Laura's Favorite Things 2015

Last year, I put together a collection of my favorite things as a year-end round up/belated gift guide. I'm trying to get this one out before 2016, and maybe it will give you some ideas for how to spend your gift cards from the holidays.

Jane the Virgin
Jane the Virgin is fantastic. The premise - Jane is accidentally artificially inseminated during what she expected to be a pap smear - is solid, but the characters are what make the show irresistible. Even the most over-the-top, such as telenovela star Rogelio De La Vega, are grounded in believable emotions and motivations. The writers manage to balance character growth against telenovela-style dramatics (drug lords! kidnapping! mistaken identities! long lost parents! murder!). Even the narrator adds to the show's charms. Jane the Virgin has me considering trying to learn Spanish this year. I highly recommend it.

Lazy Summer Reading

Possibly my favorite way to indulge in something luxurious is to find a great book and read for an entire afternoon. I don't have to be anywhere else and I don't have to do something more productive with myself. I can get lost in a story and emerge hours later.

Eric with books and baklava

Here are a few books for your summer afternoons:

Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

Eric Sanderson wakes up with no memory of who he is and only pieces together his history through letters from his past self, the First Eric Sanderson. His letters direct him to his therapist, who insists that he shouldn't open any packages that arrive for him. He agrees, until he's attacked in his living room by a fish that comes out of nowhere. The story explores the idea of conceptual fish as well as the power of language, memory, loss, and giant sharks in a captivating way. It was absorbing and moving in ways I didn't expect. The conceptual fish have swirled around my mind since reading the novel last summer.

This Weekend's Playlist

This Friday night, I'm going to see Guster, my favorite band since a friend gave me Keep It Together for my sixteenth birthday. They always put on a great show, plus a couple of friends are joining Eric and me, so it will be a great night.

In the past year, I've noticed that Guster makes up a large portion of the music I know, and I haven't changed up what I listen to significantly in a few years. My friends in college would recommend bands and share albums, but as a history major I spent most of my time reading and writing. If I listened to music, it was either soothing instrumentals (often the Io Non Ho Paura soundtrack, with its haunting string quartets) or high-energy pop music (I wrote a large chunk of my thesis to the Glee version of "Teenage Dream," no shame) so I could mostly ignore it and focus on my work.

Women, work, and what I've been reading lately

Today at work, a colleague sent me this article by Alice Zielinski about being a young, blonde engineer at MIT. It's a fascinating look at the thousands of little cuts that can convince someone that they don't belong in a top-tier STEM program.

Perhaps more disturbing is the follow-up piece the author wrote to address a lot of the criticism she received, which ranged from, "You think you're hot, but your picture isn't that hot" to "You're at MIT, so you're fine. Do you realize how many worse problems there are in the world?"