Monday Miscellany: A dagger through my tender heart

Notes from April 7 - 13

Apr 14, 2025

Hello from our new back deck! I’m so excited for an outdoor space where I can work, read, or just sit and listen to the birds, where I don’t have to tiptoe around for fear of falling through rotten wood and hurting myself on the splinters.

Endlessly grateful for this little oasis

The table and chairs are what we picked up on the IKEA trip I mentioned last week. I’m still proud (and relieved) that we were able to fit all of it in our little Prius! Up next we’re hoping to find a good outdoor sectional or other cozy seating option, so let me know if you have any recommendations.

Read this week

When I was offered an early copy1 of When the Harvest Comes by Denne Michele Norris, I excitedly accepted—Norris is editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, an online outlet I admire, and the plot of her debut novel sounded intriguing. It’s about a young Black violist named Davis, whose mother passed away when he was five years old and who is now estranged from his father (whom he calls “The Reverend”) and his sister. Davis is dancing at his wedding reception, having just married his white partner, Everett, when the two find out that The Reverend has been in a fatal car accident. The rest of the book examines the unexpected, rippling effects of this loss; Davis is forced to confront his past head-on, to repair his relationship with his sister, and to acknowledge certain things about his own identity and gender expression.

The first part of this story is immersive and compelling and drew me in right away. However, I ultimately found the writing to be a bit repetitive2 and the characters kind of flat, with too much telling and not enough showing. The premise was promising but the end result just needed a stronger edit. Still, I’m interested in reading more from Norris in the future and I’ll be keeping an eye out for whatever she does next.

Godwin by Joseph O’Neill is the April pick for a book discussion series held at our local art museum! It’s written from two very different perspectives and I spent much of my reading time trying to figure out how they’d eventually come together. First we hear from Lakesha, co-founder of a cooperative for freelance technical writers, who is stressing about a sit-down she’s having with one of the co-op members to address his recent conduct with a client. And then there’s (Mark) Wolfe, said co-op member, who follows Lakesha’s suggestion to take a few weeks of leave, using it to visit his brother in England and then… accidentally becomes enmeshed in a scheme to locate and acquire a promising young African footballer.

This book goes a lot of places, both geographically and thematically. There’s a lot about football3 and history, and the history of football, and politics and colonialism and race. Several sections are written as one character recounting a story to another during long hours of conversation, and I occasionally lost the thread, especially as the tale expanded to introduce more and more unfamiliar names. I’d say I liked but didn’t love Godwin, and that I’m not sure I fully understood what O’Neill was trying to do here—but I’m looking forward to the book club conversation, which I hope will fill in some of the gaps.

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Watched this week

A lot of the discussion I’ve seen about Longlegs (2024) compares it to The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and rightfully so—both feature a serial killer with a mysterious connection to the young female FBI agent assigned to his case. I’d also add Zodiac (2007) for the element of code-cracking, and It Follows (2014) for the excellently-maintained slow build of tension4. The ending didn’t quite live up to my hopes, but overall I thought this one was very well done. Had I not known going in that Nicolas Cage played the eponymous antagonist, I would never have clocked it. The transformation is incredible. After watching the film, I very much enjoyed reading this article about the inspiration for and physical creation of his character.

Jordan was working all day yesterday, so I decided to take myself to an afternoon showing of The Friend (2025) at our local indie theater.5

This is the second adaptation of a Sigrid Nunez novel to come out in the past year! The other was The Room Next Door (2024), based on What Are You Going Through, which I missed in theaters but am excited to see when it comes to streaming later this month. But back to The Friend. It’s about Iris, a middle-aged academic who unexpectedly loses her best friend and mentor and ends up with the responsibility of caring for Apollo, his aging Great Dane. First of all, I would have been happy just watching this dog exist on screen for two hours—I’m generally in awe of a large animal (perhaps because I am a tiny person) and I completely fell in love with this one. But I liked the rest, too. It’s an examination of depression, grief, the human-pet relationship, what it means to author a text, and what we owe our friends. There’s a twist in the book that caught me fully off-guard, and I really liked how the film handled it. Oh, and I definitely cried at the ending.

Last night after scrolling Netflix for a while, searching for something new to us, we settled on The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021). ‘Twas cute! This family, the Mitchells, is on a road trip to take their daughter to college and repair their strained relationships in the process, when elsewhere the launch event for a big tech company’s newest product goes very wrong, causing a sudden robot uprising. Now, college drop-off on the back burner, the Mitchells have to get vulnerable with each other and band together against the evil machines in order to save the world before it’s too late. And (spoiler alert) they succeed, and it the whole thing is very sweet and silly and heartwarming. It also gets bonus points for including a Mae Shi song in one of the first scenes.