Blog – PretenseSoup

July 2026: July comes around again

July, July, July. How’s it going, friends?

This newsletter has been a bit delayed, in part because I was up in Minnesota over the 30th of June/1st of July in order to have a little release party for Renaissance at Tropes and Trifles in Minneapolis. It was a great night—thank you so much to everyone who came—and I left in my wake an obscene number of signed copies, so if you’re in the area, go buy one! Mostof them have swag inside. I believe you can also order the signed copies through their website (you can use the search function to find the other volumes) .

This essay in its current form is me throwing in the towel, to some extent—I keep trying to write something interesting about doing the audiobook of Dionysus in Wisconsin and getting lost in the weeds. Partially, I think this is because I’m not doing any of the real work, other than offering a few directorial comments. I did have some really interesting conversations about voice with my narrator, Scott, where we discussed ways of telling a story via the qualities of a character’s voice. For example, Scott’s Sam tends to sound unsure at the beginning of the book, and grows more certain of himself as the chapters go on. Ulysses has a low, slightly flat voice at the outset, because he’s trying very hard to be detached and unemotional. But all of that was stuff Scott brought to the table, along with ideas for the myriad characters who have at least one line, meaning they need to be vocally distinct from each other. I just mostly said, “Wow, that’s a cool idea. Sounds great. Let me know if you need anything.”

One interesting question, or at least interesting for the part of my brain that enjoys fancasting, was “Who would you cast if you were making a movie of this?” Scott explained he wasn’t looking to mimic a voice, but kind of an overall…vibe? Ethos? Something like that. Of course I originally had some actors in mind when I was writing the book—Ulysses, famously, looks like James Dean, even though at the beginning he is a few years older than Mr. Dean ever reached. (This was in part intentional; at the beginning of the series, Ulysses is sort of stuck in this…I don’t want to say a persona, but he made some choices when he was about 14 years old about clothing and swagger and just…never changed. A lot of the novels is Ulysses slowly becoming a person who can wear a suit and tie when it’s required.) But James Dean’s acting is very theatrical, what little I’ve seen of it. This was a thing with fifties movies, I think. Not his fault. And Sam was physically based on the singer Mika, who is not an actor and who I have barely seen talk outside of listening to his music (my fault for not watching Eurovision I guess, since he co-hosted one year). Plus there are a lot of characters. So if I were casting the movie today…

Tragically, I am not good at actors. I rarely watch movies or television. So I polled my friends and family. My husband immediately suggested Shohreh Aghdashloo as Ekaterina, primarily because she was very good at swearing in The Expanse, and I agree with that. He also suggested JK Simmons as Howard Sterling. Terrific. Love it. I thought maybe Gillian Anderson could play Aunt Cass, since she’s capable of being caring, but with an iron core. But who for our title role? But none of this got me closer to who could play the leads.

Someone (Dr. Jesse, maybe) suggested Andrew Scott as Ulysses, which—he is a very interesting actor and I would love to see what he does with the part, but he’s also a little British, which doesn’t always work well in an American context (e.g., Benedict Cumberbatch in Dr. Strange). And someone else suggested Sebastian Stan, who looks a lot like James Dean in my head (although I am face blind, so if you’re confused by this assertion, don’t ask me), but I mostly know him from his turn at playing an emotionally devastated man who is entirely broken and yet picking up the pieces (Bucky Barnes), and while I really love that type of character, that’s Laz. So I don’t know. And I know even less who I’d cast for Sam. I’m vaguely aware of Jacob Elordi, who is quite tall (and unfortunately pale), but in the photos I’ve seen he seems to lack the endearing awkwardness Sam has in the first book. Jacob Anderson, maybe, who I know only from gifsets, but who sometimes looks godly and sometimes looks like a wet cat?

All of which is to say the audiobook is going to be really awesome, but not because of any particular help I provided.

Here are some actual facts:
Who is the narrator? Scott Paige
When will it be released? End of the summer
Is it up for preorder yet? No
What platforms will it be on? As many as I can manage—certainly Libro.fm and Audible; beyond that, I will have to see what is available
How much will it cost? I think it will be around $19.99

Do you have any actors you’ve cast in your head to be in the film version of Dionysus in Wisconsin? Let me know!

Sales
I forgot to include this when I sent out the newsletter, but all the books are currently deeply discounted in the Smashwords annual sale! Find them here.

Upcoming Appearances
I will be spending July doing normal people things, but on August 1, I’ll be attending the author festival in Middleton, WI, which is again combined with the Mustard Museum’s Mustard Festival. Last year, I was interviewed for a local news segment in Iowa by a reporter dressed as a bottle of mustard. He asked how much I like mustard and I believe I said “A normal amount.” Who knows what this year will bring?

The author part of the festival is on Hubbard Avenue west of Parmenter (from Grace Coffee down to Long Table or so). It runs from 10-4pm. If you’re also planning to go to the mustard festival and get the fabled mustard ice cream (if that’s back this year; I don’t know for sure), I recommend coming early. They sold out last year. It’s possible I have severely underestimated how much “a normal amount” of liking mustard is.

Book Reviews
My Beautiful Enemy, by Sherry Thomas (cis M/F). If you, like me, think that the sexiest thing a woman can be is ready to kill you at a moment’s notice (preferably with a sword), this book is probably for you. I only wish it had been written ten years earlier so we could have had a film version with Michelle Yeoh as Ying Ying. (Actually, maybe we still could? Somebody get on that.) The book is set in about 1891, but much of the action takes place in Chinese Turkistan in 1883, with the hero and heroine riding all around, doing tricks with slingshots and swords, fighting bandits, sneaking in and out of the homes of warlords, and in general having a really good time. I think it would have been a little better with some amount of gender fuckery in it (as it is, the hero immediately clocks the heroine as a woman dressed as a man, but no one else does). But it was very good. Content warning for infanticide (it’s not bloody, but it is on-page—I can’t do spoiler warnings here, but if you want to skip that chapter entirely, I say which one it is in my review on Goodreads here.)

Between Two Fires, by Christopher Bruehlman. I flippantly described this as “Jesus and her two dads go on a road trip across France in 1348 to kill the Pope,” but there’s a lot more to it than that. It’s billed as horror, but the real horror is really a question of theodicy—why did the Black Death happen, how could a good god permit it, and (to some extent, I think) how can people forgive god for it. (Small wonder that this book, which came out in 2012, saw a revival during/after COVID.) Not to worry though: while this book does take on weighty philosophical issues, it’s also got a lot of action scenes in which the characters are attacked by a variety of monsters, plus such medieval favorites as the Wandering Jew, Franciscans friars, Bisclavret, the Harrowing, and more. There are lots of potential triggers here, for illness, violence, mild homophobia, mild antisemitism, monsters, and the threat of sexual assault, so be aware if that is not your thing, but it’s told in the style of a fable or parable, which kept me emotionally detached enough from the characters that it was fine.

