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Reading Wednesday

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 23:56:48 GMT

Finished Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, a slice-of-life novel set in "a village of four hundred souls" in '90s(?) Iceland, narrated in a sort of anonymous, collective community voice (opening line: "Now, we'd almost written that what made our village unique was that it wasn't unique at all, but apparently that isn't true"). Something of a connected short stories feel in the way each chapter does follow a different, specific story arc/plotline from beginning to end, but even then, there's a meandering, kaleidoscopic feel— I'd say it's somehow both sprawling and narrow in focus?— and a few running plot/story threads throughout. (I've seen the author described as an Icelandic Charles Dickens; I found myself thinking more of South Riding.) Particularly enjoyed this for having recently traveled to Iceland, because although we only drove past/through the type of very small, rural town/village where this is set, I did have enough of a sense of the buildings and landscape and the vibes to picture it as I read. (More than if I had read this before I went to Iceland, anyway...)

Finished Buffet for Unwelcome Guests by Christianna Brand, a collection of short stories categorized into "Cockrill Cocktails" (featuring her recurring detective Inspector Cockrill), "Entrees" (longer stand-alones), "Petit Fours", and "Black Coffee." There was something generally flippant about the "Petit Fours", including two separate stories that made me think of the Mmm Whatcha Say SNL sketch, only one of them was about a jewel heist* and one about blackmail and murder; the latter also featured some cheerfully callous children, making two for two on a reaction of o__O towards the children in Brand's mystery stories, which does make me curious about the vibe of her novels for children. The "Black Coffee" stories were, as the name suggests, just plain dark: ( ... ) Bit of a grab bag, quality-wise, and I did skip a couple of stories— one had such a baffling opening sentence that I was like, you know what? I'll come back to this and then I didn't; one was just virulent fatphobia for the first couple of pages and I safely assumed it would not improve— and it ended on a sour note, since the second-to-last story hinged on an intentionally false accusation of sexual assault in a way that has aged extremely poorly. (Not sure when it was written, but this collection was published in the early '80s?) There were some good stories, though— particularly among the Cockrill ones, where I found I liked him more than in Brand's novels— so not an entirely disappointing experience.

* Actually, on double-checking, that one was filed under "Something to Clear the Palate" rather than a "Petit Four"— presumably as the one story in the collection that did not involve murder?— but I don't want to rewrite that whole sentence at this point.

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Weekend reading

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 17:12:14 GMT

Read We Hexed the Moon by Mollyhall Seeley, in which a group of teenage girls accidentally cause the moon to disappear and then have to do some grave-robbing and human sacrifice to get it back. I enjoyed this a lot! Written with a bit of a noticeable Tumblr accent— not in an offputting way, imo; the author is ofgeography, so she comes by it organically— and very girlhood is cannibalism, but even more than the horror-fantasy/magical realism aspect, I enjoyed the slow, layer-by-layer reveal of all the hairline fractures in the foundation of the girls' codependent friend group, just ready to crack apart and take everyone down with it even before they have to grapple with a whole trolley problem of murder and self-sacrifice vs. the fate of the world. I'd say there's an overlapping target audience with Jennifer's Body, Thoroughbreds, Yellowjackets, and (at least in spirit) The Locked Tomb.

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Reading Wednesday (v2)

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:44:25 GMT

Finished Crimson Angel by Barbara Hambly, one of her series of historical mysteries set mostly in 1840s New Orleans— the title character, Benjamin January, is a free Black surgeon turned musician turned informal detective— but more of a thriller than a mystery, taking January and co. to Cuba and then to Haiti in search of a rumored treasure and a family secret that someone is evidentially willing to kill for. ( ... ) I always love the dynamic of January, his wife Rose, and their Anglo-Irish friend Hannibal Sefton as a mystery-solving trio, and this one had some great moments with those three (including one scene where I was like, ohhh, this is when sovay's fic is set!); I also really liked the role that voodoo/vodou as a faith practice played in this one.

Read the second half of Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return), covering her teenaged years studying abroad in Austria and her return to Iran in the late 1980s (before leaving again, for good, in the mid-90s). I hate to nitpick the narrative structure of a memoir, but the first half/book felt like a noticeably tighter/stronger story; it might just be that the first half is so very good that it's hard to live up in comparison. Separately, another tick in the box for this year's inadvertent reading trend of "all memoirs are mental health memoirs."

Still poking along in Christianna Brand short story collection Buffet for Unwelcome Guests; struck by the recurring themes of conspiracy— with variations on theme including conspiracy in the murder itself or in its cover-up, and intentional or accidental collaboration— and of murder committed for sordid, selfish, petty reasons by someone who thinks they've been terribly clever in covering it up. I'm slightly haunted by one story in which an innocent man is accidentally framed for murder, and a guilty man accidentally shielded, by the testimony of children preoccupied with covering up their own unrelated, inconsequential secrets. (It wasn't even a particularly good story, in itself, but...... oh man!!)

