Monday Miscellany: Home reclaims its shape

Notes from July 27 - August 2

Aug 03, 2026

Rabbit rabbit, and welcome to August! This month holds some exciting things for me, one of which is Metric, Stars, and Broken Social Scene sharing a stage in Atlanta TONIGHT. The college flashback show of my dreams! Trust that I’ll tell you all about it next time. For now, a few books and poems and links from these recent days.

The week in books

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo (2012)

I’ve now fully caught up on The Stacks book club picks! July’s selection was narrative nonfiction about Annawadi, a slum located near Mumbai’s international airport. The author, a white woman from the United States, lived among the people here for several years and reports their story based on her own observations. There are no footnotes or endnotes, and as a result it almost reads like fiction.

I had a hard time getting into this book. It was easy enough to read—the language isn’t overly academic or technical—but something about the pacing of the sentences kept me at a distance. And though the subtitle mentions “hope,” I struggled to find much of that at all amidst the life and death that Boo details. The account is dominated by violence, and conflict, and corruption, bad luck, despair, suicide; by the end I was left wondering… why? What was Boo trying to say through this slice of (traumatic, horribly difficult) life? I don’t have answers, but I did really enjoy listening to Traci’s conversation with Julianna Haubner about it.

Take What You Can by Naima Coster (August 4, 2026)

Naima Coster’s previous novel, What’s Mine and Yours, was a favorite when I read it back in 2021, so I was excited to find out she had another one coming!1 Take What You Can centers on two best friends, Milly and Val, whose relationship starts on a study abroad in France in the early 2000s and continues through present day. Val has just moved from her hometown in North Carolina to be near Milly in New York City—both women are pregnant and hope to raise their daughters together. We alternate between this timeline and flashbacks to the early years of their friendship, along the way learning about someone named Helène and the long-term impact she’s had on both of them.

There is so much toxicity and complication between Milly and Val, and yet they keep returning to each other. Money is a factor (Val had more of it when they were young, and now Milly is better off), but they’ve also each been affected by parental abuse or loss, and something always keeps them from reaching out at the right time or letting the other in when they should. Both of them behave in deeply frustrating ways and make choices that I don’t think I ever could. But something about their story drew me in, kept me hoping they’d eventually figure their shit out. Coster is also thinking more generally about friendship, and motherhood, codependency, marriage, polyamory, jealousy, race, class differences, the crafted personas we present on social media, and what it means to show up for someone else without fully sacrificing the self. I’ll be chewing on these ideas for quite a while.

Right now and upcoming

One of my regulars at the coffee shop surprised me on Friday with an advance copy of BECKY CHAMBERS’ NEW BOOK, so obviously I am dropping everything to read that! Sorry for the galley brag, but October will be here before we know it! Stay tuned for thoughts.

What are you reading right now?

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, July 27

(This would’ve been my paternal grandmother’s 97th birthday)