Monday Miscellany: A long drink of cold water when you wake up parched

Notes from June 22 - 28

Jun 29, 2026

Good evening! I’m home from last week’s quick trip to the mountains, and though nothing has changed with our house,1 I’ve been reading more and running a lot and resting well. Spirits are high—the chaos persists, but so do we. I hope your week is off to a promising start as well!

Quick reminder: from now until July 8, I’m offering $1 off per month for your first year of paid subscription! If this newsletter brings you joy each week and you would like to help tangibly support it, now’s your time.

Get 20% off for 1 year

The week in books

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl (2006)

This debut novel has been on my to-read list for quite a while! It came out twenty years ago, but I remember hearing about it when it was still relatively new, on Book Riot and from friends who enjoyed it. I can’t remember what brought it back to my attention more recently, but I borrowed it on Libby, started reading on a Tuesday, and didn’t finish until a full week later (hence my not having any books to talk about in last Monday’s newsletter). Whew. I liked it okay, but I’m still pondering whether or not it was worth powering through.

The story follows Blue van Meer, a precocious high schooler whose mom passed away years back and who now travels around with her professor dad, living each season in a new town. When they finally settle down a bit for her senior year, she befriends a small group of classmates who spend time outside of school at the home of one of their teachers. Eventually there are a couple of deaths and a bit of a mystery, but the whole thing takes quite a while to build and I didn’t find the conclusion satisfying enough to justify the journey.

The vibes are a little bit Secret History and a little bit The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet—dark academia meets over-educated young prodigy who speaks exclusively in literary, scientific, and cultural references. While the parentheticals are fun at first, the book is over five hundred pages long and after a while they start to weigh the story down. I think I would have loved this had I read it when it came out, but at this point in my life I probably should have given up on it after the first few chapters.

Skin Contact by Elisa Faison (2026)

If you’ve been subscribing here or following me on Instagram for a while, you’ve already heard me talk about this one. But listen, when your friend writes a book and it’s good, you have to hype it up as much as possible. I don’t make the rules.

Skin Contact is about Ben and Frances, a married couple who are both bisexual.2 Frances has recently lost her mother and a bit of her zest for life, so in the thick of grief, in hopes of reigniting something vital within her, she and Ben decide to give polyamory a go. The narrative unfolds from their points of view and many others, almost like a novel in short stories. It’s funny, introspective, and vulnerable, investigating ideas of love, desire, friendship, physicality, motherhood, selfhood, loss, and potential.

This was my second read-through, and this time around I was much more focused on the concept of physical touch, on the ways we express emotion and create connection using our bodies, not exclusively in a romantic context but also with friends, parents, and children. Covid is present in the story and its inclusion really highlights those ideas. There’s just so much to think about and discuss here—I recommend.

Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein (2026)

Jean is a forty-year-old woman with a steady job, a totally acceptable husband, and a comfortable life, but she’s also completely hung up on a summer she spent in France on study abroad twenty years ago. Back then, she had it bad for her history professor, David, and her desire was both reciprocated and consummated before their very brief affair ended abruptly. She prays to Saint Monica Lewinsky in the present day, begging for help with the lingering feelings she can’t seem to shake, and an answer comes in the form of the person herself, who then accompanies Jean back in time to observe the summer in question.

I think we can all agree that this premise goes hard! And that in lesser hands it might’ve turned out overly campy or too weird to take seriously. But Julia Langbein sticks the landing; her writing is among the funniest I’ve read, and at the same time it’s smart (I accidentally learned a few things about medieval architecture) and thoughtful and poignant. The delightfully unexpected way she puts words together stopped me in my tracks more than once.

In response to one of the other characters unabashedly singing a farewell song, a cappella, to her fellow students, Jean thinks,

I would never do anything as self-exposing as opening my throat and pouring out a desperate, earnest love song from my private fuschia-tissued uterine depth. (109)

Later she contrasts herself with her professor and his wife, who is also an academic, thusly:

They like libraries. They like to write books in librairies, where I like to sit on the quavering theremin of my vagina pretending to read. (157)

Other notable descriptions include “the Costco turkeys” of a particular nun’s “bosoms” (183) and the complete sentence “garlic is pervy” (214). Langbein’s brain is on a whole other level and I am here for it.

Right now and upcoming

I’m currently nearing the end of a queer detective story about whether or not Alice B. Toklas had a horn that’s coming out tomorrow,3 and afterward I have two other upcoming releases to dive into: one fiction and one non.

How about you? What are you reading?

This week on screen

Nobody Wants This (2024- )

We’ve reached the end of the two available seasons and now I require more, please! Joanne and Noah are great together, of course, and I’m looking forward to seeing where things go with them, but I might be even more interested in what the future holds for Sasha, Esther, and Morgan. Season 3 is coming in September!

My So-Called Life (1994)

I very much enjoyed my first experience of this cult classic show, which was made even better by the Happy to Be Here companion episodes. It won’t be a frequent comfort re-watch for me like it is for some people who grew up with it as teens themselves, but I can understand why it’s so beloved. The vibes are quintessentially 90s, the stakes and emotions heightened in way I remember so vividly from my youth. I was reminded a little of Felicity, both aesthetically and visually, and realized that a big factor here might be W.G. Snuffy Walden,4 the composer the two shows share in common. And speaking of, maybe it’s time for a rewatch of that—I could easily imagine Felicity as the less outwardly alternative but just as intensely introspective older sister of Angela, Felicity the college manifestation of My So-Called Life’s high school battlefield…

Haiku round-up

This poetic form, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern, originated in Japan. I’ve been writing one each day since the beginning of 2024 as an exercise in structured creativity. Here are this week’s poems:

Monday, June 22