Re-posting to add: read Space Invaders by Nona Fernández in one sitting this evening, after seeing it recommended by rachelmanija, who reviewed it more eloquently than I could ever manage here; a short and breathtaking novella taking a child's-eye view of Pinochet's Chile. Actually pairs surprisingly well with my other book in progress— Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, a kaleidoscopic novel set in a small village in Iceland— in the sense of a similarly detailed-but-dreamlike Greek chorus of a narrative POV.

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Weekend reading

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 23:40:10 GMT

Read Wearing the Lion by John Wiswell, a retelling of the myth of Hercules told through the alternating narrative POVs of a furious, foul-mouthed Hera (opening line: "Good news, Heaven," announces my dipshit husband. "I've made a new king of the mortals") and an endearingly himbo-ish Heracles (opening line: "Dear Auntie Hera, Thank you for the snake friends"). As you might know, I am a snob about Greek mythology retellings, although "snob" doesn't always feel like the right word, because I am down for retellings that get silly with it— I just want them to do something creative and interesting with the source material??— and I enjoyed this one. Overall, it's got a cozy-fantasy feel— Wiswell's take on the twelve labors of Heracles reads like a D&D campaign where the players insist on befriending the monsters instead of, or at least after, fighting them; he calls the Nemean lion "Purrseus"— but is bittersweet enough to keep things interesting.

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Next to Normal (2024)

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 03:40:31 GMT

More of a PSA than a review, but the proshot of the 2024 West End production of Next to Normal is available on YouTube through the end of the month (so... three days?) and it's fantastic— recent Tony winner(!) Caissie Levy's performance as a suburban mom struggling with bipolar disorder and long-buried grief, and Jack Wolfe's as the now-teenaged figment of the son she lost as an infant seventeen years before, both lived up to the hype, but I was also really impressed by the actress who played emotionally neglected (living) daughter Natalie (Eleanor Worthington-Cox), especially opposite Levy— incredible mother-daughter casting, there. (X)

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The Family Man - James Lasdun

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 03:25:04 GMT

Finished The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh by James Lasdun, which was true crime— about a 2021 murder case that got a lot of media/national attention, although I didn't follow it at the time and so was getting most of the story for the first time— and therefore depressing. ( ... )

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Recent reading

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 01:56:43 GMT

Re-read Matilda by Roald Dahl for the first time since I was a child, on a pub trivia question-induced whim. Interesting to note what I did and didn't remember— apparently the school shenanigans had left more of an impression than Matilda's pranks on her awful, neglectful parents, but this time, oh my god, her parents are awful— and I was surprised to realize that Miss Honey is only 23???? As the meme goes, she should have been at the club.

Also re-read what turned out to be only the first half of Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (i.e., Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood; I've put book 2— The Story of a Return— on hold, so stay tuned), a graphic novel memoir about growing up in early 1980s Iran. Satrapi's black-and-white art appears simple but so evocative: I found myself marveling over one page, where young Marji and her classmates are drawn just as circles for faces and eyes and dashes for noses, against identical black headscarves, but there's enough subtle variation in those sparse lines that they're all distinct characters and you can tell which one is Marji.

Read The Other Man by Farhad J. Dadyburjor, a m/m romance novel set in contemporary Mumbai (specifically, in 2018, on the cusp of the Supreme Court of India's ruling decriminalizing homosexuality): the closeted heir of a major company falls for an American tourist just as he finally resigns himself to marrying to satisfy his family's expectations. Romance novels are not really my cup of tea, but this was a serviceable enough mini paper cup of Lipton, as it were.

Started The Family Man by James Lasdun, true crime nonfiction about the now-infamous Murdaugh family of South Carolina, encompassing two murders, one accidental death of very obvious culpability, and two deaths under suspicious circumstances, not to mention the shameless financial crime. ( ... )

Have also continued reading both Crimson Angel by Barbara Hambly and Buffet for Unwelcome Guests by Christianna Brand— I'm onto the "entrees" now, longer stand-alone stories— but, as you can see, I keep picking up new books instead of focusing on the ones I have in progress. (...don't even ask about War & Peace...)

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Recent(ish) theater

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 21:11:12 GMT

Saw How Shakespeare Saved My Life at the Folger Theatre, a solo show written and performed by Jacob Ming-Trent, who I saw in a couple of different shows last year— as Falstaff in the STC's Merry Wives* and in a short but memorable turn as a tent-revival preacher in New York City Center's Bat Boy the Musical— and it turns out he was also in the Audra McDonald-led Gypsy revival, which I saw in 2024. In this show, Ming-Trent uses a mix of Shakespeare's words (and Tupac's and Biggie's, and Baldwin's) and his own to tell the story of how he survived his worst experiences— which start with being kicked out/homeless as a teenager and go downhill from there— and wrestled with his dream of being a Shakespearean actor in a world that told him he was too Black and too big and too poor to succeed in that space. He does a fantastic job of inhabiting/distinguishing all of the different characters, and there was some very cool use of video projection— including as music video-style punctuation of his words with visuals— and pre-recorded audio so that he was on stage having a conversation with himself (voicing, e.g., God), etc. Very intimate performance, in part because the Folger is just a very small space, but also intentionally curated, with Ming-Trent frequently addressing the audience as "congregation" and an element of call and response: as instructed at the beginning of the play, at key moments throughout, he would point to us and we'd echo back play on!; at another point, he had us chant you should play Othello as the refrain to his verse, as it were, about the loaded experience of seeing Othello for the first time.**