June 2026: An Invincible Summer

Epilogue comes from the Greek “epi” meaning “in addition,” and “logos,” meaning “word.” Related to the calque “afterword” but not, in my opinion, identical; an epilogue is part of a fiction manuscript and continues the story, while an afterword allows the author a chance to have a word after the book has finished. My fellow author Felicia Davin already talked about epilogues within recent memory, so I won’t belabor any of their points, but say instead: for me, an epilogue is a chance to take a breath after the main story has come to an end. Like “Her Majesty” after the drama of Abbey Road, an epilogue lets the reader relax. It puts distance between the characters and the end of the story. It offers a a little closure.

Here is something that happened to me recently. I was driving my 5yo to preschool. We were going along a fairly quiet residential road we drive down every day, going up a hill while some bicyclists came down in the opposite direction. I forget what the 5yo and I were talking about—music, maybe. And then, suddenly, one of the bikers fell.

I don’t know why they fell. It wasn’t clear, as I slammed on my brakes and jumped out of the car, what I had actually seen. It still isn’t clear in my mind. I know that their bike kept going when they hit the ground. The bike crossed the center line of the road and hit the side of my car. I moved the bike to the parkway and ran over to where the biker’s friend was already crouched beside their unmoving body. Had the impact knocked them out, or had they lost consciousness before they fell? (Luckily, they were wearing a helmet.) As I knelt next to them, their breathing was very heavy and rough, almost agonal, and I worried I was about to have to use my somewhat rusty CPR skills. Their friend called an ambulance. I tried to take their pulse. My fingers were shaking.

They came around gradually. First they tried to sit up. We gently pushed them back down and they passed out again. Some other passersby and I carried them to the parkway, because lying in the middle of the road was probably not very safe, and then we talked to them and held their hand until the ambulance arrived. They were waking up then for real. They were able to speak to the EMTs and answer questions. When I went back to my car, they were getting loaded into the ambulance, but it wasn’t in a huge hurry to speed away, which seems like a good sign. They were fine. They were going to be, anyway.

I assume they were fine. I don’t really know. I dropped the 5yo off at preschool and went home to sit in my office and feel things. The 5yo was fine, by the way—a police officer came by and gave him a sticker.

Real life so rarely comes with any sense of closure. There’s no epilogue. There’s just stuff that happens, and then you deal with it in some way. In this sense, an epilogue is also a metatextual reminder that books, like (many? most?) other forms of art, are constructed. They mirror life, but they aren’t the same.

I suppose this is why people like telling stories, or one of the reasons. By telling you all this, I gain some amount of perspective on it. Since I’m not likely to meet the biker again or find out what actually happened to them, this is basically what I have left to hold on to—this thing happened. I did what I could.

Perhaps relatedly, I wrote this second epilogue to Renaissance back when I was working on the manuscript. I don’t remember why, exactly—possibly I had just finished editing Lazarus, Home from the War and wanted to keep writing in that point of view. Possibly I just wanted to traumatize Eli a little. It didn’t make the final cut for a few reasons: The first epilogue felt like enough of a deep breath. It was strange to shift into Eli’s voice just for this scene. I think it was at least originally longer than the first epilogue, too, which didn’t make sense given that the book was really about Sam and Ulysses. But I still really like it. I like poor, traumatized Eli trying to make sense of his experience. We didn’t really get to see that at the end of Lazarus, Home from the War. So here it is instead. It’s called “Telamones.” A telamon (a Latin adoption of the Greek word telamon, meaning bearer or support) is a male figure used as a support column. They are also called atlantes or atlantids. The female equivalent (which I think is better known) is caryatid. You can find it here in epub and here in pdf. I also added it to the collected file of shorts, Toward a Consolidated Philosophy of Ghosts. You can grab them all here in epub or here in pdf. (For the curious, I’ve also updated the series roadmap.)

Side note: the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb turns out to be somewhat linguistically interesting in that it is highly regional. Other terms include road verge, grass strip, tree lawn, park or parking strip, berm, easement, boulevard, and devil strip. “Parkway,” which I’ve used here, seems to be the common term in Chicago, my ancestral homeland.

A Telamon is a male statue used as a column or support in a building. This is a gray-green watercolor painting of a telamon.

Announcements

If you are up for some activism, there are several bills you should call your senators and congress people about. Authors Against Book Bans had a nice graphic explaining them. Check out 5 Calls if you need help thinking of what to say.

Not my announcement exactly, but Andie James, an author of historical romances with whom I am acquainted, is about to start a Kickstarter for a press called Besotted Books that would specialize in historical romance novels! With the historical romance genre increasingly abandoned by the “big 5” (i.e. big traditional publishers), this is a great time for small indie presses to step up and provide high quality historical romance! But small presses need big help to get off the ground. Check out Andie’s website here or follow her on Instagram here so you’ll be ready when she launches her Kickstarter.

Upcoming Events

I’ll be at the Well-Red Damsel’s Read with Pride pop-up event on June 13 at the Baird Center in Milwaukee, selling and signing books from 10am–3pm. We’ll also have little felt guys and tarot readings! Event announcement here.

I’ll be at the Big Gay Market on Sunday, June 21 from 10am–2pm at the Alliant Energy Center. This is a mask-only market, but if you forget your mask I believe they have them available. We’ll have little felt guys and tarot here too! Additional event details here.

Finally, on June 30th I’ll be at Tropes and Trifles in Minneapolis from 7–9pm for a Q&A + book signing. Tickets cost $12.51 and you can get them here. Bring your books to sign, or pick some up at the store. (I think they’ll appreciate preorders if there’s a book you really, really want.) Please come and bring your Wisconsin Gothic questions.

Wow, that’s a lot of events. We just passed the three-year publishiversary of Dionysus in Wisconsin and I feel very popular.

Book Reviews

The Bell and the Fog, by Lev AC Rosen. I have to admit that although I ultimately enjoyed the first book in this series (Lavender House), I felt like there was a lot of self-loading in the main character, and a lot of homophobic violence directed at him as well, in addition to not feeling extremely grounded in its (excellent) choice of setting, San Francisco in the early 1950s. But other readers assured me that the series improved, and they were right. This installment finds our detective, Evander “Andy” Mills, doing the run-down noir detective thing of living above a nightclub and scraping by on unpleasant “is my partner secretly married” cases. (I think Philip Marlowe would call them “matrimonials,” even though none of the parties are actually married.) Then Andy’s ex-boyfriend arrives to ask him to find some photographs and away we go. I was really pleased by the greater variety of characters Andy encountered during the course of the investigation, and the way that San Francisco sort of wells up into the narrative, huge and beautiful and a little bit heartless. The audiobook was also really good, although the narration was so noir it verged on humor.

I read books 2 and 3 in the Lady Sherlock series, A Conspiracy in Belgravia and The Hollow of Fear, by Sherry Thomas. Look, if you like Sherlock Holmes-type historical mysteries, where everyone is extremely competent, even intelligent, and people don’t make mistakes, these are top notch and you will love them. Support women’s rights! Support women’s wrongs! Let’s go.

