We have our first international trip, it's booked. It's going to happen. I'm committed to it. So we're going back to my absolute favorite city in the world D.F., Mexico City, flying out on my birthday two more weeks from now. And I'm just like, I can't even get over how excited [I am]. We have a lot of friends there. They're all excited that we're coming. Thankfully, it's an entire city of outdoor dining so we can just walk the parks, eat outdoors. There's a place I go, it's my ritual to go the moment I land, to get a mango and guanabana juice. And I just can feel that juice. It's on the horizon. I will make it, I will make it so.
MC: Happy early birthday.
JDM: Thank you, thank you. Almost Virgo season. Lale, where are you going?
LA: I'm also leaving the country. And I'm going to Antigua in the Caribbean and I'm meeting up with my best friend from London there.
JDM: Oh my God. How nice.
LA: And just go lie on the beach for a week.
JDM: I love a good friends’ trip. Such a nice way to travel.
MC: Especially when you're going somewhere so low key and you can just catch up and relax. That sounds so delightful.
LA: I know, I can't quite believe I'm... What is it? It's Thursday today and leaving on Sunday.
MC: I am also going to the beach. I'm not leaving the country, but I'm going to Hilton Head with some friends. So I feel like we are all in need of—at a bare minimum—a book to take on a trip to a beach, whether it's down the street or half a world away. I mean, nowhere we're going is half a world away, maybe like a quarter of a world away. We'll expand the reach next time we chat. But for inspiration for people who are listening, Jynne, we'll start with you as always. What books have been really exciting you recently?
JDM: Okay. So my first recommendation, it's a little more literary, but very, very moving. It's a novel called Ghost Forest by a debut novelist, Pik-Shuen Fung. And it's very much about father-daughter relationships and how—spoiler alert, going to speak a lot for myself right now—that fear that you're always disappointing your dad, like you never can be quite good enough. And it's told in this very spare, compact, concise way where chapters are just even one paragraph long and there's like 180 chapters all with these really great titles. But, so you know, there's one where she goes to her dad on advice for where to go to college. And he just says, well, none of them are Harvard, it doesn't matter. You know, that kind of painful, slightly funny, slightly dark little moments. And it's just so beautifully written. If you're a fan… To me, it was sort of like Ocean Vuong, for anyone who loved his novel, meets Lydia Davis. Like witty, spare, compact, like almost, I don't like saying poems because then you think it's like hard or literary in some way because they're not. It's actually very readable, but almost it's just like clear spare storytelling. I was really touched by this book.