* Last fall, the STC restaged Jocelyn Bioh's 2021 Shakespeare in the Park production of The Merry Wives of Windsor (X) set in present-day Harlem with a West African flair; all of the characters except Ming-Trent's very American Falstaff (and Falstaff's sidekick Pistol) were West African immigrants (Nigerian, Ghanaian, etc.— Dr. Caius was Senegalese, keeping the Francophone humor) and the last trick played on Falstaff involved everyone dressing up as "spirits" inspired by Yoruba masquerade and Burkina Faso's FESTIMA festival. Anne Page's preferred suitor, Fenton, was played by/as a woman, adding a narrative layer of "traditional immigrant parents vs. queer daughter" (with a happy ending!) to the subplot about everyone wanting to marry Anne. Super funny, vibrant production with some great physical/visual humor.

** Which, as it happens, I also recently (finally) saw for the first time— unsurprisingly, at the STC and directed by Simon Godwin— although obviously had a very different experience: I found it a technically very good performance of a play that, in itself, I did not particularly like. (I also kept thinking about the "if Hamlet and Othello swapped plays it would solve everyone's problems" take, which didn't help.) Wendell Pierce as Othello was the production's advertised star power, and he was very good, but I was blown away by Ben Turner's Iago: a shape-shifting manipulator, he was a completely different person with each of his "marks," from the way he spoke to the way he held himself, tailored perfectly to earn that person's trust. (As the friend I saw this with joked: "drink every time someone calls Iago honest.") I was also impressed by Lucas Iverson*** as an unexpectedly endearing Cassio, and Melanie Field**** as Emilia: her denunciation of Iago was a show-stopper. Modern-dress production, heavy on military aesthetics, which I tend to find a boring way to stage Shakespeare, but worked here.

*** Who I also saw at the STC last year, as the Creature in Emily Burns' Frankenstein, before he went on to play the guy everyone hated on season two of The Pitt.

**** Ditto above, as Sonya in Uncle Vanya. ( ... )

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Reading Wednesday

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 12:55:49 GMT

Read Kissing Girls on Shabbat by Sara Glass, a memoir of the author's journey from observant ultra-Orthodox/Hasidic wife to out lesbian and trauma therapist by her early thirties. For some reason, every non-celebrity memoir I read— and, honestly, most of the celebrity ones— end(s) up being about mental health, whether their own and/or others'...? In this case, on top of everything else, Glass grew up in a family where her mother and sister struggled with mental health issues, which motivated her to go into social work and later a PhD in psychology.

Otherwise on a mystery kick: reading Crimson Angel by Barbara Hambly, one of her Benjamin January mysteries— I'm not sure if I've officially run out of novels where they stick around New Orleans or if I've just happened to stock up on the travel ones: the last few I've read have taken place in Washington, DC, Mexico, and now Cuba (and Haiti?)— and just started Buffet for Unwelcome Guests, a collection of short stories by Golden Age mystery writer Christianna Brand, starting with "Cockrill Cocktails," or stories featuring her recurring detective Inspector Cockrill. (I assume the rest of the stories will be stand-alones? The other section titles are "Choice of Entrées," "Something to Clear the Palate," "Petit Fours," and "Black Coffee.")

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Weekend reading

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:34:58 GMT

Finished the Damon Runyon collection Guys and Dolls and Other Writings! To be honest, I mostly skimmed through his Early/Other Fiction, which lacked a certain something (like... good writing...), but at least his much better Broadway Stories made up like 70% of the collection, and his 1920s-30s trial reporting— including coverage of Al Capone's 1931 trial for tax evasion and the 1933 Senate investigation of J.P. Morgan Jr., also for tax evasion, presented back-to-back— was also interesting; it, along with some of his Occasional Prose, offered a bit of insight into his Broadway Stories: the "Mindy's restaurant" that often appears in his stories is presumably a nod to the "Lindy's restaurant" mentioned in the context of the 1929 murder of gangster Arnold Rothstein... who, per a short Wikipedia rabbit hole, appears as "the Brain" in several of Runyon's short stories— and has also been pointed to as his inspiration for Nathan Detroit?— and also shows up in The Great Gatsby as Meyer Wolfsheim. The more you know! My one nit to pick with this collection was that it presented the stories without date/context, but it turns out all of this information was included in an "annotations" section at the end, so complaint retracted. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Reading Wednesday

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 23:11:45 GMT

In Guys and Dolls and Other Writings, the Damon Runyon collection that I started back in January, I've finally read all of Runyon's "Broadway Stories" of dim-witted gangsters, which are usually funny, occasionally maudlin (or sentimental: there is one Christmas episode, as it were, playing off the joke of "wise men" vs. "wise guys"), and then out of left field the last one ("A Light in France", 1944) was set in occupied France and involved setting a Nazi on fire. Have also read one stand-alone short story ("A Call on the President") that for some reason is classified separately under "The Turps" - after its central bickering married couple - rather than with the rest of "Other Fiction," presumably because of its distinct narrative voice:

The fellow in the striped pants ses what do you want to see the President of the United States about? I ses look Mister, we came all the way from Brooklyn to see the President of the United States and I have got to be back to work on my job tomorrow and if I stop and tell everybody what I want to see him about I won't have no time left. I ses Mister, what is so tough about seeing the President of the United States? When he was after his job he was glad to see anybody. I ses is he like those politicians in Brooklyn now or what?