The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, by Kit Walker (cis M/trans M). Includes the novellas Jay Moriarty Violates the Official Secrets Act, Sebastian Moran Gets Mauled by a Tiger, Jay Moriarty Ruins Everybody’s Childhood, Jay Moriarty Has Seen You Naked, and Sebastian Moran Inflicts Six Traumatic Brain Injuries, plus three short interstitial scenes. I read the first novella a while back and loved it. I apparently finished it the day after the paperback collecting Walker’s first five novellas in the series came out, so I bought that immediately. I’m delighted to report that all of these are as great as the first one—interesting mysteries, great capers, and a fun relationship. And apparently there are six more novellas for me to read!

May 2026: Spring is here, spring is here

The biggest news this month is that I have been informed Lazarus, Home from the War was a finalist for the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award, one of the Wisconsin Writer Awards. Edna Ferber was a novelist whose work won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924. (For fans of 1950s film star James Dean, one of Ferber’s novels, Giant, was made into a movie by the same name starring our boy Jimmy, Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Taylor. Unfortunately he died before release, but garnered a posthumous Oscar nomination.)

The EFFBA (as no one calls it) is a prize for literary books. Previous winners include Jesse Lee Kercheval, who is an emeritus UW–Madison professor (I never had classes with her when I was there but I knew of her; she was shortlisted in two separate categories last night); Maggie Ginsberg, who I have met on a couple of occasions and whose fiction is full of moody family drama and yearning, was an honorable mention a few years back. In other words, this is an award for people who say “fiction” when you ask them what genre they write, because “genre” means fiction, poetry, or non-fiction. The only type of fiction is the literary one.

All of which is to say, I have sent them my books every year out of cussedness rather than with any expectation of winning. Often, during the winter, I hit something of a decline, and in my diminished state, I think, “I should force that judge to read my weird little novel,” and it seems like such a good idea that I put my name in the hat. Generally this comes to nothing.
As I said, this year, much to my surprise, I am, or was, a finalist. This means very little—they barely publish the list of finalists and don’t seem to archive it anywhere. But also it means a lot.

Comparing my book to the other shortlisted ones, I am one of a very few self-published books, one of two romances, and the only book that appears to be doing anything queer, to say nothing of whatever genre my work is—urban fantasy, I guess. So thank you to the judge(s). I have learned nothing from this; I will be back again next year.

Follow-Ups
I wanted to use this space to say thank you to everyone who has bought Renaissance, and especially the few people who have already read it and let me know how much they loved it. I have not been as good about promoting it the last two weeks as I probably should have been, but it has sold more copies faster than any of my previous books, which is exciting. Anyway, I always appreciate hearing nice things about the books.

I have paperback copies of Renaissance available! If you would like a signed copy, you can either email me or purchase one through itch.io here. They are $17 including shipping within the US. If you live internationally, please send me a message first so we can figure out shipping. I also still have five paperback copies of The Alignments.

For those eagerly looking forward to an audiobook version of Dionysus in Wisconsin, I expect to hire a narrator in the next few days. I will have a better idea of the timeline from here to completed audiobook soon!

Finally, if you know someone who is interested in Dionysus in Wisconsin but hasn’t bought it yet, it is on sale for $1.99 on Kobo until the 15th of May in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US (I think that’s it).

Upcoming Appearances
I will be at the Madison Night Market on May 14th along with author Louise Mayberry! Louise writes smart, politically engaged historical romances, and I’m excited to get to share a tent with her. The Madison Night Market runs from 5–9pm at the Capitol/on State Street. I don’t yet know where exactly our tent will be set up, so check out social media on the day if you’re interested in finding us. Rowan is also coming so we should have a bunch of little felt things available as well.

On June 13th, I will be at the Well-Red Damsel’s queer book fair in Milwaukee. More details to come.

On June 21st, I will be at the Big Gay Market here in Madison. This is a masks-required sale, so if you have been wanting something signed but a general lack of maskiness was a barrier, here is an opportunity! (Or email me, I can send you a signed book plate for free.)

At the end of June, I will probably be at Tropes and Trifles in Minneapolis for an author talk and book signing. Stay tuned for the exact date!

Podcast
For various political reasons, I have to point you all to this episode on the Avignon Papacy. Somehow never thought this would be relevant to anything.

We put out our 100th episode in April! On JRR Tolkien and his antifascist mythmaking! Huzzah! In a world where I didn’t suffer from SAD/have to occasionally finish novels and Dr. Jesse didn’t have finals to grade, we would probably have hit 100 episodes a lot faster. But as it is, I’m really proud that we have reached this milestone. Looking forward to the next hundred. If you have burning questions you’d like to hear addressed, feel free to email questions(AT)askamedievalist(DOT)com.

Book Reviews (Or “Wow, I read a lot in April despite releasing a book!”)
Mr. Milner Gets Divorced (cis M/M), by Jane Hadley. A brand new (4/30) release! Full disclosure: I know Jane, and therefore was able to pressure her into sending me an ARC of this. It’s a delightful little midcentury romp set in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St Paul, MN, for those not from around here). It was somewhat inspired by an actual memoir she found called The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s: A Gay Life in the 1940s, by Ricardo J. Brown. If you enjoyed 1950s-era Cat Sebastian books, you may want to check this one out.

When the Angels Left the Old Country, by Sacha Lamb. It’s an extremely queer, extremely Jewish supernatural adventure. Think Good Omens meets The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. I loved this so much I sent my mom a copy.

River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey. People keep asking me about this, or maybe I found it bewildering enough that I keep talking about it. In 1910, there was a proposal to import hippos to live in the bayou, where they would eat invasive water plants and eventually be slaughtered for “water cow bacon.” (By “in 1910,” I mean in real life. In 1910 in our universe, someone proposed this.) This book takes that as a jumping-off point, although she moves the proposal back in time about fifty years. In a queernorm, feminist but very Western world, a guy named Winslow Houndstooth III is hired to clear feral hippos out of the marshlands of the Mississippi River. Violence ensues. There’s a M/NB romance in this that I wish was more developed, but overall the characters were delightful and the vengeance was sweet.

A Study in Scarlet Women, by Sherry Thomas. Look, it is not a secret that I am a lover of all things Holmesian, and this was an especially good pastiche. It’s 1886 and Sherlock Holmes is actually a young lady (25ish) named Charlotte. Also, the whole thing is about women and how they are cast out by society for men’s crimes and how they get revenge. Let’s goooo.

April 2026: Renaissance Is Here

Welcome to the Renaissance.

When I was in high school debate, we used to conclude every speech by saying, “I am now open for cross examination.” I always feel like I should say that when I launch my novels, although to be honest the idea of being cross-examined about anything I’ve written is kind of terrifying. But I guess I do need to say something valedictory at this particular moment. Although there are still four more books planned, this is the last solo Sam/Ulysses book. This is the end of a big plot arc. This is a send-off of sorts. It needs to be marked.

