Binge-gifts for you from Debbie and me
Life’s better when you have books and TV shows you like. For my wife Debbie and me, 2025 was a “productive” year for reading novels and watching TV together. We coveted escaping into fictional worlds. 1
Following are
Two recommendations of lesser-known novels that Debbie and I loved this year.
Six other, better-known novels that both of us read and liked.
An embarrassing list of our favorite TV shows and movies. The list contains nineteen entries that represent only our top 12% of over 150 shows we watched this year. We rated these nineteen shows 8 or 9 out of 10.
Our list is embarrassing because, having done some calculations, the inescapable fact is that we must have watched at least 25 hours of streaming per week. That said, we are not making a New Year’s resolution to watch less. It’s one of our favorite activities to do together.
Two lesser-known novels we loved
Little Known Facts by Christine Sneed is about a Hollywood A-list movie star (think Clooney, Pitt) whose family and friends are sucked into his charismatic and selfish gravitational pull. Debbie and I felt like Hollywood insiders reading this story. It also made us appreciate how extreme fame is like a juggernaut––both a triumphant spectacle and a trampler of everything in its path.
If you watched and liked, or even tolerated, the movie Jay Kelly starring George Clooney, we think you’ll like and prefer Little Known Facts.
We discovered Little Known Facts via Jane Ratcliffe’s Substack Beyond when she posted a guest essay by Joanna Rakoff called “The Best Books You Never Read.” The relative obscurity of Little Known Facts is particularly puzzling because it was featured on the front-page of the New York Times Book Review by Curtis Sittenfeld who gave the book a strong recommendation.
“[the book is] juicy enough to appeal to our prurience but smart enough not to make us feel dirty afterward.”
“[Sneed’s] depiction of both proximity to celebrity and celebrity itself had me totally convinced.”
Happiness & Love by Zoe Dubno is a wonderfully executed and entertaining rant against the pretensions, hypocrisy, and status hunger of the contemporary visual and literary art scenes. The unnamed narrator may be unreliable but through her hyper-critical lens, she skewers the status obsessed, awful people who populate the novel’s world. She turns some of the sharpest skewering on herself.
At the center of the book’s “little group” of strivers for artistic fame is a wealthy couple, Eugene and Nicole, whose flaws and faults are described with great wit and detail. Nicole lives large on the money she inherited and trades the luxury of her homes and dinners for the company of struggling young artists who she delights in distracting and sabotaging.
It’s emotionally exhausting to cater to Nicole’s whims:
“Nicole…had created an entire social world around her that was ruled by flattering her just enough so that she didn’t notice…[we] were actually working much harder to flatter Nicole without her noticing.
Nicole’s partner, the philandering and clownish Eugene, sponges off Nicole while resenting his role as a “kept man.” As an artist he’s “clever but untalented.” He steals the ideas of the younger artists who gather for pretentious dinners in the couples’ vast Bowery loft. Pretentious in that every served course has to make some sort of statement or be an experience. Like a honey cake sprinkled with actual dirt to be forced to taste the grit along with the sweetness.
Eugene and Nicole deserve a place in the literary pantheon of corrupting, “self-involved and predacious” couples alongside the Buchanans of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby and the Verdurins of Proust’s Swann’s Way.
We discovered “Happiness & Love” via a recommendation by Celine Nguyen who writes the Substack newsletter Personal Canon.
Six other novels
We have included only those novels liked and read by both of us in 2025.
The Stolen Queen by Fiona Davis: we hosted a Book the Writer discussion of the Stolen Queen at our home. An archeology dig in 1930s Egypt and a 1970s era Met Gala are masterfully and suspenseful connected,
Bring Down the House by Charlotte Runcie: recommended by Caroline Cala Donofrio. An acerbic critic issues a devastating review of a one-woman show at the Glastonbury Festival and much mayhem follows.
Trust by Herman Diaz: recommended by our brother Samuel Roberts. Four varying views of a financier’s life. Deservedly one of the best reviewed books of 2022.
