Issue #38: A List of Extremely Bingeable Recs

Reading rut: Solved. ✔️

Morning Person is a weekly newsletter packed with obsessively-curated recommendations and ideas—let’s get to it!

📚 Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason: One of the most honest, but also oddly funniest, depictions of living with depression and everything it takes to be human. Martha Friel has endured the debilitating mental weight that occasionally keeps her bedridden for months, through her job as a writer, two marriages, and neurotic sister Ingrid, until she moves back in with her parents in London. It’s also full of gems, like this depiction of three years of a marriage, “A holiday, a leaking pipe, new sheets, happy birthday, a technician between nine and three, a bird flew into the window, I want to die, please, I can’t breathe, I think it’s a lunch thing, I love you, I can’t do this anymore, both of us thinking it would be like that forever.”

🎧 “Dance Fever” by Florence and the Machine: Florence Welch’s fifth album positions poetic vulnerability over dance tracks, for the perfect sing-at-the-top-of-your-lungs-in-the-car album. Take the line off her single “Free,” “Sometimes I wonder if I should be medicated/if I would feel better just lightly sedated” or this one, “I need my empty halls to echo with grand self-mythology.” I’ve long loved Florence for her 2009 earworms (looking at you, “Bird Song” and “Kiss with a Fist”) and this album has plenty of those, but I was surprised to discover how much I appreciated some of her softer, ethereal songs here like “Cassandra” and “Back In Town.”