As I was thinking about this, I found myself turning to John Donne (c1571–1631), an English poet. He is one of a few writers whose work I was dragged through in my undergrad English literature classes and came to actually appreciate. Donne lived something of a weird life that I would divide, flippantly, into the horny period, the depressed period, and the god period. He fell in love with his boss’s niece, married her secretly, got thrown in jail for said secret marriage, was acquitted at trial and saw the marriage confirmed in court. Eventually, he reconciled with his father-in-law, he and his wife had twelve children, and then later he converted to the Church of England and became a priest (at the behest of King James I), and a fairly well-known one at that. He wrote some good poems, including “Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star,” and “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” which I will now quote part of here:

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

(The whole poem is here.)

This was written at a time when Donne was leaving his wife to travel to the continent. Here, he compares his and his love’s souls to the legs of a compass. A compass (also called a pair of compasses, like a pair of scissors, hence “twin compasses”) consists of two legs joined together in a V shape with a hinge at the top. One foot has a point at the end and is placed at the center of the circle that you want to draw, and the other holds a pencil and can be moved around the first to draw the circle. As one foot travels in a circle, the other may lean, but does not move, and through its steadfastness, the other foot is able to complete its circle. Similarly, as Donne travels, his wife’s steadfastness allows him to complete his errand and return home. Also, although it’s entirely correct to say a compass might lean over as you draw and then come back to the vertical as you finish, I am pretty sure “grows erect, as that comes home” is a penis joke.

(I am sorry to all my English professors for the quality of this analysis.)

Not only does this feel somehow appropriate to Sam and Ulysses’s relationship, there’s something about traveling a far distance and ending up where one began that feels right when I look at Renaissance. Maybe when you’ve read it, you will see what I mean. (Also the penis joke feels correct. Donne viewed sex in sacred terms, which has occasionally come up in the last few novels for various reasons.)

Interesting side note, John Donne was one of the earliest users of the word valediction in print—the OED has him as the earliest quote for this sense of the word. (No one is willing to say he coined it, but they don’t seem to say they know for sure he didn’t.) Officially they date the word to 1614, although this poem was written a few years before that. He is credited with coining the phrases “no man is an island” and “for whom the bell tolls.”

Anyway, I commissioned LIS Artworks to do a little drawing of a scene from chapter 1. Here it is:
Until next month, thank you all for your continuing support. And special thanks to Eliot, my editor; Rowan, my book doula; and Bryan, my husband and alpha reader. This was a really hard book, and I couldn’t have done it without any of you. (Or about ten other people; check the acknowledgements for the full list, okay?)

Okay, here are some links:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Renaissance-Wisconsin-Gothic-Book-5-ebook/dp/B0GDZ5R2CB
Ingram Spark: https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=tKwOnk3uStxCbMjB0tdkZi7D4tgSOeV703KclIw2YS9
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/renaissance-155
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/2009525
Itch.io: https://xanthippe42.itch.io/renaissance
Other sites: https://books2read.com/u/4EOE6E

Other Ingram Spark-supplied websites, such as Bookshop.org, should be available in a few days as soon as the databases update. If you want to order it from your favorite bookstore, the ISBN is 979-8-9883944-4-0. (That may also take a few days for database updates before they can find it; I don’t know for sure.)

Until next time, thank you all so much for reading. I hope you enjoy it.

April 2026: April Come She Will

One of my favorite facts is that sharks–modern sharks, that is–are older than the rings of Saturn. This is absolutely true; modern sharks are from the Early Jurassic (200 million years ago, although with some evidence stretching back to the Permian, i.e. 298 million years ago). The rings of Saturn are only 100 million years old at best. The Greenland shark, which bears the hilarious Latin name Somniosus microcephalus (sleeper shark with a small head), is also the longest lived known vertebrate, with an estimated lifespan of 250-500 years. These fascinating beasts don’t even reach sexual maturity until they’re 150 years old, and gestation takes them 8-18 years. This is life on a timescale humans can barely imagine.

I started thinking about all of this when I read about the Llangernyw Yew, which is an ancient yew in a churchyard in Wales. I have yew trees in my yard—they’re interesting plants, in part because they are very toxic. (Incidentally, Greenland sharks are also very toxic.) Also, yews are apparently very good at not dying. The Llangernyw Yew is about five thousand years old. It is not unique in its age—the Fortingall Yew is another ancient yew of perhaps the same vintage that lives in Scotland. And these are not the oldest living organisms on the planet—they’re not even the oldest living trees!

At some point in all of this, you start running into problems of how we measure age. For example, the heartwood of yews tends to rot, and in many ancient yews that wood has been removed, which makes it difficult to date the tree using methods such as counting rings. For very old clonal trees, sometimes scientists find fossilized pollen in nearby areas and can compare the genome—but is a clonal tree the same as an individual tree? A clonal tree reproduces by creating genetically identical clones of itself. Though some die and new ones sprout, the organism remains the same(?). Some clonal tree systems(?) have existed for ten thousand or sixty thousand years, but the individual trees within that system are only a few hundred years old at best. Even the roots die and are replaced over time. This is essentially the Ship of Theseus problem, but a tree; Pando, for example, is a colony(?) of quaking aspen in Utah made up of something like 47,000 separate stems, all of which are genetically identical. The tree(?) has been there for perhaps 16,000 years, meaning it was already an old organism by the time of the Clovis culture (11,100 BCE).

Humans tend to look at life on a very small timescale. I’m usually much more concerned about what I’m going to have for lunch than with what the world is going to be doing in two hundred years. But sometimes when times get stressful, it’s nice to remind myself that there are many other ways to experience life. Those sharks live through all the same minutes as I do, but they mean different things to them. (I mean…if minutes can mean anything to a shark. Someone call a philosopher and a zoologist.) At the same time, Notre Dame and Angkor Wat went up during the life of our shark’s grandparents, though they may hasve been unaware, and during her parents’ lifetime, so many things happened—Shakespeare, the Qing dynasty, the scientific revolution, the fall of the Aztec empire. The shark of our generation may have seen telegraph wires cross the ocean, telephones, and space travel. Who knows what she’ll see a century from now? Political situations—good and bad—come and go, but the shark persists. I like that.

Lake McDonald in Glacier national Park. It's a clear day and there are mountains in the background.

Events

4If you missed it, I talked to the head of the Ashman Public Library in March, and you can see the video here.

Books

The Trans Rights Readathon just finished, but in case you are still looking for books, you can find all my recs here.

That’s it for this edition! I’ll be back in two weeks to remind you that Renaissance is out.

Trans Rights Readathon

The trans rights readathon is a week-long challenge where readers are called upon to read/uplift books featuring trans/nonbinary/2spirit/etc. characters OR by authors fitting those categories. More here! It starts today (March 17th). If you’re looking for recommendations, here are a few (mostly historical romances) I have read over the years (or am currently reading) that fit those categories, organized by era. (Note that when a book is the first in a series, I’ve only mentioned the first one.)

Ancient
Sword Dance, by AJ Demas. Yes, I majored in philosophy as an undergrad.