The Stranger/L’Etranger by Albert Camus: I read it as part of Laura Kennedy’s Book Club. Debbie read it in French on her own. It led me to write the post My Mother the Absurdist
The Ten-Year Affair by Erin Somer: I saw a blurb promoting it as the “best book on adultery since Madame Bovary.” In part we liked it because it made Debbie and me feel great about our own marriage.
Heart the Lover by Lily King: I’m yet to meet any reader who does not rave about this book.
Our top nineteen streaming shows and movies
Apparently, we enjoy made-up stories of crime, war, sickness, and tragedy. A bonfire of fictional schadenfreude. The titles link to Rotten Tomatoes.
The Well-Known
The Pitt: Enjoyably stressful.
Adolescence: Painful but somehow necessary to watch
Task: Worthy heir to Mare of Easttown.
A House of Dynamite: Nuclear war. Very scary, especially if you lived through the Cold War era.
One Battle After Another: Debbie thought it started a little slow. I liked it all.
Train Dreams: Slow and spare and beautiful
Slow Horses-Season Five: Misanthropic, gaseous, and brilliant Gary Oldman makes us laugh.
Warfare: Debbie’s pick more than mine. I thought it was too realistic.
Nuremberg: We watched it on Christmas instead of eating Chinese food.
Crime, mostly UK
Accused: Each episode starts just prior to a courtroom verdict and then traces the crime back to its start.
A Place of Execution: We liked it a lot but can’t remember exactly why.
American Crime: Seasons One, Two, and Three: Anthology series from ten years ago. The storylines of drug abuse, child sex-trafficking, school violence, and migrant mistreatment are, sadly, as relevant as ever. Felicity Huffman is excellent in each series.
Depart. Q: We love misanthropic, underdog, smartest-in-the room-and-they let you-know-it detectives.
Say Nothing: The Troubles in Ireland based on the book about a woman who was disappeared. Quietly terrifying.
Unforgotten: Catching up on Seasons Four and Five: Character-driven cold case mysteries.
Blue Lights: Season Three: Our favorite police procedural.
Two Scandinavian shows
Force Majeure: a husband shows cowardice on a ski vacation when an avalanche threatens his family.
Quicksand: A school shooting mystery handled deftly.
Debbie’s Ethan Hawke Obsession
Juliet, Naked: Discussed in my post Vanity, Marriage, And A Hall-Pass Trap
Curating is an art form
Reading and watching choices today are unsurpassed in both availability and excellence. Yes, the explosion of quantity imposes greater care in selecting what we’ll enjoy. But the resources to do so are wonderful. They include crowd-sourcing review sites, using AI with a prompt of “If I liked book X or show Y, what else do you suggest and why?” and word of mouth from friends, in real life and online. Curating books and shows is one of my most important marital duties.
As for the term binge-gift, I tried to introduce it into circulation a few years ago hoping it would catch fire as a clever phrase. So far, it’s suffered the ignominious fate of “fetch” from Mean Girls.2 I have not given up. After all, what can possibly be a better gift to someone than suggesting a book or show they might want to binge?
Question for the comments: Calling for your binge-gifts of novels and shows.
This is our answer to Keynes’ question explored in the post below of how to spend leisure time.
Your idea for “binge-gift” makes me nostalgic for mix tapes. Remember when you could give music to people — a favorite CD or for a more personal, curated touch, a mix tape? I miss that. Spotify playlists are great and all, but it’s no comparison.
I’m with Debbie: Ethan Hawke is brilliant! As fan who is about Hawke’s age, I have enjoyed seeing him change over the course of his long career from a beautiful young man to a grizzled, quirky character actor.
Debbie might enjoy The Lowdown, in which Hawke plays a journalist trying to be a good dad, to uncover a secret criminal cabal in a small town, and to somehow recover from frequently being beaten up. It’s by Sterlin Harjo, whose previous series was the outstanding Reservation Dogs. Highly recommended!