A perfect Sunday with... Cole Haddon
Eggs Florentine, movie trainwrecks and the Scooby Gang!
Every week, a top writer, artist or creator reveals how they’d fill their perfect Sunday, sharing their favourite comfort reads, movies, food… anything that would make their weekend great.
Today, it’s the turn of Psalms For the End of the World author Cole Haddon.
Cole’s perfect Sunday… brunch
Without fail, Eggs Florentine, smothered in Hollandaise sauce with a beautiful cup of coffee. But I can’t just have these eggs anywhere. Believe it or not, they’re generally shit wherever you go in the world. Most of the reason for this is how badly I think most restaurants prepare Eggs Florentine or Benedict or any variant of the dish. No, the best place in the world to eat this dish is in Southeast London right after a leafy stroll to the café, particularly in early autumn or late spring. Most of my favorite days in England have started this way.
Cole’s perfect Sunday… read
It doesn’t get better than Frank Herbert’s Dune, which is as close to a Bible as I have in my life. It’s especially appropriate to Sundays, I think, when the profanity of religion always seemed most dominant in my childhood. But as I age, I find the struggle central to Michael Chabon’s novel Wonder Boys, the despair and reluctant optimism of Grady Tripp, makes more and more sense to me as a spiritual guide.
Cole’s perfect Sunday… comic
Batman: Year One or The Dark Knight Returns. The latter increasingly disturbs me with age, but these two books defined by love for Batman – and, really, comic books – at a very young age. They sit on my shelf, not far from my desk, and I regularly find myself flipping through them. They remain perfect in my mind.
Cole’s perfect Sunday… movie
I have a challenging nine-year-old kid, and these days I would call perfect any movie I get to watch with him, cuddled up on the couch. Which means Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s also one of my favorite movies of all time…which is a weird coincidence, right?
Cole’s perfect Sunday… TV binge
I’ve watched very few TV series in my life that I feel any real need to return to with the exception of a handful such as E.R., Mad Men, and – most significantly – Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I could spend any Sunday with Buffy Summers and her Scooby Gang. I wish I could choose a favorite season, but I don’t have one. My favorite episodes are scattered across the series – yes, even into Seasons 6 and 7. In fact, most of the episodes that broke my heart the most are found in those two often criticized seasons.
Cole’s perfect Sunday… podcast
I’m currently obsessed with It was a $#!t Show, which looks back at films you loved or films that were famous trainwrecks and reveals the development, production, and post-production nightmares that preceded their releases. The hosts are hilarious and lay out their narratives in compelling ways. I’d recommend starting with The Fugitive episode, which is about as insane as you can get given how brilliant the film turned out – but the Mr. and Mrs. Smith episode is a special kind of crazy.
Cole’s perfect Sunday… album
Much to my wife’s frustration, George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. Not because she hates it, but because I play it so much. I honestly think this album approaches the numinous.
Cole’s perfect Sunday… treat
A beer garden. A good beer or cider. Friends around me as we debate the films and TV we’ve recently watched, the books we’re reading, and the music on our minds. It’s a simple thing, really, incredibly mundane by most standards, but it’s as close to Heaven as I get outside my wife and kids.
Psalms For the End of the World by Cole Haddon is out now from Headline UK!
It’s 1962 and physics student Grace Pulansky believes she has met the man of her dreams, Robert Jones, while serving up slices of pecan pie at the local diner. But then the FBI shows up, with their fedoras and off-the-rack business suits, and accuses him of being a bomb-planting mass-murderer.
Finding herself on the run with Jones across America’s Southwest, the discoveries awaiting Gracie will undermine everything she knows about the universe. Her story will reveal how scores of lives – an identity-swapping rock star, a mourning lover in ancient China, Nazi hunters in pursuit of a terrible secret, a crazed artist in pre-revolutionary France, an astronaut struggling with a turbulent interplanetary future, and many more – are interconnected across space and time by love, grief, and quantum entanglement.
Spanning continents, centuries, and dimensions, this exquisitely crafted and madly inventive novel – a triple-disk, concept-album of a book – is a profound yet propulsive enquiry into the nature of reality – the perfect immersive read for fans of David Mitchell, Emily St. John Mandel, Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood.
Cole Haddon is an Australian-American novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. Dracula, his first television commission, was produced by NBC and Sky Living starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and he has gone on to develop dozens of feature films and TV series around the globe – most recently Genocidal Organ for director Park Chan-wook (Old Boy) and the rock musical Zombie Broadway for The Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart and director Jonas Åkerlund (Lords of Chaos). His graphic novels have been published by Dark Horse and others. His articles have appeared in the Melbourne Age, Sydney Morning Herald, and Village Voice Media, amongst others. Psalms for the End of the World, is his first novel. He lives in the Blue Mountains of Australia with his wife and two children.