(At one point Ethel Turp gets distracted "making snoots" out the window of the Oval Office at someone who had been rude to them and my brain immediately cast Myrna Loy, although - after going down a short Wikipedia rabbit hole - in fact Ann Sothern got the role when it was made into a movie in 1939.)

Have also been reading Madly, Deeply, the diaries of Alan Rickman, 1993-2015; now on 1995 and the filming of Sense & Sensibility and (back-to-back? simultaneously? unclear) Michael Collins, which I hadn't heard of and caused a little confusion (for a minute I was like, huh, I didn't know Sense & Sensibility filmed in Dublin!) but has been particularly interesting in terms of thoughts on playing a character based on a historical figure.

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Recent reading

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 20:15:41 GMT

Finished Famesick by Lena Dunham, which I really.... enjoyed does not feel like the right word, because it is basically a memoir of getting chewed up and spit out by the fame machine at the same time as she was suffering from chronic health issues and struggling with substance abuse and she apparently just has godawful taste in and/or luck with men, but it is an engaging and - despite the heavy content - frequently funny read. Prominently features various celebrities who I'd say I was abstractly aware of as famous people who exist, but I found that this didn't necessarily change my opinion of, say, Jack Antonoff or Adam Driver— like, not in the sense that I don't credit Dunham's narrative, it's just that my brain did not really connect my indignation over Dunham's increasingly selfish/useless boyfriend to that guy from that band, or the coworker who sounds like a walking red flag (but, even in her own memoir a decade later, she seems more enamored with than put off by??) with that guy from that movie, etc. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (Mostly, I think, because I didn't really have preexisting opinions about any of said famous people; I enjoy the music of both fun. and Bleachers, but 100% could not pick Antonoff out of a lineup of white guys in hipster glasses.)

Read Operation Heartbreak by Duff Cooper, technically a 1950 fictionalization of WWII's Operation Mincemeat— a deception operation to convince the Nazis that the Allies planned to invade Sardinia, not Sicily, by way of "secret" plans planted via dead British officer washing ashore in Spain; in recent years, the subject of a book, a movie, and a musical— although only the last ~20 pages (of 155) have anything to do with/map onto the story of Operation Mincemeat (which was still classified in 1950, although Cooper apparently learned of it from Churchill as dinner gossip and Ewen Montagu published his own account only a few years later). Instead, it is mostly the pretty bleak life story of one Captain William "Willie" Maryngton (barely filing the serial numbers off of Mincemeat's faked Major William Martin here), a born and bred soldier with the misfortune of being too young for WWI and too old to be shipped to the front in WWII, who finally achieves his life's goal of seeing "action" only after he dies of pneumonia and is used in a deception operation to convince the Nazis that etc. etc. Can't really put my finger on the tone, beyond bleak— the dialogue frequently has the gung-ho feel of a propaganda film, but I feel like there's kind of a cynical edge, overall? The most interesting character in this is actually Willie's foster brother Horatio "Horry" Osborne, the son of a military family who pursues his dream of becoming an actor instead, but— after a lifetime of insisting that the Army wasn't "going to get [him] in their clutches"— immediately joins up when WWII breaks out, motivated by his "profound hatred of injustice and cruelty," and is almost as quickly killed in battle. (RIP Horry.)

It's interesting to compare what we know now about the IRL Operation Mincemeat to Cooper's fictional Operation Heartbreak: in the novel, Maryngton's death provides the operation with a ready-made cover story, vs. the real-life work that went into carefully constructing an identity, down to the pocket litter. (Although someone does still write a love letter to send off with him: in this case, the secretary who does so is the aforementioned Horry Osborne's younger sister! Who Willie has been in love with for years! And had in fact recently turned down his proposal!) Also interestingly, the afterword on the IRL Operation Mincemeat, written circa 2004, dismisses Glyndwr Michael— the "real" Major Martin, an unhoused man from Wales who died (whether intentionally or accidentally) from poison— as a possible identity for the body used, positing that "a postmortem might have discovered [his real cause of death] and the risk would have been too great." Happy to pass this along to anyone who'd like to read it, btw, otherwise it's going to local little free library.

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Reading Wednesday

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 22:33:05 GMT

Instead of starting one of several recently-acquired new books, or picking back up on any of my increasingly ridiculous number of books in various stages of progress, over the past couple of days I started and finished This Is Not About Us by Allegra Goodman, a novel that feels like a short story collection since each chapter focuses on a different member of an extended Jewish family scattered mostly along the East Coast and split by a feud between two elderly sisters - the family matriarchs - who had a falling out at the deathbed of their other, younger sister. Domestic but compelling; I liked that most of the individual plot points were never really - or at least not tidily - resolved, per se, leaning into the snapshot/short story feel.

