Hello, and welcome to Leisure Time. Here at Leisure Time, you can expect a roundup of things to do with your leisure time. I’m Lisa Weidenfeld, a writer and editor based in Cambridge. I’ve been an arts reporter, a freelance TV critic, a digital editor, and for about a year and half in high school, a very sullen flower delivery driver. Like many people who have dipped a toe in the journalism pond, I’m both very good at metaphors, and eager to have a lower stress way to write. Which brings us to this new newsletter!

The plan for Leisure Time is that we’ll start with a few paragraphs of my finest prose, and then we’ll get into what I’m reading/watching/listening to at the time. I’m excited to see where this goes! I hope this newsletter proves useful to fill “time when you are not working and you can relax and do things that you enjoy” as awkwardly defined by Google’s top result when I tried to make sure nothing else was using this name. I hope it becomes a thing that you enjoy! And I won’t tell anyone if you read it while you are working.

OK, enough riffing, here’s what we’ve got for this week:

What I’m reading in print

I’m fudging this slightly. What I am actually reading this week is a book called Shorefall by Robert Jackson Bennett, but seeing as that is a sequel, I thought I’d shout out the book I read last week, which is The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, by Shehan Karunatilaka. As the book opens, the titular Maali is dead, and he’s got a week to linger around town and solve his own murder before he either moves on to the afterlife, or risks becoming a demon. The book is set in Sri Lanka in the 1980s amid a time of tremendous unrest, so there are a lot of different dangerous people and forces Maali has to consider. It’s a place and an era I didn’t know much about, so I really enjoyed getting to know a new-to-me setting, plus Maali is very entertaining company. He’s a war zone photographer, but he’s also a bit of a jerk and mouths off all the time. But what I enjoyed most is that the book is a really wonderful love story, not just with the boyfriend Maali is hopelessly unfaithful to, but with his best friend. As an avid participant in best friendship, I like seeing it get the recognition it deserves.

If an epic fantasy series is more your speed, Shorefall is the sequel to Foundryside, which is great. It follows a squad of unlikely allies as they seek to pull off a heist to right great injustice and stop the apocalypse, and two of the heroes fall in love, and various of them can do magic, and it’s very funny.

I also spent a lot of time reading crime fiction recently to prep for a podcast I recorded with the author Chuck Hogan (coming soon!). I’m pretty sure most people have seen The Town by now, but if you haven’t read the book it’s based on, pick up Prince of Thieves, and have fun picturing Jeremy Renner and Ben Affleck the whole time. Hogan’s newest book, which I wrote about for Boston College Magazine, is Gangland, about a closeted mafioso working for the real-life mob boss Tony Accardo in the ‘70s in Chicago. To quote my own article, the book is “revisiting a nigh-unbelievable actual moment in Accardo’s life: the night a group of unidentified people broke into his house and trashed it while he was in Florida, setting off a chain of retaliatory murders allegedly ordered by Accardo.”

And if you want to read what the experts are reading, Hogan recommended the ‘70s classic The Pope of Greenwich Village, by Vincent Patrick. I’ll just warn that an author would have a hard time getting away with some of the language in it now, but it’s also very funny, a real classic of the genre, and kind of an incredible slice of life of the moment it depicts.

What I’m reading online

If you’re still really annoyed about Love Life getting unceremoniously deleted off of HBO Max, head over to Slate to read “Peak TV Is Over. Welcome to Trough TV." by the critic Sam Adams for a thoughtful take on what’s next in the streaming era.

We’ll get to this in the next section, but I love Party Down, and I got a kick out of this interview with Tyrel Jackson, who plays aspiring TikTok star Sackson on the reboot and has the unenviable task of being one of the cast newcomers.

I haven’t read this book yet, but I loved this interview with The Luminaries author Eleanor Catton about her latest, Birnam Wood, and how people should stop treating New Zealand as some kind of untouched utopia. I studied abroad there in college, so it was actually touched by me, briefly. This is irrelevant to the piece, but I just think people should know I’ve been to New Zealand.

Please read my old pal Spencer Buell’s charming piece about Mike O’Brien, who’s been “featured in man-on-the-street interviews dozens of times” because he’s just kind of…around? And interested in being featured. How does he do it? “They’re just always there. It’s not like I’m seeking it out. I just kind of walk around Boston and there they are. So I ask, ‘Do you need a man-on-the-street?’” he said.

It wouldn’t be a Lisa newsletter without at least one cat reference, so please read this Washington Post story about a Polish town’s top tourist attraction on Google Maps: a friendly cat. Hoping for several followup stories about this detail: A spokesperson for Google initially said the company would reply to questions from the Washington Post about why Gacek was temporarily removed as an attraction, but then the spokesperson did not answer the questions. This is not the first time Gacek’s reviews have been taken down from Google Maps, news reports show.

What I’m watching

The new season of Perry Mason is getting very good reviews so I decided to go back and start the first season. Right now it’s going a bit heavy on what a sad and tragic figure he is, and I’m just not sure how many more scenes I need of him drinking and looking sad and then having flashbacks to the trenches of World War I, but I’m determined to stick with it for now, even though it is grievously underusing Tatiana Maslany (this crime was also committed by She-Hulk even though she starred in it).

I’m also watching Poker Face, because, like everyone else, I am powerless to resist Natasha Lyonne doing her thing. And I’m loving the new season of Party Down. I have really low tolerance for cringe comedy these days (the people rewatching The Office are simply unfathomable to me), but somehow this show does it at a level I can handle. The rare reboot that feels like it has a grasp on who its characters are now, and why we’re revisiting them. Just don’t ask for my Starz login to watch it, because I shared it with too many people and all of us named the profiles things like Fart Palace and I don’t really remember who’s on there anymore.

What I’m listening to

I’m an elder millennial, so let’s get thing started with an indie rock song of my youth: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s “Skin of My Country Yellow Teeth.”

Restaurant recommendation

This will mostly be of use to my Boston readers, but if you’re an oyster bar kind of a gal like me, get thee to Puritan Oyster Bar in Cambridge. They have a crab rangoon dip! With wonton crackers! And a caviar cone with sour cream and egg salad in it. Honestly just get one of everything and that should cover it.

Thanks for reading!