Nineteenth Century
A Gentleman’s Gentleman, by TJ Alexander. A sort of regency fantasia.
A Bloomy Head, by J. Winifred Butterworth. Come for the gender, stay for the murder.
The Scandalous Letters of V and J, by Felicia Davin. Post-Revolutionary France gender magic!

Twentieth Century
Widdershins and Unhallowed, by Jordan L. Hawk. Two great series set in Widdershins, MA, a weird, creepy, perfect place. I also deeply love the reclaiming of Lovecraftian horror for queerness! Lovecraft would have hated it, which is reason enough.
Oh! You Pretty Things, by Jane Hadley. Set in Minneapolis in 1970; Arthur is gonna be so happy when he finally hears the word “nonbinary” in ten years.

Twenty-First Century
Rules for Ghosting, by Shelly Jay Shore. I wrote about this recently, but it’s so sweet and so Jewish, I love it.

Not romance honorable mention:
Tiger Honor, by Yoon Ha Lee. YA. This is the middle book in a trilogy, but my 8yo read it first. They appreciated the nonbinary main character and also the space battles.
The Affair of the Mysterious Letter, by Alexis Hall. Not gonna lie, this is probably my favorite of Hall’s books. It is Sherlock Holmes meets HP Lovecraft, and you should read it. This is such a weird, fun book.

March 2026: The Ides of March Approaches

The days are getting longer, and everyone’s favorite holiday is approaching: the ides of March.

Actually, every month has an ides. It was the Roman word for the middle of the month—the fifteenth of March, May, July, and October, and the thirteenth of other months. You can see it marked on the Fasti Antiates Maiores here. Wikipedia claims that the ides originally fell on the full moon, but given how messed up the Roman calendar eventually got before Caesar’s reforms, I would not bet on this having happened a ton. (We did a whole podcast on this if you’re curious—click here. It’s recent, but I still find it fascinating.) Anyway, the ides of March is of course now best known for being the day Caesar got stabbed on.

Speaking of overthrowing tyranny (haha, what a segue!), I decided to donate a portion of the proceeds from the WanderLust book event to anti-ICE shenanigans. We raised about $100 that way, so I rounded up and donated it all to Shir Tikvah’s Yesod (mutual aid) fund—it had a donation matching thing going on the week I was looking to donate, which seemed great. I later got an email that they collected over a million dollars in February! If you’re looking for anti-ICE places to send money to, https://www.standwithminnesota.com has a good list.

Other than that, things are proceeding here. I did some work on future books while waiting for the manuscript of Renaissance to come back from the editor. Now it is back, so I am beginning the final push toward having a finished book. I’m very excited about it. It is going to be the longest book I have written—currently it’s something like 92k words (probably 400 pages for those of you who are not writers). I guess this makes sense, because I originally thought it would be two books. There’s a lot of plot to get through. I hope you’re all going to love it.

I still have nine copies of the original twenty-copy run of The Alignments, so if anyone wants a signed paperback, let me know! I’m selling them for $10 including shipping.

Upcoming Events

On March 3rd, I’ll be doing a zoom event with the Ashland, MA Public Library’s Romance Book Club. It runs 7–8pm eastern (6–7pm central), and you can find all the registration info here. This is open to anyone! Please come so I’m not stuck talking to an empty room.

On March 11th, I’m participating in a romance panel discussion hosted by Forward Theater and the Wisconsin Book Festival at the Madison Central Public Library! Forward Theater is a really exciting local professional company that does great work, and they’re presenting the world premier of Lady Disdain, by Lauren Gunderson, which led to this event. I’m so excited to be a part of this evening. It’s from 7-8pm at the library, details here. Usually on Wednesdays I go to aikido–this is the only type of thing I’d change my schedule for.

Book Reviews
Wine for Roses (cis M/M), by Emily O’Malley Liu. I blurbed this! A lovely little urban (rural?) fantasy/romance novella set in Indiana. It’s a Beauty and the Beast retelling to some extent, but really it’s just a lush little piece of writing with interesting magic and sweet relationships. Now available for preorder, comes out in March.

Rules for Ghosting (trans M/cis M), by Shelly Jay Shore. A nice Jew4Jew romance centered around Ezra, whose family owns a funeral home, and Jonathan, whose dead husband was the son of Ezra’s mother’s new girlfriend. (Yeah, there’s a lot of family drama here. And ghosts, too!)

Rivers of London, by Ben Aaronovich. If you’re not into romance but you love urban fantasy, I present this for your consideration. A cop accidentally interviews a ghost who witnessed a murder and winds up as an apprentice wizard. I thought it dealt really well with the problem of is magic secret (it isn’t really, it just declined because of technology and WWII), and there are some great gods.

Post Captain (cis M/M? cis M/F? Who knows, but I ship it), by Patrick O’Brian. He really said, “You know what Jane Austen needs is more privateers,” and then he delivered. I don’t know a topsail from a topgallant, but O’Brian is so dryly funny I don’t care. I keep forgetting this was written in 1972 rather than 1812. The audiobook was very well done, too.

February 2026: Six More Weeks

At least January is over. (Or, as I write these words on the 23rd of January, I hope that it will be over when I send this. I have faith that January cannot last forever.)

Living in the upper Midwest, never a picnic during the winter, has been especially stressful for the last couple of weeks owing to the ICE occupation of Minneapolis, a place where I have many friends and family members. I generally donate a book’s first day Amazon profits to a charity, and since I didn’t get that done in December for The Alignments, I wound up giving my money to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. If you’re interested in making a donation to a Minnesota organization but don’t have any particular org in mind, you might like to look at this website that lists a whole bunch of good ones.

(Just to be clear, I don’t do this donation thing to goad people into preordering from Amazon or anything; it’s just the most popular single site people buy my books from. Amazon is patently not a good company, but also I respect them for the way they have made self-publishing both accessible and very popular. Business, it seems to me, is often about figuring out how to work with awful people and keep hold of your soul. This is my way.)

I can usually tell when I’m stressed out, because I read a lot more. Right now I am at six novels and two academic articles for the year, and we won’t even talk about the amount of fanfiction I consumed. I realize this isn’t that many comparted to many, but I do have a novel to finish. Part of my stress came from trying to finish Renaissance before sending it out for developmental edits. Then with it off my plate I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I read a lot, and eventually started revising the first draft of book 6. And now I’m revising Renaissance again before copyedits.

Thank you to everyone who has preordered Renaissance already, by the way. In less than a month, it reached the number of preorders The Alignments had during its entire preorder period (which, to be fair, was only slightly more than a month). This is a stat that means almost nothing, but also I’m extremely buoyed by it. It is wonderful to hear how many people enjoyed the previous books enough to take a chance on this one, and how excited everyone is for it.

Upcoming Events

Madison’s new mobile romance bookstore, WanderLust Mobile Books, will be having its grand opening on Valentine’s Day, and I’ve been invited to participate. I’ll be selling and signing books at Giant Jones Brewing Company, at 931 East Main Street in Madison, from 3–7pm. The bookmobile will be outside and we will be inside, so come by and say hi! We may also have little felted chickens in honor of ~~Lupercalia~~ Valentine’s Day.