Probably won't get around to those unread books any time soon, because I got a "skip the line" Libby loan for Lena Dunham's new memoir, Famesick, and as I was otherwise 383rd in line for 55 copies, who am I to look a gift library book in the mouth. I've been vaguely aware of Dunham as a controversial and/or maligned pop culture figure for what seems like my entire teenage/adult life, although I don't think I've ever actually watched any of her work; I'm like 2-3 chapters in and terribly endeared by her portrait of the artist as a young dumpster fire, and also preemptively sad for that starry-eyed 20-something, who is going to go through some stuff.

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London theatre!

Sun, 31 May 2026 09:04:39 GMT

I saw three shows in London and all of them had a cast entirely/primarily of actors with/doing American accents:

Saw Catherine Tate (!) in Oh Mary!, an extremely silly, irreverent, riotously funny play reimagining Mary Todd Lincoln as a boozy, outrageous wannabe cabaret star, which has been the hot ticket on Broadway for the past year or so— particularly for its rotating (and everything-blind) celebrity casting— and recently transferred to the West End. The play is basically a series of increasingly bonkers vignette-like scenes leading up to ( ...spoilers?? ) This show is basically a vehicle for whoever plays Mary to chew the hell out of some comedic scenery and Tate absolutely killed it; she played Mary with a Southern accent like a deranged Scarlett O'Hara.

Saw End of the Rainbow at Soho Theatre Walthamstow, starring Jinkx Monsoon as Judy Garland in a biographical play/musical— there are musical numbers, but it doesn't feel like a musical, exactly?— about Garland's 1968 residency at the Talk of the Town (now the Hippodrome) in London, shortly before her death at 47. This was the saddest show I've seen that had the audience laughing out loud for most of it, and Monsoon— who made her name on Drag Race doing impressions of Garland and other icons— is so pitch-perfect it's less impersonation than embodiment. It's hard to steal the show in a cast of four people total and with such a clear star that the tickets literally say "Jinkx Monsoon as Judy Garland in End of the Rainbow", but the actor playing Garland's loyal gay British pianist Anthony (Adam Filipe) managed it, although both Anthony and Garland's fifth husband-to-be Mickey Deans— the only other two significant characters; the fourth actor played a couple of bit parts (BBC radio host, stage manager)— ultimately felt a bit more like stand-ins than real people: for Garland's gay fanbase and for the entertainment industry, respectively; at one point they literally argue over who loves Garland/who she needs more, with the weight of their symbolic significance behind each side. On the other hand, the show's Judy more than makes up for any thinness of its other characters, as a nuanced, compelling portrait of a woman who is both an incredibly charismatic star and a complicated human being struggling with addiction, and again, Jinkx Monsoon is just fantastic in the role.

Saw the new West End production of Beetlejuice, with David Fynn— who I've adored since seeing the STC's Comedy of Errors— as the titular ghost with the most. Substantively the same show as the production I saw in NYC (X), although the set/technical effects were a little more impressive (understandably, by virtue of being a touring production vs. on the West End) and there were some lyric/joke changes for the UK audience (including a running joke poking fun at current West End darling Paddington the Musical), and a combination of those tweaks and Fynn's acting choices made West End Beetlejuice (the character) feel distinct from Broadway/U.S. Beetlejuice. I also feel like the humor was a little raunchier than the American version? The program mentioned that there were some nods to British pantomime tradition incorporated into the show's fourth-wall-breaking narration, but other than ( a Peter Pan reference ) I didn't know enough about pantomime to catch this. Anyway! Narratively, what struck me this time was how much— not even very far below the edgy, goofy surface— it's a musical about people who are scared of change: the Maitlands literally die procrastinating/only break out of their shells as ghosts ("Ready, Set, Not Yet" vs. "Maitlands 2.0"); Lydia's grief/struggle to adapt to a world without her mom is compounded by the fact her dad seems to be moving on; even "life coach" Delia's embrace of the woo-woo is her way of coping with life's unexpected twists.

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Recent reading

Sun, 31 May 2026 06:42:41 GMT

I left for my trip to Ice-/Ire-/England with two books* and am coming home with nine— in my defense, two of the seven acquired** were a. one pocket-sized novella (The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark, from Books Upstairs in Dublin) and b. one even smaller copy of a short story (Mr. Salary by Sally Rooney, from a random used book stall in Bath), which were also the only two I've actually finished on the trip:

- The Driver's Seat is difficult to discuss without spoilers, although you learn in the first sentence of chapter three that the protagonist, Lise, will be found the next morning, brutally murdered, and I guessed the twist(?) fairly quickly: ( ... ) I really liked the narrative approach, with its lurking sense of doom from the mixed present and future POV— Lise's ongoing actions are followed by asides on how the person she's just interacted with will explain it to the police later— and the ominous pattern that emerges when you notice how the false background Lise spins for each person is based on the conversion she had with the previous person.

