Michael Calore: That’s pretty good. Katie?
Katie Drummond: My recommendation is very specific and very strange. It is a 2003 film called What a Girl Wants, starring Amanda Bynes and Colin Firth.
Michael Calore: Wow.
Katie Drummond: I watched this movie in high school, where I was cheating on my math exams. Sorry. For some reason, just the memory of me cheating on my high school math exams makes me laugh, and then I rewatched it with my daughter this weekend, and it’s so bad and so ludicrous and just so fabulous. Colin Firth is a babe. Amanda Bynes is amazing, and I wish her the best. And it’s a very fun, stupid movie if you want to just disconnect your brain and learn about the story of a 17-year-old girl who goes to the United Kingdom to meet the father she never knew.
Michael Calore: Wow.
Lauren Goode: Wow.
Katie Drummond: Thank you. It’s really good.
Lauren Goode: I can’t decide if you’re saying it’s good or it’s terrible.
Katie Drummond: It’s both. You know what I mean?
Lauren Goode: It’s some combination of both.
Katie Drummond: It’s so bad. She falls in love with a bad boy with a motorcycle but a heart of gold who also happens to sing in the band that plays in UK Parliament, so he just happens to be around all the time. He has spiky hair. Remember 2003? All the guys had gel, spiky hair.
Lauren Goode: Yes, I still remember that. Early 2000s movies, boy, did they not age well.
Katie Drummond: This one, though, aged like a fine wine.
Michael Calore: That’s great.
Katie Drummond: It’s excellent.
Lauren Goode: It’s great.
Katie Drummond: Mike, what do you recommend?
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Michael Calore: Can I go the exact opposite?
Katie Drummond: Please, someone. Yeah.
Michael Calore: I’m going to go literary.
Katie Drummond: OK.
Michael Calore: And I’m going to recommend a novel that I read recently that it just shook me to my core. It’s by Elena Ferrante, and it is called The Days of Abandonment. It’s a novel written in Italian, translated into English and many other languages, by the great pseudonymous novelist, Elena Ferrante. And it is about a woman who wakes up one day and finds out that her husband is leaving her and she doesn’t know why and she doesn’t know where he’s going or who he’s going with, but he just disappears from her life and she goes through it. She accidentally locks herself in her apartment. She has two children that she is now all of a sudden trying to take care of, but somehow neglecting because she’s-
Katie Drummond: This is terrible.
Michael Calore: But it’s the way that it’s written is really good. It is a really heavy book. It’s rough, it’s really rough subject-matter-wise, but the writing is just incredible, and it’s not a long book, so you don’t have to sit and suffer with her for a great deal of time. I won’t spoil anything, but I will say that there is some resolution in it. It’s not a straight trip down to hell. It is a, really, just lovely observation of how human beings process grief and how human beings deal with crises, and I really loved it.
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