On March 3rd at 6pm CT/7pm ET, I’ll be doing a zoom book talk with the Ashland, MA Public Library’s Romance Book Club. It doesn’t look like you have to be a MA resident to sign up. There’s also an option to order signed copies of books 1-4 through Tropes and Trifles in Minneapolis, MN. (I will be supplying them with signed Wisconsin Gothic book plates and they will mail the books, presumably around 3/3 or slightly thereafter.)

On March 11th, I’m participating in a romance panel discussion hosted by Forward Theater and the Wisconsin Book Festival at the Madison Central Public Library! Forward Theater is an exciting local theater company that does great work, and they’re presenting the world premier of Lady Disdain (by Lauren Gunderson!), which led to this event. I’m so excited to be a part of this evening. It will be at the Central Public Library from 7-8pm. I think this event is free and does not require a ticket.

Podcasts

We put out two podcasts in January—episode 98, on what the heck was wrong with Roman calendars, and episode 99, on authority! Stay tuned for episode 100 in February!

Book Reviews

I feel like I am in no way an early adopter on this, but Death in the Spires by KJ Charles was very good. It’s a mystery novel with a lot to say about bodies and liberation, about law and morality. There’s a relationship in it, but it is not a romance.

A Bloomy Head (cis F/trans M) by J. Winifred Butterworth was also delightful. It’s 1820 and the newly widowed Kate is trying to save her family farm by making cheese, her brother brought home his doctor friend who is recovering from a severely broken femur in the corner of her kitchen, and someone just found a decapitated body in the creek. You can order signed copies directly from the author if you are a lover of signed copies!

Finally, if you’re looking for something academic, I’ll recommend “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Come for the postmodernist theorist drinking game (take one drink if he mentions Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Bakhtin, Butler…maybe we better stop there, you’re looking wobbly), stay for the weirdly (annoyingly?) prescient things he says about outsiders, categories, and desire. It’s in a lot of places; I read the copy available here: https://www.qc.cuny.edu/academics/prod4/wp-content/uploads/sites/147/2024/08/FYW-Sample-Reading-B.pdf (warning, pdf).

That’s all for this month! Stay warm and fuck ICE!

January 2026 Newsletter: New Year, New Novels

Hello! It’s the new year, somewhat inescapably. So much has happened since I wrote the draft of this newsletter, I don’t even know where to start. The month of December was kind of a disaster around these parts, for reasons I will get to later, and the global political events of the last three days are so bizarre and terrible, I don’t even know what to say about them, except possibly a long and offensive string of blasphemous/curse words.

Putting that aside, about two weeks ago, when I was putting together my announcement for the release of The Alignments, I started thinking about my relationship with music, which is highly…obsessive, I guess is the word I would use. I have the tendency to fall in love with a song and then listen to it over and over again a truly egregious number of times. The song gets tangled up with whatever I’m working on, until I can later recall the circumstances of writing the novel by listening to the song. This is the way that my books get assigned theme songs—what song became special to me when I was working on it? What song came, in some warped way, to typify what I was trying to do?

These are the theme songs of the books that have been released:

Dionysus in Wisconsin: Big God, by Florence and the Machine. (I mean…)
Old Time Religion: Old Time Religion, by Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie.
Troth: Harmony Hall, by Vampire Weekend.
Lazarus, Home from the War: Half the World Away, by Oasis. (Although this book had a lot of good songs, and eventually it’s kind of what got me into Springsteen.)
The Alignments: This Will Be Our Year, by The Zombies. I didn’t realize at the time that it was from an album called Odyssey and Oracle, but when I found out…well, it’s appropriate.

As I work on the third draft of Renaissance, two songs have been battling it out for the position of theme song. I’m excited to see which one wins.

Speaking of which…

Here’s the news, in order of least to most important:
0/ Thank you to everyone who bought/read/left a review of The Alignments. I really appreciate you.

1/ At the end of the year, I usually do a blog post listing all the books I read in the previous year and short reviews of each. That post has gone live and can be found here.

2/ I have updated the series roadmap to include The Alignments and release info about Renaissance. I know I previously said it would be out 3/2. Because of all the stuff that happened in December and how stressed out everything was making me, I’ve moved the release to 4/13. I hope this isn’t too much of a disappointment. I hate having to change it. I was just having anxiety dreams and I needed to release some of the steam. But I’m very happy with the new schedule, which leads to…

3/ Renaissance is up for preorder here. Other sites to follow! Here is the cover and blurb:

June, 1971. As the academic year draws to a close, Sam and Ulysses are looking forward to a quiet summer. But when Ulysses’s grandmother is hospitalized, it becomes clear that relaxation is not in the cards. Unable to accept that her fall was an accident, Ulysses begins to investigate whether it may be related to a cult from their past whose mysterious and powerful leader seems to be popping up all over town.

Sam’s doing his best to hold things together and be supportive, but it’s hard when his new husband is barely listening and keeping him at arm’s length every time family is concerned. And on top of everything else, the library has something urgent to tell Sam…

As they reunite with old friends and prepare to bid farewell to others, Sam and Ulysses will see their marriage tried, their lives threatened, and meet an old enemy they thought long dead.

If you preorder it, let me know and I will send you one of these postcards for free!
Sam and Ulysses, wearing nice suits. Ulysses is helping Sam with a cuff link. It's a scene from The Alignments.

I know the big issue is that some people really love paperbacks, and I can’t do paperback preorders. But you can still get one!

if you buy the paperback in the first month or so and let me know, I’ll send one to you
if you come to an in-person sale, you can get one free with purchase (and I have a special Laz postcard too if you buy his book)
that’s it I guess

4/ It’s traditional at the beginning of the year for an author to lay out what they’re hoping to accomplish. The last six months of 2025 were quite stressful, riddled with my own illness (I wound up getting diagnosed with asthma); our dog dying; moving one kid to a new daycare; the unexpected diagnosis, decline, and death of a friend; and then immediately thereafter we did two rounds of the flu. As a consequence, my list of goals is a little pared-back. Still, I think it’s not bad:

Publish Renaissance in April! I’m really excited about this.
Start work on an audiobook version of Dionysus in Wisconsin. It’s time. Doing an audiobook is a little scary, but I love audiobooks so much, and I want my work to be accessible that way.
Maybe another short story or novella, I’m not sure yet. I love writing novellas, but I have learned they don’t take less work than novels.
The next Laz novel, ideally by the end of the year. This is a book about what happens when you take someone who is already kind of stressed out and on the edge and give him one more thing. Which is currently how I feel. So that should be good.

In a lot of personal ways, 2025 was not a great year. I prefer less fascism, less strife, fewer deaths among my friends. But it was also a fun and productive year—I published Lazarus, Home from the War, a book that went on to be named to the best of 2025 list by the biggest romance podcast out there. I published “Sparking Something,” which is a moody little AU scene that I really enjoyed working on. And I published The Alignments, which came out so much more awesome than I thought it would. I edited and put out seven episodes of the podcast, which is not what we usually shoot for but considering everything? I think I’m happy.

