Monday Miscellany: A chosen pebble in the palm of a hand

Notes from December 29 - January 4

Jan 05, 2026

Hello! I’m finally home from holiday travel and let me tell you, it feels so good.

There’s just something about the quiet and familiarity of one’s own space, the company of one’s cats, and the clean slate of a new year that can’t be beat. I hope your January is off to a calm and comfortable start, friends.

Read this week

Flashlight by Susan Choi was one of my most anticipated books of 2025 because of how much I appreciated Choi’s previous novel, Trust Exercise. I tried to avoid learning much about it, since I like going in cold and being surprised by plot details, but the little I knew—that it begins with a father and daughter walking on the beach and the father going missing—made it sound like a literary thriller akin to Happiness Falls by Angie Kim, which I very much enjoyed a few years ago.

In short, I was wrong. It was much more disjointed and wide-ranging, jumping from character to character over a span of years, from the present timeline to decades in the past and back again. A big part of the story concerns the relationship between the daughter, Louisa, and her mother, Anne, which is contentious and bleak. The whole book felt very cold to me, understandably so considering the period of Japanese and Korean history that it centers around, but it wasn’t what I was expecting or prepared for in the moment. It’s worth a read, just make sure to steel yourself for a long journey through a sprawling metaphorical forest of despair with not much redemption at the end.

Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood was also at the top of my 2025 priority list. I’m a huge fan of Lockwood’s and have read several of her other books—Priestdaddy is an all-time favorite memoir, and No One is Talking About This wrecked me in the best way a few years back. This newest one is technically a novel but definitely has autobiographical roots. It’s about Lockwood’s experience getting long COVID and losing her mind for an extended period while she was sick. It is dreamlike and strange, and peppered with some of the most beautifully rendered thoughts I’ve encountered in quite a while.

Maybe the soul was just that dearness nestled in the center of the body, like a chosen pebble in the palm of a hand. When you held someone it was that dearness you felt, that closeness. (6)

Let me emphasize, though: this is a weird book. I was able to follow it for the most part because I was already loosely familiar with details about Lockwood’s family and background from her earlier work. But without those grounding facts, it would’ve been much less approachable and significantly harder to parse. If you want to give this one a try, I would strongly recommend checking out her memoir and previous novel first.

I chose Intentional by Chris Bailey1 as my first book of 2026 because it sounded like exactly the motivational nonfiction I wanted to set the tone for the year. The subtitle is “How to Finish What You Start,” which is something I really am trying to improve on. Bailey serves up a few helpful tidbits and reminders, like:

Review your goals regularly to make sure they’re still in line with your personal values and worth the effort you’re putting into them, and adjust or scrap accordingly
If you find yourself procrastinating on an aversive task, try meditating or journaling about why you’re resisting it as a way to get over the mental hump
When you’re considering what remains to be done, counterbalance negative self-talk and put things in perspective by remembering everything you’ve achieved already

Ultimately though, Intentional could have been condensed into a shorter form. At times it felt unnecessarily bloated, and the tone swung back and forth between overly jargon-y and weirdly informal. I never fully sank into it. If the subject matter sounds interesting to you, I would recommend Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, which quite literally reframed the way I looked at life when I read it a few years ago.

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Seen and heard this week

Have you watched The Chair Company (2025) yet? I first learned about Tim Robinson when he was on SNL in 2012, but I don’t remember him being in a ton of sketches, so he didn’t stand out to me at the time. My household really got into his work when his own sketch show, I Think You Should Leave, came out in 2019, and then we went back and streamed Detroiters (2017), and saw Friendship (2024) while it was in theaters. His humor is so strange and distinctive—he combines the mundane with the outrageous in ways that are unexpected and delightful. So of course the new show was a must. We watched the entire first season a little while ago and started it again over the weekend with some friends. Turns out it’s just as weird the second time around! I need people to talk to me about the ending, please. What, what, WHAT2 is that ending?

My big Christmas gift to Jordan was tickets to see The New Pornographers in May, so of course they’re freshly on my mind. My favorite album of theirs is probably Challengers, but I listened to Twin Cinema (2005) this week and was reminded of how great it is too. Most especially “The Bleeding Heart Show,” which has one of the best build-ups ever. It starts calm, with a really satisfying drum punctuation—

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
I leapt across three or four beds into your arms (thunk THUNK)
where I had hidden myself somewhere in your charms (thunk THUNK)

And then it grows slowly, picking up emotional speed before opening into a chorus of vocal oooo’s, more urgent percussion, and then some beautifully harmonized hey-lah’s and a final repeating line: we have arrived too late to play the bleeding heart show…

It’s impossible to describe the way this song makes me feel, but it’s something like my ribcage starting to crack as my chest expands, the sense of possibility and freedom getting bigger with every beat. Anything can happen. We have arrived.

Haiku round-up

Haiku is a poetic form that originated in Japan, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern. At the beginning of 2024, I started writing one every day, and while traditional examples include thematic reference to the seasons, mine tend to be a bit more all over the place. Here are this week’s efforts—enjoy!