- Mr. Salary is a sparse, aimless short story in which a young woman returns to Dublin from grad school in Boston to visit a. her dying estranged father and b. the older man she's had a years-long, codependent, nonsexual but not exactly platonic relationship with. Technically beat the "every Sally Rooney book is just people talking about sex and Marxism" allegations by virtue of being people talking about sex and death instead, but I feel like I caught shades of Rooney's Intermezzo (2024). (Maybe a bit of Conversations With Friends? Which was published in the same year, 2017.)

* The Truelove by Patrick O'Brian and North Sun by Ethan Rutherford, both of which I did start, but......

** Other books acquired were The Long Game: Inside Sinn Féin by Aoife Moore, from Hodges Figgis in Dublin; Operation Heartbreak by Duff Cooper (1950 fictionalization of Operation Mincemeat), Sofia Petrovna by Lydia Chukovskaya (1930 novella advertised as one of the few surviving contemporaneous accounts of Stalin's Great Purge), and A Writer's Diary (the diaries of Virginia Woolf, 1918-1941) from Persephone Books in Bath; and what appears to be an inscribed/autographed copy(?!) of Naomi Mitchison's memoir You May Well Ask from second-hand bookstore Skoob in London. (It was just tucked away on the shelf and only £6, but it does match her handwriting/signature according to a quick Google search.... WILD.) We did also visit Gay's The Word in London but I restrained myself to postcards and pins.

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Weekend reading

Mon, 18 May 2026 03:32:39 GMT

Finished Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville, a collection of short stories technically ranging from flash fiction to novellas. The absolute best story was the last one— "The Design," a strange and spooky tale with far more than it says out loud (as it were) lurking at the edges of it; tl;dr, in early 20th century Glasgow, a med student discovers a cadaver with scrimshawed bones— but I would say my other favorites were "In the Slopes," about an archeological dig in a world a few ticks stranger than ours, and "The Rope Is The World," the brief, vivid history of life finding a way inside an abandoned space elevator. I also particularly enjoyed the stories that committed so wholeheartedly to a weird premise— the previously mentioned therapist-assassins; apocalypse by plague(?) where, if the infected stays in one place for too long, a circular trench starts to dig through whatever they're standing on, which as you can imagine is not great on, say, the upper floors of a building or in a moving vehicle; a kaiju story where the kaiju are the animated remains of scuttled oil rigs— that they landed on genuinely compelling. Overall, I'd say the flash fiction was the weakest part, at least personally, although there were some standouts: I liked the title story, and loved the variation(s)-on-myth of "Four Final Orpheuses."

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Belated Reading Wednesday

Thu, 14 May 2026 22:35:11 GMT

In War and Peace, Natasha and Andrei have fallen in love and gotten engaged at great speed, although on the promise to Andrei's father that they won't get married for a year, and will keep their engagement secret for that year, which will cause absolutely no problems whatsoever. :) :) :) Natasha's first ball is one of the scenes I'd remembered fondly from my first read-through, ~10 years ago— Tolstoy is just so good at evoking the feeling of experiencing feelings (here, the deadly seriousness of preparing for, and giddy excitement of attending, Baby's First Big Grown-Up Social Event) and, between Natasha and Kitty in Anna Katerina, I feel like he's surprisingly good at writing teenage girls? On the other hand, I had not recalled the twin plot threads of Andrei and Pierre both trying to engage with reform via committee: in Andrei's case, advocating for military reform, through which efforts he quickly becomes besties with but just as quickly disillusioned with (I'm sensing a pattern/foreshadowing here) an upstart statesman; in Pierre's, getting really invested in the mission and mysteries of the Freemasons and trying to convince his fellow Freemasons, who view it more as a social networking club, to take it equally seriously.

I've started reading Madly, Deeply, the edited and published collection of Alan Rickman's diaries, 1993-2015; so far, his 1993 entries have been a blur of names and references that I mostly don't recognize— main plot threads of 1993 are a failed bid to acquire a theater(?) and shambles on the set of the movie Mesmer— but it is delightful whenever someone I do recognize pops up (so far, Fiona Shaw— who he refers to as "Fifi"— and Ian McKellen). I'm also delighted by his frequent mini-reviews of random movies: "Jurassic Park— what the hell is the plot? Great dinosaurs." and "Sleepless in Seattle— halfway through I think 'I was in this movie'" (followed by editor's note: "He wasn't").

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Weekend reading

Sun, 10 May 2026 14:20:10 GMT

Read Sounds Like Titanic by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, a memoir of her time - as a young, desperate aspiring violinist - playing violin in a fake orchestra that toured the U.S. (and, briefly, China) while "doing the Milli Violini", i.e., the instrumental version of lip-synching to a recorded CD. It's also a memoir of the cultural shift/dissonance of post-9/11 America ("The desire for postdisaster control was so strong in the years [Hindman] worked for the Ensemble, the years 2002-2006, that even the slightest sound of a pennywhistle was soothing") and of what she describes as life in the body, a theme encompassing everything from the way that being A Violin Player was an escape from and defense against the pressures of being A Teenage Girl, to the panic disorder ("disaster-brain") she developed while on the aforementioned U.S. tour. Engagingly written; had a lot going on in a relatively slim memoir - shuffling between circa-1990s backstory, the circa-2000s "main plot", and contextual/reflective interludes like a deck of cards - but it worked.

