Monthly Archives: January 2026

I have no idea why this was the year that I read all the stuff that was on Best Of lists. It’s not a thing I usually do, but somehow they were all readily available as audiobooks from the library, so I just… did. And honestly, it mostly confirmed my suspicion that these lists areContinueContinue reading “A Marriage at Sea, Sophie Elmhirst”

Look, we all knew I was gonna love this novel — a fragmentary novel about a new mother adjusting to life with a baby and reading Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and thinking about narrative and time. I mean, come on. Though the novel arguably has broader appeal beyond its ostensibly niche audience, that niche audienceContinueContinue reading “The Long Form, Kate Briggs”

A lot of books you see on the Best Of lists don’t live up to the hype, but this one really, really does. What a remarkable woman, what a remarkable life. Both Arundhati Roy and her mother. And how skillyfully she recounts their complicated personalities and interactions. When I read Azadi a few months agoContinueContinue reading “Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy”

I was thinking, as I left the theater, that I would love to see a list of movies that involve stand-up comedy, and perhaps especially, most interestingly, stand-up that isn’t especially good, but also isn’t bad. There’s something really intriguing to me about staging an intentionally so-so comedy performance. It seems like an art formContinueContinue reading “Is This Thing On?”

First book of 2026. I actually read it twice, because I got to the end and thought, wait, what? And it was so short that hey, why not? Bellatin’s Beauty Salon is maybe in my all-time top 10 favorites (it’s amazing) and Perpetual Law has that same mesmerizing, eerie quality, but it’s more opaque inContinueContinue reading “Perpetual Law, Mario Bellatin, tr. Stephen Beachy”