom was some kind of saint, and erase all the messy, complicated parts of her life.

The third section follows Agnes, a teacher who’s taken a temporary job as a grader of standardized tests. She meets a security guard on the job, and their sudden, intense relationship leads to a series of impulsive decisions. Eventually, Agnes returns home to Shreveport to confront the pieces of her past she’s been ignoring for years.

Each of these sections is about a pivotal moment, a period of transformation in these three women’s lives. But the stories don’t intersect in the traditional sense. It’s a book made of silences and empty spaces. It messed with my ideas about what a novel should be. It’s just not a collection of three novellas printed together in one volume. It’s clearly a novel. But it’s not a novel with an easily identifiable beginning, middle, and end. The structure is unexpected. The book has this incredible pull to it, partially because, the whole time, I was trying to figure out how all the pieces would fit together. And they never fit together how I kept thinking they should. That’s what I ended up loving so much about this book: the pieces don’t fit together neatly. They fit together messily.

I’m fascinated by how the stories of these three women speak to each other. What do their stories have to say about Black southern womanhood? About mothers and daughters? About being perceived as an other by those you consider your family or community? Why these three women? Why these specific moments? Birdsong asks so many questions, and she doesn’t offer any easy answers. She presents these three Black women—their obsessions, their fears, the people they love, their grief, the mistakes they’ve made, the families they’ve built—without commentary. She leaves the figuring out to the reader. I know I’ll be thinking and figuring for a long time.

It’s out in February and you can preorder it here.

The Bake

I love these cookies, and make them every year, but for some reason this rather sad picture of them all packed up in bags is the only one I could find. They are not too sweet, and have a wonderfully crumbly texture.

Greek Sesame Twists (Koulourakia)

These beautiful twists are a Greek cookie traditionally made for Easter. I make them every year in December instead. This recipe is a mashup of various recipes I’ve used over the years. It has cognac in it, but some recipes use brandy, or you can leave out the alcohol altogether.

Ingredients:

• 2 3/4 sticks (14 Tbs) unsalted butter, at room temperature

• 1/4 cup sunflower oil (any neutral oil is fine)

• 1 1/2 Tbs orange zest

• 200 grams (1 cup) toasted sugar

• 1 egg

• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla

• 2 Tbs cognac

• 480 grams (4 cups) all-purpose flour (yes, it’s a lot of flour!)

• 2 tsp baking powder

• 1/4 tsp baking soda

• 1/4 cup freshly squeezed orange juice

• sesame seeds for sprinkling (black, white, or a combo)

• 1 egg + 1 Tbs cognac (for egg wash)

Preheat the oven to 350. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

In a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, or in a bowl with electric beaters, combine the butter, oil, and orange zest. Mix on medium low speed until will blended. Add the sugar and mix to incorporate, followed by the egg, vanilla, and cognac. At this point the mixture should be quite creamy.

Add the flour in four additions, mixing after each one. Once all the flour is incorporated, add the baking powder, baking soda, and orange juice. Continue to mix until a smooth dough forms. It will be soft and sticky and hold together relatively well.

To shape the cookies: Pinch off 1-2 tablespoons of dough and roll it into a rope about 1/2-inch thick. If the dough is too sticky to work with, you can rub some olive oil on your hands. Form the rope into an upside-down “U” on the counter. Twist the two arms of the U together and pinch the ends together to seal. Transfer the twist to the prepared baking sheet and repeat with the remaining dough. Leave an inch or so between cookies.

Lightly beat the egg with 1 tablespoon of cognac. Brush the egg wash over the cookies, and scatter sesame seeds on top. Bake for 11-12 minutes, until just lightly golden brown around the edges. They will still be quite soft when they come out of the oven. Don’t overbake them! They’ll crisp up as they cool. Let them cool completely before taking them off the tray. The baked cookies freeze beautifully.

The Bowl & The Beat

The Bowl: Cutting Brussels This Way Will Change Your Life

I’ve been working a lot in order to clear my schedule for Cookie Extravaganza, which means I haven’t done much cooking in the past week. So instead of a recipe, I have something else to share today. I got to spend some time with my dear friend Will a few weeks ago, and we did a lot of cooking. He introduced me to a revolutionary new way of cutting brussel sprouts. Where has this technique been all my life? It is EVERYTHING.

Here’s the deal: instead of cutting brussel sprouts in half…slice them! Sure, still halve the small ones. But slice the big ones into rounds instead. It’s magic! Instead of brussel sprouts that are burned on the edges but still hard in the middle, you end up with lovely, soft, beautifully browned sprouts. I don’t understand why all recipes don't instruct you to cut your brussels this way.

We enjoyed several meals that included sliced sprouts sautéed with bacon. One night for dinner we had these perfectly cooked sprouts alongside tasty squash toasts with jammy onions, and it was supremely delicious.

The Beat: Big Friendship, written and read by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman

I actually listened to this a few weeks ago, but since I listen to more than one audiobook every week, I haven’t written about all of them here. I’m planning on sharing a few favorites throughout December. This book is such a joy! It’s so rare to find books that focus on friendship like this. Sow and Friedman have been friends since their early twenties, and here they talk about the work they’ve put into their relationship. They talk about going to couples therapy as friends, the specific challenges of interracial friendship, the importance of communication, and so much more. It reads a bit like a joint memoir—they recount how they met, discuss what their relationship means to them, and share the ups and downs they’ve weathered. But they also talk about friendship more generally. They take turns narrating, often switching after every few paragraphs, and it’s just so charming.

The Bookshelf

The Visual

Since December is all about baking for me, please enjoy this photo of my favorite bookshelf in the house: the cookbook shelf.

Around the Internet

You have may noticed that I love themed reading. For Book Riot, I wrote about how to set up a mini reading intensive about any topic of your choice.

The Boost

One of my favorite weekly newsletters is Our Queerest Shelves, Book Riot’s LGBTQ+ newsletter. Danika does an amazing job with it. She always has lots of smart things to say about what’s going on in the queer book world (and queer books in general). In addition, you’ll find tons of recs, info about new releases, and many, many queer book links. She also highlights a queer org you can donate to at the beginning of each newsletter. A few recent ones include Pride and Less Prejudice, Trans Women of Color Collective, and Black Trans Advocacy.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: This is from a few weeks ago, a sunset walk at one of my favorite places on the planet.

And that’s it until Friday, when I’ll be back with my favorite fiction reads of 2021!