Monday Miscellany: And hope floods my chest

Notes from January 12 - 18

Jan 19, 2026

The horrible chest congestion and cough that have been going around finally made it to my house! And though I myself have somehow magically avoided succumbing,1 I’ve been participating in some lowkey secondhand sick days with Jordan, snuggled under a blanket, heat turned up a little higher than usual, passing the time with books and other quiet activities. I raise my mug of immune-boost hot tea to you, friends, and hope the new week finds you cozy and well.

Read this week

Steppe by Oksana Vasyakina (trans. Elina Alter) is a beautiful new novel2 coming out from Catapult tomorrow. The main character is a queer literature student whose father, a long-haul trucker, walked out on her family a decade ago, and the story follows her as she rides along with him across the Russian plains (the steppe). Woven into the present-day narrative are flashbacks to her childhood, before her dad left, and leaps ahead to the future, after he has passed away from AIDS. The focus is largely interior, the narrator sorting through a lot of sadness and guilt as she works to understand herself and the family she came from, but in the background Vasyakina paints a rich portrait of Russia in the 1990s with all its patriarchal and violent political dynamics. There’s a healthy dose of bleakness here:

I felt shame and unbearable pity for all of us, that we had wound up here. There was no power that could reverse what was happening. There was no instrument to slice away a section of time and space and, wrapping them in a piece of paper, toss them out, the farther the better, someplace over the fence. (182-183)

But the writing is gorgeous and this book is very worth reading for the sentences alone.

Being on the road, as you know, isn’t just another span of time. The road has to be accepted and endured. It won’t tolerate anxiety or hurry. The road wants to become part of you, to be assimilated and absorbed without any stray thoughts of the place you’ve left behind or dreams of your destination. The road loves itself, and it turns you into itself, too. (126)

Time slowed. I had no desire to get up. I didn’t want to do anything that would interrupt our mute lingering. (29)

This is Vasyakina’s second novel to be translated into English, and though it easily stands alone, I hear that it’s something of a sequel to the first, Wound, which I am now also very curious to read.

The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis is my book club’s pick for this month and I can’t wait to talk about it with friends. Listen to the setup: the five Mansfield sisters live with their grandfather in the village of Little Nettlebed, and word has started to spread that, in the wake of their grandmother’s death, the girls have started transforming into dogs. What?? Yes! If The Virgin Suicides, Nightbitch, and Mary Toft; Or, the Rabbit Queen had a glorious threesome, the resulting lovechild would be this novel. It’s all about gossip, and femininity, and expectations, and freedom, and in my mind the rural setting looks like the countryside where Emma and Harriet take their walks in the 2020 Autumn de Wilde adaptation.

In addition to the girls and their grandfather, there’s Thomas, a young man in town for the season to help with the grandfather’s haymaking; two unmarried sisters who serve as maids in the grandfather’s house; a sober bartender named Temperance, and a nosy ferryman whose job is in jeopardy thanks to an extended drought.

“The truth is like a water creature,” he continued. “Too large for any single man to catch. He can take hold of one tentacle, or a silver tail, or a fin, but he’ll never catch the whole creature, not on his own.” (56%)

Though the story is anchored in a nebulous past era, the themes are still all too relevant. I could’ve lingered in this atmospheric world for a lot longer than the 240 pages we’re given.

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Watched this week

After Cinderella last week, I decided to keep the Disney live action remake train rolling with Beauty and the Beast (2017). My main takeaways from this rewatch are as follows:

The part where the beast asks Belle if she could ever be happy in his castle and she responds “can anybody be happy if they aren’t free?” hits particularly hard in the current context of ICE raids and Trump bullshit. It really is that simple—people just want, and deserve, to be free.
Speaking of villains and evil behavior, we aren’t shouting “YOU WON’T GET AWAY WITH THIS” nearly often enough. Let’s bring that back.

“Evermore,” one of the new songs written for this version, which the beast sings from atop his tower as Belle leaves to save her dad from Gaston, still slaps SO hard. As an alto myself, I love that the melody goes low where you think it’ll go high, that Dan Stevens doesn’t rely on flashy vocal embellishments or reaching outside of his range to convey the depth of emotion he’s feeling.

As I stare down my approaching 40th birthday, lamenting the passage of time and occasionally worrying that my life has gotten stuck in a rut despite my simultaneous need for routine and safety, I’m feeling really targeted by the line “bittersweet and strange, finding you can change.” Bittersweet and strange, indeed. Exciting as well. Here’s to contentment, but here’s also to continuing to grow and learn as we age.

Bridesmaids (2011) is just a forever favorite, period. I was talking about it with a friend at work on Friday and realized it had been a while, so I watched it again when I got home from my shift. Turns out, Kristen Wiig remains the comedy queen of my life. I had forgotten just how many little lines and references from this movie have burrowed into the fabric of my daily existence.

Last night I got to introduce some friends to Save the Last Dance (2001), a classic from my youth.3 It is, let’s say, very of its time—hip-hop! single teen moms! drive-by shootings! going-out tops! interracial relationships! There’s not a ton of nuance to be found, but the soundtrack is amazing and it’s delightfully cringy to watch Julia Stiles embarrass herself as she, A Sheltered White Teen Ballerina, learns to loosen up and embrace a new style of dance.

Revisiting the world of high school during this time period also made me want to watch Center Stage (2000) and Bring it On (2000) immediately. Oh, the butterfly clips of it all!

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!

Monday, January 12