Read Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth, queer coming-of-age in early 1990s rural Ireland; I liked this a lot but don't have much to say about it. Would recommend if you enjoy intense teen girl friendships-to-lovers, complicated relationships with one's mother, Catholic guilt, and slow-burn emotional/personal growth.

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Reading Wednesday 2: Thursday Boogaloo

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:26:59 GMT

Since my last update in War and Peace (yesterday), I'm back to The Great Comet of 1812 territory with the scene that's the source for "No One Else"— interestingly, it's Natasha's song in the musical but Andrei's experience in the book, after seeing Natasha for the first time while visiting the Rostovs on business and feeling the first stirrings that life might be worth actually living again, post-Austerlitz and post-Lise: First time I heard your voice / Moonlight burst into the room vs.

As soon as he opened the shutters the moonlight, as if it had long been watching for this, burst into the room. He opened the casement. The night was fresh, bright, and very still. . . .

His room was on the first floor. Those in the rooms above were also awake. He heard female voices overhead.

"Just once more," said a girlish voice above him which Prince Andrei recognized at once.

(On the other hand, the lyric I feel like putting my arms around my knees / and squeezing tight as possible / And flying away is an almost verbatim quote from Natasha, and the differences might only be in translation.)

I also forgot to mention that I've turned back to China Miéville's Three Moments of an Explosion, a collection of short stories that mostly take either a frog-in-boiling-water approach—you'll start out reading about a couple on vacation, or a therapist who's kind of unhealthily overinvested in one of her patients but in a normal way, and then halfway through it slips into folk horror, or a world where therapists are also assassins ("Sometimes the externalized trauma-vectors in dysfunctional interpersonal codependent psychodynamics are powerful enough that more robust therapeutic intervention is necessary"); I very nearly laughed out loud on the metro at the latter twist— or a peeling-the-onion one, where it starts out in a world that is overtly not our own and the parameters reveal themselves, slowly, as you keep reading. ( ... ) I'm a little over halfway through, although I did end up skipping one story after very quickly realizing that it was not a flavor of horror I had the stomach to read.

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Reading Wednesday

Wed, 06 May 2026 11:05:21 GMT

Read Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, which reads like how pressing on a bruise feels: poor doomed Giovanni, who you know from early in the first chapter to be fated "to perish, sometime between this night and this morning, on the guillotine" but not yet how he got there; the poor wretched narrator, who's rotting from the inside from internalized homophobia and willing to throw anyone and everyone else under the bus about it. Poor Hella, the narrator's girlfriend turned fiancée, whose brief period of being actually engaged to him reveals her to have such a nightmarish vision of midcentury heterosexual wedded bliss that it's almost a relief when the narrator's secrets blow up in their faces. An excellent novel, but HOO BOY.

In War and Peace, Nikolai Rostov— on facing the inherent contradiction of the top ranks of the Russian army being bosom buddies with the French now that peace has been negotiated between them, while wounded soldiers suffer in makeshift hospitals completely without resources, his friend Denisov faces a court martial for ""requisitioning"" a supply cart to feed his starving division, etc.; so many soldiers died fighting, and for what?— very nearly realizes that war is bad and unfair, but instead he gets drunk about it and insists that obviously whatever Emperor Alexander decides is best!!! So maybe we should all stop criticizing and complaining!!! (To the confusion of his drinking buddies, who literally did not mention the Emperor at all.) On the "paired scenes" theory of War and Peace, I had wondered if the parallel was between Nikolai getting goaded by Dolokhov into gambling himself into massive debt and Pierre getting himself talked out of his grand plans to liberate his serfs, etc., by self-serving estate managers; in fact, the parallel was that "all the plans Pierre had attempted on his estates—and constantly changing from one thing to another had never accomplished—were carried out by Prince Andrei without display and without perceptible difficulty."

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Recent reading

Sat, 02 May 2026 17:47:32 GMT

Read Oxford Soju Club by Jinwoo Park, which starts with the murder of a North Korean spy in an alley in Oxford, England, and then spends the first half of the book as a slower, more understated read than one would expect from that opening: split between three characters living very different, but entangled, lives in Oxford— a North Korean spy (the protégé of the murdered spy) posing as a Japanese-French grad student, a Korean-American CIA agent posing as a bartender from Seoul to keep tabs on the North Korean spy cell, and a South Korean restaurant owner with a tragic backstory— it's mostly an exploration of identity (what does it mean to be Korean?) until it does in fact loop back around to being a spy thriller, and then several things I was kind of ???/ambivalent about from a narrative standpoint clicked into place. ( SPOILERS )

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Recent reading

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 23:45:20 GMT

Finished The Ritz of the Bayou by Nancy Lemann, a novelist's-eye nonfiction account of her time as a "girl reporter" covering the 1985 racketeering trial (and 1986 retrial) of the then-sitting Governor of Louisiana Edwin Edwards on assignment for Vanity Fair,* in airy snapshots with a vivid eye for personality and atmosphere, populated by characters referred to obliquely as "the jazz-crazed assistant prosecutor," "the courtroom existentialist" (distinguishable from "the courtroom philosopher" by his quirk of keeping a diary, since the 1950s, to rate every oyster he'd eaten), "the man from the train", "the Yankee reporter", etc. Truly just 100% vibes rather than any sort of political or legal commentary, but I found myself thinking, throughout, that there were still dots to connect between the attitude that, in the mid-1980s, Lemann credited specifically to "Louisiana politics"— that the public seemed to enjoy charismatic politicians behaving badly, as "the two great enemies of Louisianians are boredom and lack of style"; that, at one point, an "alleged bribe . . . was scoffed at {by the defense} as being an amount too low to constitute a decent bribe, an indication of the moral tenor"— and American Politics These Days; Lemann does in fact connect them in her afterword to this new 40th anniversary edition.

