⬜ Ignore the ugly book cover

This memoir of Venice is worth it.

Kyle Chayka: While I was in London for the holidays, I made a pilgrimage to Daunt Books. It’s a boutique chain of bookstores founded by a guy named James Daunt, who went on to become the head of Waterstones, a much bigger British bookstore chain, and turned that around. Now, he’s the head of Barnes & Noble, which is a bit like taking over a bank in 2009. Daunt’s whole strategy is embracing curation: He lets the staff of each store decide how books are displayed. I went to the Daunt Books in Marylebone, which is travel-focused, with an atrium of books arranged by the place they relate to.

In the Italy section, I came across this book: The Politics of Washing: Real Life in Venice by Polly Coles. It was published in 2013; I knew nothing about the author or the tiny publisher, Robert Hale (now owned by The Crowood Press). And that cover. It pains me to say that I have seen few covers so bad. The twee watercolor scene, the typeface that looks like it’s from a 2008 webcomic. I wasn’t hopeful. But I’ve always been interested in how Venice survives the impact of tourism, so I flipped through it. You can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can judge it by its paragraphs. Sometimes the texture of a text just works. You can tell from the tone and care in a few sentences that you’ll like a book, and something about Coles’s voice grabbed me immediately. It was smart and esoteric without being pretentious. Wryly funny without being jokey. Perfect for a travel memoir that promised realism.

Still, I put the book back down and stepped away. Could I really keep that on my shelves? It looked like a castoff of the Eat, Pray, Love boom. Then I picked it up again and read a little more. The tone was consistent, like a cake baked all the way through. Each scene that caught my eye seemed compelling. I decided to buy it (along with a book about opening a bookstore in Tuscany) and it kept me company through much of my recent book tour. I never would have found it otherwise, but the Daunt bookstore’s curatorial hand delivered to me exactly what I needed.

Cole moves to Venice from the British countryside with her partner and two sons. The mundane logistics of life turn into fascinating details: How do you get all your household possessions on to an island? By hand. What are schools like when the local population is so tiny and the infrastructure so fixed? Bleak, classical. How do Venetians deal with floods? Either by wearing tall boots or just staying inside til it’s over. Come for the voyeurism of actual local life, stay for Cole’s observations on how history, culture, and tourism intertwine. Like these lines:

“Much of Venice is now, you might say, chronically deforested and swathes of the city are effectively desert because real life is no longer taking place in them. … A city is impoverished at the profoundest of levels when the only exchanges taking place are between strangers and are all to do with the transitory experience of a short visit, with four limited goals: to look, to sleep, to feed and to buy.”

Yet Coles is not too pessimistic, given the twin ravages of cruise ships and climate change. There is still beauty to be found around every corner, and the book glows with that pursuit. It lands right around 200 pages and it feels like the kind of slim volume NYRB would rerelease in a few decades, which is, of course, the best kind of book. Enjoying it so much made me want to escape the tyranny of the newly released. Given the chance, we can find just as much to like in the back catalog. I know I’ll be looking for Coles’s other books soon.

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Taste notes

• I cannot get enough of this bizarre Janick Sinner Gucci ad, (somehow) by way of Joseph Campbell, which recycled through my feeds after a stomping of Djokovic and Medvedev on his way to a first Grand Slam title. To me, the ad is the closest real-life approximation of the AI Harry Potter Balenciaga video for the uncanny valley of aspirational Italianness, which of course, is always worth complicating in Meloni's Italy. I'll say I much prefer it to Alcaraz's Calvin Klein Houston Street underwear ad, his own major fashion appearance after a first Grand Slam victory. The two have come to make a hilarious set of cultural counterpoints in tennis, though admittedly, they do not exist that far apart in tennis's very long line of Western European champions. — Nate Gallant

• This Times article on Gen Z fashion consulting was, more than anything, intergenerational-feud-fueling clickbait, despite being shaped and photo-edited into what was essentially an ad. Still, for those interested in following the way blandness manifests in fashion primarily through Instagram, give it a read. Similitude comes in many forms, but it's interesting how Instagram's formula of infinite reproducibility shapes notions of authenticity and taste in fashion across various kinds of socio-political divides. Don't spend enough time online to know how to trend-chase in 2024? Ask an Instagram-whisperer! — NG

• Alison Roman, our secret fav, wrote a lovely essay on opening a store (shoppy shop vibes) in rural upstate New York. Roman’s sensitivity to place and the humility of just wanting to sell nice ingredients to people speaks to what we like about her, I think: Ultimately, she always wants you to have a good time. Also, Jess and I went to this place in its previous iteration as Table on Ten and stayed at the owner’s Airbnb. Do we regret not buying it before a celebrity chef did? Yes. — KC

• Jason Stewart, co-host of How Long Gone, wrote a review of Horses, the LA restaurant first famous for its retro vibes and cool celebs and then infamous for its co-owner’s animal abuse lol. He finds that it’s still going strong, a place to go for a specific vibe but also a compelling menu: “These veal sweetbreads could be fed to any of your children as a nugget replacement, and no one would bat an eye unless some frisée got stuck to it.” — KC

• The menswear brand paa, which was celebrated in a GQ profile in 2022, is shutting down! I can’t figure out why; no one seems to have covered it yet. They’re doing a fire sale of their remaining items; it’s mostly picked over (I got a few t-shirts, a shirt, and a wool jacket) but you can still find a few gems. — KC

• My employer, The New Yorker, has been on a really good run of its new Critics at Large podcast. The camaraderie between Naomi Fry, Alexandra Schwartz, and Vinson Cunningham is palpable and the pod strikes a nice balance between freewheeling chat show and pointed discussion. I particularly liked the episode defending criticism: Each host explains how they first got into the dark art. — KC