It was a year where there was a lot going on, and I think I’m proud of myself for getting through it. I’m glad you all got through it too, even if you’re feeling bruised by what you went through. I hope you have had some time off to recover, whether that meant making cookies and going to see friends or sitting in a darkened room listening to The Mountain Goats and reading hockey romances. (I have done both of these lately.) And I hope that if you had a 2025 like mine, you have a better 2026. I don’t necessarily have any clever reasons to hope that 2026 will be better, I just think at least it’s going to be different, which can be its own type of better.

Upcoming Events
In ten days, I’ll be presenting at the Wholehearted Writers Week!

At the end of next week, I’ll be selling books at the Well-Red Damsel’s Damsels Not in Distress event (January 18), which combines sword yoga with a romantasy book sale. There are yoga classes offered at 10, 11:30, and 1pm; the book sale is 11am-3pm. If tickets are still available, they’ll be here. I do not know what sword yoga is. It sounds fun? The event will be held at the Baird Center in Milwaukee (400 W. Wisconsin Ave.). You can also check out the Well-Red Damsel’s website here. We will also have some little felt things (hopefully bookmarks!). I do not know if the print copies of The Alignments will have arrived or not. Check my social media for updates closer to the date.

More events in March, but I won’t bother you with them just now.

No book reviews this month, because I just posted my list of everything I read in 2025. See you in February!

Books of 2025

For those who are really interested in what writers read. This year, I read a lot of somewhat random romances because I swung hard into audiobooks. My library generally has crummy waiting times for queer romances, but when I sorted by “available now,” I found a few interesting ones.

Organized by genre.

Romance

You Should Be So Lucky, by Cat Sebastian (m/m, both cis). I don’t care about baseball but this was good. (Reread.)
The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, by KJ Charles (m/m, both cis). I read the second one first, so I knew how this ended, which was good because it was very tense there for a moment.
The Sugared Game, by KJ Charles (m/m, both cis). Love Will Darling. (Reread.)
Subtle Blood, by KJ Charles (m/m, both cis) (Reread.)
True Pretenses, by Rose Lerner (m/f, both cis). I had a lot of problems with the use of some antisemitic tropes here. But the characters are compelling.
Hither, Page, by Cat Sebastian (m/m, both cis). Another reread. Very lovely and quiet.
Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover, by Sarah MacLean (m/f, both cis). Look, MacLean writes very particular stuff. I wish this one specifically had allowed the FMC to be less gender? And the implicitly gay viscount should have gotten a happy ending.
Bombshell, by Sarah MacLean (m/f, both cis). Early Victorian feminist revenge fantasy rather than actual historical romance, but not in a bad way.
Lord of Darkness, by Elizabeth Hoyt (m/f, both cis). A well-written excursion into definitely not my thing.
Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake, by Sarah MacLean (m/f, both cis). Also wish there had been a lot less gender in this one.
Sailor’s Delight, by Rose Lerner (m/m, both cis). Another Jewish character, and it’s really well done! Closed door, I wish it wasn’t, just for reasons of closure.
A Gentleman’s Gentleman, by TJ Alexander (m/m, both trans). There is one major historical…call it a choice that isn’t in accordance with reality, let’s say, and if you can get past that, I think you will enjoy it. More than that, I think it is worth trying to suspend your disbelief and getting to know this book, because there’s a lot of interesting stuff here (philosophically) and there’s a lot of fun stuff (the actual plot).
The Queer Principles of Kit Webb, by Cat Sebastian (m/m, both cis, one of them is bi). The rare reread where I think I liked parts of it better and parts of it worse on the second go-round. It doesn’t really work on its own as well as I initially thought.
The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes, by Cat Sebastian (m/ bi f, both cis). A reread where I came out loving it. Let Marian do crimes! She’s good at it. And she could use a treat.
Wilde in Love, by Eloisa James (m/f, both cis). James doesn’t really care about historical accuracy, and no one has a problem that can’t be solved by having a lot of money and smiling winningly at people. This series would be better with a couple of queer characters in the mix to up the camp levels, but it’s already so silly and fluffy, I don’t know what to do.
Too Wilde to Wed, by Eloisa James (m/f, both cis)
Born to be Wilde, by Eloisa James (m/f, both cis)
A Caribbean Heiress in Paris, by Adriana Herrera (m/f, both cis). I wish she had subverted some of the more problematic tropes she’s playing with (like protective man/weak lady in need of protection–girl never even got to shoot anyone despite carrying a pistol the whole time!), but the way it addressed race, class, and colonialism was tremendous.
Mr. Collins in Love, by Lee Welch (m/m, both cis). Remember Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice? Remember hating him for proposing to Lizzy badly and being kind of a doofus? Turns out he’s an anxious wet cat. This is a really daring little novella, and Welch totally pulls it off.
Seducing the Sorcerer, by Lee Welch (m/m, both cis). Um…does what it says on the tin. Read it while I was sick and up nights, and it was great. There was a magic horse made of an old burlap sack. In the way that horses aren’t just a mode of transportation for a historical story but a character, it really becomes a character, and I loved it so much.
The Barkeep and the Bro, by AJ Truman (m/m, both cis). A contemporary romcom, which was always going to be a hard sell, and indeed it didn’t work for me. This is an age gap, forbidden boss/employee, daughter’s ex-boyfriend, gay-or-possibly-bi-for-you book, and the tropes kind of took over. But because I read it and mentioned it to a friend, I was given a felted zucchini. (There is a scene in the novel in which a zucchini figures prominently.) So. Take that as you will.
Paladin’s Grace, by T. Kingfisher (m/f, both cis). These books (yeah, I read all four) are all so fun and funny. The world reminds me a bit of Terry Pratchett.
Paladin’s Strength, by T. Kingfisher (m/f, both cis). I liked this one the best.
Paladin’s Hope, by T. Kingfisher (m/m, both cis). I was disappointed that this is the shortest of the books.
Paladin’s Faith, by T. Kingfisher (m/f, both cis). Probably the best plot of the four books in the series but my least favorite romance. Honestly I’m not sure these actually qualify as romances? They might be fantasy novels with romantic elements.
Husband of the Year, by MA Wardell (m/m, both cis). I still don’t really read contemporary, but this was nice–Jewish guy in interracial relationship gets married and adopts his husband’s nephew. More serious stuff than I expected from a romcom, but it tends to flinch away from any kind of real conflict; either you will like that or you won’t.
Breakout Year, by KD Casey (m/m, both cis). A sweet Jew4Jew sports romance that was somewhat oddly shaped, story-wise. A little squishy in the middle, but Casey writes a delicious sentence, and ultimately it was enjoyable.
Home Ice Advantage, by Ari Baran (m/m, both cis). A former NHL star becomes the head coach of his hometown team and winds up falling for the (Jewish) assistant coach who got overlooked for the job. I know even less about hockey than I do about baseball, but the emotional arc here was delicious and subtle.