* She turned in her story and the Vanity Fair editor "basically said Huh? What?" and paid her a "kill fee" and then Lemann turned that story into this book.

Turned back to War and Peace, which I've been neglecting lately. Since joining the Freemasons, Pierre has made a half-hearted (or, rather, whole-hearted but half-assed?) attempt at improving the lot of his serfs— unfortunately, he let himself be talked into downgrading Plan A: free the serfs!!! into Plan B: improve the lives and workload of the serfs...?, which under self-serving estate managers turned into paving the road to hell with good intentions— and visited the Bolkonskys, while an increasingly cynical Andrei tries to adjust to widowered fatherhood and civilian life.

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Recent reading

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 03:22:29 GMT

Read Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed, a graphic novel in translation from Arabic, set in a world where wishes are real, and regulated, commodities, but most people can only afford sketchy third-class wishes; in Cairo, Egypt, a small neighborhood kiosk with three genuine, first-class wishes for sale changes three lives - a recent widow barely scraping by; a wealthy student struggling with depression; and the kiosk's owner - for better or worse. Clever world-building, with interludes between the three volumes/chapters(?) in the form of world-building infographics and an eye to the way inequality could/would still exist in a world where, theoretically, anyone could wish themselves rich, to solve world hunger or for world peace, etc. (The short answer is who has access to wishes as a resource, on both an individual level and, e.g., which countries have the raw resources vs. the corporate headquarters, a la the history of extractive colonialism.)

Read Hooked by Asako Yuzuki, a contemporary Japanese novel about a budding friendship between two socially isolated thirty-year-old women - an office worker and a homemaker blogger - that quickly grows toxic; picked this up at osprey_archer's recommendation. From the description, it seems like the plot should be "Misery, but about a parasocial relationship with a social media personality," and might have been more satisfying if it was, but actually I found it most interesting when the two women's storylines ran in parallel, exploring themes of, like... to what extent is any given interaction with someone else a matter of performing the version of yourself that they expect...? And, like, the extent to which other people can have such different worldviews - not even in a political or religious sense, but just, a way of approaching things - that when trying to interact they both just end up baffled. (Speaking of which, I did find the recurring, and perhaps overall, theme of Gendered Expectations in Friendships utterly baffling myself— I think it is to some extent reflective of a cultural difference, but I have definitely encountered the American version of this online in terms of, like, she's a girl's girl! or POV your boyfriend's pick-me girl friend and it always makes me feel like a space alien.) ANYWAY. Shades of Ottessa Moshfegh and Halle Butler, which is to say I found this deeply off-putting but couldn't put it down. ( ... )

It is officially LIBRARY USED BOOK SALE SEASON; I acquired a box set of Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series from the one I went to last weekend, so I guess I will finally get around to reading that. As 2025 was the Year of Twelfth Night, 2026 really is shaking out to be the Year of As You Like It, because I also stumbled across and acquired a copy of Rosalind: Shakespeare's Immortal Heroine by Angela Thirlwell, a self-described "biography" of the character through interviews with actors, directors, etc.

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Shakespeare round-up, 3rd edition

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 01:52:26 GMT

( Updated June 2026: I have seen 43 versions of 19 Shakespeare plays )

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Recent reading

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:23:23 GMT

Have been reading two wildly different nonfiction works from the '80s covering criminal trials in the American South: James Baldwin's The Evidence of Things Not Seen, a 1985 book-length essay technically about the Atlanta child murders of 1979-81 and the trial of the man believed to be responsible (although only convicted for the murders of two adult victims), but more broadly about the intersection of race and (in)justice; and I've just started Nancy Lemann's The Ritz of the Bayou, a 1987 book springing from a failed Vanity Fair assignment to cover the '85 racketeering trial of the then-sitting Governor of Louisiana, which so far is less any sort of coherent trial coverage and more a collection of snapshots with an eye for personality and atmosphere.

Have turned back to Mick Herron's Slough House series of spy novels about spies who are, for the most part, pretty bad at their jobs, such as they are after being relegated to a dumping ground for MI5's screw-ups and burnouts— Joe Country (book #6) and Slough House (#7); I'd ended up skipping book #5 (London Rules) after a couple of failed attempts last year, mostly because it seemed focused on the one character I actively cannot stand (an incel-y hacker with delusions of grandeur and an incredibly annoying internal monologue)— which are very much potato-chip reads, fun and not particularly memorable. ( Spoilers? )

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