Monday Miscellany: A hefty spoonful of the bizarre

Notes from March 24 - 30

Mar 31, 2025

Today I’m reporting live from the backseat of our Prius, where I was relegated after a game of large box Tetris at IKEA. It took some doing, but everybody eventually fit and we’re headed homeward. Soon I’ll tell you more about what we’re hauling, but for now it’s time to discuss what I’ve been putting into my brain this week!

Read this week

I’ve been making my way through books a little more slowly these days, maybe because the transition from winter to spring has meant more outdoor runs, more social gatherings with friends and family, and less hermit time. No self-judgment, though—it’s been nice to feel myself coming alive again, to find that I’m reading more for enjoyment’s sake and less for self-preservation or escape from reality.

This week I finished Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids by Leyna Krow, a story collection chosen for this month’s Gretagram book club. It was new to me, a book I haven’t really seen anyone talking about online even though it just came out in January.

The stories are contemporary or near-future, all with at least a passing reference to the climate crisis and a hefty spoonful of the bizarre. One particular family of characters reappears throughout, highlighting the passage of time and lending an interconnectedness to the collection. I cheered when I saw Ruby, a young girl from the first story, show up again as a young adult, and then as a grown woman about to have a baby of her own. Her brother Nicholas, whom we initially meet as a baby, is another compelling figure who returns in subsequent moments, and we learn a good deal more about the family’s history and dynamics through letters that her mother Jenna writes to Ruby’s future child at the end of the book.

As for the hint of weirdness, this collection has everything:

A second baby suddenly appearing in the crib beside a family’s current child and everyone just rolling with it
A giant pit in the yard of a couple’s new home that has restorative effects on whatever falls into it
A mysterious supplement pill, homemade by one member of a friend group, that the rest of the group starts taking daily without knowing what’s in it or what it’s intended for, to varying results
A female octopus who falls in love with her neighbor and completely abandons her biological imperative
A bored couple who goes on a vacation with the intent of committing a gruesome crime together to spice things up in their relationship
A bunch of time-traveling men who arrive in a small town claiming to be sent from the future to prevent a viral infection that would, if not for their intervention, eventually wipe out the majority of humanity
AND MORE!

It’s a real shame that this book hasn’t gotten more buzz. I found it strange and compelling and overall a delightful reading experience.

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Watched this week

‘Tis a moment for the peculiar and whimsical, it seems; the movies I saw this week also felt unconventional and out of the ordinary.

Death of a Unicorn (2025) is new from A24 and, as expected, a truly wild time. Elliott (Paul Rudd) and his daughter Ridley (Jenny Ortega) are en route to a very important meeting with an ailing pharmaceutical bigwig at his remote vacation home when they hit and kill(?) a unicorn with their rental car. It only gets stranger, gorier, and more intense from there (please see the March 27th haiku below). I gasped a few times, laughed a lot, and found the ending very satisfying.

I originally saw Lost in Paris (2016) at our local River Run film festival the year it released and was immediately charmed. This is a quirky slapstick comedy about Fiona, a young woman who visits Paris for the first time at the request of her aging aunt Martha. When she arrives she can’t find Martha, but she does meet an unhoused man named Dom, who keeps showing up in unexpected ways and ends up going along with Fiona on her quest.

Wicked Little Letters (2023) was another rewatch, a delightful not-actually-that-mysterious mystery based on the true story of a Littlehampton woman writing profane letters to her neighbors and acquaintances in the early 1920s. The cast is truly the best part of this film. Olivia Coleman and Jessie Buckley play the main characters, and it’s delicious listening to them deliver so many over-the-top British swears. Anjana Vasan, whom I also loved in We Are Lady Parts, is absolutely perfect as “woman police officer Moss.” The whodunnit is fairly obvious from the beginning, but it’s still a really fun ride.