Scifi/Fantasy/Horror

Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir. Lesbian space Jesus saves the planet with swords.
Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir. Ten thousand years is exactly the amount of time needed to develop the most toxic workplace in the universe.
Nona the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir. What if instead of gender, we had swords, ghosts, and spaceships?
System Collapse, by Martha Wells. I think this is the one I got hit by a car while I was listening to the audiobook. So, uh. Distracting.
All Systems Red, by Martha Wells. Reread. If I had Kevin R. Free dollars, I’d hire him to do my audiobooks. I also read this aloud to my 8yo. I read this book probably too many times in a short period. It impressed me more after having read through all the other books.
Artificial Condition, by Martha Wells. Reread.
Fugitive Telemetry, by Martha Wells. Reread.
“Home, Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory,” by Martha Wells. Technically a short story. Also a reread?
The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson. Masterful. More queer than I remembered. Technically this was a reread but I read it the first time when I was maybe 20.
The Masquerades of Spring, by Ben Aaronovich. I want to recommend this to everyone. Delightful and funny. Like Wodehouse but add Americans, race, queerness, magic, and jazz.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson. Look, Merricat should be allowed to murder all those dreadful people. As a treat.

Plays

The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, by Wole Soyinka. He really gets Dionysus and creates a great, very dark, comedy.
The Bakkhai, by Euripides, trans. by Anne Carson. Not as good as Soyinka’s. Sorry, tumblr. Get your “not for me…not if it’s you” out of here, Anne Carson.
Father Comes Home from the War, by Suzan-Lori Parks. She’s one of the top playwrights of our modern times and this is a banger.
We Bombed in New Haven, by Joseph Heller. Not famous for a reason.

Mysteries

No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith. Is it a mystery? There’s a detective. But it’s a wonderful portrait of a time and place he clearly loved.
Fer-de-lance, by Rex Stout. Very clever, a little racist and sexist.
Fadeout, by Joseph Hansen. When I was getting sick in August, I spent a lovely rainy morning reading this in my brother’s sunroom while the kids ran around playing. Also it’s a nice California noir.
Lavender House, by Lev AC Rosen. Rosen is way more about vibes than about creating a mystery that wraps up well. And the vibes are good! I was just left with a lot of questions.

Nonfiction

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, by Colin Dickey. Very interesting.
Hi Honey, I’m Homo: Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture, by Matt Baume. I had a lot of thoughts about how you get to see what they want you to see. But mostly I was left imagining showing Bewitched to Ulysses, and I couldn’t stop laughing.
- No, okay, I guess I am going to talk about this. When you watch TV (and this is still true even with streaming), what you see is the shows they decided to make. Obviously. But why do they decide to make a show? It’s because they (they being network executives) do a complex calculation that boils down to “what will catch the public’s imagination such that we can make a boatload of dollars from this?”
- And a lot of this is predicated on this idea of what “middle America” wants. (What is “middle America”? I feel like I live there? But also where I live, I have a lesbian mayor, a lesbian senator, and a gay congressperson.)
- Anyway, whenever you’re asking, “Why weren’t there any gay main characters on TV before Will and Grace?” the answer is basically an exec thought that “middle America” wouldn’t like it. Even getting queer recurring characters or story lines that painted queer guest stars as sympathetic could be a stretch during some periods.
- And now we have had a mainstream sitcom with a married gay couple who adopts a child and they’re main characters in the show, yay progress.
- But if you think about this, and think about the world, and the vastness of the stories that are never being told because someone thinks they won’t be profitable stories, it gets very sad. I feel very tinfoil hat-y when I talk about it, but the censorship freaks me out. Not the “pulling your book out of a library” censorship, which is devastating, but the “we are going to ignore your ideas and not give you a chance” censorship.
- Anyway, yay, self-publishing?
“Appropriating the Golem, Possessing the Dybbuk: Female Retellings of Jewish Tales,” by Ruth Bienstock Anolik. Modern Language Studies, vol. 31, no. 2 (Autumn 2001): pp. 39-55.
Alone, Unarmed, and Unafraid: Tales of Unarmed Reconnaissance During Vietnam, by Taylor Eubank. Engaging, but I don’t know if I recommend it.
Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), by Jerome K. Jerome. Is this nonfiction? I don’t know. I had an abridged audiobook narrated by Hugh Laurie. I wish he’d done the whole thing.
Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself, by Alan Alda. I’m not big on celebrity memoirs but this was good. Alda is an old school, fought-for-the-ERA liberal, and I love him.
You Could Make This Place Beautiful, by Maggie Smith. A divorce memoir. I…wish she’d just hate him. Or talk more about craft, because she obviously wants to. But as it stands, it was good but felt a little like Swiss cheese?
An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. I cried, even though I knew who died and when. For example, her husband Dick Goodwin was at the White House getting the East Room ready when they brought Kennedy’s body back from Dallas to lie in state. Everyone was so young and idealistic and they worked so hard. The audiobook has clips of the original deliveries of many of the speeches she talks about (including RFK [original recipe] talking about the death of MLK Jr. on the campaign trail in Indiana the night King died), which was amazing.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders. Ultimately I disagree with him about the interpretations of the stories that he offers, and I only sort of like his ideas about how to write a story, but I liked the book. Make of that what you will.
Manhood for Amateurs, by Michael Chabon. An older volume of essays, but one I really enjoyed. Made me laugh aloud at times.
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures, by Merlin Sheldrake. Mushrooms are terrifying, and I’m 20 million microbes walking around in a human suit.
Reading Selfishly: A Craft Journal for Writers, by KD Casey. I don’t think this is officially out yet, but she dropped a link to the first public version on Bluesky, and I think I’m officially a fan.
Crochet Monsters: With more than 35 body patterns and options…, by Megan Lapp. I made four monsters out of this. All in all they were the biggest crochet projects I’ve finished to date. Even with a smallish hook (3.75-4mm), the monsters are all about 8″ tall or more. The book is well laid out, the instructions it offers are easy to parse even for a beginner-to-intermediate crocheter, and there are loads of photos. My kids liked flipping through it and coming up with new monsters, and I didn’t hate making them.

YA Novels I Read Aloud to My Children

Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett. It was good. I have no notes except that it felt like the main character has out-aged the kid I was reading this to a bit and I want to wait before I read him the next one.
Over Sea, Under Stone, by Susan Cooper. Not as good as The Dark Is Rising. The child still really liked it.
Greenwitch, by Susan Cooper. Very good.
The Grey King, by Susan Cooper. Cooper is a powerhouse. I don’t know what to say. More creepy poems in fantasy novels! (Content warning! There’s a dog that gets shot in this one. I was a little shocked.)
The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien. Reads aloud well. (Not only was this a reread, this wasn’t even the first time I’d read this aloud.)
The Halloween Moon, by Joseph Fink. If you want a middle-grade YA novel about a Jewish kid, you could do worse.