Monday Miscellany: You go to the desk, and then you open up the world

Notes from December 1 - 7

Dec 08, 2025

We got some snow this morning! Nothing stuck, but it was beautiful as it fell.

Just imagine: this, with a steaming mug of your favorite hot beverage, a cozy blanket, a good book, and an entire day free of obligations. In the daydream we’d also have a nice dusting of white on the ground—so whoever is in charge of that, could you get on it, please? I’m ready.

Read this week

Even though it’s been almost ten years since I read Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut novel, Pond,1 and I’ve forgotten all the details by this point, I recall loving the vibes—hazy and dreamlike, painted in gorgeous prose. So I’ve continued to read what Bennett has put out since then, which now includes her newest, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye. Like Pond this one is extremely interior; we’re in the mind of a young woman protagonist, but instead of dwelling in a small cabin by a pond, the narrator of Big Kiss is moving house and recovering from a breakup.

I loved the stream-of-conscious nature of the writing, the way memories show up multiple times in slightly different contexts and thoughts move cyclically through the narrative just like they do in a mind left to wander. Plot-wise, the timeline is a bit unclear—I wasn’t always sure what was a flashback and what was occurring in the present—but something about the slight confusion felt correct, like an intentional choice on Bennett’s part. The ending didn’t work so well for me, but I take full responsibility for that. Reading on the couch before bed, I saw how little I had left and chose to push through instead of leaving it for the next morning, and as often happens in that situation, I found myself nodding off, going over certain paragraphs again and again and still struggling to parse them. Pond is still my favorite of Bennett’s works, but this one is worth a try if you enjoy the heady, fever-dream feeling of inhabiting someone else’s brain for a while; it’s like a mashup of Virginia Woolf, Samanta Schweblin, and Sally Rooney.

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami is a much more tangible and straightforward story, difficult in subject matter but requiring a lot less intellectual work from its reader. It’s set in a United States that’s closer to our own than I’d like, where the government has started using an advanced algorithm to identify potential criminals, who are then detained in facilities that technically aren’t prisons but in fact are totally prisons. Thanks to a partnership with a tech business called Dreamsaver Inc., the data used to calculate someone’s likelihood of committing a crime now also includes the contents of their dreams.2

Sara, a 38-year-old archivist at the Getty, wife, and mother of two, is stopped at the airport on her way home from a work trip, allegedly due to a risk score that’s just over the limit, and ends up in a detention center for what should be a few weeks but ends up stretching much longer. Reading about her time there, as she works to improve her standing in the eyes of the legal system while navigating an endlessly complicated and ever-changing list of rules, had me simultaneously horrified and riveted. Sara’s interactions with fellow detainees reminded me a bit of Orange is the New Black if that memoir had instead been speculative fiction about thought-crimes, and the underlying commentary on the United States’ for-profit carceral system brought Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s writing to mind. Though the ending felt a little sudden after months and months of buildup, the messaging definitely worked on me; I emerged from this reading experience angry at the prison-industrial complex, wary of where algorithms and AI are taking us, and reminded to always read the fine print before agreeing to the terms of service.

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Seen and heard this week

The weather where I live has taken a notable turn—the trees are fully stripped of their leaves, which lie in a damp reddish-brown mass on the ground, and lately we’ve been waking to fog, overcast grey skies that never fully clear, and temperatures that hover just above freezing. And that, precisely, is what Narrow Stairs (2008) by Death Cab for Cutie sounds like to me. The fanfare of autumn finally gone and the warmth of spring still months away, everything is a little muted, a little sad. Musically, I’m not sure what exactly evokes this mood. Minor key? Depressing lyrics? Distortion pedal? A certain quality of singing voice? Whatever it is, these songs have it, and I’d put this album in the same undefinable category as these kindred spirits:

Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton, Knives Don’t Have Your Back (2005)
Silversun Pickups, Carnavas (2005)
Typhoon, Offerings (2018)
Waxahatchee, Out in the Storm (2017)

Lest I slide into the familiar and well-worn territory of winter isolation and despondency before the season has even officially arrived,3 I’ve been trying to get out of the house, be around humans, and do fun things—like seeing Wicked: For Good over the weekend! I expected to love it and I did indeed love it. We splurged on the 3D version, which felt a little silly at first but ended up being a good time and a nice way to elevate the experience.4 Since this installment was simply the second half of the story, I don’t see the use in comparing it to last year’s film, but I did appreciate the emotional payoff in this one, which nicely balanced out the fact that most of the musical bangers are in Act I. Other favorite parts include the animals, and the cyclone, and the way we get to see Dorothy but never her face, and the ending that brings us back to where the first movie begins and made me want to immediately watch it all over again.

A couple of the week’s outstanding sunsets

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!