Monday Miscellany: A wonderland, this

Notes from January 26 - February 1

Feb 02, 2026

Rabbit rabbit! It’s a new month, everything outside my window is still covered in white, and I am happily camped out in front of my trusty space heater. To paraphrase a tweet I saw earlier today, the bar is on the floor, so you better not f-ck this up, February. I have hope—and I also have some good books to tell you about and a whole section of wintery photographs to share. Let’s go:

Read this week

The premise of Emily Habeck’s novel Shark Heart is what initially drew me to it, along with glowing reviews from Bria Grant of Reading Glasses podcast and a few other trusted reader friends. What if, Habeck wonders, human beings occasionally transformed into animals? How would this affect their lives, their careers, their families, their marriages? To be clear, these transformations aren’t the stuff of Animorphs fantasy, the ability to change one’s shape when convenient or necessary and then quickly resume life as a human. They are involuntary and permanent, and once complete, they require the subject to be put down or released into the wild. Imagine, then, how jarring and sad it must be when main character Lewis, having discovered a softening and flattening of his nose, is diagnosed with one of the rarest and most dangerous of these, the carcharodon carcharias mutation—over a period of nine months, he will become a great white shark. Shark Heart follows his period of transition, his release, and the aftermath stretching over a span of years.

Through the music’s swells, they swayed, and they knew, and they held each other, and they knew, and they melted, and they knew, and they knew, and they knew: Everything would be different and difficult soon.

The chapters are extremely short, which gives the book a strong sense of momentum and propulsion. Though it is 400+ pages long, I probably could have sped through it in an afternoon if I’d had the hours to devote all at once. Habeck’s writing is lyrical and poignant—the one tiny qualm I had toward the end was the prose’s verging into overly sappy territory, the story beginning to feel emotionally manipulative. But on the whole I appreciate the thought experiment at play here and the gravity with which it is treated; Shark Heart is definitely unlike anything I’ve read before.

Sophie Gilbert had me in my feelings this week as well, with her collection of nonfiction essays, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. These pieces delve into cultural trends of the late 1990s and early 2000s, cataloguing developments and changes in areas like fashion, the internet, porn, and social media, and unpacking their effects on society’s perception and treatment of women and girls. As a millennial woman myself, I came of age during the period of time Gilbert is examining and lived through this particular history—it felt simultaneously horrifying and comforting to revisit it, reframing my understanding of certain events with the context I didn’t have as a kid.

“A lot of what the ‘90s was about was this huge question of ‘How do we live as women within some kind of idea of the feminine but not have it wreck us?’” is how the music critic Ann Powers once characterized the era. (20)

Did you know that YouTube was invented after one of its creators was searching for a video of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl and couldn’t easily find one? Or that Google Images came about in direct response to the massive amount of searches for the green Versace dress that Jennifer Lopez wore to the Grammys in 2000? There are so many facts in this book that disgusted me in retrospect, that made me ache for the young girl I was at that time. I’m shocked that I’ve emerged into middle age as intact as I have, and deeply sad for the millions of women and AFAB folks, celebrities and regular-degulars alike, who can’t say the same.

I’ve always wondered why people diminish girlhood as somehow cosseted or twee, when the reality of coming-of-age as a young woman is so raw, filled with emotional violence and literal blood. (8)

This is not an easy read, especially if you lived this history, but it’s worthwhile for sure. I’d recommend it both to members of this generation and demographic, and to others who want to better understand the societal forces that shaped (and continue to shape) girls who came of age at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

If you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I earn a small percentage commission. This is an easy way to support my work at no additional cost, and I appreciate it very much—thank you! ♥︎

Snow!!

A second winter storm rolled through this weekend, and it was everything that the one last weekend wished it could have been—somewhere between seven and nine inches of soft, glistening powder, no iced-over trees or power lines to be found. It snowed for maybe eighteen hours straight on Saturday and I felt like a little kid, tromping around in it and marveling at my good fortune. We met friends at our neighborhood pub, we wandered through the park, we returned home rosy-cheeked and tingly to thaw out and eat some soup. Here are some photographs of these past few days.

Phoebe watching it come down and a view of Salem Creek from the overpass

Lesser Known Brewing, our beloved local spot

A neighborhood Little Free Library and a peek into Narnia

Accumulation on our back deck and (if you squint), a robin sheltering in the tree

Scenes from day two in the neighborhood and the park